Maybe a condition that is a result of interactions between wizards and some varieties of technology? Would help with the Death Eater propaganda of Wizard AIDS being the result/punishment of “degenerate” consorting with Muggles.
A Hippie in the House of Mouse (Jim Henson at Disney, 1980)
- Thread starter Geekhis Khan
- Start date
- Status
A grateful 1999-2009 breathes a sigh of relief.
The Deathly Hallows creators already tried that - I believe JK shot them down.
I think the idea of making Hermione a "white savior" type by making her black from the beginning:
Maybe she could be convinced to release the world building info in forms of media similar to George Lucas and Star Wars.
Are you saying he's cast instead of Richard Harris or after Richard Harris dies? If the later I read that Richard Harris' family wished that Peter O'Toole would get the role. Any thoughts on that?
Even if Disney only gets the movie rights the following fan theory could be made canon even if only as a blink and you'll miss it Easter egg:
The Real Spies of Washington
Declassified: The Flipping of Robert Hanssen
Post from Declassified: The Lives and Stories of Real-Life Spies, by N. Cognito
What makes a person become a spy for another nation? Why betray your home country to the benefit of another? For some, the reasons are ideological, such as dedicated Marxists Julius and Ethel Rosen, who gave Stalin the secrets of nuclear weapons. For others it’s national or cultural, such as Jonathan Jay Pollard who spied on the US for Israel. For some, the reasons are monetary, like basic greed or a need to pay off debts or feed a substance addiction. For some it’s the results of blackmail after being compromised. Some are disgruntled about a lack of career opportunity or disaffected with their careers and seeking revenge.
And yet for others, the only reason for their betrayal seems to be because they can.
For a decade from 1979 to 1989, FBI Agent Robert Hanssen betrayed America to the Soviet Union for a grand total of roughly $500,000 and various gifts. An espoused anti-Communist and devout Catholic, he had no apparent ideological reasons for approaching the GRU and KGB. He had no personal or familial ties to Russia or any other Soviet Republic. The amount of money that he gained was significant, but hardly sufficient to become independently wealthy, and while he was clearly living beyond his apparent means, he was not living a life of abject luxury. He had no noteworthy debts or drug or alcohol issues. The Soviets appeared to have no blackmailable information on him. His career path was advancing and he had no reported issues with his superiors.
Instead, Hanssen was an underconfident, self-important loner who’d been emotionally abused by his father and needed to feel important. He had few friends and alienated many of his colleagues with his antisocial personality and sense of smug superiority. He was obsessed with spies from a young age, in particular James Bond, and over the years bought bond-related objects like Leica cameras, a shortwave radio, and a Walther PPK. Even a Swiss bank account.
He also had free access to lots of Top Secret documents, plenty of free time on the job, and little supervision of his actions. His numerous incidents of mishandling classified documents and unauthorized disclosure, though well known by his subordinates, went largely unreported and undisciplined.
When Hanssen approached the GRU in 1979 for $21,000, the reasons seemed to be based mostly in the thrill of it all, and a chance to demonstrate to himself his own intellectual superiority over his peers. The espionage continued until 1981 when his wife nearly caught him reviewing a GRU document in the basement, after which he cut off communications with the GRU. But in 1985 the “bug” must have bitten again, because he contacted the KGB under the pseudonym Ramon Garcia, ultimately giving them such critical intelligence assets such as the names of KGB double-agents Sergey Motorin and Valeriy Martynov, leading to their execution. Hanssen also compromised the FBI's espionage investigation of senior State Department official Felix Bloch, who was suspected of providing information to the KGB, as well as an FBI report on possible Soviet penetrations.
The signs of his duplicity were clear in hindsight. He constantly sought access to classified information that he had no “need to know”. He lived well above his apparent means, sending his kids to expensive private schools, buying new cars, and paying for an addition to his home in cash. And yet he never garnered any suspicion from the bureau. In fact, in 1987 he was assigned with the job of seeking out a suspected Soviet mole within the FBI, effectively tasked with finding himself!
By 1988 however, he was overconfident and getting sloppy, giving away secrets that openly identified him as an FBI employee. Hanssen even recommended to the KGB that it recruit his close friend Jack Hoschouer, serving at the time as a military attaché at the U.S. Embassy in Bonn. He became sloppy about hiding the massive stacks of cash he had at home. Still, none of his actions or unexplained wealth set off any alarms within the FBI Counterintelligence[1].
All that would change when a new Counterintel agent was assigned to the unit. This employee was Debra Evens[2], who joined the FBI in 1984 and became an agent in 1987. She was initially assigned to the New Orleans Field Office, working on civil rights and white-collar crime issues, but was quickly sent on temporary duty to Los Angeles to work on a growing investigation into child trafficking and sexual abuse at Alphy’s Soda Pop Club and other locations in LA, all with ties to some relatively big Hollywood names. She gained distinction working on the case, managing to turn an accused underground bartender at Alphy’s and blow the case wide open, resulting in several arrests of long-time abusers and the closing of Alphy’s in 1988. Per her request, she was sent to the Foreign Service Institute in Rosslyn, Virginia, in 1988[3] where she studied counterintelligence and the Russian language.
