By ROGER FRANKLIN Herald correspondent
NEW YORK - In the spy business, like the spin business, it's all a question of image projection.
Take, for example, the two men who last week each represented one or another of those most venerable of Washington's dark arts.
The first is accused mole Robert Philip Hanssen, who went from the cold obscurity of a top cloak-and-dagger job with the FBI's counterintelligence unit to the front pages of America's newspapers when he was arrested in a blaze of carefully orchestrated publicity after more than 15 years of allegedly passing some of his country's most sensitive secrets to Moscow.
As Hanssen explained in one of the chatty notes that accompanied the packages of top secret information he sent to his handlers, "a meeting out of the country, it simply is not practical for me."
He was rejecting an invitation to speak face-to-face with the Russians on neutral turf.
"I must answer too many questions from family, friends and Government - plus it is a cardinal sin for a spy. You have made it that way because of your policy [of overseas meetings]. Policies are constraints, constraints breed patterns. Patterns are noticed."
And the one thing Hanssen could not afford was to be noticed - not when he was loading floppy disks with the names of United States moles inside the KGB, or warning his masters in Moscow that double agents in Washington or Paris were about to be arrested.
According to prosecutors, at least two of the men he exposed were seized and executed by the KGB.
FBI Director Louis Freeh, the man on the other side of the equation, was pursuing a very different objective this week, when he summoned reporters to his agency's Washington headquarters to announce Hanssen's arrest.
For all the sad and straight-faced candour he displayed for the cameras as he detailed the damage Hanssen had done to US security, broadcasting the grim truth was really the last thing on the embattled lawman's agenda.
What he needed to do was spin, to whirl the story until the most glaring fact of the case - the FBI's incredible incompetence - became lost in the general blur of minute details not even a LeCarre might have dared to concoct.
And twirl it he did, burying the press in a deluge of details that teams of investigative reporters from America's premier news organisations were still scrambling to unravel and expand as the week ended.
Freeh had both his own future and his agency's soiled reputation to consider - and the one question he couldn't afford to be grilled about was also the most obvious: How could Hanssen, a man who had spent virtually his entire official career hunting Russian spies, have managed to work so long and hard for Moscow without being uncovered?
As even Freeh was forced to admit, all the signs were there to be noticed.
As a close reading of the voluminous, 100-page affidavit laying out the reasons for Hanssen's arrest makes clear, all that should have been required to catch this mole was basic, routine diligence.
That, and perhaps just a bit less institutional arrogance on the part of an agency that considered itself beyond penetration.
Instead, while the man one congressional intelligence staffer described last week as perhaps the biggest traitor since Benedict Arnold accumulated a $US1.4 million ($3.2 million) fortune in laundered cash and top-class diamonds, the FBI evidently neglected to give him so much as a lie-detector test.
Even more striking was failure to notice that Hanssen was regularly trolling the agency's most sensitive computer data base to see if his own name had been added to a list of possible moles.
According to intelligence veterans, a routine FBI audit of its own computer-access records would have ferreted out the traitor in minutes.
Yet for reasons Freeh was in no hurry to explain, that simple precaution also appears never to have been taken.
Instead, Freeh repeatedly stressed the unique qualifications that had allowed Hanssen to avoid detection for so long.
"What made the case so difficult was that Mr Hanssen was himself a senior counter-intelligence specialist, so he knew better than anybody how to cover his tracks," Freeh explained.
He said Hanssen had taken such extreme precautions that not even his Russian handlers knew his real name or where he worked within the intelligence community.
While Hanssen"s fellow spy catchers were oblivious to their colleague's secret life, the children who played with his own six kids on the leafy suburban street in the Washington suburb where he lived were not so blind.
As the FBI continued to rate its agent a perfectly normally and unremarkable law-enforcement specialist, the local youngsters realised there was something decidedly odd about the man.
Sure, Hanssen loaded his wife and six children into the family's VW van every Sunday and headed off to church.
And when Little League was in season, he'd be down at the baseball diamond, just another dad cheering for his pint-size sluggers.
