The evidence against him was overwhelming, and to avoid the death penalty, Hanssen confessed and agreed to be debriefed by American intelligence officials. Your effort and contribution in providing this feedback is much Hanssen gave them the name of a Russian general, Dimitri Polyakov, who had been providing information to the Americans. In 1979, three years after joining the FBI, Hanss Under Mr. Hanssen's plea bargain, she. [12] Hanssen received an MBA in accounting and information systems in 1971 and took a job with an accounting firm. The agents working for him reported this breach to a supervisor, but no action was taken. history. To be very clear on this issue, at no time was he authorized to communicate information to agents of the KGB/SVR. An FBI Agent who raised his right hand and spoke those words over 25 years ago has been charged today with violating that oath in the most egregious and reprehensible manner imaginable. Robert J. McNamara is a history expert and former magazine journalist. In her statement, Bonnie Hanssen thanked government officials for allowing her to retain the pension and for recognizing that she and the children clearly are innocent victims.. 1979 - Begins spying for the Soviet Union. In fact, when his father passed away, Hansen inherited 17 guns from him as well. December 2000 - The FBI begins surveillance of Hanssen. Hanssen was finally discovered when a former KGB agent contacted American intelligence agents. At present he is serving his fifteen successive life terms as prisoner #48551-083 at a federal supermax prison, the ADX Florence. The complaint, however, does not allege any compromises by him at the State Department. [25] That same year, Hanssen, according to a government report, committed a "serious security breach" by revealing secret information to a Soviet defector during a debriefing. Hanssen appeared to be a devoted anti-communist. Darla, who had a masters degree in Education, would earn her own income by teaching learning disabled kids. The FBI trusted him with some of the most sensitive secrets of the U.S. government, and instead of upholding that trust, he abused and betrayed it. A proficient hunter and tracker since childhood, Hansen chased down his victims in the Alaskan wilderness with a Ruger Mini-14 and a knife. Hanssen's jailers allowed him to watch this movie, but he was so angered by it that he turned it off. Robert Hansen's Parents. FBI and CIA personnel who debriefed Hanssen about his 21 years. WASHINGTON - Convicted FBI spy Robert Hanssen, who's set to be sentenced to life in prison tomorrow, asked his best friend to drug and have sex with . Yet Brookner said Bonnie Hanssen has no intention of divorcing her husband. Some promising suspects were cleared, and the mole hunt found other penetrations, such as CIA officer Harold James Nicholson. She sold their house and bakery in Alaska and shifted closer to her family in Arkansas after the children were getting bullied massively at their school. Please be aware how deeply Mrs. Hanssen regrets the damage that her husband, Robert Hanssen, has caused to our country and to their family, the statement said. Three years later, Hanssen transferred to the FBI's Soviet analytical unit, responsible for studying, identifying, and capturing Soviet spies and intelligence operatives in the United States. During his sessions with investigators, Hanssen claimed his motivation had always been financial. Unlike Cold War spies of an earlier era, Hanssen claimed to have no political motivation for selling out his country. To closely oversee his activities, the FBI relocated him in its headquarters in January 2001. (Photo courtesy of FBI/Newsmakers). Hanssen's story is the subject of the 2021 documentary A Spy in the FBI. Nor can there be any doubt that he was keenly aware of the gravity of his traitorous actions. In 1978, Hanssen was transferred to the FBI office in New York City and was assigned to a counterintelligence post. Robert Hanssen was born in Chicago, Illinois, to a Lutheran family who lived in the Norwood Park neighborhood. All Rights Reserved. In 1971 he earned his Master in Business Administration in accounting and information systems. The FBI and CIA formed a joint mole-hunting team in 1994 to find the suspected second intelligence leak. The information he delivered compromised numerous human sources, counterintelligence techniques, investigations, dozens of classified U.S. government documents, and technical operations of extraordinary importance and value. Instead, the 57-year-old defendant will be sentenced to life in prison without parole if he honors his pledge to tell the government all the secrets behind his two-decade career as a Russian spy. Hansen opened a bakery and learned how to fly the small plane that he purchased. His application in the National Security Agency, for the post of a cryptographer, was rejected due to budget restrictions. He went to the Russian embassy in person and physically approached a GRU officer in the parking garage. His case is considered one of America's greatest intelligence failures, as Hanssen operated as a mole within the bureau's counterintelligence division, the highly sensitive part of the FBI tasked with tracking foreign spies. It was not a very demanding job, said Sullivan. Hansen even followed in his fathers footsteps and opened up his own bakery. However, Hanssen escaped notice, likely because these efforts concentrated on CIA agents rather than FBI agents. While not identifying himself, he was able to gain their trust by initially providing information which the Soviets found both credible and valuable. