Robert Hanssen as American Beauty
The Times gloats over FBI spy’s piety.

By James Morrow, managing editor of Ironminds.com
February 26, 2001 9:05 a.m.

ne of the cultural Left's articles of faith is that religious people are really hypocrites behind closed doors, and that public morals and piety are nothing more than a screen for furtive, often sexual, misdeeds. The recent film Chocolat epitomized this view, as did the Oscar-winning American Beauty, which celebrated the ideal of suburban fathers ditching their responsibility, featured a closet-case Marine, and took place in a white-picket-fence neighborhood where the only normal couple were the two gay guys with the same first name. How cute, and really, how predictable. So perhaps it shouldn't be surprising that the East Coast headquarters of this school of thought, the New York Times, took out against Robert Philip Hanssen, the treacherous spy now being called the Kim Philby of the FBI, this Sunday in a front-page piece, "Much Piety but Not Polish From Spy Suspect."

"For a man accused of betraying his country to the godless leadership of the Soviet Communist Party," Philip Shenon's article begins, and here you can clearly imagine him rolling his eyeballs, much as liberals everywhere did whenever Ronald Reagan called the U.S.S.R. an evil empire, "Robert Philip Hanssen could not have seemed a more devout follower of the Roman Catholic Church — or a more committed anti-Communist. He often told his friends in the counterintelligence division of the FBI where he worked for most of his 25-year career with the bureau, that he loathed Communism and that the teachings of Lenin were incompatible with those of Jesus Christ." Not only that, but the 'burbs-dwelling Hanssen — whose church-going ways have already been widely reported in the media — eschewed going-away parties for colleagues at strip clubs (a car-pool buddy said the spy called such events "an occasion of sin"), and would sometimes slip out of the office to attend Mass. Filling out the Times indictment, Hanssen and his family were even "adherents of Opus Dei, an elite conservative Catholic order. Opus Dei urges its members to attend daily Mass, and Mr. Hanssen also regularly appeared for evening prayer and confession sessions known as recollections."

The rest of the article concentrates on potential motivations for Hanssen's crimes, as well as his dour demeanor and his apparently incredible ability to bifurcate and compartmentalize his life. But the real meat of the story, which the Times reports gleefully, is the delicious notion of Hanssen as devout Catholic hypocrite, making him a character tailor-made for the biases of West 43rd Street. Of course, there have been plenty — too many — Americans who have betrayed their country for foreign governments, yet the Times has never focused on their piety. Could one imagine the paper doing a large take-out on Jonathan Pollard's commitment to Judaism? Or on the worship habits of Aldrich Ames (if they've ever even been reported)? No way. But the Times is happy enough to trumpet evidence of the theory that if you scratch a Christian, you'll find a hypocrite — so long as his name's not Jesse Jackson.