Special Agent Debra Evans c.1987 (Image source “iup.edu”)
This combination of skills naturally got her assigned to the counterintelligence office at the J. Edgar Hoover building in Washington, DC. By this point, suspicions remained that there was a Russian mole in the office, and she joined the investigation. Oftentimes, simply having a new set of eyes on the problem is the most critical part of finding the solution, and Evans, upon striking up casual conversations with the rest of the unit, began to grow increasingly suspicious of Hanssen. Although her suspicions were largely laughed off by her supervisors, she was still given the permissions to investigate Hansen, assured that she’d find nothing.
Instead, she found more than she bargained for, including a bank account in Hanssen’s own name in a bank across the street from the FBI building which had tens of thousands of dollars deposited in large amounts at seemingly random times. She soon interviewed Hanssen’s brother-in-law Mark Wauck, an FBI agent himself who had been growing slightly suspicious of Hanssen, and he agreed to poke around. Eventually, Wauck found out from his sister Bonnie that she’d found a stack of cash in his dresser as well as other suspicious or incriminating actions. Evans and Wauck presented their evidence to the Counterintel office in a secret meeting in the summer of 1989, and the office now took the news seriously and arranged a tail for Hansen, ultimately catching Hanssen making a drop with some false intelligence they’d arranged for him to “find”.
Hanssen was reportedly quietly interrogated, ultimately spilling the beans.
“He was very proud of himself,” Evans remembered in an interview long after many of the events were declassified. “It was all a game to him, and a chance to play James Bond. But the men he’d gotten killed were critical US assets, not faceless SPECTRE goons. I wanted him prosecuted to the highest, but [FBI] Director [William] Sessions had different ideas.”
In 1989, FBI Director William Sessions was facing increased scrutiny from the George Bush administration. Attorney General Dick Thornburgh[4] was putting lots of pressure on Sessions over what Thornburgh described as “insubordination and possible corruption” and which Sessions described as “a lack of sufficient loyalty to the administration.” As such, Sessions was under increased pressure from Thornburgh to “root out corruption and incompetence”, with an unspoken threat of termination hanging over it all. Sessions needed a “big win” to “keep the wolves at bay”, and with the Berlin Wall having just fallen and President Bush increasingly concerned about what Gorbachev and other high-ranking Soviets had planned, he saw potential in using Hanssen to his advantage and the nation’s.
“Director Sessions knew that President Bush wanted more insight into the Soviets,” said Evans, “And I’d have thought that taking down the man who was exposing our assets would be win enough, but he wanted to flip Hansen and use him against the Soviets.”
Robert Hanssen was made an offer he couldn’t refuse. While the details remain highly classified, a FOIA request revealed that Hanssen’s deal included provisions where he could avoid jail and even keep some of the money from the KGB, but only if he worked with the CIA and NSA without pushback and agreed to constant monitoring and sharing with the CIA all communiques he had with the Soviets. Hanssen would thus be a veritable Triple Agent, feeding his Soviet handlers false information and planted stories in a way that would protect current US assets and shift suspicions onto Soviet agents that the US considered a threat. It was a complicated arrangement and ultimately doomed to failure, but if even a few years of the plan could be maintained during the critical period marking the end of the Cold War, it could reap massive benefits for the US and NATO, or so Sessions and Baker believed.
“The egotistical bastard loved it,” said Evans, referring to Hanssen and still clearly irked years later.
[1] Everything prior to this is as per our timeline, plus or minus a few minor changes. Read all about it here. In our timeline he remained undiscovered until 2001 despite exhibiting all the classic signs of spying that should have set off alarm bells in counterintelligence.
[2] Real person. Read about her distinguished career in our timeline here, which ironically included working on our timeline’s Hanssen investigation.
[3] A year prior than in our timeline due to serving on the Alphy’s case and gaining the earlier notice of her superiors.
[4] On a related note, butterflies prevent the airplane accident that killed Pennsylvania Senator John Heinz in 1991 in our timeline, so Thornburgh never quits as AG to pursue the Senate seat, so William Barr never takes over as AG as he did in our timeline.
Post from Declassified: The Lives and Stories of Real-Life Spies, by N. Cognito
What makes a person become a spy for another nation? Why betray your home country to the benefit of another? For some, the reasons are ideological, such as dedicated Marxists Julius and Ethel Rosen, who gave Stalin the secrets of nuclear weapons. For others it’s national or cultural, such as Jonathan Jay Pollard who spied on the US for Israel. For some, the reasons are monetary, like basic greed or a need to pay off debts or feed a substance addiction. For some it’s the results of blackmail after being compromised. Some are disgruntled about a lack of career opportunity or disaffected with their careers and seeking revenge.
And yet for others, the only reason for their betrayal seems to be because they can.
For a decade from 1979 to 1989, FBI Agent Robert Hanssen betrayed America to the Soviet Union for a grand total of roughly $500,000 and various gifts. An espoused anti-Communist and devout Catholic, he had no apparent ideological reasons for approaching the GRU and KGB. He had no personal or familial ties to Russia or any other Soviet Republic. The amount of money that he gained was significant, but hardly sufficient to become independently wealthy, and while he was clearly living beyond his apparent means, he was not living a life of abject luxury. He had no noteworthy debts or drug or alcohol issues. The Soviets appeared to have no blackmailable information on him. His career path was advancing and he had no reported issues with his superiors.
