Turncoat Hanssen Was a Very Weird Dude

The late FBI agent-turned traitor left a strange mark in the annals of espionage

The one thing that sticks in my mind about my Vietnamese spy all these decades later is how he picked at the black mole on his right cheekbone with an elongated finger nail on his pinkie. That, and the stubby, anthracitic French cigarettes he incessantly smoked during our monthly meet-ups in a stifling ramshackle hotel room. Middle aged, an anticommunist fanatic, I didn’t know him long enough to discover other bad habits. I’m sure he had them.

And that wouldn’t have been particularly unique, either. Spies are not regular folks, as you might expect, and not in the usual movie way that may come to mind. They all have tics—alcoholism and raging egos being among the most common. Some far more than that.

But one in particular stands out in the known annals of espionage: Robert Hanssen, the infamous FBI turncoat who died Monday, aged 79, in his SuperMax prison cell while serving several consecutive life sentences for stealing tons of invaluable secrets for the Russians.

"They are all weird in their own way. Healthy people (usually) don’t spy," says former CIA case officer and Russia hand John Sipher. "That said, he was a mess."

“He lived a kind of Jekyll and Hyde existence, nondescript and dour at work but daring as a spy,” espionage historian Calder Walton sums up in his new book, Spies: The Epic Intelligence War Between East and West. Hanssen, a devotee of the far-right Opus Dei Catholic splinter group, began spying for the Soviets shortly after he joined the FBI in 1976. Except for a two year hiatus, he went on spying right through the collapse of the USSR, until he was finally caught in 1994.  

It was always about the money for Hanssen, a fierce, sociopathic anticommunist. His treachery exposed multiple, way above-top secret American intelligence operations and dozens of Russian spies for the U.S., at least three of whom, and probably more, were executed. NBC News intelligence reporter Josh Campbell called Hanssen “arguably the most damaging spy in U.S. history,” a verdict shared by many in the game.

But on a weirdness scale alone, Hanssen, known around FBI headquarters as “the undertaker” for his funerial mode, stood apart (at least among those spies we know about). 

“Vain, and a sexual exhibitionist, Hanssen set up a closed-circuit video hookup so a friend could watch him having sex with his wife without her permission,” the historian Walton wrote.  “He used some of the money he obtained from the KGB to carry on a relationship with a Washington stripper; he bought her jewelry and a Mercedes, and bankrolled her life with an American Express card he gave her. She left him.”

Aldrich Ames, the other star Soviet mole of the Cold War, he in the CIA, was just off kilter in the usual way—a resentful, pussy whipped alcoholic with access to the family jewels. These are the kind of people case officers on all sides seek out.

As John Le Carré’s bitter Alex Leamas bitterly grouses, without too much exaggeration, in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold:

“What the hell do you think spies are? Moral philosophers measuring everything they do against the word of God or Karl Marx? They're not! They're just a bunch of seedy, squalid bastards like me: little men, drunkards, queers, hen-pecked husbands, civil servants playing cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten little lives. Do you think they sit like monks in a cell, balancing right against wrong?”

Ames, 82, is living out his final days in prison, too. 

There are countless more like Ames and Hanssen still roaming around. Russians, too, who worked (or are still working) for our side.

One of the weird ones was Vitaly Yurchenko, who was serving his 25th year in the KGB when he defected to the CIA during an assignment in Rome. Pining for a Russian lover in Canada, he changed his mind after giving up the names of a few moles to his debriefers. 

“In November 1985,” goes his Wikipedia entry, “before eating a meal at Au Pied de Cochon, a French restaurant in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, D.C., Yurchenko told his CIA guard, ‘I'm going for a walk. If I don't come back, it's not your fault.’” Some walk it was—straight to the Soviet embassy. They held a press conference to welcome him back.  

Retired CIA operations officer Colin Thompson was one of Yurchenko’s minders. On Monday, I asked him about memorable weirdos he’d known over the decades in his his trade.

“How many do you want to know about, and how do you define ‘weird?,’” he said.  Too many to count. “Takes all kinds.”