Source-History.com-
One of the most damaging double agents in modern American history, Robert Hanssen gave the Soviets, and later the Russians, thousands of pages of classified material that revealed such sensitive national security secrets as the identities of Soviets spying for the U.S., specifics about America’s nuclear operations and the existence of an FBI-built tunnel underneath the Soviet Embassy in Washington.
Hanssen’s double life began in 1979 and ended in 2001, when he was arrested after the FBI discovered, thanks to help from an ex-KGB officer, that Hanssen was a mole. A church-going father of six, Hanssen is thought to have been motivated by money rather than ideological beliefs. While covertly working for Moscow on and off over the years, he was paid $600,000 in cash and diamonds, with another $800,000 supposedly held for him in a Russian bank. Hanssen was only the third agent in FBI history charged with spying.
Born in 1944, Hanssen was a Chicago native and son of a police officer. He graduated from Knox College in 1966 then attended dental school at Northwestern University before quitting the program to earn an MBA. He went on to work as an investigator for the Chicago Police Department then joined the FBI in 1976. He worked for the agency in Indiana and later New York City.
Hanssen’s deceit began in 1979, when he volunteered to spy for GRU, the Soviet military intelligence agency. He soon informed the Soviets that one of their generals, Dmitri Polyakov, was in fact a CIA informant who’d been spying for America since the 1960s. The Soviets eventually executed Polyakov.
In 1980, after Hanssen’s wife reportedly caught him with some suspicious-looking papers, he admitted to selling secrets to the Soviets, but claimed the information he’d given them was worthless. At his wife’s insistence, Hanssen promised to sever ties with the Soviets and confessed to a priest, who told him to donate the dirty money to charity. However, in 1985, Hanssen resumed his espionage activities, this time for the KGB. He gave the KGB the names of three Soviet officers collaborating with the CIA and FBI. The three spies were arrested and executed.
Meanwhile, Hanssen continued to rise through the FBI’s ranks, eventually working in senior counterintelligence roles. In 1991, with the Soviet Union breaking apart, he stopped spying, possibly due to fears that he’d be found out. But In 1999, while serving as the FBI liaison to the U.S. State Department, he once again resumed his double-agent career, this time for the SVR, a post-
Soviet, Russian intelligence service.
Hanssen’s downfall came in 2000 when the FBI, which by then suspected there was a mole in its ranks, paid $7 million to an ex-KGB officer to procure information from SVR headquarters that helped identify Hanssen as the turncoat. The FBI put Hanssen under surveillance in late 2000, and on February 18, 2001, he was arrested at a park in Vienna, Virginia, after making a drop of classified documents in a plastic garbage bag for the Russians. Nearby, FBI agents discovered a bag with $50,000 in cash, intended as Hanssen’s payment. When he was arrested, Hanssen reportedly exclaimed, “What took you so long?” Read more
Comentários