The Cold War era is often dubbed the ‘golden age of espionage’; this period was awash with stories of spies and double agents, from the Cambridge Five to Aldrich Ames, and also inspired the creation of fictional spies such as James Bond.
In the midst of the Cold War, in January 1976, Robert Hanssen swore an oath to protect his nation and became a new FBI agent. 25 years later, described by the FBI as ‘the most damaging spy in Bureau history’, he was arrested in Foxstone Park, Virginia, caught red-handed doing a dead drop for his KGB handlers, having caused the deaths of multiple US spies, shared countless classified plans, and accumulated $1.4 million as a reward for his perfidy.
Hanssen first became a double agent in 1979, eight months after he had been transferred to the FBI’s counterintelligence office in New York. Ironically, he was meant to be working on a dossier of Soviet intelligence activities but instead began to work for the Soviets. He would conduct his espionage by visiting the offices of Amtorg, a Soviet trade agency that was also a front for the Soviet Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU), and leaving anonymous packages there. Hanssen’s information was incredibly damaging to the FBI, as it detailed their bugging activities and lists of staff suspected of being Soviet agents. The most destructive information Hanssen revealed during this time was the identity of a CIA informant, Dimitri Polyakov, a general in the Red Army. However, perhaps due to a lack of faith in Hanssen’s reliability, the Soviets didn’t act on this information until it was corroborated in 1985 by Aldrich Ames, a CIA agent who was also a Soviet mole (but working completely separately from Hanssen), whereupon Polyakov was arrested in 1986 and executed in 1988.
Hanssen’s first foray into espionage came to an abrupt end when his wife, Bonnie, stumbled across him reviewing communication from the GRU in the basement of their house in 1981. Although he didn’t reveal the true extent of his double dealings to his wife, Hanssen said that he subsequently confessed all to an Opus Dei priest (an organisation within the Catholic Church of which Hanssen was a member), who granted him absolution and suggested that he donate the $21,000 he had received for his information to charity.
Hanssen remained a dormant spy until 1985. In the interim, he had achieved more promotions and transfers, first to the FBI’s budget office and then becoming a supervisor for the Soviet Analytical Unit, giving him easy access to a broad range of sensitive information. It was in October of this year that Hanssen resumed his espionage, this time by writing an anonymous letter to the KGB (Hanssen later said he chose the KGB over the GRU because it was more professional and gave more money), requesting $100,000 in return for his services. Operating under the alias Ramon Garcia, Hanssen went on to disclose the identities of three FBI informants in the KGB: Boris Yuzhin, Valery Martynov, and Sergei Motorin.
This time Hanssen had corroborated information already given by Ames, and so the Soviets wasted no time in recalling all three agents to Moscow, where Martynov and Motorin were placed in front of a firing squad, but Yuzhin escaped execution, spending six years in a Siberian prison before being released following the fall of the Soviet Union. Incredibly, during an investigation into how the three agents became compromised, Hanssen was given the task of finding a possible KGB mole in the FBI; in effect, he was asked to find himself. Hanssen, of course, made sure not to expose himself, while sending a complete copy of the report, including details of the Soviets who contacted the FBI about KGB informants, to the KGB.
This second period of deception, which lasted from 1985 until the fall of the Soviet Union, was Hanssen’s most prolific period of espionage. Over these six years, Hanssen passed more than 6,000 documents to the KGB and dozens of computer discs, in turn receiving at least $500,000 in cash and three large diamonds. Along with compromising US assets, Hanssen also stepped in to save KGB informant Felix Bloch, a U.S. State Department official who was being investigated by the FBI. After Hanssen informed the KGB of this investigation, they broke off all contact with Bloch; as a result, the FBI was unable to find any substantial evidence, and thus Bloch was spared arrest, although he was sacked and denied his pension.
Hanssen was also happy to share details of US intelligence capabilities, from spy satellite positions and weapons to US plans for the protection of the President and retaliation in the event of nuclear war, and to provide, on two separate occasions, complete lists of American double agents in the USSR. Furthermore, Hanssen caused the failure of Operation Monopoly, an FBI plan to create a tunnel under the new Soviet Embassy in Washington. Construction had started in 1977, taking over a decade to complete and costing hundreds of millions of dollars — all rendered completely useless as Hanssen made sure the Soviets were fully aware of its existence.
Following the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, it was not until 1993 that Hanssen tried once again to resume his traitorous activities. Perhaps driven to desperation by a lack of money (Hanssen had requested $10,000 from his mother on the day of this approach), Hanssen recklessly exposed himself: he made face-to-face contact with a GRU officer in the garage of the officer’s apartment building, revealed himself as an FBI officer, and gave his Soviet code name, Ramon Garcia. Again, Hanssen had brought with him a package containing summaries of all the double agent cases the FBI had going on in the GRU — possibly as much to prove his authenticity to the officer as to receive money for it. However, despite Hanssen’s best efforts, the GRU officer was unfamiliar with the code name, and therefore refused to accept the package. He then reported the encounter to his superiors. The Russian Embassy then lodged a formal complaint against the US government, believing Hanssen to be a triple agent.
