Robert Hanssen, the infamous FBI double agent who secretly fed Russia a few of America’s deepest secrets and techniques within the Nineteen Eighties and Nineteen Nineties, died in a top-security jail on Monday, jail officers stated.
Providing himself to Soviet navy intelligence in 1985, Hanssen traded authorities secrets and techniques and the identities of US moles within the Soviet and Russian governments in alternate for diamonds and a whole bunch of hundreds of {dollars}.
As a result of he was within the FBI’s essential New York counterintelligence division, tasked with chasing down overseas spies, he was in a position to cowl his tracks as he ostensibly investigated Moscow’s brokers in the USA.
He was lastly caught at a lifeless drop for exchanging messages along with his Russian handlers in suburban Virginia, simply outdoors Washington, on February 18, 2001.
A yr later he was sentenced to life in jail with no chance of parole. Hanssen, 79, was discovered unresponsive early Monday within the ultra-high-security US jail in Florence, Colorado, and was later pronounced lifeless, in keeping with a jail assertion.
The FBI referred to as him “probably the most damaging spy in bureau historical past”. Hanssen joined the FBI in 1976 after first serving as a policeman in Chicago. 9 years later he took a place in counterintelligence within the New York Metropolis workplace, the place brokers invested big quantities of time monitoring and attempting to recruit Soviet officers on the United Nations.
As a substitute, inside a short while he provided his companies to the opposite facet below the identify “Ramon Garcia” and even his handlers didn’t know his true identification.
On the time that he was caught, he was thought of probably the most damaging mole ever to cross US secrets and techniques to a overseas authorities, with hundreds of categorised US paperwork handed over to the Soviets, and later to the Russians.
These included US nuclear warfare plans, software program for monitoring spying investigations, and the identities of US sources in Moscow — together with Dmitri Polyakov or “Tophat,” a Soviet basic who fed his nation’s secrets and techniques to the USA between the Sixties and Nineteen Eighties.
Polyakov was arrested in 1986 and executed a number of years later. Believed to have been motivated by cash and intrigue slightly than ideology, Hanssen reaped some $US1.4 million ($2.1 million) in money and diamonds for his betrayals.
Whereas for a number of years the FBI and CIA knew there was a well-placed informant of their ranks, Hanssen was for a very long time not a high suspect.
He had a spouse and 6 kids, lived frugally, and combined intently with Washington’s conservative Catholic elite.
US investigators finally turned extra consideration to Hanssen with small bits of data supplied by a Russian defector.
He was secretly tracked and recorded in his workplace for months earlier than being caught on the Virginia lifeless drop.
In Might 2002 he pleaded responsible to fifteen counts of espionage in alternate for a prosecution settlement to not search the loss of life penalty.
“I apologise for my behaviour. I’m shamed by it,” Hanssen stated at his sentencing.
“I’ve opened the door for calumny towards my completely harmless spouse and kids. I’ve harm so many deeply.”
Initially printed as Robert Hanssen, infamous FBI agent who fed secrets and techniques to Russia, lifeless in jail
