Robert Philip Hanssen was sent to life imprisonment on May 10, 2002, after authorities discovered that he was a spy for the KGB, the Soviet Union intelligence agency. He had been providing them with secret information about United States security for around 20 years. This included names of American spies working for the Soviets, details about America’s nuclear weapons, and even information about a tunnel the FBI made under the Soviet Embassy.
Hanssen became a spy in 1979, and three years after he began working for the FBI, he approached the Soviet Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU) to offer his help. He secretly gave information to Moscow for over two decades, even after the Cold War ended. This was one of the worst cases of spying in American history. He got paid $600,000 in cash and diamonds and supposedly had another $800,000 in a Russian bank. Hanssen was only the third FBI agent ever caught spying.
The FBI exposed Hanssen with the help of a former KGB officer. He was a good neighbor to people in Vienna, Virginia. He was a strong believer in the Catholic faith and a caring dad, and he worked hard at the FBI. Most people saw him as a friendly 56-year-old man named “Bob,” just like any other typical American neighbor.
Hanssen was born in 1944. He was from Chicago, and his father was a police officer. He finished college at Knox College in 1966. After that, he started studying dentistry at Northwestern University, but he didn’t finish. Instead, he got an MBA. Later, he became an investigator for the Chicago Police Department.
Before the FBI caught him red-handed, Hanssen was a good counterintelligence agent. He finished training at the FBI Academy on January 12, 1976. His first job was with a squad that dealt with White-Collar Crime at the Gary Resident Agency in the Indianapolis Field Office.
“I could have been a devastating spy, I think, but I didn’t want to be a devastating spy. I wanted to get a little money and get out of it,” Hanssen said after his arrest.
Hanssen met his wife Bonnie, a very religious Roman Catholic, while they were studying to become dentists at Northwestern. They got married in 1968, and Hanssen changed his religion from Lutheranism to Catholicism. In 1979, the Hanssens and their three children moved to New York City. The FBI had a rule that its agents had to move around often to keep them alert, but they didn’t give them extra money for living in expensive cities.
So, Hanssen’s bills for his credit card, house, and other expenditures increased. He had to move his family farther from Manhattan because they needed more space. Even though Hanssen didn’t get paid much, and he worked long hours and had a long trip to work, the FBI trusted him with more important tasks. When he started working in counterintelligence, he could see the most secret documents about spying in the United States.
Robert Hanssen was worried about his bills. So, he wrote a letter without saying who he was to a not-very-important Soviet official working at the United Nations. He told them about General Dmitri Polyakov, a high-ranking mole working secretly for the USSR’s military intelligence. Hanssen said he’d tell this secret for $20,000. If the Russian person agreed, they could arrange the exchange by putting an advertisement in The Village Voice.
A few weeks later, someone replied to the ad. So, Robert Hanssen was now working for the Soviet Union.
Meanwhile, Hanssen got a new job in Washington, D.C. He worked in the budget office, where he could access a lot of secret information about FBI operations. This included details like names, money, places, and dates. He also knew about what FBI agents, spies, and informants were doing.
He quit spying for many years beginning in 1980, after his wife, Bonnie, caught him in the basement of their house in Westchester County, N.Y., trying to hurriedly hide his documents. He admitted to her and to a priest linked with Opus Dei, the conservative Catholic group they were part of.
Hanssen bought a house in Virginia for $150,000. But he still needed more money, so in 1985, he started spying again for the KGB. This time, he was more careful, using secret ways to hide what he was doing, like sending messages in code and using hidden methods. Even the Russians didn’t know his real identity. He only called himself by code names such as B and Ramon Garcia. Mr. Hanssen gave them important information, like details about satellite spying abilities.
On October 1, 1985, he wrote a letter to Victor Cherkashin, a senior KGB officer. He had already recruited a CIA agent named Aldrich Ames. In the letter, Hanssen gave the names of three Soviet spies working for the FBI and offered proof. He asked for $100,000 in return.