Instead, Hanssen was an underconfident, self-important loner who’d been emotionally abused by his father and needed to feel important. He had few friends and alienated many of his colleagues with his antisocial personality and sense of smug superiority. He was obsessed with spies from a young age, in particular James Bond, and over the years bought bond-related objects like Leica cameras, a shortwave radio, and a Walther PPK. Even a Swiss bank account.
He also had free access to lots of Top Secret documents, plenty of free time on the job, and little supervision of his actions. His numerous incidents of mishandling classified documents and unauthorized disclosure, though well known by his subordinates, went largely unreported and undisciplined.
When Hanssen approached the GRU in 1979 for $21,000, the reasons seemed to be based mostly in the thrill of it all, and a chance to demonstrate to himself his own intellectual superiority over his peers. The espionage continued until 1981 when his wife nearly caught him reviewing a GRU document in the basement, after which he cut off communications with the GRU. But in 1985 the “bug” must have bitten again, because he contacted the KGB under the pseudonym Ramon Garcia, ultimately giving them such critical intelligence assets such as the names of KGB double-agents Sergey Motorin and Valeriy Martynov, leading to their execution. Hanssen also compromised the FBI's espionage investigation of senior State Department official Felix Bloch, who was suspected of providing information to the KGB, as well as an FBI report on possible Soviet penetrations.
The signs of his duplicity were clear in hindsight. He constantly sought access to classified information that he had no “need to know”. He lived well above his apparent means, sending his kids to expensive private schools, buying new cars, and paying for an addition to his home in cash. And yet he never garnered any suspicion from the bureau. In fact, in 1987 he was assigned with the job of seeking out a suspected Soviet mole within the FBI, effectively tasked with finding himself!
By 1988 however, he was overconfident and getting sloppy, giving away secrets that openly identified him as an FBI employee. Hanssen even recommended to the KGB that it recruit his close friend Jack Hoschouer, serving at the time as a military attaché at the U.S. Embassy in Bonn. He became sloppy about hiding the massive stacks of cash he had at home. Still, none of his actions or unexplained wealth set off any alarms within the FBI Counterintelligence[1].
All that would change when a new Counterintel agent was assigned to the unit. This employee was Debra Evens[2], who joined the FBI in 1984 and became an agent in 1987. She was initially assigned to the New Orleans Field Office, working on civil rights and white-collar crime issues, but was quickly sent on temporary duty to Los Angeles to work on a growing investigation into child trafficking and sexual abuse at Alphy’s Soda Pop Club and other locations in LA, all with ties to some relatively big Hollywood names. She gained distinction working on the case, managing to turn an accused underground bartender at Alphy’s and blow the case wide open, resulting in several arrests of long-time abusers and the closing of Alphy’s in 1988. Per her request, she was sent to the Foreign Service Institute in Rosslyn, Virginia, in 1988[3] where she studied counterintelligence and the Russian language.
Special Agent Debra Evans c.1987 (Image source “iup.edu”)
This combination of skills naturally got her assigned to the counterintelligence office at the J. Edgar Hoover building in Washington, DC. By this point, suspicions remained that there was a Russian mole in the office, and she joined the investigation. Oftentimes, simply having a new set of eyes on the problem is the most critical part of finding the solution, and Evans, upon striking up casual conversations with the rest of the unit, began to grow increasingly suspicious of Hanssen. Although her suspicions were largely laughed off by her supervisors, she was still given the permissions to investigate Hansen, assured that she’d find nothing.
Instead, she found more than she bargained for, including a bank account in Hanssen’s own name in a bank across the street from the FBI building which had tens of thousands of dollars deposited in large amounts at seemingly random times. She soon interviewed Hanssen’s brother-in-law Mark Wauck, an FBI agent himself who had been growing slightly suspicious of Hanssen, and he agreed to poke around. Eventually, Wauck found out from his sister Bonnie that she’d found a stack of cash in his dresser as well as other suspicious or incriminating actions. Evans and Wauck presented their evidence to the Counterintel office in a secret meeting in the summer of 1989, and the office now took the news seriously and arranged a tail for Hansen, ultimately catching Hanssen making a drop with some false intelligence they’d arranged for him to “find”.
Hanssen was reportedly quietly interrogated, ultimately spilling the beans.
“He was very proud of himself,” Evans remembered in an interview long after many of the events were declassified. “It was all a game to him, and a chance to play James Bond. But the men he’d gotten killed were critical US assets, not faceless SPECTRE goons. I wanted him prosecuted to the highest, but [FBI] Director [William] Sessions had different ideas.”
In 1989, FBI Director William Sessions was facing increased scrutiny from the George Bush administration. Attorney General Dick Thornburgh[4] was putting lots of pressure on Sessions over what Thornburgh described as “insubordination and possible corruption” and which Sessions described as “a lack of sufficient loyalty to the administration.” As such, Sessions was under increased pressure from Thornburgh to “root out corruption and incompetence”, with an unspoken threat of termination hanging over it all. Sessions needed a “big win” to “keep the wolves at bay”, and with the Berlin Wall having just fallen and President Bush increasingly concerned about what Gorbachev and other high-ranking Soviets had planned, he saw potential in using Hanssen to his advantage and the nation’s.
