Breach - the true story
Guardian Unlimited
The current atmosphere between the British and Russian governments has been strained by the events surrounding the murder of Alexander Litvinenko and the purported discovery of communications equipment concealed in a piece of fake rock in Moscow. Meanwhile the cinemas are full of tales of spies on the run, spies losing their memories and spies being hunted down by other spies, but not all these thrillers are the product of an overactive imagination - Breach, in cinemas August 31, brings to the big screen the story of one double agent's calculated betrayal over 15 years and the investigation that led to his eventual capture.
On February 18 2001, former FBI agent Robert Hanssen was arrested, charged with selling top secret documents and information to the Soviet Republic and, latterly, to the Russian government. It was said that by the time of his arrest Hanssen had received more than $1.4m in cash and diamonds for the information he had passed over to the KGB. In July of 2001 he pleaded guilty to 15 separate charges of espionage, and was sentenced to life in prison without parole.
Hanssen's story is retold in Breach, which follows the internal investigation and surveillance that led to his arrest. Written and directed by Billy Ray, whose previous film Shattered Glass was widely acclaimed by critics, Breach brings Hanssen to the big screen - and embodies him with a cold, angry intelligence courtesy of Oscar winner Chris Cooper.
The story deals with the final weeks of the chase to unmask the spy - but what led to the eventual sting? And how had this unassuming family man managed to systematically steal information across so many FBI departments, completely unheeded, for quite so long?
Hanssen, born in Chicago in 1944, studied Chemistry and Russian in college and subsequently began training as a dentist, before switching to accountancy because he "didn't like spit all that much". After graduating, he followed his father's career path into the Chicago Police Department, where he worked as an internal affairs investigator - gaining many of the skills that would later aid him as a spy. By 1976 he was recruited by the FBI, and in 1981 he relocated to their head office in Washington, DC.
It was here that Hanssen - calling himself only 'B' - made an approach to a Kremlin representative and started passing on valuable secrets. These included the names of three KGB agents on the FBI payroll - information which eventually led to two of them being executed.
Between 1985 and 2001 he continued to sell state secrets, in what the commission set up to investigate his betrayal described as "possibly the worst intelligence disaster in US history".
By the time he was caught, evidence against Hanssen was as thrilling as any spy novel - intricate details of the 'dead drops' that 'B' used to communicate; messages left with packing tape that would covertly indicate whether the drop had been made; the money deposited in secret accounts or even in cash, taped beneath a bridge in a park in the suburbs outside Washington.
In the end, it took a team of 500 agents to put together the pieces of the puzzle. But the sting itself was made possible by a young FBI employee by the name of Eric O'Neill: in January 2001 Hanssen was moved to a new post - a post created specifically in order to watch him. O'Neill was brought in as his aide, and finally got the evidence to catch his superior just two months before Hanssen was due to retire.
It is these last tense weeks of the case that are examined in the film, with Ryan Phillippe playing the young, inexperienced but fiercely loyal and ambitious O'Neill to Cooper's tightly-wound Hanssen. Alongside the main narrative, the wider implications of deceit and betrayal of country, family and colleagues are all played out. O'Neill takes on the case knowing almost nothing about Hanssen, and is drawn into a dangerous investigation involving espionage, pornography and murder. The building intensity as events unfold is captured perfectly in the film, which will have you on the edge of your seat as O'Neill has a series of close calls while trying to obtain the evidence needed to confirm Hanssen's guilt.
At the end of it all, Hanssen - who escaped the death sentence - remains aloof. Apart from his own ego, there seems little that motivated him to turn on his country; just the need to support his wife, Bonnie, and their six children - and, of course, the intellectual game of it all.
"I could have been a devastating spy, I think," he told agents questioning him after his arrest. "But I didn't want to - I wanted to get a little money and get out of it."
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