Robert Hanssen: The FBI Agent Who Became America's Most Damaging Spy
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On the evening of Sunday 18 February 2001, a tall, stooped man in a dark suit pulled into Foxstone Park in Vienna, Virginia, a leafy suburb outside Washington. He walked down to a small wooden footbridge, reached up underneath it and taped a rubbish bag full of classified documents to one of the beams, exactly as he'd done many times before.
As he walked back to his car, FBI agents swarmed out of the darkness and pinned him down. Robert Hanssen, a 25-year veteran of the FBI, didn't put up a fight. According to the agents, all he said was: "What took you so long?"
For more than two decades Hanssen had been selling America's secrets to Moscow while working in the heart of the FBI's own counterintelligence operation. He's still described by the Bureau as the most damaging spy in its history.
Quick Answers
Who was Robert Hanssen? An FBI counterintelligence agent who secretly spied for the Soviet Union and then Russia on and off for 22 years, from 1979 until his arrest in 2001.
What did he give away? Thousands of pages of secrets, including the identities of Soviet officials secretly working for the US, nuclear war plans and a spy tunnel under the Soviet embassy. At least two of the people he exposed were executed.
How much was he paid? Around $1.4 million in cash, bank funds and diamonds.
How was he caught? In 2000 the FBI obtained a file from a Russian source that contained a fingerprint and a recording of his voice. He was arrested at a dead drop in Virginia on 18 February 2001.
What happened to him? He pleaded guilty to 15 counts of espionage and conspiracy to avoid the death penalty, was jailed for life, and died in the Florence supermax prison in Colorado in June 2023, aged 79.
A Chicago Childhood
Robert Philip Hanssen was born in Chicago on 18 April 1944. His father, Howard, was a Chicago police officer, and by most accounts a bully who belittled and humiliated his son. Friends later wondered whether some of what Hanssen did as an adult was about proving he was cleverer than everyone who'd ever looked down on him.
He was bright, awkward and solitary. He graduated from Taft High School in 1962 and studied chemistry at Knox College, where he also took Russian. His father wanted him to be a doctor, so he spent two years at Northwestern University's dental school before dropping out and doing an MBA in accounting and information systems instead.
In 1968 he married Bernadette Wauck, known as Bonnie, and converted from Lutheranism to her family's devout Catholic faith. He was fascinated by spies, codes and gadgets, and after a few years as an accountant and then as an investigator in the Chicago Police Department's internal affairs unit, he joined the FBI in January 1976.
The First Betrayal
Hanssen was a poor fit for an FBI that prized action and team spirit. He was gloomy, aloof and arrogant, but he was very good with computers at a time when most of his colleagues weren't, and he ended up in counterintelligence, working on Soviet intelligence officers in the US.
In 1979, just three years into his career, he walked into the offices of a Soviet trading company in New York used as a front by the GRU, Soviet military intelligence, and offered his services. Over the next two years he handed over secrets including the identity of Dmitri Polyakov, a Soviet general who had been one of America's most valuable spies for years. Polyakov was later arrested and executed.
In 1981 Bonnie walked into a room and caught him with a stack of papers. Hanssen admitted he'd been dealing with the Soviets, though he claimed he'd only been feeding them rubbish. She made him go to a priest, who told him to stop and give the money to charity. For a few years, he did stop.
Ramon Garcia
In October 1985, now a supervisor in the FBI's New York office, Hanssen started again. This time he wrote to a KGB officer at the Soviet embassy in Washington, offering classified documents for $100,000. To prove he was serious, he named three Soviet officials who were secretly working for the US. Two of them were recalled to Moscow, tried and shot.
Hanssen was careful in a way most spies weren't. He never told the Soviets his real name, never met a handler in person and never travelled abroad to see them. He signed himself "B" or "Ramon Garcia", and everything was done through dead drops in parks around northern Virginia, with signals left in chalk or tape on signposts to show a package was waiting.
What he gave away was staggering. Over the years he passed on thousands of pages of material, including details of how the US would keep its government running during a nuclear war, the names of Soviet officials recruited by the FBI, American spy technology, and an extraordinarily expensive secret eavesdropping tunnel the FBI and NSA had dug under the new Soviet embassy in Washington. He also told Moscow the FBI was investigating a US diplomat, Felix Bloch, who was suddenly tipped off.
Hiding in Plain Sight
Hanssen was in the perfect place to cover his tracks. As a counterintelligence officer he could look up the FBI's own files to see whether anyone was getting close to him, and he regularly searched the Bureau's computer system for his own name and addresses linked to his dead drops.
