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Review: Gray Day: My Undercover Mission to Expose America’s First Cyber Spy, Eric O’Neill, 2019.

Since I followed the Robert Hanssen espionage case when it broke and have seen Breach (where O’Neill is played by actor Ryan Phillippe), I was hoping to learn something new about Hanssen the man and the details of the secrets he passed.

This book succeeds on those accounts.

The secrets Hanssen passed, starting in November 1979 and continuing through 1999, included FBI and CIA assets in Soviet and Russian intelligence, nuclear weapon information (though how he got a hold of those is not revealed), continuity-of-government plans by the US government (essentially plans to prevent a “decapitation” of leadership in a nuclear war), methods and operations, and the existence of a secret FBI and NSA tunnel under the Russian Embassy in Washington D.C.

Hanssen, a CPA and holder of an MBA, joined the FBI in 1976. He had a life-long interest in spying. But, though “smart, technically proficient, and analytical” and good with computers, the FBI bureaucracy shunted him aside. As O’Neil says, Hanssen joined the FBI to become a spy. They made him a librarian. Continue reading →