Robert HanssenA former FBI agent who was one of the most damaging spies in American history was found dead in his prison cell Monday morning, according to the Bureau of Prisons.
Hanssen, 79, was arrested in 2001 and pleaded guilty to selling highly classified material to the Soviet Union and later to Russia. He was serving a life sentence at the federal penitentiary in Florence, Colorado.
F.B.I
Hanssen was found unresponsive and staff immediately began life-saving measures, Bureau of Prisons spokeswoman Kristie Breshears said in a statement.
“Staff called for emergency medical services and life-saving efforts continued,” Breshears said. “The inmate was later pronounced dead by outside emergency medical personnel.”
Hanssen appears to have died of natural causes, according to two sources briefed on the matter.
Three years after being hired by the FBI, Hanssen approached the Soviets and began spying in 1979 for the KGB and its successor, the SVR. He stopped a few years later after his wife confronted him.
He resumed espionage in 1985, selling thousands of classified documents compromising human and technical sources and counterintelligence investigations in exchange for more than $1.4 billion in cash, diamonds and foreign bank deposits. Using the alias “Ramon Garcia,” he passed information to spy agencies through encrypted communications and dead drops, never having to meet in person with a Russian handler.
Eric O’Neill, who went undercover for the FBI during its investigation of Hanssen, told CBS News that Hanssen came from a complicated background and had issues with his father, who wanted him to go into medicine. But Hanssen, who did go to dental school, wanted to be in law enforcement.
“He wanted to catch spies. He was a James Bond fanatic, he loved the movies,” O’Neill said. “He could quote them chapter and verse. He wanted to be a spy. He joined the FBI to do that, not to spy against the US, but to go in and hunt spies.”
But he became angry when he didn’t get the exact job he wanted at the FBI, and taking care of his growing family while living in New York and later the Washington, DC area was expensive.
“And that led him to decide that he was going to get everything he wanted: to become a spy,” O’Neill said.
His job at the FBI gave him unrestricted access to classified information about the bureau’s counterintelligence operations. His revelations included details of US nuclear war preparations and a secret spy tunnel under the Soviet embassy in Washington, DC. He also betrayed double agents, including Soviet General Dmitri Polyakov, who were later executed.
Hanssen was arrested after a dead drop in a Virginia park in 2001 after the FBI had been secretly monitoring him for months. His identity was discovered after a Russian intelligence officer handed over a file containing a garbage bag with Hanssen’s fingerprints and a recording of his voice.
In letters to the KGB, Hanssen expressed concern that he might one day be caught, and frequently checked the FBI’s computers for any signs that he was being investigated.
“I would finally appreciate an escape plan. (Nothing lasts forever.),” he wrote in 1986, according to the FBI affidavit.
Hanssen never revealed his motivation for spying. But O’Neill, who he wrote a book about the investigation to catch Hanssen, he has a few theories.
“He really didn’t have much respect for Russia, at least not in his conversations with me,” O’Neill said. “But he was able to use them very effectively to solve his other problems. One where he was angry at the FBI for not putting him in the position of authority and gravity and respect that he thought he deserved. And two, he needed money. He had financial problems and he needed money and you solve both problems by becoming a spy.”
“At some point, spying and being the best spy in the Soviet Union, while he was in the FBI, became the thing that made him belong to something much bigger than himself,” he added. “I think at some point, even more than the money that became what was so important to him.”
Hanssen’s life in prison was “absolutely horrible,” O’Neill said. He spent 23 hours a day alone in a small cell.
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Caitlin Yilek