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 Hanssen became much more wary. He also independently disclosed the identity of two KGB officials who, first compromised by Aldrich Ames, had been recruited by the U.S. Government to serve as agents in place at the Soviet Embassy in Washington. McNamara, Robert. Nor would many other intelligence and counterintelligence accomplishments that routinely but quietly contribute to the security of this Nation. Hanssen pled guilty to 15 counts of espionage on July 6, 2001. [9] He is of Norwegian descent. A Warner Bros. "I have opened the door for calumny against my totally innocent wife and children. News reports at the time of his sentencing said American intelligence agencies were not entirely satisfied with the extent of his cooperation and believed he was holding back information. He compromised information about Americas plan of forming Measurement and Signature Intelligence, its bugging plan over the Soviets by digging a tunnel under the decoding room of the Soviets new embassy and data on double agents of the US. Hanssen's three sons attended The Heights School in Potomac, Maryland, an all-boys preparatory school. Instead, he ultimately became the most damaging spy in. Biography of Vladimir Putin: From KGB Agent to Russian President, Biography of Mata Hari, Infamous World War I Spy, Haym Salomon, Spy and Financier of the American Revolution, Biography of Virginia Hall, WWII's Most Wanted Spy, Biography of Fred Hampton, Black Panther Party Leader, Biography of Robert Kennedy, US Attorney General, Presidential Candidate, John Dillinger's Life as Public Enemy Number 1, Biography of Nikita Khrushchev, Cold War Era Soviet Leader. Hanssen, a former counterintelligence supervisor for the FBI, pleaded guilty last week to 15 espionage-related charges and admitted that he had sold the Russians thousands of pages of national security secrets in exchange for $1.4 million in cash and diamonds. He enrolled in dental school at Northwestern University[11] but switched his focus to business after three years. Many of them were agents of the Soviet intelligence agency, the KGB, or its military counterpart, the GRU. He was, after all, a trained counterintelligence specialist. Hanssen was set to retire, so investigators had to move fast. With two children already out of school, the pension money will help Bonnie Hanssen support two children who are in college and two more still in high school, Brookner said. While the risk that an employee of the United States Government will betray his country can never be eliminated, there must be more that the FBI can do to protect itself from such an occurrence. Six was to be added to the month, day, and time of a designated drop time, so that, for example, a drop scheduled for January 6 at 1:00p.m. would be written as July 12 at 7:00p.m..[61], Despite these efforts at caution and security, Hanssen could sometimes be reckless. He was paid handsomely by the Soviets. For more than a decade, Hansen had been luring sex workers into his vehicle or home with the promise of an easy transaction. [41] The idea that an FBI agent was the second mole was not considered early enough. He placed a white piece of tape on a park sign, which was a signal to his Russian contacts that there was information at the dead drop site. 1981 - Is assigned to the Intelligence Division at FBI headquarters in DC. In 1981 he was assigned to the Budget Unit in the FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C. His job in the suburb of Vienna included electronic surveillance and wiretapping, which gave him more access to different FBI activities. For a while he was in contact with Priscilla Sue Galey, a stripper in Washington, who received cash, jewelry and other benefits from Hanssen. We particularly appreciate the unhesitating leadership and support of Attorney General Ashcroft from the moment he took office. She would then use this money to run her house and support her children. House Belonging To Former Spy Robert Hanssen Won't Sell. Hanssen is mentioned in the seventh episode of The History Channel series America's Book of Secrets, as well as in the fifth episode of Netflix series Spycraft. [7][8] On May 10, 2002, Hanssen was sentenced to 15 consecutive sentences of life