The FBI's affidavit against Robert Hanssen (2001)

Page 1 of 92

The file

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hanssen-affidavit-2001.pdf · 92 pages · 0.1 MB

Extract

Pages 1-4,6-21,23-54,56-84,87-90,94-96,99-101,103 of the 103-page original: the affidavit without the eleven pages that give the Hanssen family's home address or street addresses he used as return addresses; those pages are in the FBI's original release. The full release is at the link below.

Full text

Read it page by page (the file's own text layer)

Original

FBI Records: The Vault

Copied

26 October 2026, from the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine copy of the government page (copy)

SHA-256

2c8d800c925e48ce97ea134eb5e995c811ed57da88c95cbb1918932eb0305a4a

Licence

Public domain: a work of the US federal government (17 U.S.C. § 105).

For fifteen years the KGB and its successor, the SVR, did not know the name of their best American source. They called him "B", and he signed himself "Ramon". The FBI learned who he was only in late 2000². This affidavit, sworn by Special Agent Stefan A. Pluta of the Washington Field Office to support the arrest and search warrants for Robert Philip Hanssen, is the government's first full account of what "B" did, and the reason so much of the The Hanssen case can be told in Hanssen's own words¹. Hanssen was arrested on 18 February 2001 after leaving a package at a dead drop in a Virginia park².

What it contains

The affidavit opens with a summary: from 1985 "B" had compromised human sources, dozens of classified documents, technical collection programs and FBI counterintelligence methods; the affidavit cites 27 letters he sent, 26 computer diskettes and more than 6,000 pages he passed; and he had been paid over $600,000 in cash and diamonds, with a further sum the Russians said was worth $800,000 held for him in a Moscow bank¹. Two of the sources he betrayed, KGB officers Valeriy Martynov and Sergey Motorin, had already been given away in June 1985 by the CIA officer Aldrich Ames; both were executed¹. (See 1985, the Year of the Spy.)

After sections on definitions, Hanssen's FBI career, his oaths of office and his security clearances, the core of the document, Section V, is a chronological reconstruction of "the KGB's 'B' operation"¹. It begins on 4 October 1985, when KGB officer Viktor Degtyar received at his home an envelope addressed to the counterintelligence chief Viktor Cherkashin, and runs through each letter, signal and dead drop exchange, with code-named sites such as PARK, BOB, CHARLIE and ELLIS, to a package of $50,000 the FBI found and photographed at the LEWIS drop on 12 February 2001¹. Long passages quote the letters themselves, including the SVR's welcome when contact resumed in 1999 and Hanssen's anxious, self-regarding notes of 2000¹.

Section VI sets out the case that "B" was Hanssen: his fingerprints on a plastic bag "B" had used to wrap a delivery; letters to the KGB found on a memory card in his briefcase; tape, chalk, thumbtacks and classified printouts in his car; and a comparison of his assignments, promotions and travel to what "B" told his handlers at the time¹. The last sections justify searching his home, computers and vehicles, at night if necessary¹.

Limits of the record

The affidavit is a charging document, written to establish probable cause, not a history. It lists its sources, among them "KGB/SVR operational and production files" and information from former KGB/SVR personnel, without saying how the FBI came by them¹. It covers only 1985 to 2001; the inspector general's 2003 review adds Hanssen's first spell of spying for the GRU, from 1979 to 1981, and his reckless approach to a GRU officer in 1993². On 6 July 2001 Hanssen pleaded guilty to conspiracy, thirteen acts of espionage and one of attempted espionage; the government gave up seeking the death penalty in exchange for his debriefing, and he was imprisoned for life³. He died in prison on 5 June 2023⁴.

Our copy is the text-layer PDF the FBI posted in 2001. It omits ten pages that give the address of the family's home; nothing else is cut¹.