FLASH
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"The most damaging spy in the bureau's history" leaked secrets in Russia for two decades in treachery that led to lost lives. Robert Hanssen had enjoyed the perfect Sunday.
A long breakfast with his family followed by mass at the local church and a game of frisbee with his best friend Jack.
At 7:00 pm on a February evening in 2001, he had another assignment to run. Looking around to check he was alone, he climbed under a wooden footbridge, took the package wrapped in a black pouch from his tweed jacket and slipped it into the metal structure.
Then, on the way to his Ford Taurus, he taped a small piece of white tape to the sign for Foxstone Park, a small suburb in Vienna, Virginia, to alert his caretakers that he had been at the location of assigned.
But as he was pulling his car keys out of his pocket, the father-of-six was caught by some of the 300 FBI agents who had been working on his case. As he was being handcuffed, the man still known as "the most damaging spy in the bureau's history" turned to his former colleagues and said, "What took you so long?"
On Monday, Hanssen, 79, was found dead in Florence, Colorado, where he was serving a life sentence on 15 counts of espionage. One of the FBI's most notorious spies, his work as a double agent for Moscow went undisclosed for 22 years.
The secrets he divulged for a total of $1.4m (£1.13m) included details of the US government's planned response to a nuclear attack and a multi-million dollar eavesdropping tunnel built by the FBI under the Soviet Embassy.
He also named KGB agents Valery Martynov and Sergei Motorin, both of whom were lured back to Moscow, tried for espionage and shot in the head. Another double agent, Aldrich Ames, had also given their names to the Russians.
Hanssen also betrayed General Dmitri Polyakov, a CIA informant who had been passing information to US intelligence since the early 1960s as he rose to the rank of general in the Soviet Army. After Hanssen's revelations, he was sent back to Moscow and in 1988 was sentenced to death for treason.
Hanssen, who studied Russian at university before joining the FBI in 1976, began providing information to the Soviet Union in 1979.
Then his wife, Bonnie Hanssen, discovered he was dealing with the Russians when she found him covering up documents in the basement of their home.
He assured her that he was only giving them false information. But worried, she took him to the local priest to confess, who said he should donate the $30,000 he had been paid to Mother Teresa Catholic Charities and stop working with them.
But in October 1985, Hanssen sent a letter to Viktor Cherkashin, Moscow's chief counterintelligence officer at the Soviet embassy, saying he would extract classified information for $100,000.
Using aliases, including B and Ramon Garcia, he relied on "dead spots," physically leaving material for his handlers to discover in suburban areas of Virginia.
Hanssen refused to ever meet Moscow face to face and it is thought that they never knew his true identity.
The bureau began searching for him after the 1994 arrest of Ames, a CIA agent who was also spying for Russia, when the bureau realized classified information was still leaking.
He was caught almost two decades later, when a disgruntled Russian intelligence officer gave the FBI a fingerprint Hassen had left on one of the discarded garbage bags, a tape recording of a phone call with an agent.
To gather evidence against him, in 2000 the FBI gave him an undisclosed assignment with a small team working undercover to monitor him. At the time of his arrest, there were reportedly 300 agents working on the case.
It was later revealed by a secret agent that Hanssen had dreamed of spying against his country since the age of 14 after reading a book about Kim Philby, the British intelligence officer who was also a Russian double agent.
When asked why he had done it, Hanssen later told investigators it was "the fear of being a failure and the fear of not being able to provide for my family." He also said the FBI's lax security amounted to "criminal negligence."
Louis Freeh, the director of the FBI, called his betrayal "the most treasonous act imaginable against a country governed by the rule of law."
Hanssen was indicted on May 16, 2001. He pleaded guilty to 15 counts of espionage to avoid the death penalty and was sentenced to life in prison without parole in 2002.
Hanssen had led a double life in more ways than one – outwardly an anti-communist and devout Catholic father of six, but a strip club-goer who secretly filmed porn videos of his wife.
Dr Alan Salerian, who was hired by Hanssen's defense team to examine him, said at the time:
“[Hanssen's] espionage was an escape from his sexual demons. When he found himself in exciting, dangerous positions, such as espionage and espionage, he found his demons slowed.”
Asked why he thought Hanssen had done it, Eric O'Neill, the undercover FBI agent who monitored the spy for three months until his arrest, told the BBC: "It was the thing that made him feel he was more the best at something. in the world. No one was better. And he knew it would make him immortal. And it was done.” /Telegraph
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