The trustworthy face that tricked an FBI pro
By Gina Piccalo
Times Staff Writer
February 16, 2007
AS a baby-faced undercover FBI operative, Eric O'Neill, at the time just 27, duped America's most notorious double agent, Robert Hanssen, a paranoid egomaniac and sexual deviant who kept a stash of automatic weapons in his trunk.
By comparison, Hollywood's menagerie of control freaks was child's play. Pitch meetings didn't really challenge him, he said, because espionage and movie-making demand a similar skill set: nerves of steel, preternatural charm and a high pain threshold.
"You've got to be a really good actor — put on a mask and never let it slip," said the now 33-year-old O'Neill, referencing his FBI undercover work and not the three-day movie junket he'd just survived. "It just turned out I was good at it."
So good, in fact, that within two years of Hanssen's summer 2001 guilty plea, O'Neill had won over Universal Pictures chair Stacey Snider (she's a "huge fan" of the FBI, said O'Neill) and had negotiated a movie deal — without an agent. These days, when he's not negotiating U.S. Department of Defense contracts as a Washington, D.C., attorney, O'Neill is working on a TV pilot about a team of undercover field operatives for the CW.
"Breach," starring Ryan Phillippe as O'Neill and Chris Cooper as Hanssen, recounts the two months O'Neill spent acting as an assistant to Hanssen, one of the FBI's top agents, who had by then been compromised by the Russians. O'Neill shared a windowless office with the man, all the while reporting his every move to a massive investigative team. O'Neill's job was to help catch Hanssen in the act of sharing U.S. secrets.
"There were 500 agents working this case at its peak," said "Breach" writer-director Billy Ray. "There was only one who was locked in a room with the guy all day. And that was Eric."
O'Neill, like all the agents on the case, was initially ordered to keep quiet about it, telling only family and friends, at least until the FBI went public with its version of events. It just so happened, though, that O'Neill's brother David was an actor and aspiring screenwriter living in Los Angeles, trying to hit it big. So they started planning their Hollywood strategy days after Hanssen's takedown. Months later, after Hanssen pleaded guilty, freeing O'Neill from having to testify, he got the clearance to sell his story. David approached screenwriter Bill Rotko and together with Rotko's partner, Adam Mazer, they developed a book proposal, thinking the screenplay could come after it published.
But every publisher in New York already had its "Hanssen book," so Rotko and Mazer just wrote a screenplay instead. The early drafts didn't get them too far, though; O'Neill called them "outrageous." They had so glamorized his role in the arrest — one version had him single-handedly capturing Hanssen — that pitch meetings became slightly awkward.
"They'd go, 'Is that true?' " said O'Neill. "And I'd say, 'No.' It turned out people really wanted the truth."
By 2004, Ray had taken over writing the script — Mazer, Rotko and Ray share the credit — and after meeting with dozens of FBI officials, reading the half-dozen Hanssen books and getting to know O'Neill's family, Ray chose to center the story on the odd dynamic O'Neill shared with Hanssen. Ultimately, everyone involved acknowledges O'Neill's role in the case was exaggerated to keep the plot interesting. But Ray pointed out that O'Neill's job was crucial. "Had he done his job badly," Ray said, "the whole thing could have been blown."
As a consultant on the film, O'Neill took time off from his job to spend five marathon days on the set, sharing his impression of Hanssen down to the smallest detail.
He influenced everything in the film from Cooper's body language and style of ankle holster to the type of pen he used. Just to keep things authentic, Phillippe even carried O'Neill's worn briefcase from the time.
"The guy is encyclopedic in his ability to retain information," Phillippe said of O'Neill. "It was almost as if he could remember in exacting detail every single day he spent with Hanssen."
In real life, O'Neill never warmed to Hanssen. He remembers him as obsessive-compulsive, a devout member of the rigid Catholic sect known as Opus Dei who pressed his religion on acquaintances. He was socially awkward and liked to pick up O'Neill's calls unannounced, sneak up behind him and lean in too closely, just to put O'Neill off balance. And though O'Neill knew Hanssen was a high-level target for the FBI, it was only later that O'Neill learned the scope of Hanssen's duplicity, like the fact that he was a devout family man who also bought cars for strippers.
Still, O'Neill convinced Hanssen of his admiration, quizzing him on his favorite subjects: God, computers and counterintelligence.
"A big part of the job was to just keep him thinking it was real," said O'Neill.
Ultimately, O'Neill was so convincing that the FBI worried news of his betrayal would prove too demoralizing to Hanssen and would inhibit their interrogation. So O'Neill was denied his request to interview Hanssen.
That didn't surprise Cooper, who saw O'Neill as "the most unlikely person to be an FBI agent."
"He looked like a Botticelli painting to me — big eyes and a very open face," Cooper said. "Very gentle guy."
Of course, underneath it all is a hard-core patriot who knows how to read a room and can talk his way out of just about anything.
"Once you let fear take over and worry you're going to fail, you're going to fail," said O'Neill. "It worked in dealing with Hollywood. I was never nervous in a pitch or meeting with actors." The key, he added, is "never let yourself feel anybody is better than you."
| |
What Will My Spy Be? Capitalist, Drone, Deviant...
FBI trainee Eric O'Neill (Ryan Phillipe, left) is hand picked to keep an eye on suspected spy Robert Hanssen (Chris Cooper) in "Breach."
By MANOHLA DARGIS
When John le Carré appropriated a nursery rhyme for his 1974 book about spies and spy-catchers, he borrowed just three words, “tinker, tailor, soldier,” then sexed up the whole thing by adding a fourth word, “spy.” The new film “Breach,” about the F.B.I. counterintelligence agent Robert Philip Hanssen, who sold secrets to the Soviet Union and later Russia for more than two decades, suggests that it’s time to dust off the rest of that same rhyme: “rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief.” Now in prison, where he’s serving a life sentence, Mr. Hanssen was a little of each; he was also greedy, pathetic, malevolent — a creep’s creep.