“Director Sessions knew that President Bush wanted more insight into the Soviets,” said Evans, “And I’d have thought that taking down the man who was exposing our assets would be win enough, but he wanted to flip Hansen and use him against the Soviets.”
Robert Hanssen was made an offer he couldn’t refuse. While the details remain highly classified, a FOIA request revealed that Hanssen’s deal included provisions where he could avoid jail and even keep some of the money from the KGB, but only if he worked with the CIA and NSA without pushback and agreed to constant monitoring and sharing with the CIA all communiques he had with the Soviets. Hanssen would thus be a veritable Triple Agent, feeding his Soviet handlers false information and planted stories in a way that would protect current US assets and shift suspicions onto Soviet agents that the US considered a threat. It was a complicated arrangement and ultimately doomed to failure, but if even a few years of the plan could be maintained during the critical period marking the end of the Cold War, it could reap massive benefits for the US and NATO, or so Sessions and Baker believed.
“The egotistical bastard loved it,” said Evans, referring to Hanssen and still clearly irked years later.
[1] Everything prior to this is as per our timeline, plus or minus a few minor changes. Read all about it here. In our timeline he remained undiscovered until 2001 despite exhibiting all the classic signs of spying that should have set off alarm bells in counterintelligence.
[2] Real person. Read about her distinguished career in our timeline here, which ironically included working on our timeline’s Hanssen investigation.
[3] A year prior than in our timeline due to serving on the Alphy’s case and gaining the earlier notice of her superiors.
[4] On a related note, butterflies prevent the airplane accident that killed Pennsylvania Senator John Heinz in 1991 in our timeline, so Thornburgh never quits as AG to pursue the Senate seat, so William Barr never takes over as AG as he did in our timeline.
Last edited:
What a weirdly misogynist comic, trading in repellent jokes about 'girly' interests and completely inaccurate in its portrayal of Disney's handling of Spiderman to boot.
Flipping FBI Agent Robert Hansen like this as a Triple Agent? Well I can see him going for it- it seems a huge ego stroke for him, but I cannot see him getting off scott free, keeping his marriage etc. Good chance it will all go wrong.
Still nice work there Agent Debra Evans - you deserve a promotion!
Interesting chapter @Geekhis Khan - why do I suspect there is a movie in this somewhere?
Still nice work there Agent Debra Evans - you deserve a promotion!
Interesting chapter @Geekhis Khan - why do I suspect there is a movie in this somewhere?
Almost assured, but i think that the plan is to at least trying to get result while it last...after all even if Hansen feel the consequences of his action i doubt a lot of people will shead any tears. Honestly, i expected that a lot of head will roll at the FBI,or at least being assigned to the office in Alaska, as an agent with an enormous sign that say 'HELLO SPY HERE' has not even suspected
Re: Harry Potter ITTL.
It is possible that Joanne Rowling does not go flat hunting in Manchester in 1990 and does not get the idea for Harry Potter, or her Agent never manages to get a publisher interested, or HP simply bombs. If not Harry Potter then what other franchise catches the readerships attention in 1995?
I think its too early to speculate really, so I guess as @Geekhis Khan keeps telling us - stay tuned!
It is possible that Joanne Rowling does not go flat hunting in Manchester in 1990 and does not get the idea for Harry Potter, or her Agent never manages to get a publisher interested, or HP simply bombs. If not Harry Potter then what other franchise catches the readerships attention in 1995?
I think its too early to speculate really, so I guess as @Geekhis Khan keeps telling us - stay tuned!
Great stuff. Although
Great stuff. Although after a little google search, I've discovered Hanssen is spelt with two Ss.Declassified: The Flipping of Robert Hansen
Post from Declassified: The Lives and Stories of Real-Life Spies, by N. Cognito
What makes a person become a spy for another nation? Why betray your home country to the benefit of another? For some, the reasons are ideological, such as dedicated Marxists Julius and Ethel Rosen, who gave Stalin the secrets of nuclear weapons. For others it’s national or cultural, such as Jonathan Jay Pollard who spied on the US for Israel. For some, the reasons are monetary, like basic greed or a need to pay off debts or feed a substance addiction. For some it’s the results of blackmail after being compromised. Some are disgruntled about a lack of career opportunity or disaffected with their careers and seeking revenge.
And yet for others, the only reason for their betrayal seems to be because they can.
For a decade from 1979 to 1989, FBI Agent Robert Hansen betrayed America to the Soviet Union for a grand total of roughly $500,000 and various gifts. An espoused anti-Communist and devout Catholic, he had no apparent ideological reasons for approaching the GRU and KGB. He had no personal or familial ties to Russia or any other Soviet Republic. The amount of money that he gained was significant, but hardly sufficient to become independently wealthy, and while he was clearly living beyond his apparent means, he was not living a life of abject luxury. He had no noteworthy debts or drug or alcohol issues. The Soviets appeared to have no blackmailable information on him. His career path was advancing and he had no reported issues with his superiors.
