R obert Hanssen told the KGB how the US intelligence services had built a tunnel under the Soviet embassy in Washington to spy on their communications. He also informed Moscow about the three KGB officers who were spying for the US, costing the lives of two of them who were convicted in Russia of treason. These were some of the actions of Hanssen, an FBI super agent who for 22 years, from 1980 to 2001 with some breaks, passed secret information to his country’s number one enemy during the Cold War and beyond, the ‘USSR and the Russian Federation. He was “the most harmful spy in history” of the FBI, according to the entity.
Hanssen appeared dead shortly before 7 a.m. Monday in his cell at the maximum security prison in Florence, Colorado. He was serving a life sentence there under a sentence of 15 life sentences for other crimes of espionage and conspiracy. He was 79, and was pronounced dead after unsuccessful resuscitation efforts by prison medical staff. Authorities did not specify the cause of death.
Married with six children, he did not act out of conviction, but perhaps out of resentment, given that he felt undervalued in the agency, according to internal rumors, and above all because of money. He soon succumbed to Moscow gold, although he actually cashed in diamonds, cash totaling $1.4 million, and an unspecified amount in bank funds. He was, in short, a volume capitalist. And, far from any affinity towards communism, he was affiliated with Opus Dei.
Hanssen did have a vocation as a spy. As a child he was obsessed with James Bond, collected spy devices and opened an account in Switzerland. A native of Chicago, he studied Russian and chemistry at Knox in Illinois. Then he asked the cryptography section of the National Security Agency. He then studied Dentistry for a while and obtained a master’s degree in Business Administration. During this time he met who would become his wife, Bonnie Wauck, who persuaded him to change his faith from Lutheran to Catholic. After a few months of working at an accounting firm, he joined the Police Department of Chicago, where he worked for four years, and finally at the FBI in 1976.
At the agency, he held counterintelligence positions that gave him access to classified information. Although his betrayal began three years after joining the KGB, his most refined work for the KGB began in 1985. He identified himself as Ramón GarcÃa or “Bâ€. The reports included key data on satellite intelligence gathering. Everything went well for him for years. Until the 1990s, the authorities arrested CIA agent Aldrich Ames for espionage without the leaks ceasing. Then Operation Graysuit was launched to find out who was still spying. But the investigators were on the prowl, and even spent two years following the lead of a CIA veteran who turned out not to be the traitor.
The bosses moved him around, gave him a false assignment, and monitored him until they accumulated evidence against him. The investigation led to an operation involving 300 officers who caught him red-handed as he left a package containing reports for Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) under a footbridge in Foxstone Park, a suburb of Vienna ( Virginia).
“Why did you take so long?”, he asked the agents. And already during the interrogations he said that security at the FBI was weak to the point of “criminal negligence”. Anyone at the agency could, with basic authorization, find “stuff” in the computer system, he said before testifying that he regretted it and was “embarrassed” at trial.
The FBI was also embarrassed. In fact, he changed the security protocols to cover the glaring holes that one of his own had used for 20 years to get rich selling state secrets. How many did he hand over to the Russians? Maybe only they and he knew. How many will he have taken to the grave? Maybe only he knew that.
