‘Fascinating and Repulsive’: Major Garrett Breaks Down His Podcast On The Most Destructive Spy in US History
Major Garrett, the chief Washington correspondent for CBS News and creator and host of The TakeOut podcast, appeared on this week’s episode of The Interview for a chat with myself and Mediaite editor Aidan McLaughlin — about the chaos in the House, the media and Trump, and his fascinating new podcast.
Agent of Betrayal, Garrett’s new podcast series for CBS News, tells the story of an FBI agent, Robert Hanssen, who was considered one of the most damaging covert operatives in U.S. history.
The culmination of two years of reporting, Agent of Betrayal is an 8-hour limited series about the former FBI agent, who was secretly working for the Kremlin during the Cold War.
Hanssen’s espionage, as Garrett reports, “caused the execution of at least three individuals and cost hundreds of millions of dollars of damage to the United States Intelligence Program.”
But people who knew him personally said he was as “regular as pie,” a “solid citizen.”
“He was in every way a contradictory human being,” Garrett told Mediaite. “I’ve never encountered, studied, researched, someone who was as diseased, and regular, and routine a liar as Robert Hanssen.”
Garrett said that Hanssen started working for Soviets in 1979 while at the FBI, where he served for a total of 25 years. He was what was considered a “walk-in” which means someone who is not actively recruited by the FBI.
“During the Cold War, the Soviets and the United States were engaged every day in trying to recruit people on the other side to get them to tell them secrets about the other side. So we were constantly trying to recruit Soviets. Soviets were constantly trying to recruit Americans to give them little bits of information to create some level of advantage or equalize things between the superpowers in this massive global competition. Robert Hanssen just walked in the door of a known place in New York where Soviets were, and because he was an FBI agent and it paid attention to the conversation in the offices he worked in in New York, he knew that was a good place to find Soviets.”
According to Garrrett, Hanssen was a walking contradiction – on the one hand, the father of a pious family, on the other a deceitful spy trading dangerous secrets to the threatening adversary of the United States.
“He went to mass every single day, talked about how much he hated communists and communists all the time, talked about how much he believed in law and order in America, how much he loved his family. All of these outward projections of patriotism, anti-communism, Catholicism, moral uprightness,” Garrett said. “Every step of the way, projecting all of these things. He was doing the exact opposite. That to me was both fascinating and repulsive and something I just couldn’t stop looking into once the hook got him.”
Garrett spoke with more than fifty people who knew Hanssen to attempt to understand the deeply complicated man who died of colon cancer in 2023 while in prison.
One great mystery remains: why did Robert Hanssen do it? Garrett attempts to close in on the answer in his new series.
“Did Robert Hanssen, at various stages of his FBI career, feel he was underappreciated and bureaucratically ignored? Yes, he did. Was he also promoted? Yes, he was. Was he considered in some respects, a pretty good FBI special agent? Yes, he was. So did he get hassled and shunted off to terrible places and not get good promotions? No, he got good assignments and good promotions. But nevertheless, he nursed a kind of resentment that the FBI didn’t do that faster or move him higher. So resentment is a component of it.”
But Garrett told Mediaite “resentment” was only part of Hanssen’s motive. Money too was a contributing factor, however more than financial gain it was a sense of self-entitlement and enormous ego that drove Hanssen.
“Is money a factor? Yes. Decisive? No. He got about $600,000 over the course of his side hustle spying career,” Garrett said. “Compared to the value of the secrets he gave the Soviets and the Russians, he could have made much, much more. Millions upon millions of dollars if he had asked for it. But he didn’t.”
Garrett’s podcast Agent of Betrayal is available now on Apple Podcasts. Watch Mediaite’s full interview here. Subscribe to The Interview on Youtube, Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
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