Instead, Hansen was an underconfident, self-important loner who’d been emotionally abused by his father and needed to feel important. He had few friends and alienated many of his colleagues with his antisocial personality and sense of smug superiority. He was obsessed with spies from a young age, in particular James Bond, and over the years bought bond-related objects like Leica cameras, a shortwave radio, and a Walther PPK. Even a Swiss bank account.
He also had free access to lots of Top Secret documents, plenty of free time on the job, and little supervision of his actions. His numerous incidents of mishandling classified documents and unauthorized disclosure, though well known by his subordinates, went largely unreported and undisciplined.
When Hansen approached the GRU in 1979 for $21,000, the reasons seemed to be based mostly in the thrill of it all, and a chance to demonstrate to himself his own intellectual superiority over his peers. The espionage continued until 1981 when his wife nearly caught him reviewing a GRU document in the basement, after which he cut off communications with the GRU. But in 1985 the “bug” must have bitten again, because he contacted the KGB under the pseudonym Ramon Garcia, ultimately giving them such critical intelligence assets such as the names of KGB double-agents Sergey Motorin and Valeriy Martynov, leading to their execution. Hanssen also compromised the FBI's espionage investigation of senior State Department official Felix Bloch, who was suspected of providing information to the KGB, as well as an FBI report on possible Soviet penetrations.
The signs of his duplicity were clear in hindsight. He constantly sought access to classified information that he had no “need to know”. He lived well above his apparent means, sending his kids to expensive private schools, buying new cars, and paying for an addition to his home in cash. And yet he never garnered any suspicion from the bureau. In fact, in 1987 he was assigned with the job of seeking out a suspected Soviet mole within the FBI, effectively tasked with finding himself!
By 1988 however, he was overconfident and getting sloppy, giving away secrets that openly identified him as an FBI employee. Hanssen even recommended to the KGB that it recruit his close friend Jack Hoschouer, serving at the time as a military attaché at the U.S. Embassy in Bonn. He became sloppy about hiding the massive stacks of cash he had at home. Still, none of his actions or unexplained wealth set off any alarms within the FBI Counterintelligence[1].
All that would change when a new Counterintel agent was assigned to the unit. This employee was Debra Evens[2], who joined the FBI in 1984 and became an agent in 1987. She was initially assigned to the New Orleans Field Office, working on civil rights and white-collar crime issues, but was quickly sent on temporary duty to Los Angeles to work on a growing investigation into child trafficking and sexual abuse at Alphy’s Soda Pop Club and other locations in LA, all with ties to some relatively big Hollywood names. She gained distinction working on the case, managing to turn an accused underground bartender at Alphy’s and blow the case wide open, resulting in several arrests of long-time abusers and the closing of Alphy’s in 1988. Per her request, she was sent to the Foreign Service Institute in Rosslyn, Virginia, in 1988[3] where she studied counterintelligence and the Russian language.
Special Agent Debra Evans c.1987 (Image source “iup.edu”)
This combination of skills naturally got her assigned to the counterintelligence office at the J. Edgar Hoover building in Washington, DC. By this point, suspicions remained that there was a Russian mole in the office, and she joined the investigation. Oftentimes, simply having a new set of eyes on the problem is the most critical part of finding the solution, and Evans, upon striking up casual conversations with the rest of the unit, began to grow increasingly suspicious of Hansen. Although her suspicions were largely laughed off by her supervisors, she was still given the permissions to investigate Hansen, assured that she’d find nothing.
Instead, she found more than she bargained for, including a bank account in Hansen’s own name in a bank across the street from the FBI building which had tens of thousands of dollars deposited in large amounts at seemingly random times. She soon interviewed Hansen’s brother-in-law Mark Wauck, an FBI agent himself who had been growing slightly suspicious of Hansen, and he agreed to poke around. Eventually, Wauck found out from his sister Bonnie that she’d found a stack of cash in his dresser as well as other suspicious or incriminating actions. Evans and Wauck presented their evidence to the Counterintel office in a secret meeting in the summer of 1989, and the office now took the news seriously and arranged a tail for Hansen, ultimately catching Hansen making a drop with some false intelligence they’d arranged for him to “find”.
Hansen was reportedly quietly interrogated, ultimately spilling the beans.
“He was very proud of himself,” Evans remembered in an interview long after many of the events were declassified. “It was all a game to him, and a chance to play James Bond. But the men he’d gotten killed were critical US assets, not faceless SPECTRE goons. I wanted him prosecuted to the highest, but [FBI] Director [William] Sessions had different ideas.”
In 1989, FBI Director William Sessions was facing increased scrutiny from the George Bush administration. Attorney General Dick Thornburgh[4] was putting lots of pressure on Sessions over what Thornburgh described as “insubordination and possible corruption” and which Sessions described as “a lack of sufficient loyalty to the administration.” As such, Sessions was under increased pressure from Thornburgh to “root out corruption and incompetence”, with an unspoken threat of termination hanging over it all. Sessions needed a “big win” to “keep the wolves at bay”, and with the Berlin Wall having just fallen and President Bush increasingly concerned about what Gorbachev and other high-ranking Soviets had planned, he saw potential in using Hansen to his advantage and the nation’s.
“Director Sessions knew that President Bush wanted more insight into the Soviets,” said Evans, “And I’d have thought that taking down the man who was exposing our assets would be win enough, but he wanted to flip Hansen and use him against the Soviets.”
