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CNN Live Today

Hanssen Lived Complex Double Life

Aired May 10, 2002 - 12:15   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
BILL HEMMER, CNN ANCHOR: Former FBI agent Robert Hanssen will spend the rest of his life in prison for selling Cold War secrets to the Russians. Hanssen sentenced in federal court today. He has no chance for parole.

Our National Security Correspondent David Ensor now was there for the sentencing in Alexandria, Virginia. He joins us now live from there -- good afternoon, David.

DAVID ENSOR, CNN NATIONAL SECURITY CORRESPONDENT: Good afternoon, Bill.

Well, Robert Hanssen looked pale and gaunt in the courtroom. Apparently he doesn't like the prison food. He'll be eating a lot of it for many years to come, however.

It was fascinating to see this man, so intelligent, so complex, so troubled. Really one of the strangest people alive on earth.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

ENSOR (voice-over): There is not one, but at least two Robert Hanssens, experts and friends say. Entirely compartmentalized personalities, often with opposite views on any given subject.

Take espionage. Russia's mole in the FBI for over 20 years now tells interrogators, quote, "I could have been a devastating spy, I think, but I didn't want to be a devastating spy. I wanted to get a little money and to get out of it."

A little money? More than $600,000. Not a devastating spy? Not even his friends like former FBI colleague Paul Moore believe that one.

PAUL MOORE, CENTER FOR COUNTERINTELLIGENCE STUDIES: His ambition is to play the spy game better than anybody has ever played it before. He wants to be the best spy ever.

DAVID VISE, AUTHOR, "THE BUREAU AND THE MOLE": We are talking about the most prolific and damaging spy in American history.

ENSOR: Hanssen was abused by his father, experts say, and learned as a young man to compartmentalize those feelings so as to survive. VISE: He was able for more than 20 years, without the Russians ever learning his identity, to be a spy, to be a solid FBI analyst, to be a patriotic American, to commit treason, to be a church-going man, and to have blood on his hands.

ENSOR: Sex is another area where there are two other Hanssens. One who spent some of his spying money from the Russians on a stripper he picked up here. Another, church-going devout Opus Dei Catholic who spoke up when FBI agents were planning a farewell for a colleague at a nude dancing bar.

MOORE: He was just tremendously against that, absolutely sincere. "You should not go to these places, it's wrong if you go to the places. It's a sin if you go to the places."

VISE: Robert Hanssen put a secret spy camera in the bedroom of his home so that his best friend, Jack Hoschouer, could sit in the den and watch on the big-screen TV while Robert Hanssen had sex with his wife Bonnie.

ENSOR: A new book by Lawrence Schiller and Norman Mailer quotes Hanssen's friend Jack Hoschouer as saying, "The spy even suggested giving his wife Bonnie an illegal date rape drug, then letting his friend rape her." The friend demurred.

MOORE: There's a psychology that drove the whole thing, and it's a sickness, it's a sick psychology.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

ENSOR: Hanssen did apologize in the courtroom today, Bill. And Hanssen, the patriotic Catholic, does understand only too well why the other Hanssen, the twisted, sexual adventurer and the master traitor is now facing life imprisonment -- Bill.

HEMMER: David Ensor, thank you, in Virginia.

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