In the spring of 2002, an assistant director at the F.B.I. explained Mr. Hanssen’s success as a spy this way: “Succinctly put, security, other than physical security, was not inculcated into the culture as a priority that must be practiced, observed and improved upon every day.” No kidding. For many of the 25 years he worked at the F.B.I., he covertly thrived in that culture, like a stealth malignancy. On the February 2001 morning of his arrest, he attended Mass at a Roman Catholic church where the services were in Latin and many in the congregation belonged to Opus Dei. Later that day, he dropped a garbage bag stuffed with intelligence secrets in a Virginia park not far from his home.
One of the strengths of “Breach,” a thriller that manages to excite and unnerve despite our knowing the ending, is how well it captures the utter banality of this man and his world. Unlike Kim Philby, an aristocratic figure who swanned across the world while passing classified British and American information to the Soviets, Mr. Hanssen, played by the stellar Chris Cooper, comes across as a middle manager type, a drone in a suit. The real double agent practiced his tradecraft in Washington and New York, not Cairo and Istanbul, and delivered the goods — more than 6,000 pages — in garbage bags secured with tape. With his weekend casuals and Ford Taurus, he might have been just another suburban dad bagging leaves.
The director Billy Ray, who wrote the screenplay with Adam Mazer and William Rotko, uses a young agent-in-training, Eric O’Neill (Ryan Phillippe), to jimmy his way into the story. (The real Mr. O’Neill, now a lawyer, served as a consultant on the film, which helps explains why it feels true in tone and texture.) Shortly before Mr. Hanssen was caught, the bureau assigned Mr. O’Neill to work for him. The younger man had been told only that Mr. Hanssen was a sexual deviant (he had some freaky habits), not that he was a turncoat. This lack of knowledge about the assignment and its dangers suits Mr. Phillippe well, largely because he always looks as if he were hiding something behind those nervous eyes of his.
Mr. Ray last directed the 2003 drama “Shattered Glass,” about that artful dodger Stephen Glass’s tarnished tenure at The New Republic. Like the earlier film, “Breach” is about secrets and lies, and smart, arrogant men waylaid by their own pride and pathologies. “Shattered Glass” has its moments, if not enough of them; as in “Breach,” Mr. Ray’s unapologetic seriousness is one of the film’s strongest assets. Even so, only a filmmaker with a naïve, blinkered view both of journalism and human nature, and with so little grasp of what can happen when youthful ambition meets institutional self-importance, could have been surprised by a Stephen Glass or reached such dizzying heights of outrage.
The stakes are far higher in “Breach,” of course, but Mr. Ray wisely holds his indignation in check in favor of something more analytical. When he keeps it cool, the film works surprisingly well. Mr. Ray doesn’t do much with the camera, but his no-frills, almost generic visual style suits the subject. In contrast to the world of shadows and mystery Robert De Niro fashions for “The Good Shepherd,” his origin story about the C.I.A., Mr. Ray serves up a bland, anonymous corporation, one in which organizational rivals bitterly compare offices, and shrink-wrapped computers sit stacked in the harshly lighted halls. It’s “The Office” without the jokes; Kafka without the soul. In other words, it’s the F.B.I., stripped of the usual movie-made gloss.
This conception of the F.B.I. as a more bureaucratically constipated, possibly more malevolent version of, say, Microsoft, if nowhere near as securely fortified, is Mr. Ray’s masterstroke. Mr. Hanssen might well have been insane, as he himself suggested to his Soviet contacts, but he was also a worker bee. His insanity might have been hardwired into him or simply (or not so simply) a symptom of working too many years in counterintelligence, where deception and detection are the rules of the game, and pride and promotion its only rewards. Mr. Hanssen earned promotions, but perhaps never enough to suit his pride. Certainly it wasn’t enough for his bank account: Kim Philby spied for Communism; a real capitalist, Mr. Hanssen earned $1.4 million.
Mr. Ray doesn’t explain Mr. Hanssen; rather, he offers us symptoms and secrets, procedures and routines, as well as a fundamentally banal man who, in any other job, would have been just another Walter Mitty. Mr. Hanssen used various aliases during his spy days, including the improbable Ramon Garcia. (As if sensing his neediness, the Soviets gave Ramon love and money: “Congratulations on your promotion. We wish you all the very best in your life and career.”) Mr. Cooper, who looks more like a Robert than a Ramon, keeps his face pulled in tight for much of the film, like a fist held firm to his chest. He rouses our curiosity but never solicits our pity. It’s enough that he and Mr. Ray make this monster human.
“Breach” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). It includes some mild adult language and a few scenes with guns.
BREACH
Opens today nationwide.
Directed by Billy Ray; written by Adam Mazer, William Rotko and Mr. Ray, based on a story by Mr. Mazer and Mr. Rotko; director of photography, Tak Fujimoto; edited by Jeffrey Ford; music by Mychael Danna; production designer, Wynn Thomas; produced by Bobby Newmyer, Scott Strauss and Scott Kroopf; released by Universal Pictures. Running time: 110 minutes.
WITH: Chris Cooper (Robert Hanssen), Ryan Phillippe (Eric O’Neill), Laura Linney (Kate Burroughs), Dennis Haysbert (Dean Plesac), Caroline Dhavernas (Juliana O’Neill), Gary Cole (Rich Garces), Bruce Davison (John O’Neill) and Kathleen Quinlan (Bonnie Hanssen).
