NewsMax.com Wires
Thursday, March 8, 2001

The newspaper quoted a senior U.S. official as saying the house in Vienna, Va., was bought under the name of a woman, Ann Manning, who paid $362,500 in cash, according to property records and the realtor who represented the sellers.

The transaction, first reported on "Dateline NBC," was made final on Dec. 21. The house bought by the FBI was on the market in early December for about $375,000, according to a Virginia man who bid on the property.

From the house, FBI investigators were able to monitor Hanssen in the weeks leading up to his arrest Feb. 18, the newspaper said.

Before arresting Hanssen, investigators secretly entered his home. They also had bugged Hanssen's office at FBI headquarters.

An FBI affidavit supporting the espionage charges against Hanssen indicates the bureau began watching him on Dec. 12 as a suspect in a frenzied hunt for a mole within U.S. intelligence.

Hanssen, a 25-year FBI veteran, was arrested after he allegedly left secret documents for Russian contacts at a park near his house. Hanssen planned to plead not guilty, his attorney said.

In a television interview that aired Tuesday night, Hanssen's former boss at the FBI, David Major, said he "felt like I got kicked in the stomach" when he learned Hanssen had been accused of being a Russian agent.

"I could see his mind saying, 'I am sitting in this meeting and they're discussing how to catch spies, how to find people who are agents, and I'm the one they really want, and I'm right next to them," Major told CBS' "60 Minutes II."

Major said he wondered what prompted Hanssen's alleged actions, because he did not appear to be a materialistic person.

"Not only would he talk about them operationally, but he was a religious person," said Major. "He would put it in a religious context. He would say that the Soviet Union is bound to fail because they're run by communists. And communists don't have God in their life."

For more than 10 years, Major and Hanssen worked in FBI counterintelligence. Major's job was to unmask U.S. agents working in Russia.

"He would have never popped up," said Major. "This was not a money man; it's a man who wore the same suit all the time, sometimes the same tie all the time."

Copyright 2001 by United Press International. All rights reserved.

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