The story of FBI agent-turned-spy Robert P. Hanssen is a bizarre affair.
Known as a passionate patriot, staunch conservative and unrelenting anti-Communist, he married a devout Catholic, converted and joined Opus Dei, a strict sect that even some Catholics view as a cultlike fringe group.
But Hanssen led a double life: In early 2001, he was arrested by his FBI colleagues for selling secrets to Russia and the Soviet Union for nearly 20 years.
And once his personal house of cards began tumbling down, more secrets fell out. Hanssen regularly gave nude pictures of his wife, Bonnie, to his best friend, suggesting he could drug her so she'd have sex with his pal. The wayward agent later befriended a stripper, lavished her with gifts and took her to Hong Kong on a business trip.
It's a true-life story with more drama than any typical TV movie. But CBS's miniseries Master Spy: The Robert Hanssen Story leaves out some compelling details.
According to press reports, Hanssen had an affair early in his marriage that left his wife suspicious of other trysts for years, but Master Spy never shows that. He reportedly admitted having sex with the stripper in Hong Kong, but CBS's movie shows him refusing her advances.
He posted tales of sex with Bonnie on the Internet using their real names and, according to Washington Post reporter David Vise, grabbed the exposed breasts of one of Bonnie's sisters while she was breast-feeding. Neither act is shown in the movie.
Director Lawrence Schiller _ who with his mentor, acclaimed novelist Norman Mailer, developed both the miniseries and the book Into the Mirror: The Life of Master Spy Robert P. Hanssen _ denied omitting or toning down details to avoid embarrassing vital sources such as the FBI and Hanssen's family, or even to placate CBS.
"We weren't interested in making a film . . . where people receive the usual simple answers," he said. "We were interested in making a film that was a psychological portrait. We made the film _ CBS had very little, virtually no input at all. They left us all alone to make a film that would deal with an intellectual audience as well as their usual audience."
Oscar winner William Hurt (Altered States) is perfectly cast as Hanssen, though his blond, thinning hair and ice-blue eyes don't resemble the real turncoat at all.
Instead, it is Hurt's trademark detached acting style that fit Hanssen's personality perfectly. Hurt often glides through his roles like an absent-minded professor whose attention is always partly focused elsewhere _ the perfect attitude for a brilliant, socially awkward guy maintaining a complex double life.
Master Spy hints at several motivations behind Hanssen's actions. A psychologically abusive father (he secretly paid a driving examiner to flunk his son to teach humility) pushed the spy-to-be into creating an outer life for the world and an inner life for himself. Frustration over the shortcomings of fellow agents and his inability to prosper at the FBI led Hanssen to find a perverse satisfaction in fooling his colleagues. And financial pressures created a need for fast cash.
"Here was a man with enormous opposites who had managed to keep his sanity, and that appealed to me," said Mailer, who also collaborated with Schiller on the Pulitzer Prize-winning movie The Executioner's Song and CBS's O.J. Simpson miniseries, American Tragedy. "I thought, "Here is going to be someone who is interesting to write about and try to understand.' "
What has resulted is an off-balance, sometimes tedious movie that wallows in the twisted quality of Hanssen's life. At times, Master Spy is a compelling drama about a man whose double life seemed to slowly unravel his sanity, but those moments are spaced too far apart in a four-hour miniseries that could have told its story in two or three.
According to CBS press materials, Schiller and Mailer spent more than nine months after Hanssen's arrest talking to those close to him, including best friend Jack Hoschouer, members of the KGB, members of his family and FBI agents, some of whom were consultants for the movie.
But neither were allowed to speak with Hanssen himself. And Schiller won't say whether Bonnie Hanssen talked to them.
"We were introduced to a lot of people in the family on a personal level, and we agreed not to specifically single out anybody," said Schiller, admitting concerns early on that the project not affect Bonnie's deal with government prosecutors (she still receives Hanssen's pension, though he's serving a life sentence for his crimes).
Bonnie, as played by West Wing guest star Mary-Louise Parker, comes across mostly as strong, if shrilly devout. But the real Bonnie was so dependent on Hanssen, she didn't know how to balance a checkbook on her own and was terrified by delusions of a coming Armageddon that Hanssen reportedly fed by showing her atomic bomb shelter sites.
"There were people who participated in this because they want the story told, not because they wanted to be in a movie," Schiller said.
Beyond the sordid details of his sex life, Hanssen's story also exposes weaknesses at the FBI. In another incident not shown in Master Spy, Hanssen's brother-in-law Mark Wauck, also an FBI agent, told the agency in 1990 that Hanssen may have been selling secrets after noticing how much cash he had.
But nothing came of the warning, and Hanssen wasn't caught until more than a decade later.
"What I did do, which I think is more damaging, is show how easy it is to steal from the bureau," Schiller said. "Just put papers in your briefcase and walk out? Just put a floppy disc into a computer and download it? I felt (those scenes) were more damaging to the bureau, which admitted it made some major mistakes in this case."
The movie begins with Hanssen's wedding to Bonnie Wauck in 1968, introducing his father (played by the godfather of overbearing TV dads, Everybody Loves Raymond's Peter Boyle) and Bonnie's devout Catholic family. Despite getting angry when best friend Jack (Dolores Claiborne's David Strathairn) makes a rude comment about Bonnie's sex appeal, Hanssen eventually sends naked photos of his wife to his pal while he's stationed in Vietnam.
Joining the FBI against his father's wishes in 1976, Hanssen begins selling information to the Soviets while living in New York City, struggling to make ends meet on a low-level agent's salary.
Bonnie discovers a letter he has written to the Soviet intelligence agency GRU and Hanssen admits selling secrets to the Russians, promising to stop and donate what he has been paid to Mother Teresa.
Instead, Hanssen delves deeper, cleverly declining to reveal his identity to his Soviet contacts (using the alias Ramon Garcia) and devising a "blind drop" system in which the Russians would leave payments under a secluded park bridge after he left secrets there.
And what secrets he provides: The film shows Hanssen revealing the identities of KGB agents working with the FBI (some were later executed), U.S. plans for coping with a nuclear attack and the government's work to dig a tunnel under the Russian Embassy in Washington for espionage purposes.
All this in between maintaining his double life of piety interspersed with perversion.
It all unravels after the fall of the Soviet Union, when materials provided by "Ramon" are turned over to the FBI and tested for fingerprints. Even though Hurt's Hanssen seems to sense that the FBI is closing in, he still looks surprised when agents spring from the park's bushes to take him down.
The one question left hanging once the dust settles: Why?
Master Spy's greatest weakness is that it doesn't really provide a compelling answer _ possibly because Hanssen himself may not know.
"Hanssen's own psychologist . . . and Hanssen himself . . . could not give a simple, overriding explanation," Schiller said. "With Hanssen there's no simple answer. This is a man going in different directions simultaneously, and he doesn't fall apart."
Though William Hurt, left, looks nothing like real-life spy Robert Hanssen, his detached acting style is perfect for the role. David Strathairn, right, plays Hanssen's best friend, Jack Hoschouer.
