accountable." Technically, however, Mr. Hanssen was not charged with treason, but with espionage and conspiracy to commit espionage for allegedly passing classified information to a foreign power. Treason is a separate crime of passing secret military information to a country at war with the United States. Prosecutors in Mr. Hanssen's case could seek the death penalty because of the deaths of the two Russian agents, in addition to fines of up to $2.8 million, twice the amount he is believed to have received from his spying. Justice Department officials have not said whether they will seek the death penalty. Mr. Hanssen, a married father of six, has been held in a detention center in Virginia since his arrest at a park near his home in the Washington suburb of Vienna, Va. He was arraigned today in a Federal District Court in Alexandria, Va. Mr. Freeh was in the F.B.I.'s command center at the agency's headquarters when Mr. Hanssen was arrested as he returned to his car after dropping off a package of classified documents, law enforcement officials said. Mr. Hanssen was "shocked and surprised," Mr. Freeh said, but he did not resist arrest. Agents were exultant after the successful arrest, but the mood in the command center quickly turned somber as F.B.I. officials realized that it was one of their own agents who had just been taken into custody. It was Mr. Freeh who proposed the outside inquiry into the F.B.I.'s internal security procedures, a suggestion accepted by Mr. Ashcroft. Although the accusations against Mr. Hanssen are by far the most serious against an F.B.I. agent, he is not the first agent to be accused of spying. In 1997, Earl Pitts, who was stationed at the F.B.I. Academy in Quantico, Va., was sentenced to 27 years in prison after admitting he spied for Moscow during and after the cold war. Richard W. Miller, a Los Angeles F.B.I. agent who was caught spying, was arrested in 1984 and later sentenced to 20 years in prison. His...
