Robert Philip Hanssen (born on April 18, 1944) was an FBI agent who was convicted of spying for the Soviet Union and Russia. He was arrested on February 18, 2001 at Foxstone Park near his home in Vienna, Virginia and charged with selling American secrets to Moscow for $1.4 million in cash and diamonds over a 15-year period. His treason has been described as the "worst intelligence disaster in US history."
Born in Chicago, Illinois, he was the son of a policeman. Hanssen suffered terrible abuse during his childhood, both mental and physical, at the hands of his domineering father. Court documents say he told his Moscow handlers that he read Kim Philby's book at age 14 and thought of him as a hero. Philby was a mole in British intelligence who eventually defected to the Soviet Union. Philby's autobiography My Silent War was published in 1968, so Hanssen must have meant a different book, or was lying to his Moscow handlers, or mistaken.
He attended Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois and studied chemistry and Russian. He enrolled and dropped out of dentistry school, got a masters of accounting, got a business job but quit to join the Chicago police as an internal corruption investigator, then joined the FBI counterintelligence unit.
In 1979 he made his first traitorous act revealing to the Soviets that Soviet official General Dmitri Fedorovich Polyakov of the GRU was selling Soviet secrets to the USA, mostly out of hatred for the current "corrupt" Soviet leadership. He was the most important mole of this period.
Hanssen's wife Bonnie found Hanssen out due to some strange behaviour; Hanssen half-confessed that he sold some worthless facts for $20,000. Bonnie made him confess to a priest, identified by the New York Times as the Reverend Robert P. Bucciarelli, former head of Opus Dei in the USA. The actual confession and advice is privileged; the priest did not break his vow of confidentiality; the spying continued for years.
Hanssen was transferred to the Washington, D.C. office and moved to the suburb of Vienna, Virginia. In 1985, he sold to the Soviets the names of three KGB agents in the United States secretly working for the FBI (Boris Yuzhin, Valery Martynov, and Sergei Motorin). These three had already been betrayed by another mole, CIA employee Aldrich Ames; they were soon recalled to Russia to face their fate. Because the FBI could attribute the leak to Ames, the trail to Hanssen was diverted. He also revealed an expensive secret tunnel dug under the Soviet embassy for the purpose of eavesdropping. He compromised the investigation of Felix Bloch, a State Department official accused of working with the Soviets; he gave them the plan of a program for the continuity of government in case of a Soviet nuclear attack and planned defense and retaliation. It's also believed that Hanssen sold the Russians a computer program designed to track enemies, and, in turn, the Russians sold that to Al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden. [citation needed]
According to USA Today:
- [t]hose who know the Hanssens describe them as a close family. They attended Mass weekly. Four of the children attended Our Lady of Good Counsel Catholic School, which now covers kindergarten through eighth grade, in Vienna. Only two of the children remain at home, a comfortable brown frame house with a basketball hoop on the side of the house.
Other accounts say Hanssen attended Mass daily. [citation needed]
USA Today: "His biggest fear, Hanssen confided, was 'someone like me' — an agent on the Russian side with knowledge of Hanssen's spying who decided to work for the Americans. A former CIA counterintelligence expert, Vincent Cannistraro, suspects that that is what happened."
According to the New York Observer, August 6, 2001:
- On July 29, the Los Angeles Times published a lengthy investigation of his role as a top F.B.I. overseer of domestic counterintelligence operations. From documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act...the Times discovered that Mr. Hanssen spent several years directing the bureau's notorious Reagan-era probes of American liberal and peace organizations. Such groups were deemed inimical to the objectives of the conservatives then in power, who tended to regard dissent over the nuclear-arms race and war in Central America as Soviet-influenced and subversive....As later Congressional investigations would show, what this often meant in practice was the harassment and sometimes the smearing of Americans engaged in lawful political activity. Among the many groups under surveillance by the F.B.I. in those days were the Gray Panthers, nuclear-freeze advocates associated with SANE-and the left-leaning Catholic adversaries of Opus Dei who opposed the American-backed repression in Central America.
- Robert Novak. The conservative columnist admitted on July 12 that Mr. Hanssen had served as his main source for a 1997 column attacking Janet Reno, then the U.S. Attorney General, for supposedly covering up 1996 campaign-finance scandals.[citation needed]
Hanssen hired lawyer Plato Cacheris. On May 10, 2002, in exchange for cooperating with authorities, he was spared the death penalty and sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole, and his wife, along with her six children, received the survivor's part Hanssen's husband's pension, $39,000 per year. Hanssen is required to submit to a gag order with respect to public comments. Hanssen is currently serving his sentence at a Supermax prison, Administrative Maximum Security (ADX) in Florence, Colorado.
Hanssen admitted to another secret life in having illicit relations with a Washington D.C. stripper. The stripper went to Hong Kong with Hanssen on a trip; he gave her money, jewels and a used Mercedes but ended his relationship with her prior to his arrest.
Further reading
- Victor Cherkashin, Spy Handler: Memoir of a KGB Officer. The True Story of The Man Who recruited Robert Hanssen & Aldrich Ames, Basic, 2005, ISBN 0-465-00968-9
- Joe Conason, New York Observer, August 6, 2001, "Was Hanssen a Spy for the Right Wing, Too?"
- Adrian Havill, The Spy Who Statyed Out in the Cold: The Secret Life of FBI Double Agent Robert Hanssen, St. Martin's, 1991, ISBN 0-312-28782-8
- Kim Philby, My Silent War, 1968, Granda Publishing, ISBN 0-586-02860-9
- Lawrence Schiller, Master Spy: The Life of Robert P. Hanssen, (original title, Into the Mirror), based upon an investigation by Norman Mailer, HarperCollins, 2002, ISBN 0-06-051281-4 (a Made for TV movie[1])
- Elaine Shannon and Ann Blackman, The Spy Next Door : The Extraordinary Secret Life of Robert Philip Hanssen, The Most Damaging FBI Agent in US History, Liittle Brown, 2002 ISBN 0-316-71821-1
- David A. Vise, The Bureau and the Mole: The Unmasking of Robert Philip Hanssen, the Most Dangerous Double Agent in FBI History, Grove Publishers, 2001, ISBN 0641579985
- U.S. Department of Justice, Office of the Inspector General, "A Review of the FBI's Performance in Deterring, Detecting, and Investigating the Espionage Activities of Robert Philip Hanssen - Unclassified Executive Summary (August 2003)", online html, online pdf
External links
