Robert Hanssen, an FBI agent turned spy for the Russians, died Monday in the cell where he was serving 15 consecutive life sentences for betraying the United States, federal prison officials said.
In a statement, authorities said Hanssen, 79, was "found unconscious" at 6:55 a.m. at the maximum-security federal prison in Florence, Colorado.
Portrait of Robert Hanssen when he was an FBI agent. FBI
Despite attempts to revive him, the man was pronounced dead by rescuers who tried to save him, according to the Bureau of Prisons.
Hanssen began spying for the Soviets in 1979, three years after joining the FBI.
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Using the alias "Ramon Garcia," Chicago-born Hanssen sold "highly classified national security information" to Moscow in exchange for $1.4 million in cash, bank funds and diamonds, the FBI said on its official history page.
Hanssen was arrested in 2001 after making a delivery in a Virginia park while being watched by the FBI, which had been watching him for months.
The former agent pleaded guilty to selling thousands of classified documents over the years detailing U.S. strategies for nuclear war as well as counterintelligence information.
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Hanssen also revealed to his Moscow bosses the existence of a secret underground tunnel built by the FBI under the Soviet embassy.
At the time, the Justice Department described the situation as "arguably the worst intelligence disaster in U.S. history."
Since July 17, 2002, Hanssen was incarcerated at Florence Maximum Security Prison, the most secure federal prison in the country, and home to other high-profile inmates such as Al Qaeda terrorist Zacarias Moussaoui, Boston Marathon terrorist Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, failed "shoe terrorist" Richard Reid, and "Unabomber" Ted Kaczynski.
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Who was Robert Hanssen?
Robert Hanssen was born in Chicago, Illinois, to a Lutheran family of Norwegian descent who lived in Norwood Park. His father, Howard, was a Chicago police officer and allegedly emotionally abused him during his childhood, according to Spy: The Inside Story of How the FBI's Robert Hanssen Betrayed America, a book by David Wise about the spy's life.
Hanssen graduated from William Howard Taft High School in 1962 and attended Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois, where he earned a bachelor's degree in chemistry in 1966. Upon graduation he applied for a crypto position at the National Security Agency, but was rejected due to budget issues. In 1972 he joined the Chicago Police Department as an internal affairs investigator, specializing in forensic accounting and four years later joined the FBI.
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On January 12, 1976, Hanssen was sworn to enforce the law and protect the nation as the new FBI special agent. However, he ended up becoming the most damaging spy in the history of the FBI.
On February 18, 2001, Hanssen was arrested and charged with espionage for Russia and the former Soviet Union. Hanssen — using the alias "Ramon Garcia" with his Russian contacts — had provided highly classified national security information to the Russians in exchange for more than $1.4 million in cash, bank funds and diamonds.
His espionage activities began in 1985. As he held key counterintelligence positions, he had authorized access to classified information. He used encrypted communications, physical deliveries, and other clandestine methods to provide information to the KGB and its successor agency, the SVR.
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The information he gave compromised numerous human sources, counterespionage techniques, investigations, dozens of classified U.S. government documents, and technical operations of extraordinary importance and value.
Thanks to his experience and training as a counter-espionage agent, Hanssen went unnoticed for years, although some of his unusual activities had aroused suspicion. Still, he was not identified as a spy.
In an affidavit, Hanssen said he voluntarily became a KGB agent in 1985, while working in the intelligence division of the FBI's New York office as a supervisor of a foreign counterintelligence brigade. Hanssen allegedly began spying for the Soviets in 1985 when, in his first letter to the KGB, he voluntarily offered information that compromised several sensitive areas.
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He also independently revealed the identity of two KGB officials who had been recruited by the U.S. government to serve as agents at the Soviet embassy in Washington.
"When these two KGB officers returned to Moscow, they were tried and convicted on espionage charges and executed," Louis J. Freeh, then FBI director, said in a statement.
