Double agent's fantasy world

One of the greatest ironies in modern intelligence history is that the KGB achieved its greatest successes against both the CIA and the FBI just as it was losing the Cold War. On the eve of Mikhail Gorbachev's accession as Soviet leader in the spring of 1985, the head of KGB foreign intelligence, Vladimir Kryuchkov, denounced his officers for their "lack of appreciable results" in recruiting American agents. What probably angered him most was that, in the 38 years since the CIA's foundation, the KGB had failed to secure a single major agent penetration of the Agency.

Scarcely had Gorbachev entered the Kremlin than Kryuchkov's prayers were answered. Out of the blue, Aldrich Ames, a middle-ranking CIA officer with almost 30 years' experience, offered his services to the KGB's Washington station. Within only two months he had betrayed 20 US and British agents, most of whom were shot by the Russians.

Collectively, the agents had represented probably the most successful Western penetration of the Soviet Union since the Bolshevik Revolution. When Ames was finally arrested in 1994, FBI investigators correctly deduced that another major Russian agent in the US intelligence community remained at large. None of them, however, suspected that the agent was their own colleague Robert Hanssen, an apparently devout Catholic with deeply conservative views who worshipped in the same church as the Director of the FBI and had the reverential manner of a mortuary attendant speaking to a bereaved family.

Hanssen volunteered his servicesto the KGB only six months after Ames.

Beneath Hanssen's self-righteously conventional exterior, David Vise has skilfully uncovered a depraved and subversive fantasy world. Hanssen fitted a secret video link in his bedroom so that his best friend (and possibly others) could watch him having energetic sex with his genuinely devout and unsuspecting wife, Bonnie, about whom he also posted poorly written sexual fantasies on adult internet sites.

Strip clubs, too, were central to Hanssen's bizarre Walter Mitty world. Some of the money paid to him by the KGB went to support a stripper to whom he boasted pathetically that he was the second most powerful man in Washington with a personal fortune to match.

Hanssen also fantasised that he was teaching his Russian case officers (who were in reality far more astute than he was) important lessons about tradecraft they did not already know. In March 2000, a year before he was finally arrested, Hanssen wrote to the Russians that he had taken the decision to work as their agent at the age of only 14, after being inspired by the memoirs of the KGB's most celebrated British agent, Kim Philby.

"Now that is insane, eh!", he added dramatically. Whether or not it was insane, it was certainly untrue. As his handlers were well aware, Philby's memoirs were not published until Hanssen was 24. What is missing from Vise's readable and well researched biography is a considered assessment of the impact in Moscow of the many US intelligence secrets he betrayed.

The man who benefited most was Kryuchkov. Gorbachev had initially been highly critical of the US intelligence supplied by Kryuchkov's foreign intelligence directorate. Once Ames and Hanssen began supplying large numbers of top-secret documents, however, Gorbachev changed his mind.

In December 1987 Gorbachev took the unprecedented decision to take Kryuchkov with him on his historic visit to Washington to conclude with President Reagan the first agreement to reduce the nuclear arsenals of the superpowers. Never before had a foreign intelligence chief accompanied a Soviet leader on a visit to the West. In 1988, again by Gorbachev's decision, Kryuchkov also became the first head of foreign intelligence ever to be promoted to the Chairmanship of the KGB. Kryuchkov was doubtless well aware how much his own career owed to Hanssen and Ames. He secretly sent Hanssen a personal letter full of praise and thanks for his work for the KGB.

Gorbachev has since described his decision to promote Kryuchkov as the biggest personnel mistake of his career. In August 1991 Kryuchkov was the ringleader of the hard-line coup which attempted unsuccessfully to topple Gorbachev from power. Fearing for his own security, Hanssen broke contact with the KGB.

In 1999, driven by both the compulsions of his fantasy world and financial greed, Hanssen made contact with the post-Communist Russian foreign intelligence service, the SVR. His mood, however, became increasingly fatalistic. He had, he told the SVR, "come as close to the edge as I can without being truly insane". When the FBI finally arrested him in February last year, Hanssen's first words were, "What took you so long?"