Robert Philip Hanssen (born April 18, 1944) is a former American FBI agent who spied for Soviet and Russian intelligence services against the United States for more than twenty years. Despite the fact that he revealed highly sensitive security information to the Soviet Union, federal prosecutors agreed not to seek the death penalty in exchange for his guilty pleas to fifteen espionage and conspiracy charges. He is serving a life sentence at the U.S. Bureau of Prisons Administrative Maximum facility in Florence, Colorado, a "Supermax" federal prison in which Hanssen spends twenty-three hours a day in solitary confinement.
Hanssen was arrested on the 18th of February 2001 at Foxstone Park near his home in Vienna, Virginia and was charged with selling American secrets to Moscow for more than US$1.4 million in cash and diamonds over a 22 year period. On 6 July 2001, he pleaded guilty to fifteen counts of espionage in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia. He was subsequently sentenced to life in prison without parole. His activities have been described as "possibly the worst intelligence disaster in US history".
Early life
Hanssen was born in Chicago, Illinois, to a Lutheran family of mixed Danish-Polish and German descent. His father was a Chicago police officer.
After graduating from William Howard Taft High School in 1962, Hanssen attended Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois where he received a B.S. in chemistry in 1966. While at Knox, he took an interest in Russian through elective courses. Originally set to become a doctor, Hanssen instead enrolled in Northwestern University Dental School. He did well academically, but said that he "didn't like spit all that much". He switched to business after three years, and received an MBA in 1971. After graduating, he took a job with an accounting firm but quit to join the Chicago Police Department as an internal affairs investigator, specializing in forensic accounting. Hanssen left the Department after two years, transferring to the FBI in January 1976.
Hanssen met Bernadette "Bonnie" Wauck while he was attending dental school in Chicago. Bonnie was one of eight children from a staunchly Roman Catholic family. The couple married in 1968, and Hanssen converted to his wife's faith, becoming a fervent believer.
Early FBI career and first espionage activities (1979–81)
Hanssen joined the FBI as a special agent on January 12, 1976 and was transferred to the field office in Gary, Indiana. In 1978, Hanssen and his growing family (of three children and eventually six) moved to New York when the FBI transferred him to its field office there. The next year, Hanssen was moved into counter-intelligence and given the task of compiling a database of Soviet intelligence for the Bureau. It was then, in 1979, only three years after joining the FBI, that Hanssen began his career as a Soviet, and later Russian, spy.
That year, Hanssen approached the GRU (the Soviet military intelligence agency) and offered his services. Hanssen never indicated any ideological motive for his activities, telling the FBI after he was caught that his only motivation was the money. During his first espionage cycle, Hanssen told the GRU a significant amount, including information on FBI bugging activities and Bureau lists of suspected Soviet intelligence agents. His most important leak of information was the betrayal of Dmitri Polyakov, code named TOPHAT. Polyakov was a CIA informant for more than twenty years before his retirement in 1980, and passed enormous amounts of information to American intelligence while he rose to the rank of General in the Red Army. For reasons that remain unclear, the Soviets did not act on their intelligence about Polyakov until he was betrayed a second time by Aldrich Ames in 1985. Polyakov was arrested in 1986 and executed two years later. Ames was blamed for giving Polyakov's name to the Soviets, while Hanssen's role remained unknown until after his arrest in 2001.
Another close encounter was in 1981, when Bonnie Hanssen caught her husband in their basement writing a letter to the Soviets. Hanssen admitted to her that he'd been giving information to the Soviets (motivated purely by his "need" for money) and that he had received US$30,000 as payment, but he lied and said that he was only passing along false intelligence. Knowing this, Bonnie insisted that her husband go to confession. The Opus Dei priest who heard Robert's confession is said to have told him to give the money to charity as an act of penance. This remains unconfirmed as under the Seal of Confession, “it is absolutely forbidden for a confessor to betray in any way a penitent in words or in any manner for any reason" (Canon 983.1) under penalty of "latae sententiae excommunication” (Canon 1388.1). Hanssen told his wife that he gave the money to Mother Teresa, but it is unknown if he actually did so.
