We got the news yesterday with the old picture of Robert Hansen, Special Agent, Federal Bureau of Investigation. He had been sentenced to Life in Prison some twenty-two years ago for deliberate espionage against this nation. Some of the materials he compromised were the basic data we used at the Fleet Ocean Surveillance Center Pacific out in Pearl Harbor. Which is to say, the “sources and methods” used to collect the data on which we based our analysis was throughly compromised, start to finish.

His arrest and trial had a certain immediacy to those who worked with the material, and the disclosure of what Hansen had betrayed naturally reverberated through what we did when we reported to the office each morning.

Special Agent Hansen represented a generation of those who betrayed their nation. back in the 1950s, there were True Believers in the Soviet system. That involved a lot of emotion, and was reflected by the McCarthy Era politics determined to root them out. Hansen’s generation of spies were more directly oriented in direct cash payments.

In exchange for cash, Hansen traded his life. For the last 22 years he has been confined to solitary confinement in the SuperMax. That amounts to 23 hours per day in a small cell deliberately designed to restrict access to views of the “sky,” much less the other members of the general prison population. His sentence was “life,” which yesterday was revealed to be something on the order of 8,030 days with a small black and white television and intentional sensory deprivation. We thought the punishment fit the crime. There is something else going on as the report spread of Hansen’s death. It wasn’t quite the same, but it did lead back to some strange times when allegiances were more flexible than they are today.

They could not have known the delicate generational interplay between the Hansen story, sealed up in concrete in Colorado’s Alcatraz, and the story of the former Deputy Director of the Agency, Mr. Mark Felt. That is part of the swirl of long-delayed and slow-walked stories from long ago. We still don’t understand who did what to whom. Was the killing of a President actually conducted by a deranged Lone Gunman? Or could it have been a dramatic and treasonous act by a new powerful National Security State still wrapped in the machinery of a near atomic exchange?

(The Deep Throat Garage in Arlington, Virginia. They claim it will be torn down this summer. This sign was placed by our Arlington Civic government).

We have been wondering about that with varying degrees of intensity for most of our lives. Mark Felt is honored by a street sign outside the garage where he peddled state secrets to the Washington Post. The news item that went along with the story indicates they are going to rip down the parking structure. It is dated the day they found Robert Hansen in his rack at the SuperMax. He can arguably be said to have been punished for his crime across thousands of days.

Deputy Director Felt? Not a day in custody. And with a street sign honoring his achievement. We assume that will be taken down as well, but public release of the whole story is still going to have to wait. That is consistent with what we have learned most of our lives. It seems appropriate, you know?

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