Robert Hanssen Wiki

Robert Hanssen Biography

Hanssen, 79, was arrested in 2001 and pleaded guilty to selling highly classified material to the Soviet Union and then Russia. He was serving a life sentence in the federal penitentiary in Florence, Colorado.

Hanssen was found to be unresponsive and staff immediately took life-saving measures, Bureau of Prisons spokeswoman Kristie Breshears said in a statement.

“Staff requested emergency medical services and lifesaving efforts continued,” Breshears said. “The inmate was later pronounced dead by outside emergency medical personnel.”

Hanssen appears to have died of natural causes, according to two sources briefed on the matter.

Three years after being hired by the FBI, Hanssen became close to the Soviets and began spying in 1979 for the KGB and its successor, the SVR. He stopped a few years later after his wife confronted him.

He resumed espionage in 1985, selling thousands of classified documents compromising human and technical sources and counterintelligence investigations in exchange for more than $1.4 million in cash, diamonds and foreign bank deposits. Using the alias “Ramón García,” he passed information to spy agencies using encrypted communications and deadlocks, without ever meeting a Russian handler in person.

Eric O’Neill, who went undercover for the FBI during their investigation of Hanssen, that Hanssen came from a difficult background and had problems with his father, who wanted him to study medicine. But Hanssen, who went to dental school, wanted to be in the police force.

“He really wanted to catch spies. He was a James Bond fan, he loved the movies,” O’Neill said. “He could quote them chapter and verse. He wanted to be a spy. He joined the FBI to do that, not to spy against the US, but to go in and hunt down spies.”

But he was upset when he didn’t get exactly the job he wanted with the FBI, and taking care of his growing family while he lived in New York and later in the Washington, D.C., area. it was expensive.

“And that led him to decide that he was going to get everything he wanted: become a spy,” O’Neill said.

His job at the FBI gave him unrestricted access to classified information about the bureau’s counterintelligence operations. Revelations from him included details about US nuclear war preparations and a secret eavesdropping tunnel beneath the Soviet embassy in Washington, D.C. He also betrayed double agents, including Soviet General Dmitri Polyakov, who was later executed.

Hanssen was arrested

Hanssen was arrested after making a fatal fall in a Virginia park in 2001 after the FBI had been secretly monitoring him for months. His identity was discovered after a Russian intelligence officer turned over a file containing a garbage bag with Hanssen’s fingerprints and a recording of his voice.

In letters to the KGB, Hanssen expressed concern that he might one day be caught, and often checked FBI computers for any sign that he was investigating him.

“He would eventually appreciate an escape plan. (Nothing lasts forever),” he wrote to himself in 1986, according to the FBI affidavit.

Hanssen never revealed his motivation for spying. But O’Neill, who wrote a book about the investigation to catch Hanssen, has a few theories.

“He really didn’t have much respect for Russia, at least not in his conversations with me,” O’Neill said. “But he was able to use them very effectively to solve his other problems. One who was angry at the FBI for not placing him in the position of authority, seriousness, and respect that he believed he deserved. And two, he needed money. He was having financial problems and he needed money and both problems you solve by becoming a spy.”

“At some point, spying and being the top spy for the Soviet Union, while inside the FBI, became what made him belong to something much bigger than himself,” he added. “I think at some point, even more than money became what was so important to him.”

Hanssen’s life in prison was “absolutely horrible,” O’Neill said. He spent 23 hours a day alone in a tiny cell.