Fans of spy fiction and true crime will find plenty to enjoy in O’Neill’s account.
“Robert Philip Hanssen was the greatest spy in US history.” So writes cybersecurity expert O’Neill, who, as an FBI agent, helped bring Hanssen down.
Early on in this account of the notorious Soviet spy case, the author relates that he has a special gift: being ordinary, melting into the scenery and not calling attention to himself. “I was trained,” he writes, “to blend into situations, to find cover in plain sight, to look unobtrusive, uninteresting, and unremarkable.” That ability to “be gray,” as he puts it, served him well when he was brought on to the case of Hanssen, who was nursing grievances galore about being passed over for promotion and not paid as much as he felt he deserved, along with resentment that the FBI had “dashed his James Bond dreams by closeting him with analysts and techies.” All of these grievances drove him to sell out to the Soviets—and, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, to Russian Federation intelligence. An expert in computers, Hanssen delivered the names of American assets, some of whom were then executed. As he recounts, O'Neill helped construct “an extraordinary mousetrap” in the elaborate sequence of events after Hanssen was identified as a Russian agent. “We couldn’t rely solely on surveillance to catch him,” he writes, since Hanssen was so skilled at eluding “ghost teams” and covering up his tracks. The solution was to get close, flatter, record, and “train myself to orient and decide faster than the spy” in figuring out what was going to come next. O’Neill’s narrative sometimes falls into the familiar clichés of espionage, but it is valuable in its exploration of the psychology of the traitor and his motivations as well as how spies like Hanssen so often enjoy success for as long as they do until finally caught: “Amateurs may hack machines, but professionals hack people.”
Fans of spy fiction and true crime will find plenty to enjoy in O’Neill’s account.Pub Date: March 26, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-525-57352-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 25, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2018
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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