in prison without the possibility of parole. Apparently, even though Hansen was naturally a left-handed person, he was always forced to use his right hand, making his speech problems worse. In the 1990s, after the arrest of Aldrich Ames, the FBI and CIA realized that a mole within the intelligence community was still sharing classified information with the Russians. For many years, the CIA and FBI have been aggressively engaged in a sustained analytical effort to identify foreign penetrations of the Intelligence Community. He is serving his sentence at the ADX Florence, a federal supermax prison near Florence, Colorado, in solitary confinement for 23 hours a day. Hanssen claimed he was trying to connect a color printer to his computer but needed the password cracker to bypass the administrative password. 2. A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States. Both schools are associated with Opus Dei. But money is. In court proceedings the government stated that Hanssen had been paid more than $1.4 million during his spying career, most of which he never actually received, as it was held for him in a Russian bank. He was tasked with studying all known and rumored penetrations of the FBI to find the man who had betrayed Martynov and Motorin; this meant, in effect, that he was charged with searching for himself. [6] To avoid the death penalty, Hanssen pleaded guilty to 14 counts of espionage and one of conspiracy to commit espionage. He passed on data related to surveillance activities of FBI and provided the GRU with data of suspected Soviet intelligence spies. Furthermore, she supported her husband when he was first incarcerated for theft, and then for abducting and sexually abusing a housewife and a prostitute (although the rape charge concerning the latter was dropped when he pleaded guilty.) The failure of the Bloch investigation and the FBI's investigation of how the KGB learned that they were investigating Bloch caused the mole hunt that eventually resulted in the arrest of Hanssen. The FBI waited two more days to see if any of Hanssen's SVR handlers would show up at Foxstone Park. They paid $7 million to KGB agent Alexandr Shcherbakov[43] who had access to a file on "B". Desk: FBI and CIA Counterintelligence As Seen From My Cubicle Dog Ear Publishing 2010, U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, Gray Day: My Undercover Mission to Expose America's First Cyber Spy, Spy: The Inside Story of How the FBI's Robert Hanssen Betrayed America, "USA v. Robert Philip Hanssen: Affidavit in Support of Criminal Complaint, Arrest Warrant and Search Warrant", "Federal Bureau of Prisons Inmate Locator", "A Review of FBI Security Programs (Webster Report)", "A Review of the FBI's Performance in Deterring, Detecting, and Investigating the Espionage Activities of Robert Philip Hanssen", Thompson Statement Regarding Hanssen Guilty Plea, "Spy's Wife Speaks, After Taking a Lie Test", "Riddle Resolved: Who Dimed Out American Traitor and Super-Spy, Robert Hanssen? Our joint efforts over the last several years and specifically in this case should give pause to those contemplating betrayal of the Nations trust. Although Hanssen was unaware of it, Ames had already exposed all three agents earlier that year. [71], The Hanssen spy case is told in Ronald Kessler's book The Secrets of the FBI in chapter 15, "Catching Hanssen," chapter 16, "Breach", and chapter 17, "Unexplained Cash", based in part on interviews with Michael Rochford, who directed the FBI team that eventually caught Hanssen after initially wrongly assuming a CIA officer was the master spy. After being released, he met his second wife, Darla Henrichsen, and the pair got married in 1963. 2000 - The FBI identifies Hanssen from a fingerprint and from a tape recording supplied by a disgruntled Russian intelligence operative. His father, an officer of the Chicago police, often scorned and abused him emotionally. Asked what Bonnie Hanssen thinks may have motivated her husband, Brookner said: Who knows? This included all the FBI activities related to wiretapping and electronic surveillance, which were Hanssen's responsibility. He was indiscreet enough to type his name into FBI search engines. In 1979, three years after joining the FBI, Hanssen approached the Soviet Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU) to offer his services, beginning his first espionage cycle, lasting until 1981. Two fingerprints collected from a trash bag in the file were analyzed and proved to be Hanssen's. Is sentenced to life in prison without possibility of parole. Regrettably, I stand here today both saddened and outraged. Further, the complaint alleges that Hanssen, using his training and experience to protect himself from discovery by the FBI, never met face-to-face with his Russian handlers, never revealed to them his true identity or where he worked, constantly checked FBI records for signs he and the drop sites he was using were being