The
Bureau and the Mole
By David Vise
Reviewed by
Kenny Brechner
When an interesting topic results in more than one bad book one presumes the reason to be linked to some intrinsic quality of the subject. The story of Robert Philip Hanssen, the FBI double agent who sold a truckload of national security secrets to the Russians over an incredible 22 year span, is a case in point.
The facts of the Hanssen case are of course somewhat restricted by their covert nature. In the intervening time from when the story was first reported last year, to the present crop of Hanssen books, very little fresh material on the FBI end of the case has surfaced. Fresh material pertaining to Hanssen's personal life however, has surfaced in abundance. What has come to light is that Hanssen evidenced a remarkable degree of deceptive ability in every aspect of his life.
Hanssen's personal activities were truly repellant, putting a hidden camera in his bedroom without telling his wife, enabling his best friend to watch him have sex with his wife on a television set in the guestroom, for example, and it is not surprising that the publishing industry would consider Hanssen as an exemplary subject for the true crime market.
Of the four books on Hanssen two are by true crime veterans and one by a pair of Time Magazine reporters. Hanssen author Adrian Havill, for example, is also the author of Born Evil, and Mother, the Son, and the Socialite : The True Story of a Mother-Son Crime Spree.
Thus, it is left to the truly awful book by David Vise, a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist for the Washington Post, to force one to reflect on the unsuitable and insubstantial nature of the Hanssen case for anything other than lurid voyeurism.
Vise models his book, The Bureau and the Mole, after Simon Winchester's bestselling book, The Professor and the Madman. Apart from the obvious parallels in the title Vise, like Winchester, sets up his book as a dual biography of two seemingly disparate but intrinsically linked figures. In Vise's case it is Louis Freeh, FBI director, and Hanssen. Vise's assertion that "Although the two had taken radically different paths over the past quarter century, their destines were intrinsically intertwined," has no substantial basis whatever, the Freeh biography is just filler.
Vise consistently tries to
play up the portrait of Hanssen as being fascinating for his dual good and evil
natures, marked by church going, chore doing, good fathering on the one hand,
treason, and sexual and moral depravity on the other. He quotes from Hanssen's
favorite author G.K. Chesterton, that "bad is so bad we cannot think good
but an accident. Good is so good that we feel certain that evil can be
explained." The picture which emerges of Hanssen, however, is not of a dual
personality, but of a completely repellant, if compartmentalized, individual.
And in its turn Vise's book is itself nothing more than a reflection of Hanssen,
lurid, disjointed, and desperate for the acknowledgment of its own importance.
