Into the Mirror

April 29, 2002
The Robert Hanssen case gets its latest treatment in recent months in this imaginative retelling from true-crime auteur Schiller (American Tragedy). Hanssen is the infamous FBI mole arrested in January 2001 after two decades of selling government secrets to the Russians. His friends and family knew him as a fervent Catholic, a devoted husband and father and an extraordinarily intelligent FBI agent. But there was also a darker side. Hanssen betrayed his country, consorted with strippers, wrote online pornography, encouraged his best friend to watch as he had sex with his wife. He's altogether a strange and enigmatic man—a perfect subject, in other words, for "ripped from the headlines" author Schiller, who has mined the O.J. Simpson and Jon-Benet Ramsey tragedies for bestsellers. This latest effort is a strange hybrid of novelization, film treatment and investigative journalism. Using the techniques of fiction—inventing dialogue, conflating characters, imagining private thoughts—Schiller attempts to "build a psychological portrait" of the spy that solves Hanssen's Jekyll-and-Hyde riddle. The results are mixed. Readers looking for historical accuracy or hard-nosed reporting will be disappointed (there is little here that wasn't revealed in earlier books about Hanssen). But those looking for a brisk, page-turning dramatization of Hanssen's bizarre life and times will be amply rewarded. Fans of Norman Mailer will be especially happy; he helped Schiller research the book, and much of the dialogue is based on a screenplay Mailer wrote for a CBS miniseries. Given that Hanssen can never speak to the press—prosecutors stipulated that as part of his plea bargain—Schiller's book is likely to be as close as we'll ever get to the mind of the most heinous spy in FBI history. (Apr. 30)Forecast:No doubt national publicity will give this a big initial boost, and it'll get another in the fall: the CBS miniseries is scheduled to air in November.