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Offering a fresh perspective on the Robert Hanssen spy case, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David A. Vise interweaves the stories of Hanssen's long-running treason and FBI director Louis Freeh's desperate search for the mole within his department.

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In 1979, FBI Agent Robert Philip Hanssen began to sell some of America's most closely guarded intelligence secrets to the Soviet Union. Over the next twenty-two years, the massive volume of information he divulged to the Russians from the FBI, CIA, NSA, and White House would compromise decades of espionage work and put the national security of the United States in immediate jeopardy. But during the mid-1990s, FBI Director Louis J. Freeh discovered that there was a mole within the Bureau, and he began to set the trap that would expose the traitor within its midst. This is the story of the man who betrayed more of his country's secrets than any other spy in American history -- and of the crime-fighting legend who would bring him to justice.

The Bureau and the Mole takes you into the shadowy world of Robert Philip Hanssen, a twenty-five-year veteran of the FBI who was a devout Catholic and a devoted family man, who attended the same church and sent his children to the same school as his boss, Bureau Director Louis J. Freeh. But as he emerged from a troubled childhood in Chicago to rise to the highest ranks of America's counterintelligence experts, Hanssen was also leading another life -- as a diabolically clever spy for the Russian government. Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author David A. Vise untangles Hanssen's web of deceit to tell the story of how he avoided detection for decades while becoming the most dangerous double agent in FBI history -- and how Freeh and the Bureau eventually rooted him out. Vise probes Hanssen's personal history to uncover how a seemingly All-American boy concealed a sordid sexual life from his family and ultimately became the perfect traitor by employing the very sources and methods his own nation had entrusted him with. Drawing from a wide variety of sources in the FBI, the Justice Department, the White House, and the intelligence community, Vise also interweaves the narrative of how Freeh led the government's desperate search for the betrayer among its own ranks, from the false leads, to the near misses, to its ultimate, shocking conclusion. The Bureau and the Mole is a fascinating, true spy thriller as riveting as it is unforget-table. It is a harrowing story of how one man's treachery rocked a law-enforcement fraternity founded on fidelity, bravery, and integrity to its very core -- and how the dedicated perseverance of another would finally bring him to justice.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

By the time fellow FBI agents arrested Robert Hanssen in February 2001, he'd been spying for the Russians off and on for two decades. Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post scribe Vise attempts to explain why Hanssen did it and how he got away with it in this comprehensive account. Hanssen, says Vise, was a highly intelligent but socially inept loner who felt "overlooked and underappreciated" by his colleagues at the Bureau. Determined to prove he was better than them and eager to profit from his superiority Hanssen decided to begin passing classified documents to his KGB counterparts in exchange for diamonds and hundreds of thousands of dollars. He also revealed the names of at least nine U.S. spies working in the KGB, several of whom were subsequently executed. But the FBI, Vise writes, was so blind to its own vulnerabilities that it ignored the warning signs even when Hanssen's brother-in-law (also an FBI agent) reported that Hanssen was hiding huge sums of cash at home. Vise adheres to a plain newspaper style in his account, which steals some of the excitement from Hanssen's dramatic spy craft; he also includes long, needless digressions on the career of FBI Director Louis Freeh. But Vise's research and reporting are first-rate and his sources (Hanssen's wife, mother and best friend, as well as other FBI agents and ex-KGB operatives) are excellent. This is a chilling portrait of a man who betrayed his country simply to see if he could. (Jan.) Forecast: This is one of a trio of books on Hanssen, including The Spy Who Stayed Out in the Cold (Forecasts, Oct. 1), one of which came in too late for review (see note, The Spy Next Door, page 59). The market may be too crowded for Atlantic's optimistic 50,000-copy first printing. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

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