Robert Hanssen, a former FBI agent who became one of the most notorious spies in US history, died in federal prison Monday morning. He was 79.
Hanssen was found unresponsive in his cell at the United States Penitentiary Florence ADMAX in Florence, Colo. at about 6:55 a.m., according to a statement from the Federal Bureau of Prisons. The staff tried to save his life and requested help from emergency medical services, to no avail.
No other staff or inmates were hurt, authorities said, and there is no danger to the public. The Associated Press, citing a person familiar with the matter, reported that Hanssen is believed to have died of natural causes.
Hanssen was serving a life sentence for spying on the United States and providing information to the Soviet Union and, later on, Russia.
Hanssen was apprehended in February 2001 while making a “dead drop” of classified information for his Russian intelligence contacts at a park near his northern Virginia home. He pleaded guilty that July to 13 counts of espionage, one count of attempted espionage, and one of conspiracy to commit espionage.
“The FBI trusted him with some of the most sensitive secrets of the U.S. government, and instead of upholding that trust, he abused and betrayed it,” the bureau said in a history of the case on its website.
Hanssen’s nefarious activities began in 1985, when he had been working for the FBI for almost a decade.
Because Hanssen worked in counterintelligence, he had access to classified materials that he provided to the notorious KGB and its successor agency, the SVR.
Hanssen often used encrypted communications, dead drops and other clandestine techniques to deliver the information, which in turn compromised America’s spies and their techniques, investigations, documents and “technical operations of extraordinary importance and value,” the FBI said.
Hanssen’s treason, hidden behind a modest suburban lifestyle and devout Roman Catholicism, coincided with the work of CIA double agent Aldrich Ames, who also began spying for the Soviets in 1985 and was arrested nine years later.
Soon after Ames was apprehended in 1994, the FBI and CIA realized that someone else was also handing over classified information to Moscow.
After wrongly investigating a veteran CIA case officer for nearly two years, the agencies got their hands on Russian government documents indicating Hanssen was the turncoat. With Hanssen set to retire in a matter of months, the investigation moved quickly.
“What we wanted to do was get enough evidence to convict him, and the ultimate aim was to catch him in the act,” said Debra Evans Smith, a former deputy assistant director of the FBI’s Counterintelligence Division.
By February 2001, about 300 personnel were working the case, monitoring Hanssen from the second he stepped out the door of his Fairfax County, Va., home to the minute he returned each night, the agency said.
Investigators sprung their trap when they learned Hanssen was set to make a dead drop on February 18, 2001 – he had bundled classified documents in a plastic garbage bag and taped them to the underside of a footbridge.
As Hanssen walked to his car after making the drop, agents raced up and arrested him.
Upon Hanssen’s arrest, prosecutors said they believed he and Ames had compromised three Soviet officers who were working for US intelligence, two of whom were executed after being exposed. Officials also believed Hanssen tipped off Moscow to a secret tunnel the Americans built under the Soviet Embassy in Washington for eavesdropping.
In exchange for America’s secrets, Hanssen received more than $1.4 million in cash, bank funds, diamonds and Rolex watches.
Hanssen said he was motivated by money rather than ideology, but wrote in a letter to his Soviet handlers in 1985 that a large payoff could cause complications because he could not spend it without setting off warning bells.
In all, Hanssen passed some 6,000 documents and 26 computer disks to his handlers, authorities said.
A judge sentenced him to life in prison without parole on May 10, 2002.
He was imprisoned in Colorado two months later, and had remained there ever since.
With Post wires
