Gray Day My Undercover Mission to Expose America's First Cyber Spy

O'Neill shares a first-hand account of this investigation in his book, Gray Day, my undercover mission to expose America's first cyber spy.

It's a story so thrilling that it made its way onto the big screen in the Hollywood movie Breach starring Ryan Philippe as young FBI agent Eric O'Neill.

I wanted to tell the story of a great FBI achievement I wanted to tell the story of the FBI learning about a spy and putting together an excellent operation to catch that spy in days even though it took 22 years to even learn about Hanson we were able to catch him in under three months that is extraordinary but I wanted to do more this wasn't just a memoir of how I caught Hanson gray day tells the story of the evolution of espionage using Hanson as the fulcrum of this great change in how espionage is conducted and I think that story was important because Hanson was not only one of the most damaging spies in US history but our first cyber spy he penetrated computer systems to steal everything he stole and dropped to the Russians and now the majority of espionage is conducted through cyber attacks

I was discussing this with my brother who was a Hollywood screenwriter at the time you know David O'Neill and still is and he told me you got to make a movie about this and this was the first time I thought maybe maybe someone would want to make a movie about it and it turns out that they really did so suddenly with Hanson's arrest this very intense period of your life is all over and I presume you might be able to open up a little bit about it you

I tried I tried to visit him I tried everything I could I just couldn't get in there he was at super max prison in Florence Colorado it is one of the most difficult places in the United States to to get into I tried writing the Bureau of Prisons the FBI and I just I was confounded and I wish I'd tried harder when I started writing great day I wanted the last chapter to be a conversation with Hanson and once again I had the same difficulties in getting in to speak to him I always felt like I needed to speak to him because I've never felt that I've had closure from the case I later found that I was suffering some PTSD from the case I thought that maybe talking to him would help I also really wanted to ask him a few questions the last drop that Hanson made to the Russians included my information as someone the Russians should have recruited and I don't know to this day whether he was doing that to flatter me had I really won him over did he believe that I could be a spy at his caliber that I could take over where he was about to walk away or and probably more likely did he think that he could use me as a puppet in the FBI that he could use me as his spy to continue to have access to intelligence and continue to spy from the outside that's the question I really wanted to ask him the other of course was why did you do it and then of course he passed away and I was upset he was a person who even though he was one of the most damaging spies and had not really a great person had a huge influence on my life and now I would never have that opportunity to have that final conversation with him and close the book on this case that changed my life in so many ways

If you'd like to learn more about Robert Hanson, we recommend the books Spy by David Wise, The Spy Next Door by Ann Blackman and Elaine Shannon, and Grey Day by Eric O'Neill.