Robert Hansen was made an offer he couldn’t refuse. While the details remain highly classified, a FOIA request revealed that Hansen’s deal included provisions where he could avoid jail and even keep some of the money from the KGB, but only if he worked with the CIA and NSA without pushback and agreed to constant monitoring and sharing with the CIA all communiques he had with the Soviets. Hansen would thus be a veritable Triple Agent, feeding his Soviet handlers false information and planted stories in a way that would protect current US assets and shift suspicions onto Soviet agents that the US considered a threat. It was a complicated arrangement and ultimately doomed to failure, but if even a few years of the plan could be maintained during the critical period marking the end of the Cold War, it could reap massive benefits for the US and NATO, or so Sessions and Baker believed.
“The egotistical bastard loved it,” said Evans, referring to Hansen and still clearly irked years later.
[1] Everything prior to this is as per our timeline, plus or minus a few minor changes. Read all about it here. In our timeline he remained undiscovered until 2001 despite exhibiting all the classic signs of spying that should have set off alarm bells in counterintelligence.
[2] Real person. Read about her distinguished career in our timeline here, which ironically included working on our timeline’s Hansen investigation.
[3] A year prior than in our timeline due to serving on the Alphy’s case and gaining the earlier notice of her superiors.
[4] On a related note, butterflies prevent the airplane accident that killed Pennsylvania Senator John Heinz in 1991 in our timeline, so Thornburgh never quits as AG to pursue the Senate seat, so William Barr never takes over as AG as he did in our timeline.
And this will have another side effect--before he worked on Bill Clinton's presidential campaign in OTL, James Carville got his start helping Harris Wofford win the 1991 special Senate election after Heinz died in OTL. Then-Governor Bob Casey appointed Wofford, and Wofford ran in the 1991 special Senate election, defeating Thornburgh with Carville's help. On another side note, this also butterflies away Wofford's being beaten in 1994 by Rick Santorum...
OTOH, there is another election coming up in 1991 through which Carville could earn his chops--the 1991 Louisiana governor's race between "Fast Eddie" Edwards and David Duke (yes, that David Duke--the former KKK grand wizard and notorious racist; Edwards won in a landslide in OTL, in large part because many African-Americans turned out to vote against Duke). Want to know how interesting that race was, @Geekhis Khan? One of Edwards' unofficial bumper stickers was "Vote for The Crook. It's Important." (1) (Hell, even George H.W. Bush, the president who was in the same party as Duke, campaigned for Edwards...)
Getting back to this post, though, there's no way this'll backfire by, oh, October of 1992...
(1) On a side note, Edwards would be convicted of racketeering in 2001 and spent nearly a decade in prison...
I've only just found out about this. Gotta say, its quite an interesting read. You can bet once word gets out, a whole slew of spy thrillers will take inspiration from it.Declassified: The Flipping of Robert Hansen
Post from Declassified: The Lives and Stories of Real-Life Spies, by N. Cognito
What makes a person become a spy for another nation? Why betray your home country to the benefit of another? For some, the reasons are ideological, such as dedicated Marxists Julius and Ethel Rosen, who gave Stalin the secrets of nuclear weapons. For others it’s national or cultural, such as Jonathan Jay Pollard who spied on the US for Israel. For some, the reasons are monetary, like basic greed or a need to pay off debts or feed a substance addiction. For some it’s the results of blackmail after being compromised. Some are disgruntled about a lack of career opportunity or disaffected with their careers and seeking revenge.
And yet for others, the only reason for their betrayal seems to be because they can.
For a decade from 1979 to 1989, FBI Agent Robert Hansen betrayed America to the Soviet Union for a grand total of roughly $500,000 and various gifts. An espoused anti-Communist and devout Catholic, he had no apparent ideological reasons for approaching the GRU and KGB. He had no personal or familial ties to Russia or any other Soviet Republic. The amount of money that he gained was significant, but hardly sufficient to become independently wealthy, and while he was clearly living beyond his apparent means, he was not living a life of abject luxury. He had no noteworthy debts or drug or alcohol issues. The Soviets appeared to have no blackmailable information on him. His career path was advancing and he had no reported issues with his superiors.
Instead, Hansen was an underconfident, self-important loner who’d been emotionally abused by his father and needed to feel important. He had few friends and alienated many of his colleagues with his antisocial personality and sense of smug superiority. He was obsessed with spies from a young age, in particular James Bond, and over the years bought bond-related objects like Leica cameras, a shortwave radio, and a Walther PPK. Even a Swiss bank account.
He also had free access to lots of Top Secret documents, plenty of free time on the job, and little supervision of his actions. His numerous incidents of mishandling classified documents and unauthorized disclosure, though well known by his subordinates, went largely unreported and undisciplined.
When Hansen approached the GRU in 1979 for $21,000, the reasons seemed to be based mostly in the thrill of it all, and a chance to demonstrate to himself his own intellectual superiority over his peers. The espionage continued until 1981 when his wife nearly caught him reviewing a GRU document in the basement, after which he cut off communications with the GRU. But in 1985 the “bug” must have bitten again, because he contacted the KGB under the pseudonym Ramon Garcia, ultimately giving them such critical intelligence assets such as the names of KGB double-agents Sergey Motorin and Valeriy Martynov, leading to their execution. Hanssen also compromised the FBI's espionage investigation of senior State Department official Felix Bloch, who was suspected of providing information to the KGB, as well as an FBI report on possible Soviet penetrations.
