Day: March 24, 2025

Desperate for some compelling entertainment to escape the latest bad news,  I picked up my clicker the other night and stumbled upon an old favorite, Breach, the masterful dramatization of the FBI’s desperate hunt for a Russian spy in its ranks. 

The mole turned out to be Robert Hanssen, a disgruntled  FBI computer systems whiz. Hanssen was “a complex man…a bundle of contradictions,” as the late espionage journalist David Wise described him. He was a good father and husband and an extremely devout Catholic, for example—all the while pursuing a secret relationship with a stripper and making hidden-camera sex videos of him and his wife that he shared with a friend. And even as Hanssen honestly applied his computer skills to FBI investigations and peppered superiors with suggestions for improvements in the system, he was helping the KGB round up several of the CIA’s Russian spies. Arrested in February 2001, Hanssen would spend the last 21 years of life in solitary confinement in the Florence Supermax in Colorado. 

Hanssen’s betrayal “doesn’t make sense to any of us because it’s not something any of us would partake in,” Michael T. Rochford, a top FBI counterespionage agent on the case, said during a panel discussion on the case years later. Getting “inside the head of a spy [is] like trying to get inside the head of a serial killer… It’s hard for me to figure. I can’t walk in those shoes.”

I’ve heard nearly identical thoughts recently while asking around about the possibility that one or more of the untold hundreds of CIA, FBI, ODNI, Justice Department, Pentagon, military and other national security employees fired in the Trump-Musk purges could be tempted to sell secrets to the Russians, the Chinese or another adversary, especially if they were already struggling financially.

Some just can’t imagine it. Wiser heads can.

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“Finlandization” is about weaker countries having to cede sovereignty to appease stronger bullies, such as Russia and, now, the US.