Mole hunting
In the 1990s, after the arrest of Aldrich Ames (a former officer and counterintelligence analyst for the CIA, the US Central Intelligence Agency, who between 1985 and 1991 spied for the Soviet Union), the FBI and CIA realized that a mole, that is, an informant in the intelligence community, He continued to share classified information with the Russians.
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The turning point came in 2000, when the FBI and CIA obtained original Russian documentation from an American spy who appeared to be Hanssen. The subsequent investigation confirmed that suspicion.
Hanssen was about to retire, so investigators had to act quickly. Their goal was to catch him "red-handed."
"What we wanted was to get enough evidence to convict him and the ultimate goal was to catch him red-handed," said Debra Evans Smith, former deputy deputy director of the Counterintelligence Division.
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Hanssen was serving in the State Department's Office of Foreign Missions at the time the suspicions arose. The FBI leadership decided that he should be removed from his post and transferred to headquarters. Special Agent Don Sullivan, a brigade supervisor in the FBI's Washington Field Office at the time, volunteered to fill in for Hanssen.
Before Hanssen left the post, Sullivan went to see his new role at the State Department. He was also tasked with observing and learning as much as he could about Hanssen's computer setup in his office and keeping an eye on who he met and talked to.
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In his office, Hanssen had full access to the FBI's Automated Case Support (ACS) system and the State Department's computer systems. Sullivan noted that Hanssen spent a lot of time looking for information at the ACS.
"I had the opportunity. He could sit in his office and close the door. It wasn't a very difficult job," Sullivan said.
The Fall
To get Hanssen back to FBI headquarters, where he could be closely watched, Neil Gallagher, deputy director of the National Security Division at the time, called him to inform him of a false assignment to be part of his staff as a special assistant on a technology project. Gallagher also told him that then-director Louis Freeh had approved a two-year extension of his service and a promotion to the Senior Executive Service.
In January 2001, Hanssen moved into a small office at FBI headquarters secretly equipped with surveillance cameras and microphones. His assistant, Eric O'Neill, was in charge of keeping investigators informed of Hanssen's movements.
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In February 2001, about 300 people were working on the research. Hanssen was tracked from the time he left his home in Fairfax County, Virginia, until he came home at night, and it was confirmed that he was still an active spy.
Investigators learned that Hanssen was to make a delivery on February 18, 2001. An FBI arrest team was stationed in Foxstone Park, a location where the man had previously been seen by FBI surveillance. Hanssen parked on a residential street and walked along a tree-lined path to a walkway with the sorted material wrapped in a plastic bag. As he was returning to his car, the arrest team rushed over and stopped him.
Hanssen pleaded guilty to 15 counts of espionage on July 6, 2001. On 10 May 2002, he was sentenced to life imprisonment without parole.
The Mind of the Spy
In his book, Wise defines Hanssen as "a walking paradox." He was a fervent anti-communist who spied for Moscow, a pious Catholic and ultra-religious member of Opus Dei who secretly recorded his wife having sex and planned to drug her so that another man could father a child with her.
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"He had at least six lives: FBI special agent, devoted family man, Russian spy, devout Catholic, obsessed pornographer, and a shabby James Bond who once took a stripper to Hong Kong," Wise writes.
"This guy [Hanssen] is out of any of the patterns. He's not ethnic, he's not ideological, he's not an ambitious young man and he doesn't seem to be in his forties, stripper notwithstanding. Everything is bottled inside. It's really weird," James Woolsey, a former CIA director, said in an interview with Wise.
Hanssen ended his days at the maximum-security federal prison in Florence, Colorado, where inmates are isolated and confined in their concrete cells 23 hours a day for at least two years and, because of the prison's design, unable to make eye contact with other inmates.
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According to Wise, Hanssen had struggled with his contradictions all his life. As a chemistry student at Knox, he had easy access to chemicals in the lab and for the last two years of college he kept a jar in his dressing table.
The spy admitted that he never felt compelled to use it, but he was reassured to have it there, as a silent witness to his despair and doubts. He claimed that he only had it on hand in case life became too complicated. The jar he jealously guarded contained potassium cyanide.