[iwar] [fc:When.Betrayal.And.Paranoia.Are.Part.Of.The.Job]

From: Fred Cohen (fc@all.net)
Date: 2002-01-02 06:53:50
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From: Fred Cohen <fc@all.net>
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Date: Wed, 2 Jan 2002 06:53:50 -0800 (PST)
Subject: [iwar] [fc:When.Betrayal.And.Paranoia.Are.Part.Of.The.Job]
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New York Times
January 2, 2002
When Betrayal And Paranoia Are Part Of The Job
By Tom Mangold
LONDON -- A vintage spy joke: The counterintelligence officer looks in the
mirror while shaving and asks, I wonder who that man is working for?
Counterintelligence, the black art of preventing other people from stealing
your secrets, was Robert Hanssen's job at the Federal Bureau of
Investigation. Now, as he sits in his cell in a federal jail quietly
confessing his monstrous thefts of America's most secret secrets, attention
turns again to the psychological profiling of counterintelligence officers.
These are supposed to be the most trusted men and women of the intelligence
world, the spies who must know all the secrets so they can protect them.
Mr. Hanssen was one of the F.B.I.'s top counterintelligence officers. He was
a tall, slightly overweight, boring individual who lacked basic social
graces. Yet he has turned out to be a clutch of paradoxes. He adored his
wife and children but spent his spare time with a stripper; he was a devout
Catholic, yet used his priest confessors as a moral shield to continue
spying; he hated Communism but betrayed his country rotten. You can almost
hear Kim Philby, the British spy and archtraitor of the West, chuckling in
his grave. Mr. Hanssen admired him. Of course.
The truth is, those whom the gods favor in the world of counterintelligence,
they first drive mad. It is a ghastly job. Imagine being told to assume that
your boss is stealing from your company. Imagine endless months of
painstaking detective work to unravel just one possible clue in an
investigation that may run for a decade at least. Imagine that even when you
get home and put your feet up and take that first sip of whiskey, all you
can talk about is the weather.
One positive result of the Hanssen case may be the establishment within the
F.B.I. of annual psychological tests for the unfortunates who work in the
febrile world of counterintelligence. Like military officers who have access
to the nuclear trigger, F.B.I. officers may in the future be scrutinized for
signs of incipient paranoia or lesser forms of mental distress. Such
afflictions are occasioned mainly, I believe, by the sheer loneliness of
keeping secrets.
Mr. Hanssen is often portrayed as some Hieronymus Bosch sinner falling
headlong into the flames of perdition. It may be a convenient way of
explaining the enormity of his treachery, but I remain skeptical. I think
Mr. Hanssen thought he was a darned clever operator (he was right) and he
simply wanted peer approval.
That would explain many of the apparent paradoxes. Why consort, as he did,
with a humble stripper? Not for sex; he never touched the gallant Priscilla
Galey, she has told interviewers. More likely he wanted her to know that he
was a good F.B.I. officer.
A former senior F.B.I. officer who worked with Mr. Hanssen told me the
confessed spy "was a sort of nerdy guy - he didn't fit into our canteen
culture." Perhaps he became a double agent to indulge in the luxury of
letting someone outside the bureau realize how smart he was.
Read his correspondence with his Soviet and Russian masters, and the clues
bite you in the leg. The exchange of letters shows a desperate Robert
Hanssen seeking approval from the one group that fully understood how good
an operator he was: the opposition.
The Russians certainly knew how to appreciate his skills - and they played
him like a harp. When he sent one valuable load of secrets to them, they
wrote back: "We acknowledge your superb sense of humor and sharp-as-a-razor
mind. We highly appreciate both." Here was the acknowledgment he must have
craved. Mr. Hanssen's response to another message reveals the extent of his
estrangement, and of his self-conceit: "The U.S. can be regarded as a
powerfully built but retarded child, potentially dangerous but young,
immature and easily manipulated."
How significant that the only people he could boast to were pledged to
secrecy - his priests (to whom he regularly confessed about spying) and his
Russian contacts.
Surely Mr. Hanssen wanted the money he was paid (although he gave much of it
away, to Ms. Galey and to Catholic charities), and possibly he was
psychologically unstable (and so said a psychiatrist retained - and later
fired - by his defense lawyers). But the explanation for his actions may be
much simpler. In the twilight world of counterintelligence, where your
closest colleague may be your next target, navigating the dark terrain of
conflicted loyalties has tested greater minds than Mr. Hanssen's.
The legendary head of counterintelligence for the Central Intelligence
Agency, James Jesus Angleton, was driven half insane by the job. For 20
years he held the same position, and at the height of the cold war his
paranoid obsessions led him into one of the most shameful acts in the
history of American intelligence.
In 1964 a young K.G.B. officer named Yuri Nosenko defected to the United
States, but Mr. Angleton concluded he was a double agent dispatched by the
K.G.B. When Mr. Nosenko denied this charge, Mr. Angleton had him arrested
and thrown into solitary confinement - without ever charging him with any
crime. He was imprisoned for more than three years - two of them in a
special concrete cell built for him on C.I.A. property. During this time,
his only reading material was a label from a tube of toothpaste. Mr.
Angleton became so obsessed with his counterintelligence work that he
violated the principles of the Constitution he had sworn to uphold. Mr.
Nosenko was later vindicated and rehabilitated. Mr. Angleton's legacy
remains controversial.
None of these painful events would have occurred if counterintelligence
agents were allowed to breathe the same air and drink the same water as the
rest of us. Counterintelligence officers should be rotated out of the
discipline at least every two years. They should be encouraged to spend as
much time as possible in the real world to counterbalance time spent in
their closed offices. Mr. Angleton's successor as chief of
counterintelligence, George Kalaris, stepped down after only two anxious
years.
We cannot assume that traitors have defective genes or have been infected by
some alien madness to which ordinary mortals are immune. We must recognize
that counterintelligence itself thrives on hot-house secrecy, engendering a
kind of loneliness that breeds irrationality and moral confusion.
Robert Hanssen, like James Angleton, is as much a victim of this paranoid
system as a cause of it. His punishment for more than 20 years of spying on
his country is life imprisonment without the possibility of parole, and most
would agree it is deserved. Equally necessary is the reform of a system that
allows such men to flourish.
Tom Mangold is a BBC-TV correspondent and author of "Cold Warrior: James
Jesus Angleton, The C.I.A.'s Master Spy Hunter." 

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