The M+G+R Foundation
A Guest Document
The Perversions of ex-FBI Agent and Opus Dei Member - Robert
Philip
Hanssen
and
The Price to the Security of the United States of America
(and we worry about Muslim fanatics...)
by Lee Penn
NOTE:
The following is an excerpt from an article by Lee Penn, "Opus Dei
& the Da Vinci Code, part II", published in the
Journal
of the Spiritual Counterfeits Project [SCP] (Vol. 29:4-30:1, 2006, pp.
42-67.)
(*) (**) (***)
Fourth, there
is the case of Robert Philip Hanssen, a top-level FBI agent responsible
for counterintelligence in the US,
who spied for the Russians from 1979 until his arrest in February 2001. He
told the Soviets about four of their own intelligence staff who were
spying for the US,
interfered with the investigation of a Soviet spy in the US State
Department, and gave the Communists “the plan of a program for the
continuity of government in case of a Soviet nuclear attack and planned
defense and retaliation.” A
biographer calls him “the most damaging spy in history.” For his efforts, the KGB (and its successor
agency, the FSB) gave Hanssen $1.4 million in cash and diamonds.
While betraying his country, Hanssen was a devoted member of Opus Dei. With
the Soviet money, Hanssen put his children through Opus Dei-approved
private schools. According
to one report, Hanssen believed that his children “might in the future
be part of a holy war that would remerge God and country, whose leaders
would then ban abortion, divorce and other evils of the world that he
and Opus Dei opposed.” He
and his wife were public activists against abortion. Meanwhile,
he put sex stories about his wife on the alt.sex group on the Internet,
“shared pornographic photos of his wife with his best friend, [and]
secretly broadcast his sex acts over closed-circuit television to his
guest room.” He
also spent $80,000 of Soviet-supplied cash on a two-year flirtation
with a stripper – and justified himself by refraining from intercourse
with her, and by trying to get her to attend church.
When his wife confronted him in 1982 after she caught him in the
basement counting out $20,000 in $100 bills, she made him confess to an Opus Dei
priest – Fr. Robert Bucciarelli, the former head of Opus Dei in the US. The priest told Hanssen to give the $20,000
that he had thus far received to Mother Teresa’s charities. The
rite of penance did not cause a change in Hanssen’s behavior; he
continued to spy on the US
throughout the Gorbachev era. Hanssen and
Louis Freeh (head of the FBI from 1993 to 2001) attended the same
church, St. Catherine of Siena, as have Justice Antonin Scalia and
Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa).
One way that Hanssen might have rationalized his behavior was his
belief that the Soviet Union would soon
collapse. One
of Hanssen’s bosses at the FBI said, “He was a religious person who put
the Soviets into a religious context. He would say that the Soviet
Union
is bound to fail because it is run by communists and communists don’t
have God in their life. He said to me, ‘Without religion, man is lost.’” The
reporter Adrian Havill added, “Did Hanssen believe that giving our most
vital secrets to the Soviet Union was a moot issue because they were
about to collapse? If so, he was a true seer. Mikhail Gorbachev would
declare communism dead in 1991. ‘Ramon Garcia’ [the name Hanssen used
in his dealings with the KGB] went to
ground a few months later.”
Another reporter
sees a more direct link to Vatican
and Opus Dei statecraft: “It may seem paradoxical that Hanssen would
spy for the Soviet Union,
a moral adversary and indeed a satanic force in the eyes of Opus Dei.
During Gorbachev’s glasnost era, however, there is evidence of
behind-the-scenes collaboration between the Vatican
and Moscow. In particular,
Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Agostino
Casaroli, a powerful Opus Dei supporter, pursued a policy of reaching
out toward Moscow with the
aim of gaining Poland’s
release from the Warsaw Pact. …
Hanssen’s most damaging activities in FBI
counterintelligence coincided with these years, 1985-89. Secrets from America’s
intelligence vaults could well have been part of the quid pro quo in
the late cardinal's dance with Moscow. Certainly, the Vatican
has had no qualms about violating American sensitivities. Indeed, it
seems to reflect a Eurocentric triumphalism. The papal encyclical on
labor rights slapped rampant materialism – that is, the immoral United
States – as the ‘other’ great evil
afoot in the world. The Vatican’s
political work with Moscow
paid off handsomely with the independence of Catholic-dominant (sic) Hungary,
Czechoslovakia,
Ukraine
and later, from Moscow’s
nominal ally Yugoslavia,
of Slovenia
and Croatia.
All the while, Hanssen kept up the flow of U.S.
secrets to Moscow.”
_______________________________________
(*)
Although we appreciate the courtesy of the Journal
of the Spiritual Counterfeits Project
[ SCP Journal] in allowing us to publish documents authored by Mr.
Lee Penn, documents which have appeared in their magazine, we do not in
any form
whatsoever endorse, agree or recommend any other article or
recommendation and/or promotion which may appear the SCP Journal.
(**) The
entire article,
which describes the track record of Opus Dei
and its members, is available to those who order a copy of this
magazine. To do so, visit the magazine's web site at http://www.scp-inc.org, or call their office
in Berkeley,California at 510-540-0300, between 9am and 5pm, Pacific
time.