Word: hanssen
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Mailer will go out this week, though. He is promoting Into the Mirror, a book about Robert Hanssen, the FBI agent arrested last year after 20 years of turning over secrets to the Russians. Turncoats are a natural subject for Mailer, who has always behaved like a man in no hurry to dispose of his own paradoxes and whose last big novel, Harlot's Ghost, was a meditation on the CIA. But Into the Mirror is not exactly by Mailer. It's a novelization by Lawrence Schiller of a Mailer screenplay, based on interviews they both conducted. In July, Schiller...
...Hanssen's story is irresistible. The archconservative son of a Chicago cop, he worked diligently for the Russians. An ultra-orthodox Catholic, he sent nude pictures of his wife to his best friend and, in one of the weirdest discoveries of the Mailer/Schiller research, proposed that his friend use the date-rape drug Rohypnol to seduce her. No mere diagnosis of "mental disorder," says Mailer, could begin to grasp the man's complexities: "There are great holes in formal psychology. Hanssen just blazes through them...
Schiller distills Hanssen's story to the torments that fascinate Mailer: guilt, subterfuge, sex and hubris. He lifts dialogue from Mailer's screenplay and incorporates some of Mailer's imagined scenes. If his serviceable prose were any match for Hanssen's intricacies, this might be a book to be reckoned with. But Schiller's real gift is for gathering information. And in the face of Hanssen's spectacular contradictions, mere facts drop to the floor...
...networks are already lining up commentators and staking out camera positions for the sentencing of renegade FBI agent Robert Hanssen, scheduled for next Friday, fifteen months after his arrest for espionage. But the confessed spy's long-anticipated day in court, originally slated for January, could be delayed a second time, according to government sources. The hitch: after debriefing Hanssen for months, FBI agents still aren't convinced he has told the whole truth about his role in what a blue ribbon commission recently called "possibly the worst intelligence disaster in U.S. history." Hanssen's lawyer, Plato Cacheris, insists...
...director Robert Mueller and top Justice officials have spent days debating whether to move for another postponement. Meanwhile, Hanssen is undergoing his most intensive probing yet, at the hands of a CIA damage assessment team that includes psychiatrists and interrogation specialists practiced at dealing with traitors' complex psychological subterfuges. Hanssen is said to have lost weight and appears more stooped than ever, but sources say flashes of the old arrogance show: he has complained recently that the press is overplaying his sexual obsessions - by reporting on his pornographic writings, which he posted...