What grabs attention is the trans-ideological nature of the Zaporozhsky ambush. Hanssen did not betray his country because the star of socialism blinded his eye and captured his soul. He wanted more money than the FBI was paying him. Zaporozhsky was, from all accounts, someone who rejected the Communist system and wished to fight against it, as so many sometime Communists did. Was corporate pride at work here? — We Russians may be governed by a different order, serving different gods, but we will not forgive a betrayal even though it was of a predecessor government everywhere rejected. What would we have thought if the government of West Germany, licensed in 1954 by the occupying powers with full authority (excepting defense policy), had lured back to Bonn a German who had defected from Hitler and given secrets to the Allies, sentencing him to imprisonment?
There is something commendable about the canons of the spy world. Ideally, one spy would not tell on his counterparts. But telling on one another is one of their principal missions. And yet there is a code of honor about betraying their own. This they will not do, except when the pressures are irresistible, and irresistible pressures are not the kind of thing the West goes in for. So we catch a Hanssen and put him in jail for life, without extorting from him everything he knows about other stakeouts in the enemy's intelligence battalions.
And finally, the Zaporozhsky affair reminds us that intelligence is an endless enterprise, and it isn't only knowledge of what Saddam Hussein and the Beloved Leader of North Korea are up to that we want. The Russians were paying spy Hanssen well even after Communism's war against capitalism was abandoned. Still, they want to know what we are up to. And, without giving away any secrets, permit us to say that we want to know what the Russians are up to, including all of their motives in luring back the wretched Zaporozhsky.