Robert Hanssen, the famed FBI double agent who secretly passed some of America’s deepest secrets to Russia in the 1980s and 1990s, died Monday in a maximum-security prison, prison officials said.
Volunteering with the Soviet Union’s military intelligence in 1985, Hanssen traded government secrets and the identities of American moles to the Soviet and Russian governments in exchange for diamonds and hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Being in the FBI’s crucial counterintelligence division in New York, tasked with pursuing foreign spies, he was able to cover his tracks while ostensibly investigating Moscow agents in the United States.
However, Hanssen hit a dead end after exchanging messages with Russians in the Virginia suburbs outside Washington on February 18, 2001. A year later, he was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Hanssen, 79, was found unconscious Monday morning at the ultra-security prison in Florence, Colorado, and was later pronounced dead, according to a prison statement.
The FBI called him “the most damaging spy in FBI history”.
Hanssen joined the FBI in 1976 after first serving the country as a Chicago police officer.
Nine years later, Hanssen took up a counterintelligence position in the New York City office, where agents spent much of their time tracking down and attempting to recruit Soviet officials to the United Nations.
Instead, this spy soon offered his services to Russia under the name “Ramon Garcia” and even those he dealt with on the other side did not know his true identity.
At the time of his capture, Hanssen was considered the most damaging mole to ever pass US secrets to a foreign government, handing over thousands of classified US documents to the Soviets and later to the Russians.
The documents included US nuclear war plans, software to track espionage investigations and the identities of US sources in Moscow, including Dmitri Polyakov or “Tophat”, a Soviet general who disclosed his country’s secrets to the United States between the 1960s and 1980s. States passed. Polyakov was arrested in 1986 and executed a few years later.
Hanssen is believed to have been motivated by money rather than ideology, and earned $1.4 million in cash and diamonds thanks to his betrayal.
Although the FBI and CIA had known for several years that there was a well-placed informant in their ranks, Hanssen was not the prime suspect for long.
American investigators eventually focused more on the hypothesis that Hanssen was the traitor after receiving some information from a Russian defector, who had been tracked into his office for several months before being caught in Virginia.
The former double agent had a wife and six children, lived simply and rubbed shoulders with Washington’s conservative Catholic elite.
In May 2002, Hanssen pleaded guilty to 15 counts of espionage in exchange for a plea not seeking the death penalty.
“I apologize for my behavior. I am ashamed of it,” he said during sentencing. “I opened the door for slander against my totally innocent wife and children. I deeply hurt many people,” he added.
Source: DN
