Robert Hanssen

Robert Philip Hanssen (April 18, 1944 – June 5, 2023) was an American Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agent who spied for Soviet and Russian intelligence services against the United States from 1979 to 2001.

His espionage was described by the Department of Justice as "possibly the worst intelligence disaster in U.S. history".

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.

Hanssen applied for a cryptography job at the National Security Agency following his college graduation but was turned down due to budget setbacks.

He enrolled in dental school at Northwestern University, but he switched his focus to business after three years.

The couple married in 1968, and Hanssen converted from Lutheranism to Catholicism.

Hanssen received an MBA in accounting and information systems in 1971 and took a job with an accounting firm.

He quit after one year and joined the Chicago Police Department as an internal affairs investigator, specializing in forensic accounting.

In January 1976, Hanssen left the Chicago police to join the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).

Hanssen met Bernadette "Bonnie" Wauck, a staunch Roman Catholic, while attending dental school at Northwestern.

Upon becoming a special agent on January 12, 1976, Hanssen was transferred to the FBI's field office in Gary, Indiana.

In 1978, he and his growing family of three (eventually six) children relocated to New York City when the bureau transferred him to its field office there.

The next year, Hanssen was transferred to counterintelligence and given the task of compiling a database of Soviet intelligence for the FBI.

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.

In 1979, Hanssen approached the Soviet Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU) and offered his services.

He never indicated any political or ideological motive for his actions, telling the FBI after he was caught that his only motivation was financial.

During his first espionage cycle, Hanssen provided a significant amount of information to the GRU, including details of the FBI's bugging activities and lists of suspected Soviet intelligence agents.

His most important leak was the betrayal of Dmitri Polyakov, a CIA informant who passed enormous amounts of information to U.S. intelligence while rising to the rank of general in the Soviet Army.

In 1981, Hanssen was transferred to FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C., and relocated his family to the suburb of Vienna, Virginia.

His new job in the FBI's budget office gave him access to information involving many different FBI operations.

This included all the FBI activities related to wiretapping and electronic surveillance, which were Hanssen's responsibility.

He became known in the FBI as an expert on computers.

He restarted his espionage activities in 1985 and continued until 1991, when he ended communications during the collapse of the Soviet Union, fearing he would be exposed.

Hanssen restarted communications the next year and continued until his arrest.

Throughout his spying, he remained anonymous to the Russians.

Hanssen sold about six thousand classified documents to the KGB that detailed U.S. strategies in the event of nuclear war, developments in military weapons technologies, and aspects of the U.S. counterintelligence program.

He was spying at the same time as Aldrich Ames in the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

Both Ames and Hanssen compromised the names of KGB agents working secretly for the U.S., some of whom were executed for their betrayal.

Hanssen also revealed a multimillion-dollar eavesdropping tunnel built by the FBI under the Soviet Embassy.

Following a second betrayal by CIA mole Aldrich Ames in 1985, Polyakov was arrested in 1986 and executed in 1988.

His father, Howard (died 1993 ), a Chicago police officer, was allegedly emotionally abusive to Hanssen during his childhood.

After Ames's arrest in 1994, some of these intelligence breaches remained unsolved, and the search for another spy continued.

The FBI paid $7 million to a KGB agent to obtain a file on an anonymous mole, whom the FBI later identified as Hanssen through fingerprint and voice analysis.

Hanssen was arrested on February 18, 2001, at Foxstone Park, near his home in the Washington, D.C., suburb of Vienna, Virginia, after leaving a package of classified materials at a dead drop site.

He was charged with selling U.S. intelligence documents to the Soviet Union and subsequently Russia for more than $1.4 million in cash, diamonds and Rolex watches over twenty-two years.

To avoid the death penalty, Hanssen pleaded guilty to fourteen counts of espionage and one of conspiracy to commit espionage.

He was sentenced to fifteen life terms without the possibility of parole, and was incarcerated at ADX Florence until his death in 2023.

Hanssen was born in Chicago, Illinois, to a Lutheran family that lived in the Norwood Park neighborhood.

He was of Norwegian descent.

Ames was officially blamed for giving Polyakov's name to the Soviets, while Hanssen's attempt was not revealed until after his 2001 capture.