(7 of 8)
In the aftermath, many agents who had known Hanssen over the years were left to wonder why. Was he desperate for money? In 1985, when he began his double life, agent pay in New York was so low that some agents used food stamps. Was he angry and vengeful? "He was really tormented professionally," says an acquaintance. "He was a lot smarter than a lot of the people he worked for, and they really kicked him around." Or was there, as former New York field office chief James Kallstrom suggests, a serious psychological kink in Hanssen's brain? "For an FBI agent to be a traitor, to sell out his family, his country, his children, is unbelievable," says Kallstrom. "There's something really wrong in how he processes information that we didn't pick up."
CONTAINING THE DAMAGE
As Hanssen sits in a detention facility in northern Virginia, the FBI hopes he is meditating on the death penalty. He may be eligible for it under a post-Ames law, for abetting the death of agents working for the U.S.--two of those three Russians he fingered in 1985 and possibly two others Moscow television says he brought down. The FBI hopes the lethal prospect moves Hanssen to detail exactly what he gave away. If he "sold the farm," as former FBI assistant director Bryant believes, U.S. intelligence will have to rebuild its entire Russian program from the ground up. And every operative in the U.S. spy apparatus, from satellite controllers to eavesdroppers to military planners, is searching frantically to discover what may have been compromised.
Equally worrisome is the damage to the FBI. "It's a real kick in the balls," says a former CIA official, for an agency that has long angled for primacy in counterintelligence and that used the Ames fiasco to expand its reach into all the CIA's Russia brief. Because the FBI got access to many more CIA files, so did Hanssen. "The FBI used the Ames case to expand their jurisdiction," says another former intelligence official. "In the aftermath, they produced a situation in which whatever this guy was doing, he was more likely to learn more."
Freeh may hope the blue-ribbon panel he quickly named under the friendly hand of former FBI Director William Webster will save the agency from a nasty probe. The proud FBI hates the very idea of any outside control or oversight. After Ames' treachery was discovered, Justice Department Inspector General Michael Bromwich produced a scathing review of the bureau's inaction and confusion when a highly placed mole was first suspected. Freeh enlisted Webster, charges a former Justice Department official, "as a pre-emptive strike to another inspector general investigation."