He had a couple of close shaves. In 1990 his brother-in-law, also an FBI agent, reported that Hanssen had large amounts of unexplained cash at home. Nothing happened. In 1993 he even walked up to a Russian officer in a car park and tried to make contact in person, then panicked when the Russians reported it as a possible provocation. Again, nobody worked out it was him.
His spying overlapped with that of Aldrich Ames, a CIA officer who was also selling secrets to Moscow, and between them they exposed many of the same people. When Ames was arrested in 1994, it looked like the leaks had been explained. But there were still losses that Ames couldn't have caused, and the hunt for another mole carried on.
Hanssen broke off contact with Moscow in 1991, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, then got back in touch with the new Russian intelligence service in 1999. It turned out to be one approach too many.
The Wrong Man
For years the FBI was sure the mole was in the CIA, and settled on an innocent CIA officer called Brian Kelley. He was followed, bugged, interrogated and accused to his face, and his family were questioned too. Kelley was completely innocent, and Hanssen knew perfectly well that the FBI was chasing the wrong man.
The breakthrough came in 2000, when the FBI managed to obtain the original KGB file on its mysterious American source from a former Russian intelligence officer, reportedly for around $7 million. Inside was a rubbish bag Hanssen had used for a drop, with a fingerprint on it, and a 1986 recording of a phone call with his Soviet contacts. When agents played the tape, one of them recognised the voice immediately. It was Bob Hanssen.
Catching Him in the Act
The FBI didn't want to just arrest him. They wanted to catch him in the act. In January 2001 they gave Hanssen what looked like a promotion, to a new computer security job at headquarters, in an office secretly fitted with cameras and microphones. They gave him a young assistant, Eric O'Neill, who was actually an undercover FBI surveillance specialist.
O'Neill's job was to keep tabs on his boss. At one point he managed to get hold of Hanssen's Palm Pilot just long enough for agents to copy it, and it held details of an upcoming dead drop. Around 300 people were working on the case by the time Hanssen drove to Foxstone Park that Sunday evening. When agents later checked another drop site, they found a bag with $50,000 waiting for him.
Guilty
Hanssen was charged with espionage, which could have carried the death penalty. In July 2001 he pleaded guilty to 15 counts of espionage and conspiracy, on condition that prosecutors wouldn't seek his execution and his wife would keep part of his pension. In return he had to tell investigators everything he'd done.
On 10 May 2002 he was sentenced to life in prison without parole. He spent the rest of his life at ADX Florence, the federal supermax prison in Colorado, held in near-total isolation. On 5 June 2023 he was found unresponsive in his cell and pronounced dead, aged 79. His death was believed to be from natural causes.
The Double Life
What shocked people as much as the spying was the gap between the public Hanssen and the private one. To his neighbours he was a devout, rather strait-laced family man with six children. He went to Mass almost every day, was a member of the conservative Catholic group Opus Dei, and sent his kids to strict Catholic schools. He railed against communism, pornography and moral decay.
In private, things were very different. He secretly filmed himself and his wife in their bedroom and let a close friend watch, at first through the window and later through a hidden camera feed, without Bonnie ever knowing. He also struck up a strange friendship with a Washington stripper, Priscilla Sue Galey, buying her jewellery and a Mercedes and taking her on a trip to Hong Kong, while insisting he was only trying to save her soul.
Nobody has ever fully explained why Hanssen did it. Money was part of it, as he was always short on an FBI salary with a big family. But he spent surprisingly little of what he was paid. Most people who've studied him think it was mainly about ego, the thrill of outwitting the organisation that never gave him the respect he thought he deserved.
Hanssen's Legacy
The damage Hanssen did was enormous, and some of it is still classified. He compromised dozens of human sources, investigations and technical operations, and at least two Soviet officials he exposed were executed. The Justice Department's own review afterwards found the FBI had missed warning signs for years, and the case led to a big tightening of internal security, including regular polygraph tests and much closer monitoring of who was looking at what on the FBI's computers. Hanssen wasn't the only FBI agent of that era to go badly wrong. In Boston, John Connolly spent years protecting Whitey Bulger and tipping him off about witnesses, with deadly results.
His story was told in the 2007 film Breach, with Chris Cooper as Hanssen and Ryan Phillippe as Eric O'Neill. He belongs in the same club as Britain's Kim Philby: trusted insiders who spent years betraying the very organisations meant to catch people like them.
Suggested Reading
Want to dig deeper into the Robert Hanssen case? These are worth a look.
Spy: The Inside Story of How the FBI's Robert Hanssen Betrayed America by David Wise. A gripping account of Hanssen's life, his spying and the mole hunt that went after the wrong man.
Gray Day: My Undercover Mission to Expose America's First Cyber Spy by Eric O'Neill. The young agent planted in Hanssen's office tells the story of the final weeks.
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