The Bureau and the Mole

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Robert Philip Hanssen was one of the FBI's most trusted agents, a twenty-five-year veteran who was a devout Catholic and devoted suburban 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 rose up the ranks to become one of America's foremost counterintelligence experts, he was also leading another life as a devilishly clever spy for the Russian government, selling secrets that would destroy billions of dollars of painstaking intelligence work and compromise a host of America's most closely guarded national security secrets, including the names of clandestine operatives and the top-secret-survival plan in the event of nuclear attack. Now, 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 FBI eventually brought him down. Vise probes Hanssen's personal history to uncover how a seemingly all-American boy ultimately became the perfect traitor by employing the very sources and methods his own nation had trusted him with -- from covert drop sites to cryptography to the use of seemingly innocuous markings on telephone poles and signs -- to jeopardize America's national security for over fifteen years. 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.Fascinating, gripping, and provocative, The Bureau and the Mole is a harrowing tale of how one man's treachery rocked a fraternity built on fidelity, bravery, and integrity -- and how the dedicated perseverance of another brought him to justice.