by: Jenni Vinson
March 29, 2001
Robert Hanssen grew up dreaming of someday becoming an FBI agent. His dream was not exactly noble. He also dreamed and planned, from an early age, of becoming a counteragent, a spy.
He met his goals. He achieved a very high agent status with the FBI, which gave him access and clearance to sensitive materials and he has been spying on his own country on behalf of Moscow for the past 15 years.
He is alleged to have given Moscow the names of agents that were serving in Russia. Because of his actions, some of those agents were killed.
He is alleged to have given Moscow extremely sensitive information regarding how we operate our codings for communications. He is said to have caused a more severe problem than any other espionage leakage in history.
Our politicians have insisted that the Cold War, the threat of a nuclear war, is over. That is simply not possible. Politicians have used this phrase as a weapon to keep their fellow politicians from allocating money to our military.
They argue that if the Cold War IS over, we should not need the same level of military readiness as we did when we were in danger and so they insist that we do not need to spend precious and sparse fundings on our military. It seems to be a solid arguement, especially when they add emotional pleas like �the needs of America�s children and the elderly�.
As I have pointed out before, during the height of the Cold War, the planet sported TWO superpowers, countries that have nuclear capability and who have built THE BOMB. Now there are more than SEVEN countries that have developed nuclear technology or have purchased it or stolen it. The Cold War is not over, it is still on going and it has escalated.
Our politicians are fully aware that this is the case, but I suppose no one wants to believe that something as horrible as a nuclear war could ever happen. But the reality of this is that it was AMERICA that opened up the possibility for nuclear war. We bombed Japan!
There has been a shift from the old boyscout addage of �be prepared� to that of �put off for tomorrow what you don�t have to pay for today�. Ironically, the children and the elderly our politicians claim to be advocating for are being left exposed as is all of America to this very real threat.
Ronald Reagan is credited with having toppled The Soviet Union. He did it by outspending them. He forced them to try to keep up with America�s military spending. The Russian�s began to shift their budget from infrastructure and the care of their people to spend what they could not afford on their military to stay at an even keel with America. This bankrupted them and they have still not recovered.
The space station, Mir is prime evidence of the Russian having lost their standing in the global community along with their money. The Russians managed the magnimous technologcal task of designing, creating, launching and establishing the planet�s first space station.
It was supposed to be in space for five years, but it made it through fifteen. The Russians did not have the necessary funding to upkeep Mir and today, the remains of this technological marvel burned through the atmosphere as trash that landed in the ocean.
Russia is down but it is not out and they still perceive America as an enemy. I can imagine that there would be some resentment towards the country that caused the Soviet Union to fall apart. And so, they paid Robert Hennsen in cash and diamonds for the secrets of our nation.
Now, as our intelligence has learned of who from the Russian Embassy in Washington, D.C. was working with Hennsen, the President has decided to expel all of them out of the country. There will be about 50 Russian diplomats returned to Russia between now and this summer.
In reponse, Russia is expelling an equal amount of American diplomats from their soil. It just isn�t an equitable punishment. Afterall our diplomats are coming home to America, to food on the shelves and freedom, but the dialog is heating up. They are saber rattling to protest the audacity of America calling them thieves and spies.
The problem that America has in all this is that her people have lapsed into an educational coma. As a nation we are not insisting that our citizens know what has historically brought us to this point and therefore we do not know how to weigh the consequences and their severity. We are now easliy lulled by the promises made by politicians who craftily play with words and manipulate issues to benefit their own need to get re-elected.
Whether we read it from a book or from the internet, it is important that we know about our history. I affects our present day. It affects us a whole society and it affects us as individuals.