The signs of his duplicity were clear in hindsight. He constantly sought access to classified information that he had no “need to know”. He lived well above his apparent means, sending his kids to expensive private schools, buying new cars, and paying for an addition to his home in cash. And yet he never garnered any suspicion from the bureau. In fact, in 1987 he was assigned with the job of seeking out a suspected Soviet mole within the FBI, effectively tasked with finding himself!
By 1988 however, he was overconfident and getting sloppy, giving away secrets that openly identified him as an FBI employee. Hanssen even recommended to the KGB that it recruit his close friend Jack Hoschouer, serving at the time as a military attaché at the U.S. Embassy in Bonn. He became sloppy about hiding the massive stacks of cash he had at home. Still, none of his actions or unexplained wealth set off any alarms within the FBI Counterintelligence[1].
All that would change when a new Counterintel agent was assigned to the unit. This employee was Debra Evens[2], who joined the FBI in 1984 and became an agent in 1987. She was initially assigned to the New Orleans Field Office, working on civil rights and white-collar crime issues, but was quickly sent on temporary duty to Los Angeles to work on a growing investigation into child trafficking and sexual abuse at Alphy’s Soda Pop Club and other locations in LA, all with ties to some relatively big Hollywood names. She gained distinction working on the case, managing to turn an accused underground bartender at Alphy’s and blow the case wide open, resulting in several arrests of long-time abusers and the closing of Alphy’s in 1988. Per her request, she was sent to the Foreign Service Institute in Rosslyn, Virginia, in 1988[3] where she studied counterintelligence and the Russian language.
Special Agent Debra Evans c.1987 (Image source “iup.edu”)
This combination of skills naturally got her assigned to the counterintelligence office at the J. Edgar Hoover building in Washington, DC. By this point, suspicions remained that there was a Russian mole in the office, and she joined the investigation. Oftentimes, simply having a new set of eyes on the problem is the most critical part of finding the solution, and Evans, upon striking up casual conversations with the rest of the unit, began to grow increasingly suspicious of Hansen. Although her suspicions were largely laughed off by her supervisors, she was still given the permissions to investigate Hansen, assured that she’d find nothing.
Instead, she found more than she bargained for, including a bank account in Hansen’s own name in a bank across the street from the FBI building which had tens of thousands of dollars deposited in large amounts at seemingly random times. She soon interviewed Hansen’s brother-in-law Mark Wauck, an FBI agent himself who had been growing slightly suspicious of Hansen, and he agreed to poke around. Eventually, Wauck found out from his sister Bonnie that she’d found a stack of cash in his dresser as well as other suspicious or incriminating actions. Evans and Wauck presented their evidence to the Counterintel office in a secret meeting in the summer of 1989, and the office now took the news seriously and arranged a tail for Hansen, ultimately catching Hansen making a drop with some false intelligence they’d arranged for him to “find”.
Hansen was reportedly quietly interrogated, ultimately spilling the beans.
“He was very proud of himself,” Evans remembered in an interview long after many of the events were declassified. “It was all a game to him, and a chance to play James Bond. But the men he’d gotten killed were critical US assets, not faceless SPECTRE goons. I wanted him prosecuted to the highest, but [FBI] Director [William] Sessions had different ideas.”
In 1989, FBI Director William Sessions was facing increased scrutiny from the George Bush administration. Attorney General Dick Thornburgh[4] was putting lots of pressure on Sessions over what Thornburgh described as “insubordination and possible corruption” and which Sessions described as “a lack of sufficient loyalty to the administration.” As such, Sessions was under increased pressure from Thornburgh to “root out corruption and incompetence”, with an unspoken threat of termination hanging over it all. Sessions needed a “big win” to “keep the wolves at bay”, and with the Berlin Wall having just fallen and President Bush increasingly concerned about what Gorbachev and other high-ranking Soviets had planned, he saw potential in using Hansen to his advantage and the nation’s.
“Director Sessions knew that President Bush wanted more insight into the Soviets,” said Evans, “And I’d have thought that taking down the man who was exposing our assets would be win enough, but he wanted to flip Hansen and use him against the Soviets.”
Robert Hansen was made an offer he couldn’t refuse. While the details remain highly classified, a FOIA request revealed that Hansen’s deal included provisions where he could avoid jail and even keep some of the money from the KGB, but only if he worked with the CIA and NSA without pushback and agreed to constant monitoring and sharing with the CIA all communiques he had with the Soviets. Hansen would thus be a veritable Triple Agent, feeding his Soviet handlers false information and planted stories in a way that would protect current US assets and shift suspicions onto Soviet agents that the US considered a threat. It was a complicated arrangement and ultimately doomed to failure, but if even a few years of the plan could be maintained during the critical period marking the end of the Cold War, it could reap massive benefits for the US and NATO, or so Sessions and Baker believed.
“The egotistical bastard loved it,” said Evans, referring to Hansen and still clearly irked years later.
