by Daniel J. Gansle

Created on: December 22, 2008

If you like political thrillers based on a true story, Breach (2007) will absolutely keep you on the edge of your chair. The 2007 political thriller starring Chris Cooper, Ryan Phillipe, and Laura Linney dramatizes the true story of the worst intelligence breach in American history.

Chris Cooper plays Robert Hanssen, veteran FBI Intelligence analyst who on February 18, 2001 was arrested for over twenty years of spying for the Russian KBG. Near his modest suburban Washington, D.C. home on 9414 Talisman Drive, Vienna, Virginia, Hanssen made numerous dead drops containing top-secret U.S. intelligence data for his KGB handlers taped up underneath a footbridge in nearby Foxstone Park. Ironically, it's also where his long career as a double-agent came to an abrupt end.

The movie starts with actual footage of newly-appointed U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft describing the arrest of Robert Hanssen as "a very serious breach in the security of the United States." The audience is then introduced to aspiring young FBI agent Eric O'Neill, played brilliantly by Ryan Phillipe. Breach is actually just as much about how Eric O'Neill was put on the biggest spy case in American history as it was about Hanssen's eventual arrest.

O'Neill is placed on an assignment by his superiors to become Hanssen's personal assistant in the newly created Information Assurance Division, where Hanssen was hired on to provide the FBI with an overhaul of their information technology security systems. The Information Assurance Division was actually a front department with the intention of ferreting out the suspected mole who has been compromising national security information to the Russians: one Robert Hanssen, who ironically was placed in charge of the entire operation unawares.

O'Neill's actual (undercover) role was to study Hanssen's daily habits in regards to complaints by Hanssen's coworkers that he was using his computer to view and post sexually-explicit content on the internet. Hanssen, a self-described conservative Catholic and active in Opus Dei, is viewed in the movie almost as a sympathetic character outraged over the FBI's outdated computer security measures, its weighty bureaucracy, and its lack of focus on the intelligence side of the Bureau (as opposed to the law enforcement side).

In a certain sense, Hanssen could be viewed as a martyr who sacrificed himself to show the FBI in the very worst way possible how vulnerable their information technology and intelligence gathering protocol

• 1
• 2
• Next Page >>