He didn’t know that the CIA agent had already given those names to the Soviets, but him being ready to help showed them he could be trusted. At the same time, when the spies Hanssen revealed returned to the Soviet Union, they were quickly killed.
Meanwhile, Hanssen kept getting higher ranks in the FBI, eventually working in senior counterintelligence roles. In the 1990s, a CIA agent named Aldrich Ames was arrested for spying for Russia. After this, the FBI and CIA realized that there was another mole, sharing confidential information with Russia. They started a mission called “Graysuit” to find a mole. But it wasn’t until the year 2000 that they got closer to finding out who this spy was. The FBI paid $7 million to a former Russian spy for a file about the spy who called himself B. This file had an audio recording with a voice that two FBI analysts recognized as belonging to Mr. Hanssen.
The FBI used fingerprints to confirm that Mr. Hanssen was the spy. They watched him secretly for months and even promoted him at work to keep a closer eye on him. On February 18, 2001, they caught him at a park in Vienna, Virginia. He was caught leaving secret documents in a plastic garbage bag for the Russians. FBI agents also found a bag nearby with $50,000 in cash, meant as payment for Hanssen. When he was arrested, Hanssen reportedly said, “Why did it take you so long?”
Hanssen would later say he did it for money, not beliefs. But in a letter to his Russian bosses in 1985, he said getting a big sum of money could be risky because he couldn’t spend it without causing suspicion.
Under the alias “Ramon Garcia,” he passed around 6,000 documents and 26 computer disks to his Russian bosses, officials said. These documents explained how to listen in secretly, confirmed who Russian double agents were, and revealed other secrets. Officials also thought he told Moscow about a secret tunnel the US made under the Soviet Embassy in Washington for listening secretly.
FBI agents later said the inquiry was hard because some of Hanssen’s co-workers were looking into him, and he kept checking FBI records to see if he was being watched. But before they could prove anything, the FBI decided to move Hanssen from the State Department job he had since 1995 and make him work at FBI headquarters, where he wasn’t supposed to talk to Russian spies.
He got an assistant named Eric O’Neill, who was actually an FBI agent assigned to watch Hanssen. O’Neill got and copied a letter that showed Hanssen wanted to be a spy for Russia since he was 14, after reading about Kim Philby, a British spy who worked for Russia too.
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In the letter, Hanssen wrote: “Some might think I’m brave or crazy. I say I’m just very loyal. You can pick. There’s a bit of craziness in all the answers.” The letter also showed Hanssen was upset with the Russians and how he asked for a PalmPilot device that helped catch him.
“I almost sacrificed myself to help you, and you give me silence. I hate silence…” Hanssen wrote in the letter. He also wrote, “The US might seem strong but foolish, but don’t be fooled. It can be very smart when it wants to be.”
After he was caught and found guilty, the government made all its agents say how much money they have. They also made a group to check FBI security, and they said Hanssen’s spying was one of the worst things to happen in US history. And a review by the Inspector General also called Hanssen ‘the most damaging spy in FBI history.’
Hanssen had been in prison since 2002, serving a life sentence without any chance of getting out on parole. This happened after he admitted to committing 15 acts of espionage and other crimes.
Hanssen, who was 79 years old, was discovered unconscious in his cell at a federal prison in Florence, Colorado on June 5, 2023. Later, prison officials declared him dead. It’s thought that he died from natural causes, as per someone who knows about the situation and talked to The Associated Press. This person wasn’t allowed to talk publicly about Hanssen’s death and wanted to remain anonymous.
Hanssen’s ability to avoid detection was a signal failure of the American intelligence apparatus. Even his brother-in-law, who worked for the FBI too, thought something was fishy about Hanssen and told his boss at the FBI about it ten years before Hanssen got caught. But his boss didn’t take it seriously.
Lots of books and movies have been made about Hanssen. In a TV movie from 2002, William Hurt played him. And in a movie called “Breach” from 2007, Chris Cooper played him.
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