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ReligionNewsBlog.com • Item 164 • Posted: Friday August 2, 2002  

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Sydney Morning Herald (Australia), Aug. 3, 2002
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2002/08/02/1028157838756.html
By Malcolm Knox
August 3 2002

INTO THE MIRROR: The Life of Master Spy Robert P. Hanssen
By Lawrence Schiller
HarperCollins, 317pp, $27.95 [Discounted at Amazon.com]

Lawrence Schiller’s tale about Robert Hanssen, the FBI agent recently convicted for selling secrets to Russia, is dramatic, lurid and highly readable. After inhaling it in two sittings, I couldn’t decide whether to recommend it or throw it away.

The very strengths of Schiller’s story – his entry into Hanssen’s mind, answering vividly the prime question of the traitor’s motivations – are the source of my unease. I don’t know whether I’ve read a “psychological portrait”, as Schiller calls it, or a fanciful work of fiction.

Schiller has dwelt in the border towns between documentary fact and fiction for some decades. He first surfaced as Norman Mailer’s collaborator in the 1979 book about the executed murderer Gary Gilmore, The Executioner’s Song. He has produced a number of “true crime” telemovies and books, covering the trial of O.J. Simpson and the murder of JonBenet Ramsey. After Hanssen’s arrest, Schiller commissioned Mailer to write a telemovie screenplay and it is upon Mailer’s interviews and re-creations that Schiller has based this book.
(…)

Hanssen started selling secrets to the Russians from 1979. His most prolific period was 1985-1991, when he earned a fortune from the KGB, selling more secrets even than the CIA’s most notorious spy, Aldrich Ames.

The known facts about Hanssen are straightforward. It is when Schiller probes into the “essence” of the man that this account finds its greatest strength and weakness.

Schiller makes much of the tension between Hanssen’s religion – he followed Bonnie into the extreme Catholic sect Opus Dei – and his sexuality.
(…)

Some of this is well known, and reported in journalist David A. Vise’s recent book The Bureau and The Mole. Where Schiller goes beyond is in passages such as this:

“When he was done, he would study his face in the mirror, the way he used to when he was a small boy. He then took out a notebook: Fourth time today, he wrote. Hand-Sin. Hanssen is full of Hand-Sin. He is handsome and he is full of Hand-Sin.”

Hanssen’s conversations with himself in mirrors comprise this book’s psychological heart. All are based on Schiller and Mailer’s imagination, as neither Hanssen nor Bonnie was interviewed.

Schiller is quite up-front about this, admitting to “authorial creation”.

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