Word: hanssen
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...intelligence agencies have had their share of moles in recent years. Senior FBI agent Robert Hanssen was arrested in 2001 for turning over to Moscow the names of KGB assets working for the U.S.--information that led directly to many agents' deaths. Still, al-Balawi may be the first double agent to kill his handlers and himself. In the business of secrets and spies, it's hard to know who is the enemy...
...William H. Webster. Over the decades, the former FBI and CIA chief has headed numerous high-profile investigations into public agencies, including the Los Angeles Police Department's response to the 1992 Rodney King riots and the FBI's failure to catch Soviet and Russian mole Robert Hanssen...
...emerge, almost inferentially from Cooper's taciturn playing, is a portrait of a sharp knife nestled in drawer full of dull ones. A man this bright should have been on the bureau's fast track. Instead, he's on a side track, chugging along a bureaucratic road to nowhere. Hanssen's fuming impatience with the patronizing doofuses who have held him back is well, even comically, stated in the script written by Ray in collaboration with Adam Mazer and William Rotko. So is the barely suppressed tension his double life imposes...
...deepest pleasure lies in the enigma of motivation. Its true that Hanssen made a fair amount of money from the Soviets, but that does not seem to be what's driving him. He just goes on living a modest middle-class existence. Nor does he bear any resemblance to certain Cold War-era spies, who served communist ideology out of some sort of (misplaced) idealism. It was rather the opposite with him. Slowly, it steals across you that he was acting out of the desire to prove just how smart he was, how superior he was to his, well, superiors...
...There is, however, a dark side to Hanssen's excellent adventure. As the film makes clear, a lot of American agents in the former Soviet Union lost their lives because of information he supplied. He may have been playing a game, but they, alas, were not. He seems never to have counted that consequence. Caught and convicted, he is being held in solitary confinement in a maximum security prison, allowed out of his cell for just one hour a day. Should one imagine him still chortling over his dark accomplishments? Or is he, at last, burdened by regret...