investigated, refused any foreign travel to meet with the Russians, and even declined to accept any trade craft. Hanssen never displayed outward signs that he was receiving large amounts of unexplained cash. Polyakov was carefully watched by the Russians from that point on, and was eventually arrested as a spy and executed in 1988. Polyakov was carefully watched by the Russians from that point on, and was eventually arrested as a spy and executed in 1988. While it did not contain Hanssen's name, among the information was an audiotape of a July 21, 1986, conversation between "B" and KGB agent Aleksander Fefelov. For a time he planned to become a dentist, but eventually wound up obtaining an MBA and becoming an accountant. In return, he received large sums of money and other remuneration. Investigators learned that Hanssen was set to make a dead drop on February 18, 2001. [34], In 1994, Hanssen expressed interest in a transfer to the new National Counterintelligence Center, which coordinated counterintelligence activities. They have committed their lives to public service and to upholding the high standards of the FBI. In 1985 he approached the Soviets again and offered valuable secrets. Its amazing to live with a man for all those years and not know him.. In 1999 he established contact with the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, the SVR, which was preceded by the KGB before Soviets collapse. He once said in a letter to the KGB that it should emulate the management style of Mayor of Chicago Richard J. Daleya comment that easily could have led an investigator to look at people from Chicago. With the mole finally identified, locations, dates, and cases were matched with Hanssen's activities during the period. The CIA and FBI searched his house, tapped his telephone, and surveilled him, following him and his family everywhere. On a 2017blog post, Hale revealed that he had attempted to contact Hansen's now adult children, but was unsuccessful. He later wrote to his KGB handler, speaking about the severity with which U.S. laws punishes his alleged actions, and acknowledging I know far better than most what minefields are laid and the risks.. [7][8] He was sentenced to 15 life terms without the possibility of parole. [64] His three daughters attended Oakcrest School for Girls in Vienna, Virginia, an independent Roman Catholic school. The Hanssen case was regarded as a low point for the FBI, especially as Hanssen had been so trusted and had committed such betrayals for so many years. This innocent looking house in Vienna used to belong to Russian spy Robert Hanssen before he was caught by the Feds. For years, Hanssen stopped contacting the Russians. Robert Phillip Hanssen was born in Chicago, Illinois, on April 18, 1944. Robert was born in 1939 in Iowa to Danish immigrants Christian and Edna Hansen. [16] CIA and FBI officials, including Deputy Director William Sullivan, believed that, at some point, Polyakov was made into a triple agent by the Soviets, who thereby deceived the West with misinformation. February 18, 2001 - Is arrested in a Virginia park after making a drop of classified documents. Although his name was not specifically mentioned, evidence in the file pointed to Hanssen, who was put under close surveillance. The investigation is covered in O'Neill's memoir Gray Day: My Undercover Mission to Expose America's First Cyber Spy, published by Penguin Random House in the spring of 2019. https://www.thefamouspeople.com/profiles/robert-hanssen-6997.php. A lock () or https:// means you've safely connected to the .gov website. During the early 1990s, KGB veterans began to approach western intelligence agencies and provide information. In January 1976, he left the police department to join the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).[4]. [14] The next year, Hanssen was transferred to counterintelligence and given the task of compiling a database of Soviet intelligence for the FBI. The Russian officer, who evidently did not recognize the code name, drove away. Robert Hanssen is a former FBI agent who sold highly classified material to Russian intelligence agents for decades before he was finally arrested in 2001. Both Ames and Hanssen compromised the names of KGB agents working secretly for the U.S., some of whom were executed for their betrayal. His job was to help assemble a database of foreign officials posted in New York who, while posing as diplomats, were actually intelligence officers spying on the United States. At work, he often spoke of his religious faith and conservative values, traits which helped him avoid any suspicion during the years that he was in secret communication with Russian spies. To the residents of the quiet suburb of Vienna, Virginia, Robert Hanssen was the perfect neighbor. For these reasons, the FBI learned of his true identity before the Russians; they are learning of it only now. 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