| On Monday, Robert Hanssen—still described on the F.B.I. Web site as “the most damaging spy in Bureau history”—was found in his cell in a Colorado prison, dead at the age of seventy-nine. Hanssen’s career in duplicity had spanned the Cold War and post-Soviet period, with casualties that included two K.G.B. agents who had worked covertly for the U.S. Media coverage of Hanssen’s life often invoked the fiction of John le Carré, the celebrated spy novelist who had himself briefly worked for British intelligence. In 2008, le Carré published a Personal History in The New Yorker about his tenure in espionage, starting when he was just twenty, on his first overseas assignment. “It was my first clandestine mission, and I was in heaven,” he recalls. But as readers of le Carré—the author of morally complex thrillers including “The Spy Who Came In from the Cold” and “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy”—will expect, his youthful enthusiasm didn’t stay intact for long. There’s a comic mishap involving a weapon and a game of billiards, which, under slightly different circumstances, wouldn’t have turned out funny at all. Later, a colleague becomes convinced that the F.B.I.—the same agency betrayed by Hanssen—was subjecting him to an elaborate psychological test, moving him to a new room in his New York hotel every night but keeping all the other details the same. “Each time around, his suits, shirts, socks, and underpants were laid out precisely as he had laid them out in the previous room,” le Carré writes. As his short-lived spy work continues, he faces creeping questions about trust and paranoia, “the superbug of espionage madness.” | 
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