Lawrence Schiller - Master Spy: The Life of Robert P. Hanssen

Based upon an investigation

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Smashwords Edition

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Copyright 2012 Norman Mailer and LawrenceSchiller

All rights reserved. No portion of this book may bereproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in anyform or by any means, mechanical, electronic, photocopying,recording, or otherwise, without written permission from thepublisher.

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(Published in hardcover as Into theMirror)

Bob picked up the phone. His fathers voiceblasted loud and clear into his ear. He skipped the pleasantries,just as he always did.

What I want to know why are you studyingRussian?

Someday Im going to catch Sovietspies.

Horseshit. I sent you to college to become adoctor.

Dad, what would you say if I told you Idreally like to be a cop? A truly high level cop like you.

Dont even think about it.

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Those looking for a brisk, page-turningdramatization of Hanssens bizarre life and times will be amplyrewarded... Schillers book is likely to be as close as wellever get to the mind of the most heinous spy in FBI history.

Publishers Weekly

American Tragedy

Perfect Murder, Perfect Town

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In Collaboration

LSD

By Richard Alpert, Ph.D., Sidney Cohen, M.D.,

and Lawrence Schiller

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Ladies and Gentlemen, Lenny Bruce

by Albert Goldman from the

Journalism of Lawrence Schiller

This book was published in hardcover as Into theMirror by HarperCollins.

Quotations from interviews by LawrenceSchiller and Norman Mailer are copyright 2001 and 2002 by KLSCommunications, Inc. Grateful acknowledgement is made to thefollowing for permission to reprint previously published materialand television broadcasts: ABC: Brief excerpt from ABC News onFebruary 20, 2001. Used by permission of ABC News; AssociatedPress: Excerpt from March 4, 2001, copyright 2001 by theAssociated Press; printed by permission of The Associated Press;TheWashington Post: Excerpt from March 3, 2001,copyright 2001 by TheWashington Post; Time:Excerpt from The FBI Spy, Time, March 5, 2001 2001 Time Inc.,reprinted by permission.

HARPERTORCH

An Imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

10 East 53rd Street

New York, New York 10022-5299

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Copyright 2002 by Lawrence Schiller and KLSCommunications, Inc. All rights reserved under International andPan American Copyright Conventions.

ISBN: 0-06-051281-4

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All rights reserved. No part of this book maybe used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without writtenpermission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied incritical articles and reviews. For information address HarperTorch,an Imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.

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First HarperTorch paperback printing:November 2002

First HarperCollins hardcover printing: May2002

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Visit HarperTorch on the World Wide Web at www.harpercollins.com

To KATHY AMERMAN,

my friend and wife,

And to my mother, JEAN,

for the loving years shes given all of herfamily.

Tableof Contents

Authors Note

The research for this narrative, whichattempts to re-create the life of Robert Hanssen, began in March2001, when I asked Norman Mailer to write a screenplay for afour-hour miniseries for CBS Television. I would produce and directthe motion picture, as I had done with The ExecutionersSong and American Tragedy, for which Mailer also wrotethe screenplays.

During the following nine months, Mailer andI interviewed members of Bonnie and Robert Hanssens immediatefamily, his closest friends, past and present Special Agents of theFBI, former agents and officials of the KGB and SVR (organs of theSoviet Union and Russian governments), diplomats of the SovietUnion, past and present members of the Catholic Church and of OpusDei, the personal Prelature of the Church, and others, who haveasked not to be credited in this work. Those whom we spoke to gaveus a window into Robert Hanssens mind. His own writings over theyears also provided a view, startling at times, particularly in hissemi-pornographic writings.

I traveled to Germany and spent an entire daywith Jack Hoschouer, who walked me through his long relationshipwith Robert Hanssen and his family, and corroborated what we hadbeen told by family members and others. Later, Mailer met withHoschouer in London. In Moscow, Viktor Cherkashin (Robert Hanssensfirst Soviet handler) and Leonid Sherbashin (KGB, Moscow Center)gave us their first interviews on Hanssen and provided a uniqueperspective, as did one of several psychiatrists who saw Hanssenafter his arrest.

Robert Hanssen and his wife, Bonnie, were notinterviewed for this work because of a plea-bargain agreement theymade with the Justice Department of the United States, whichprohibited contacts with the media.

While Mailer was finishing the first draft ofthe screenplay in November 2001, I decided to write this book,using his draft as the foundation for my work, adding to itadditional information from our interviews and from historicaldocuments.

As a result, the work is novelistic in style.And much of its dialogue is derivative of Mailers screenplay. Insome ways, it resembles Mailers The Executioners Song andmy American Tragedy, which I wrote with James Willworth.

My intention was not to document every momentor deed of Hanssens life; rather, it was to build a psychologicalportrait of him from those events that reveal the complexities ofthe man and his unique character. It has been a search for theessence of his emotional and spiritual lifethose elements ofexistence that drove him into his acts of betrayal.

His life, and his mindby any degreeare sofar removed from the ordinary that it is safe to say this story isunique, even extraordinary, in the range of its contradictions.

LAWRENCE SCHILLER

February 20, 2002

Introduction

On Monday, February 19, 2001, the day afterthe arrest of Special Agent Robert Philip Hanssen, a shock,comparable in its intensity to the horror that would permeate allof America on the morning of September 11, passed throughout theFederal Bureau of Investigation. Some indication of the personaland public disarray inside the Bureau comes through in the firstnews stories and press conferences:

ABC NEWS

FEBRUARY 20, 2001

To Russian intelligence, he was allegedlyknown as Ramon, a longtime informant on U.S. secrets. But toresidents in his quiet neighborhood in Vienna, Virginia, RobertHanssen, 56, was just Bob, devout Christian and father of six whocould be seen at church every Sunday. For more than 15 years,Hanssen allegedly spied for the Soviet Union and Russia, passing onclassified information for cash and jewels. FBI officials sayHanssen was arrested Sunday night after he deposited a packagecontaining classified information in a park near his neighborhood.Overnight, he went from being a low-key family man to only thethird FBI agent ever accused of spying.