It took another six years for Hanssen to recover from this scare (or for his financial need to again become great — his mother, who had given him over $94,000 in the mid-1990s, told him that she was running out of money in 1997), and in 1999 he offered himself to the SVR, the successor to the KGB, giving them a first dead drop in August 1999 in return for $50,000, paid into a Moscow bank account. Over the next two years, Hanssen would be able to claim at least $800,000 from the SVR.
Hanssen managed to stay undetected throughout this time through a combination of some skill and nous, but also incredible luck due to failures within the FBI. He was intelligent enough to hide his identity from his Russian counterparts, with the FBI believing that the Russians never knew the name of their informant other than by Ramon Garcia, which insured Hanssen against the danger that a mole within the KGB may learn of his identity and pass it on to the FBI. Hanssen was also able to effectively dupe his FBI colleagues, presenting himself as a devout Catholic with an anticommunist ideology. Reported to have a “dour demeanour”, and to be “an awkward and uncommunicative loner”, he was almost the exact opposite of what you might expect in an accomplished double agent.
Crucially, Hanssen was aware not to draw attention to himself with ostentatious displays of his newfound wealth, something which had caught out Ames, who was arrested in 1994, suspected in part due to his new house, Jaguar, and clothes; aside from the occasional extravagance such as a second-hand Mercedes for Priscilla (a stripper whom he had an affair with), Hanssen kept most of his money in the Moscow bank account, intending to live comfortably in retirement. Hanssen was also exceedingly careful in how he conducted his dead drops, often refusing sites his handler had selected in favour of his own choices and encrypting the time of his dead drops in messages—he would add six to each component of the date, so that a dead drop to be done on the 6th June at 2pm would be communicated as on the 12th December at 8pm.
The FBI themselves are at fault when considering how Hanssen escaped detection for so long. Following Ames’s arrest, it became clear there must still be another mole in US intelligence services, as Ames couldn’t have known about the Bloch investigation or Operation Monopoly, yet the FBI seemed determined that there must be a CIA mole, not considering the possibility it was one of their own. Hanssen was even reported to the FBI by his brother-in-law, another FBI employee, whose suspicions were aroused when Hanssen’s wife told him she had discovered $5,000 in cash on Hanssen’s bedside table, yet no investigation was opened. Despite Hanssen having revealed his face, code name and FBI affiliation to the GRU officer in 1993, the FBI was unable to identify him.
As Hanssen became more paranoid about being discovered, he became more reckless and brazen when trying to figure out if there was suspicion of him – he frequently combed the FBI’s computer network for any references to himself, the KGB, and dead drops. This kind of activity could have easily been discovered, yet somehow Hanssen escaped detection. Even when he committed two flagrant security breaches: hacking into a colleague’s computer to access classified Soviet counterintelligence documents under the guise of demonstrating a flaw in the FBI’s computer system; and installing a password breaker on his own computer, apparently just for access to a colour printer, his explanations were accepted without question.
Despite the FBI’s conviction that they were looking for a CIA man, they were still at least aware that there was a mole somewhere in the US intelligence services. This led to a breakthrough in the investigation in 2000, when the FBI paid $7 million to the disaffected KGB officer Alexandr Sherackov in return for an audio recording of a 1986 conversation between Soviet spy ‘B’ and his KGB handler. The FBI video analysts recognised Hanssen’s voice as ‘B’, and even remembered him using a quote that he had repeated in the audio.
The FBI now created a fake job for Hanssen, ‘promoting’ him to a cushy desk job, away from any sensitive information, while a 300-strong team monitored his every move. While Hanssen was at a shooting range, they were even able to copy the contents of his Palm Pilot (a predecessor to the mobile phone), giving them reams of incriminating evidence. Hanssen was clearly suspicious, writing in a letter to the Russians that he was in a “do-nothing job”, and “something has aroused the sleeping tiger”, yet he still arranged to go to Foxstone Park on the evening of 18 February 2001. Hanssen had just finished taping a garbage bag to the underside of a footbridge when an FBI squad burst in, and he was taken into custody. He gave no resistance, even asking, “What took you so long?” as he was arrested.
Hanssen was sentenced to 15 consecutive life sentences after agreeing to cooperate with the authorities to avoid the death penalty. He died in a federal supermax prison just under a year ago, on 5 June 2023.
Ultimately, a multitude of factors motivated Hanssen to become “the worst intelligence disaster in US history”. Money was certainly a significant factor and may have been the initial reason for his spying, but once his financial needs were met, the man who grew up idolising James Bond and reading Kim Philby’s memoirs, believing he was intellectually superior to his FBI colleagues, appeared devoid of any ideological motivation or other ‘higher’ justification for his acts. Quite simply, he craved the excitement of spying and the praise from the Russians as the antithesis to his dull FBI career.
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https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/05/us/robert-hanssen-spy-dead.html
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-65820220.amp