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Early life Born in Chicago, Illinois, he was the son of a policeman. Hanssen suffered terrible abuse during his childhood, both mental and physical, at the hands of his domineering father. Court documents say he told his Moscow handlers that he read Kim Philby's book at age 14 and thought of him as a hero. Philby was a mole in British intelligence who eventually defected to the Soviet Union. Philby's autobiography My Silent War was published in 1968, when Hanssen was 24. He attended Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois and studied chemistry and Russian. He enrolled and dropped out of dentistry school, got a masters of accounting, got a business job but quit to join the Chicago police as an internal corruption investigator, then joined the FBI counterintelligence unit. FBI counterintelligence unit In 1979 he made his first traitorous act revealing to the Soviets that Soviet official General Dmitri Fedorovich Polyakov of the GRU was selling Soviet secrets to the USA, mostly out of hatred for the current "corrupt" Soviet leadership. Hanssen's wife, Bonnie, found Hanssen out when she caught him writing a secret letter that she believed was to another woman: Hanssen confessed that he sold some worthless facts to the Soviets for $20,000. Bonnie made him confess to a priest, identified by the New York Times as the Reverend Robert P. Bucciarelli, former head of Opus Dei in the USA. Hanssen's wife apparently did not inform anyone in the FBI or elsewhere within the United States government that her husband had confessed his guilt to her either. In 1990, Hanssen's brother-in-law, who was also an FBI employee, complained to the bureau that Hanssen should be investigated for espionage. The brother-in-law had become suspicious when seeing the excessive amounts of cash that Hanssen had in his home. Another FBI agent arrested for spying, Earl Edwin Pitts, said he thought that Hanssen was also a spy. Hanssen withdrew his name from consideration for a higher post with more money when he discovered that a lie detector test would be required, even though he was under serious financial pressure. Transfer to Washington, D.C. Hanssen was transferred to the Washington, D.C. office in 1981 and moved to the suburb of Vienna, Virginia. In 1985, he sold to the Soviets the names of three KGB agents in the United States secretly working for the FBI (Boris Yuzhin, Valery Martynov, and Sergei Motorin). These three had already been revealed by another mole, CIA employee Aldrich Ames, and they were soon recalled to Russia. Because the FBI could attribute the leak to Ames, the trail to Hanssen was diverted. He also revealed an expensive secret tunnel dug under the Soviet embassy for the purpose of eavesdropping. He compromised the investigation of Felix Bloch, a State Department official accused of working with the Soviets; he gave them the plan of a program for the continuity of government in case of a Soviet nuclear attack and planned defense and retaliation. This included plans for contacting various government officials and securing them in underground bunkers. Additionally, Hanssen handed over extensive information about MASINT including the methods the US used to intercept Soviet transmissions. On top of this, he wrote up lists of agents that the KGB had a strong chance of recruiting. On two occasions, Hanssen gave the Soviets a list of all American double-agents, false spies who were designed to pass the Soviets misinformation. USA Today: "His biggest fear, Hanssen confided, was 'someone like me' — an agent on the Russian side with knowledge of Hanssen's spying who decided to work for the Americans. A former CIA counterintelligence expert, Vincent Cannistraro, suspects that this is what happened." Hanssen took great pains to prevent his Soviet handlers from learning his identity. He used dead drops, aliases, and many other methods to avoid having his identity revealed to the Soviets. The depth and breadth of the information that Hanssen passed would automatically raise suspicion that there was more than one person involved, but Hanssen's cautious practices assured that the Soviets knew of only one anonymous spy. Hanssen is often portrayed as a mediocre agent, but in the words of David Major, one of his superiors at CI3, "Bob Hanssen was diabolically brilliant." He refused to use the dead drop sites that his handler, Cherkashin, suggested and instead picked his own dead drop sites. He even designated a code to be used when dates were exchanged. A “6” was to be added to all dates (ex: June 6 at 1:00 pm would be December 12 at 7:00 pm). In an early letter to Cherkashin, he claims, "As far as the funds are concerned, I have little need or utility for more than the 100,000." Hanssen felt that his skills were underused and sought acceptance and appreciation from his peers; as such, he began to spy for the KGB which recognized his lack of friends and attempted to compensate. For example, his handlers would often make small talk with him. Eventually, Hanssen's payments from his contacts in cash and gems would total more than $1.4 million. Concurrent with the Hanssen investigation was a sensationalized investigation of a CIA employee who lived in Vienna and who was suspected of using dead drops along his jogging route through local parks. At the State Department there were two instances of espionage prior to Hanssen's being posted there (one involved a microphone in a conference room, the other involved a man in a tweed jacket that walked off with documents and has never officially been identified). Arrest and conviction Federal authorities were also aided greatly by the opening of the KGB archives. Within the archives at Yasanevo, there was a taped phone conversation and a bag that might have had Hanssen's fingerprints on it. The archives also contained the entire KGB file on Hanssen. According to the New York Observer, August 6 2001: Robert Novak. The conservative columnist wrote on July 12 that Mr. Hanssen had served as his main source for a 1997 column criticizing Janet Reno, then the U.S. Attorney General, for allegedly covering up 1996 campaign-finance scandals. Hanssen hired lawyer Plato Cacheris. On May 10, 2002, in exchange for cooperating with authorities, he was spared the death penalty and sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole, and his wife, along with their six children, received the survivor's part of Hanssen's pension, $39,000 per year. Hanssen is required to submit to a gag order with respect to public comments. Hanssen is currently serving his sentence at ADX Florence supermax penetentiary in Florence, Colorado. Family life According to USA Today: those who know the Hanssens describe them as a close family. They attended Mass weekly. Four of the children attended Our Lady of Good Counsel Catholic School in Vienna. Only two of the children remain at home, a comfortable brown frame house with a basketball hoop on the side of the house. A priest at the private school where Hanssen's children attended said that Hanssen had regularly attended a 6:30 a.m. daily mass for more than a decade. Father C. John McCloskey, III, said Hanssen occasionally attended the daily noontime mass at the Catholic Information Center in downtown Washington, D.C. Hanssen affiliated with a Washington D.C. stripper. The stripper went to Hong Kong with Hanssen on a trip; he gave her money, jewels and a used Mercedes but cut off contact with her prior to his arrest. Further reading The Extraordinary Secret Life of Robert Philip Hanssen, The Most Damaging FBI Agent in US History, Liittle Brown, 2002 ISBN 0-316-71821-1 Notes | ||||||||||
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