NewsMax.com
Thursday, March 1, 2001

That's akin to the option chosen by Central Intelligence Agency turncoat Aldrich Ames, who in 1994 forfeited his government pension, his half-million-dollar Virginia home, a luxury car and all his life's savings in return for a life sentence instead of the death penalty.

Ames' deal with prosecutors also bought leniency for his co-conspirator wife so she could raise their son while he went to prison for life instead of being executed.

Robert Hanssen, the Federal Bureau of Investigation counterspy accused of peddling the very heart of United States espionage secrets to the old Communist Soviet Union and then to its survivor state, Russia, may have even more to lose – or save.

His prosecutors are counting on that as their primary leverage to find out exactly how much he may have passed along to his Russian spy masters.

According to a story in the New York Post:

In addition to his own life, Hanssen has at risk the $60,000-a-year pension he was five weeks away from collecting when he was arrested and the Vienna, Va., suburban home in which his wife and six children reside.

"He has a lot riding on this," said Paul Moore, a former FBI counterintelligence agent and close friend of Hanssen. "His family, basically, is being left with nothing.

"But the question is: What compartment of his life is he in right now? Is he Bob Hanssen, the good Catholic family man? Or is he Bob Hanssen, the spy?"

Prosecutors will attempt to find out when they begin negotiations in the next few weeks with Hanssen's high-profile Beltway lawyer, Plato Cacheris.

He is the same attorney who worked out the talk-or-die deal for Ames.

While all that was in the works, Attorney General John Ashcroft, FBI Director Louis Freeh and CIA chief George Tenet were being grilled Wednesday about the Hanssen case for three hours behind closed doors by the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Ashcroft told the senators he will cooperate with all inquiries and "do what is possible to avoid this kind of breach in the future."

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