A young FBI agent helps catch a traitor in 'Breach'

LOS ANGELES -- No doubt Eric O'Neill has a fine poker face. But the former FBI guy who helped take down one of the most dangerous traitors in agency history is wearing another sort of face altogether today. For starters, he's smiling nonstop. He's also wearing makeup, a little base to be sure, maybe a hint of blush. It's his camera-ready, there's-a-major-motion-picture-based-on-me face. So much for the undercover career he once coveted.

"I couldn't go back. I'm way too high-profile now," O'Neill says, laughing it up in a fancy hotel suite, the sort of perk low-level G-men don't typically enjoy. "What would I do? By the time this is done, everyone will have seen my face on TV at least once. An FBI agent can't stick out and do his job."

"This," as he puts it, is the new movie "Breach," in which the boyishly adorable Ryan Phillippe plays the equally adorable O'Neill, who was just a 27-year-old agent-in-training when he was pulled off his low-level surveillance gig and put on the bureau's highest-level assignment: nailing a veteran agent suspected of selling intelligence secrets to the former Soviet Union, among other crimes. Six or so weeks later, agent Robert Hanssen was in handcuffs and O'Neill was rethinking his commitment to covert operations.

"Breach," which opens Friday, tells the mostly untold story of those nail-biting weeks, when O'Neill and Hanssen bonded over computers, Catholicism, and (alleged) commitment to country. At one point O'Neill had to swipe Hanssen's Palm Pilot and download data before his ultra-paranoid boss returned to the office. Another time he had to keep Hanssen away from headquarters while agents searched his car (and found enough weapons to start a small war in the trunk). O'Neill, now 33 and leading a far more staid life as a government-contracts lawyer, says those scenes were hardly embellished at all.

"That's a real scene, too," O'Neill says again and again. "It's nothing I ever thought about, but [director Billy Ray ] said 'In this story, the truth is so much better than fiction that keeping true to the story just keeps it from ringing false. ' . . . For a Hollywood movie it's incredibly accurate."

Ray, who helmed the movie from a script he helped write, considers "Breach" to be the story of O'Neill, rather than Hanssen, who is played by Chris Cooper. Anyone who followed the case as it unfolded in 2001 knows that Hanssen pled guilty to treason and is now serving life in prison without the possibility of parole. But not many have heard of O'Neill, who's nowhere to be found in the books written almost overnight about what then-FBI director Louis J. Freeh called "the most traitorous action imaginable." That's because O'Neill wasn't yet declassified; as far as the FBI was concerned he didn't exist until the case was wrapped up. Then he got permission to tell his family and friends.

Now he's an acknowledged hero, even if he did quit the agency about six months later in part to save his marriage and in part because he knew he'd hit the high point already. "Breach" was made with the bureau's blessing, although Ray's request to meet with Hanssen was denied and Hanssen himself refused to answer written questions. But anyone else he wanted to chat up was made available, and the politically progressive Ray says he came to consider the people who make up the FBI "real patriots." And of course he had O'Neill, whose journey to Hollywood began after his actor-writer brother heard what he'd been through and talked him into helping with a screenplay that was the precursor to "Breach."

"I loved the world this story was set in," said Ray, who told a based-on-real-life story of another sort of betrayal in "Shattered Glass," about a magazine writer's tendency toward fabrication, and to this day is ashamed of having written "Volcano."

"No one has ever told a story like this about the FBI before. Eric being locked in a room with this impenetrable guy, I thought that was great. The mentor-mentee relationship, I love that. Here's this guy in the middle of his 20s and . . . while he's stuck in a room with Hanssen he has to ask himself, 'How do I feel about my career? How do I feel about my religion? How do I feel about my marriage?' That's real character stuff and that's the sort of movies I'm interested in making."

Ray, in fact, doesn't see "Breach" as a spy thriller, although he's happy if that notion sells tickets. However, he won't even refer to Hanssen as a spy, saying, "I think of him as a thief. It almost flatters him to call him a spy. He would love that."

Still, neither Ray nor O'Neill professes to know why Hanssen sold state secrets. For the purposes of the movie, it doesn't matter. Ray wasn't even interested in the decades during which he did damage right beneath the bureau's nose. It's catching Hanssen that caught Ray's interest.

The director stayed focused on that, only bringing Hanssen's wife , Bonnie (Kathleen Quinlan), into the story when absolutely essential. Hanssen shared videotapes of the couple having sex and otherwise humiliated her enough with his treachery, Ray says, adding , "I think we've been really discreet on that one." Hanssen, however, also had a thing for Catherine Zeta-Jones, who Ray says graciously allowed her image to be used in the movie. It becomes one of the many tension-filled moments of bonding between O'Neill and Hanssen.

As O'Neill describes those days, "I was so tired and exhausted and I was just trying to keep succeeding in the case and didn't really have any mental capacity" to think of anything else, like making a movie of those moments.

Besides staying a step ahead, O'Neill was also trying to keep his head. There were moments when he feared for his life, although the scene where Hanssen takes him into the woods and shoots at him never happened. O'Neill also didn't quit the day of Hanssen's arrest; as a material witness to a massive espionage case, that wouldn't have been allowed. And the two never met one final time at the elevator, a scene that's pure fiction but also Ray's favorite. But each instance passed what Ray calls his litmus test: "Are you creating something that is untrue to the spirit of events?"

"Hanssen never took Eric to a park and shot a gun at him, but to me Hanssen was a total menace and a threat and that's just an extrapolation of that idea, so that felt OK to me," Ray said. "The elevator scene, because it's a movie, there has to be a moment where these two guys evaluate each other one last time. It was a little bit of a leap but I think it's forgivable and very satisfying and would be very dissatisfying to the audience if it wasn't there."

O'Neill says he found the entire experience satisfying, from being picked from bureau obscurity to being part of a huge team that stopped Hanssen (even if the movie makes it look like his doing it more or less alone) to having survived to talk about it all. A bit of an adrenaline junkie (skydiving, kayaking, rock climbing) he doesn't know what's next. He's still married to Juliana, a former East German whose nationality caused the FBI to pull her husband's security clearance temporarily, and the couple is thinking kids. He says he likes the simpler life and hardly misses the agency at all.

"He performed an extraordinary service to his country," said Ray, who has "Hurricane Season," a post-Katrina movie also based on real events, up next. "He had done enough by the time he left. He had done a lifetime's worth by the time he left. It's a story, his story, I really wanted to tell."

Lynda Gorov can be reached at lgorov@aol.com.