But when neighbourhood kids visited his home, all were given the same stern warning about the special room off the basement they must never, ever enter.
"He could be a scary guy when he stared straight into you," one former playmate recalled last week.
Jam-packed with banks of elaborate computer equipment, the dark chamber was the sanctum sanctorum of Hanssens 'treachery, the place where he transferred sensitive documents to floppies before leaving them at pre-arranged drop points - taped to the girders of bridges, tucked under stones, jammed behind road signs - where his Russian contacts could retrieve them.
The basement refuge was perhaps the only place in the world where Hanssen felt free to drop the facade, where the lie he lived every minute of every day was permitted to become the truth.
Freeh said that not even Hanssen's wife knew of his other life.
In return for the information Hanssen provided, Moscow showed its gratitude with packages of $US100 bills, sometimes containing as much as $US50,000, that were double-wrapped in black plastic garbage bags and accompanied by often quite long letters of appreciation and concern.
In one such missive, all of which were peppered with outrageous misspellings and comical punctuation errors, his handler took the time to wax poetic with the informant he had never met.
"What's our life, If full of care, You have no time To stop and stare," the handler rhymed, perhaps hoping that little dose of doggerel would draw out the informant he know only as B. Ramon, or one of several other shifting aliases.
It is obvious from the notes that Hanssen penned that the double life was wearing him down.
And even with the Russians, he could not curb a pathological need to deceive.
"I decided on this course when I was 14 years old," he wrote in March last year, adding by way of explanation, "I'd read Philby's book!"
It was a minor but instructive slip: When Hanssen was 14, British traitor and double agent Kim Philby had yet to put pen to paper.
Indeed, at that stage, Philby was still a respected member of Britain's Secret Intelligence Service, one who was being groomed for the top spot.
In another note, he mulls the need for an escape plan, observing with professional detachment how no mole can hope to remain in place forever.
What of the damage Hanssen inflicted on his country? On that, Freeh had less to say.
The arresting officers affidavit mentions how Hanssen gave the Russians nuts and bolts details of several counterintelligence programmes, including a high-tech operation intended to eavesdrop on Russia's electronic communications.
In other letters, he provides the names of potential moles who, he suggested, the Russians might consider trying to recruit.
One of them, a military officer who Hanssen calls an old friend, was identified as a ripe prospect because he had been denied promotion and was understandably bitter.
In another letter, one that the Russians failed to collect in time, Hanssen warned that a microphone planted inside a secure conference room at the State Department had been discovered.
It was a costly lapse on Moscow's part since the field agent who was dispatched to monitor the bug was observed and arrested as he strolled outside the building listening to the secret conversations on a handheld radio scanner.
If you take Freeh's word for it, Hanssen's greatest gift to the Russians was his role as a source capable of confirming information they were receiving from their other assets inside US intelligence, most notably the secrets spilled by CIA turncoat Aldrich Ames.
When Ames reported that Moscow was harbouring at least three agents who were reporting to the CIA, Moscow would have been loathe to take action on the strength of but a single and unconfirmed tip.
After all, it could have been a classic game of bluff - an espionage stratagem aimed at plunging the KGB into a crippling paroxysm of unwanted paranoia.
But when Hanssen was able to confirm two of the names, the fingered men were arrested in short order, tortured and dispatched with bullets to the head.
The third man - the one Hanssen could neither confirm nor deny, was merely arrested and held in prison until Boris Yeltsin ordered his release last year.
Where the Hanssen scandal goes from here is anybody's guess, although the suspect's chances of being executed would have to be a good bet in the light of George W. Bush's affection for capital punishment.
As for Freeh, his prospects are clouded by almost as much doubt. Republicans hold the man in no great affection, widely suspecting that he holds his job in higher regard than they perceive to be his duty.
The proof they cite is that when Bill Clinton's Attorney General, Janet Reno, stalled and stymied any number of investigations into White House scandals, Freeh registered his objections but never broke his oath by leaking the details to Clintons enemies on Capitol Hill.
The definition of honour and loyalty in Washington's parallel universe can be a very subjective thing. Just ask Robert Hanssen.
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