Selling out your country for money is pretty low. Selling secrets to the enemy, with the knowledge that you are sending someone to their death, is the worst kind of spy. Robert Hanssen was that type of spy. Hanssen, an FBI agent who, from 1979 to 2001, fed information to his Soviet handlers that netted him over $600,000 in cash and $50,000 worth of diamonds. The information that he sold costs lives. Spies in the Soviet Block were outed and subsequently executed. The CIA and the FBI knew there was a mole, but Hanssen escaped detection for years. At one point he typed in his name on the FBI mainframe computer to see if he was under suspicion. Apparently, that wasn’t suspicious.
Hanssen had dreams of getting out of the spy game, packing up his decoder rings, and relocating to Moscow so he could teach Soviet spies the techniques of spying. His “hero” was British-born spy, Kim Philby. Hanssen wanted to emulate Philby, perhaps because Philby successfully defected to the USSR. Maybe Hannsen didn’t research what really happened to Philby. Philby, like most “true believers,” found the reality of actual communism to be not the vision of worker utopia found on propaganda posters. Reality was, stifling. He was under virtual house arrest and guarded by KGB thugs, 24/7.
Over at Langly, a mousy-looking, 31-year veteran of the agency named Aldrich Ames was doing the same thing as Hanssen. Ames netted far more cash than Hanssen in his truncated spy career. Ames and Hanssen combined to compromise the identities of hundreds of human assets, most notably Gen. Dmitri Polyakov. Polyakov was the head of Soviet Intelligence. He was fingered by Hanssen and Ames. Polyakov was arrested and executed.
Most recently, we have seen an increase in spies, and spying for China. Fang Fang, Eric Swalwell’s alleged side-chick was (and still is?) a Chinese spy. He claims he didn’t know of her spying, and offered no information for her affections. Kathy Hochul, the nasally governor of New York, had a spy working under her nose. […]
— Read More: redstate.com