FBI counterintelligence unit, further espionage activities (1985–91)
Hanssen was transferred to the Washington, DC, office in 1981 and moved to the suburb of Vienna, Virginia. His new job in the FBI's budget office gave him access to all kinds of information involving many different FBI activities. This included all the FBI activities related to wiretapping and electronic surveillance, which were Hanssen's responsibility. He became known in the Bureau as an expert on computers.
In 1983, Hanssen transferred to the Soviet analytical unit, which was directly responsible for studying, identifying, and capturing Soviet spies and intelligence operatives in the United States. Hanssen's section was in charge of evaluating Soviet agents who volunteered to give intelligence to the US, to determine if they were genuine or double agents.
In 1985, Hanssen was again transferred to the FBI's field office in New York, where he continued to work in counter-intelligence against the Soviets. It was after the transfer, while on a business trip back to Washington, that he resumed his career in espionage. This time, he became an operative for the KGB.
On 1985 October 1, he sent an anonymous letter to the KGB offering his services and asking for US$100,000 in cash. In the letter, Hanssen gave the names of three KGB agents in the United States secretly working for the FBI: Boris Yuzhin, Valery Martynov, and Sergei Motorin. Unbeknownst to Hanssen, all three had already been exposed earlier that year by another mole, CIA employee Aldrich Ames. Martynov and Motorin were executed, and Yuzhin was imprisoned for six years, and eventually emigrated to the United States. Since the FBI attributed the leak to Ames, the trail to Hanssen was diverted. The October 1st letter was the beginning of an active, long espionage period for Hanssen. He remained busy with KGB correspondence over the next several years.
In 1987, Hanssen was recalled yet again to Washington. He was given the task of making a study of all known and rumoured penetrations of the FBI in order to find the man who had betrayed Martynov and Motorin. Little did his superiors know that he was looking for himself. Not only did Hanssen ensure that he did not unmask himself with his study, but he also turned over the entire study, including the list of all Soviets who had contacted the FBI about FBI moles, to the KGB in 1988. Also in 1987, Hanssen, according to a government report, "committed a serious security breach" by revealing secret information to a Soviet defector during a debriefing. The agents working underneath him reported this security breach to a supervisor, but no action was taken.
In 1989, Hanssen handed over extensive information about American planning for Measurement and Signature Intelligence (MASINT), an umbrella term for intelligence collected by a wide array of electronic means, such as radar, underwater hydrophones for naval intelligence, spy satellites, and signal intercepts. When the Soviets began construction on a new embassy in 1977, the FBI dug a tunnel beneath the embassy, right under their decoding room. They planned to use it for eavesdropping, but never did for fear of being caught. Hanssen disclosed this detailed information to the Soviets in September 1989 and received a US$55,000 payment the next month. On two occasions, Hanssen gave the Soviets a complete list of American double agents.
Another event in the very busy year of 1989 happened when Hanssen compromised the FBI investigation of Felix Bloch. Bloch was a State Department official who had served all over the world for more than thirty years when he came under suspicion in 1989. Bloch was seen meeting a known KGB operative and giving him a black bag. (Bloch was a stamp collector and later claimed that the bag contained stamp albums.) In May 1989, eight days after the meeting of Bloch with the KGB operative, Hanssen told the KGB that Bloch was under investigation. In June, the operative called Bloch and said that he could not see Bloch anymore, saying, "A contagious disease is suspected." The FBI believed that the call was a warning. Felix Bloch maintained his innocence through an aggressive interrogation and an investigation that continued for months afterward. The FBI never found any hard evidence, and Bloch was never charged with a crime. The failure of the Bloch investigation, and the FBI's suspicion of what the KGB had found out, drove the mole hunt that eventually led to the arrest of Robert Hanssen.
In 1990, Hanssen's brother-in-law, Mark Wauck, who was also an FBI employee, recommended to the bureau that Hanssen be investigated for espionage. This was because
Robert Hansen - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
This article is about the convicted killer. For the basketball player, see Bob Hansen. For the spy, see Robert Hanssen.
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Robert Hanssen
Robert Hanssen. AKA Robert Philip Hanssen. Born: 18-Apr-1944 Birthplace: Chicago, IL. Gender: Male Religion: Roman Catholic Race or Ethnicity: White Sexual orientation: Straight
Robert Hanssen - Wikimedia Commons
English: Robert Philip Hanssen (born April 18, 1944) is a former FBI agent who spied for Soviet and Russian intelligence services against the United States for more than 20 years.