[1] Everything prior to this is as per our timeline, plus or minus a few minor changes. Read all about it here. In our timeline he remained undiscovered until 2001 despite exhibiting all the classic signs of spying that should have set off alarm bells in counterintelligence.
[2] Real person. Read about her distinguished career in our timeline here, which ironically included working on our timeline’s Hansen investigation.
[3] A year prior than in our timeline due to serving on the Alphy’s case and gaining the earlier notice of her superiors.
[4] On a related note, butterflies prevent the airplane accident that killed Pennsylvania Senator John Heinz in 1991 in our timeline, so Thornburgh never quits as AG to pursue the Senate seat, so William Barr never takes over as AG as he did in our timeline.
Thank god for Barr never coming up, but I do wonder how butterflies will fly from that.
Wow. I am honestly stunned I've never heard of this guy before (I'm Welsh, in case anyone doesn't know) but the way you've altered this makes it all the more interesting! ...I am, I admit, somewhat intrigued by you altering history in this way, as it indicates that some political event may be about to be altered severely which is going to be very fun to watch play out.
And why do I suspect this will have an effect on how the Soviet Union will collapse.
I feel like it's a cheap shot if JK Rowling's ideas get butterflied for very little reason besides "randomness". Same with Disney not accepting it (since Mort actually got off the ground so why would Jim reject The Philosopher's Stone which was already popular in Britain?) or even Scholastic in the case that Disney rejects it. I'll respect Geekhis's decision to butterfly HP to bring in some other franchise to notoriety but it's hard for me to believe that Disney does not snatch HP because it's perfectly within Jim's alley.
But to answer the latter question, I think it's fairly likely that The Wheel of Time series would get some recognition, but it probably would fall under MGM if Disney decides to acquire it, making it less popular than Harry Potter. Same with His Dark Materials. It's also possible that Narnia will be adapted by Disney, but not touted as a competitor to HP since the films were the one that drove Disney to adapt Narnia in the first place. Disney also did A Wrinkle in Time too.....
That's not to say that Disney is starved of fantasy IPs since they have George Lucas's Willow and the Prydain Chronicles to work with (plus the wealth of folk tales that are waiting to be adapted), but you know Disney. They will always want more.
What a unique story from this timeline. Who would've guessed that a pop culture story would include actual CIA spies, the KGB, and triple agents?
Finally we get to see the person that took down the dreaded Alphy's Soda Pop Club. Regardless of what happens behind the scenes in this timeline, that's definitely one change I'm glad happened for the people that live ITTL.
It's also possible that if Disney does Harry Potter that Hollywood Pictures acquires the movie to compete with Disney but actually do a good job on it, similar to the OTL Narnia Chronicles.
That's probably what Hollywood Pictures or WB will do if Disney gets Harry Potter.
It'd be hilarious if WB does Narnia since that'd be the inverse of what happened OTL.
How many chops would he earn from that, was there any chance at all somebody could run things so badly Duke wins?
Maybe if WB does Narnia they could do a Narnia-themed land at their theme parks. That would be fun. Have the famous light post be a photo op spot.
I could see TTL Disney using their third Florida park for their IPs. Like Star Wars, Harry Potter, and maybe even Discworld could have themed lands. Am I the only one who would jump at the chance to explore Ankh-Morpork? Sir Terry would naturally have a level of creative control. And I’m just imagining his reaction to the massive royalty checks he’d be getting for it.
I could see TTL Disney using their third Florida park for their IPs. Like Star Wars, Harry Potter, and maybe even Discworld could have themed lands. Am I the only one who would jump at the chance to explore Ankh-Morpork? Sir Terry would naturally have a level of creative control. And I’m just imagining his reaction to the massive royalty checks he’d be getting for it.
Last edited:
Whenever I think of Harry Potter, to my mind always come Ursula Le Guin's brutal comments on Rowling's writing, which ended up reminding me how Hayao Miyazaki had actually asked Le Guin on the potential of doing an animated adaptation of Earthsea in the 80s, which she initially turned down, but later accepted after seeing My Neighbor Totoro. The movie in question, Tales from Earthsea, would finally release in 2006, but I have to wonder whether Ghibli's earlier relationship with Disney may or may not result in it emerging earlier.
On the update though, what a fascinating turn of events! I can only wonder what role Hanssen's going to play in the lead-in to the end of the Cold War. Could Johan Galtung find himself paired with Francis Fukuyama, with his comments on the impending fall of the Soviet Empire (or more specifically, the methodology behind that prediction, and what it entailed) turning out to be false? Could Robert Kaplan's notion of "ancient hatreds" in the Balkans in light of the Yugoslav conflict be done away with entirely? Probably not. The ramifications of either are immense!
On the update though, what a fascinating turn of events! I can only wonder what role Hanssen's going to play in the lead-in to the end of the Cold War. Could Johan Galtung find himself paired with Francis Fukuyama, with his comments on the impending fall of the Soviet Empire (or more specifically, the methodology behind that prediction, and what it entailed) turning out to be false? Could Robert Kaplan's notion of "ancient hatreds" in the Balkans in light of the Yugoslav conflict be done away with entirely? Probably not. The ramifications of either are immense!
- Status