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PERSON FILE · 18 April 1944 – 5 June 2023

Robert Hanssen

FBI counterintelligence agent who sold secrets to the GRU, KGB and SVR in three bursts from 1979 to 2001 without ever revealing his name. Arrested in 2001, he died in a federal supermax prison in 2023.

1944–2023

3 min read · 5 sources, 3 primary

Portrait: Robert Hanssen in an FBI photograph released after his arrest in February 2001. Federal Bureau of Investigation. The source gives no specific photo credit. Wikimedia Commons, Public domain.

Robert Hanssen's colleagues saw an awkward, devout, anti-communist FBI agent who attended Mass daily. The Justice Department's inspector general, reconstructing his career after his arrest, found a man who had been selling the Bureau's most closely held secrets on and off for 21 years, and who described his espionage to investigators as an "addiction"2.

Accountant, policeman, agent

Hanssen was born in Chicago on 18 April 1944. The inspector general found that his father, a Chicago police officer, emotionally abused him throughout his life, and that he was fascinated from boyhood with spies and James Bond2. He took a degree in chemistry at Knox College in 1966, studied dentistry at Northwestern University, then switched to an MBA in accounting and information systems in 1971 and qualified as a certified public accountant. In 1972 he joined the Chicago Police Department as a financial investigator1.

He entered the FBI on 12 January 19761. After two years in Indiana he was sent to New York in 1978, where in March 1979 he was put in charge of building the field office's new automated counterintelligence database. It placed him, as the inspector general put it, "at the center of the information flow"1,2. Later postings at headquarters, in the budget unit and the Soviet analytical unit, gave him wide access to FBI and Intelligence Community operations against the Soviet Union1,2.

The spy

Hanssen spied in three periods: for the GRU from 1979 to 1981, for the KGB from 1985 to 1991, and for the KGB's successor, the SVR, from 1999 to 2001. He never revealed his name or met his handlers, and in his letters he told them which methods were safe from FBI surveillance and which were not2,1. His betrayals included the identity of a long-time FBI source in the GRU, generally identified as Dmitri Polyakov, and in 1985 the names of the FBI's two best KGB sources, both later executed2. The Hanssen case page follows the espionage and the hunt in detail.

The inspector general rejected the idea that he was a master spy. He was "a mediocre agent" with strong technical skills and poor interpersonal ones, repeatedly mishandled classified information without consequence, and was never polygraphed in 25 years. In 1990 his brother-in-law, also an FBI agent, reported unexplained cash in the Hanssen home to a supervisor, who did nothing2.

Motive

Hanssen told the inspector general that money was one reason, and he spent the KGB's payments on his house, cars and his children's school fees. The inspector general put more weight on low self-esteem, a wish to demonstrate intellectual superiority, a fascination with the world of espionage, and the conviction that he could get away with it. "[I]f I had thought that the risk of detection was very great, I would never have done it," he told debriefers2. In 1999, the report found, he returned to spying partly because he had discovered through FBI records that the Bureau was hunting a mole, and wanted to warn the Russians about the CIA officer it suspected, and partly because his finances were the worst they had ever been2.

Arrest, plea and death

He was arrested on 18 February 2001 in Foxstone Park in Vienna, Virginia, after leaving a package for the SVR2. On 6 July 2001 he pleaded guilty to conspiracy, 13 counts of espionage and one of attempted espionage; the government agreed not to seek the death penalty in return for full debriefings3. He was sentenced to life imprisonment on 10 May 20022.

From July 2002 he was held at the federal supermax prison in Florence, Colorado. He was found unresponsive in his cell on the morning of 5 June 2023 and pronounced dead, aged 794,5.

Key dates

  1. 12 January 1976 Sworn in as an FBI special agent.
  2. November 1979 Volunteers to the GRU in New York.
  3. 1 October 1985 Mails his first letter to the KGB, naming three FBI sources.
  4. December 1991 Breaks off contact with the KGB as the Soviet Union collapses.
  5. 1999 Resumes contact with Russian intelligence.
  6. 18 February 2001 Arrested at the Foxstone Park dead drop in Vienna, Virginia.
  7. 6 July 2001 Pleads guilty to 15 espionage-related counts.
  8. 10 May 2002 Sentenced to life without parole.
  9. 5 June 2023 Dies at the federal supermax prison in Florence, Colorado.

Sources

  1. Court record Affidavit in Support of Criminal Complaint, Arrest Warrant and Search Warrants, United States v. Robert Philip Hanssen (E.D. Va.), US District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, via FAS (2001-02).
  2. Official history A Review of the FBI's Performance in Deterring, Detecting, and Investigating the Espionage Activities of Robert Philip Hanssen (unclassified executive summary), US Department of Justice, Office of the Inspector General (2003-08-14).
  3. Court record Thompson Statement Regarding Hanssen Guilty Plea, US Department of Justice, Office of the Deputy Attorney General (2001-07-06).
  4. Other Robert Hanssen, one of America's most notorious spies, dies in prison, CNN, via ABC7 Los Angeles (2023-06-05).
  5. Wikipedia Robert Hanssen, Wikipedia.
  6. Wikipedia English Wikipedia article (used for cross-checking).

Elsewhere in the files

Read next

November 1979 – 18 February 2001 The Hanssen case FBI agent Robert Hanssen spied for Soviet and Russian intelligence in three bursts from 1979 to 2001 without revealing his name. Caught at a Virginia dead drop in 2001, he was the most damaging spy in FBI history. November 1961 – 15 March 1988 TOPHAT: the Polyakov case From 1961 to 1980 GRU officer Dmitri Polyakov, later a major general, spied for the FBI and CIA. Betrayed by Robert Hanssen and Aldrich Ames, he was arrested in 1986 and shot in 1988. 1921–1988 Dmitri Polyakov GRU major general who spied for the FBI and CIA from 1961 to 1980, under the code names TOPHAT and BOURBON. Betrayed by Robert Hanssen and Aldrich Ames, he was arrested in 1986 and shot in 1988. 16 April – 25 November 1985 1985, the Year of the Spy In 1985 the FBI arrested a string of Americans spying for Moscow, Beijing and Israel, a KGB officer defected and re-defected, and the CIA lost almost every agent it had inside Soviet intelligence. United States · 1908 Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) The US Justice Department's investigative service, founded in 1908: chief hunter of foreign spies at home from the 1930s, and under J. Edgar Hoover the author of secret domestic programs exposed in the 1970s.