Robert Hanssen Today: Espionage, Capture, and Supermax Death

Robert Hanssen was an FBI special agent who spied for Soviet and later Russian intelligence for more than two decades before his arrest in 2001, a betrayal the Bureau has described as the most damaging in its history. He pleaded guilty to 15 espionage-related counts, was sentenced to life in prison without parole, and died of colon cancer on June 5, 2023, at age 79, inside the federal supermax prison in Florence, Colorado.¹²

The Agent Behind the Mole

Hanssen was born in Chicago, the son of a Chicago police officer. He earned a chemistry degree from Knox College, studied Russian there, and later completed an MBA in accounting and information systems at Northwestern. After a short stint with the Chicago Police Department investigating corrupt officers, he joined the FBI, graduating from the Academy on January 12, 1976.³⁴

Most of his FBI career ran through Soviet counterintelligence. He worked in the New York field office, FBI Headquarters, and the Washington field office, served as unit chief of the National Security Threat List Unit in the Intelligence Division, and spent six years as the FBI’s senior representative to the State Department’s Office of Foreign Missions. He held Top Secret clearance with Sensitive Compartmented Information access, which exposed him to intelligence and counterintelligence activities across the FBI, CIA, NSA, and DIA. Colleagues noted the black suits, the dour manner, and the loud anticommunism; some called him “Dr. Death.”⁴³

What He Gave to Moscow

Hanssen’s espionage played out in three distinct stretches. He began in November 1979, three years into his FBI career, by walking a package into a Soviet trade organization in New York and offering himself to the GRU, Soviet military intelligence. In that first period he exposed a long-standing FBI asset inside the GRU and collected at least $21,000. It ended abruptly in the spring of 1981 when his wife Bonnie caught him going over GRU materials at home. He told her it was a ploy to feed disinformation; a priest told him to donate the money to charity, and Hanssen later said he had given it to Mother Teresa.⁵⁶

In October 1985, he restarted on a much larger scale. This time he volunteered to the KGB, using the alias “Ramon Garcia.” From his seat in the FBI’s Soviet Analytical Unit he had access to the intelligence community’s most sensitive Soviet secrets. Between September 1985 and August 1987 alone, he handed over thousands of pages of classified documents and dozens of computer disks covering U.S. nuclear war planning, military weapons technologies, the identities of active U.S. assets inside Soviet intelligence, the locations of KGB defectors in the United States, and the budget and policy of the Soviet counterintelligence program itself.⁷

One disclosure stood out. Hanssen told the KGB about a joint FBI-NSA eavesdropping tunnel beneath the Soviet Embassy complex on Wisconsin Avenue in Washington, a project that had taken years and cost several hundred million dollars. FBI court papers later said he had compromised “an entire technical program of enormous value, expense and importance to the United States government.” Former intelligence officials have said there is no evidence the tunnel ever produced useful information, which suggests the Soviets knew about it from the beginning.⁸⁹ Across this period he received at least $500,000 and three diamonds, and he broke contact in late 1991, around the Soviet collapse.⁵

After a clumsy attempt to re-contact the GRU in 1993, Hanssen started again in 1999, now dealing with the KGB’s successor, the SVR. He was in financial trouble, and he was using the FBI’s Automated Case Support system to search for the mole hunt that was closing in. At that point the Bureau was looking at the wrong person entirely, and Hanssen read along as it happened.⁵

The Agents Who Died

In a typed letter to the KGB dated October 1, 1985, Hanssen gave up three FBI human sources to prove his value and protect himself. Two of them were executed.¹⁰

Valeriy Martynov, a KGB officer at the Soviet Embassy in Washington recruited by the FBI in 1982, was recalled to Moscow in November 1985 after being compromised by both Hanssen and CIA mole Aldrich Ames. He was arrested, tried, and executed.
Sergey Motorin, another KGB officer at the Soviet Embassy recruited by the FBI in 1983, was also compromised by Hanssen and Ames. He was convicted of espionage in 1986 and executed in February 1987.
Boris Yuzhin, a KGB officer who had served in San Francisco as an FBI agent-in-place, was arrested in December 1986 and sentenced to 15 years. He was released under a 1992 amnesty and emigrated to the United States.¹⁰

At sentencing, U.S. intelligence officials confirmed that Hanssen’s information also revealed technical details about U.S. interception of Soviet satellite transmissions.¹¹ The FBI assessed the overall damage as “exceptionally grave,” and then-Director Louis Freeh said the full extent could not be measured without jeopardizing the investigation itself.²

How He Was Finally Caught

For years, the FBI and CIA had the wrong man. CIA counterintelligence officer Brian Kelley, who had actually helped push attention toward the existence of a mole in Washington, became the target of the investigation himself. His career suffered, and he was never charged. Kelley died in 2011 at his home in Vienna, Virginia.¹²

The break came in 2000. The FBI paid $7 million to a former KGB officer for a Russian file on an anonymous mole operating in Virginia. The file contained a recording of Hanssen talking to his handlers and fingerprints from trash bags used in dead drops. Voice and fingerprint analysis identified him.¹³⁷

Investigators still needed him in the act. In late 2000 the Bureau pulled Hanssen back from the State Department with what looked like a promotion to a Senior Executive Service post in computer security at FBI Headquarters. On January 13, 2001, he reported to a small office wired for video and audio. A young FBI operative named Eric O’Neill was placed as his assistant to watch his movements. By February, about 300 FBI personnel were tracking him. At one point another agent lured Hanssen to a firing range while O’Neill copied the contents of his Palm Pilot, which held metadata and drop schedules that tightened the case.⁵²¹³

On February 12, 2001, agents recovered a package of $50,000 in cash that the SVR had left at a dead drop for him. Six nights later, on February 18, Hanssen drove to Foxstone Park in Vienna, Virginia, walked down a wooded path to a footbridge, and left a plastic bag of classified materials. The arrest team took him as he returned to his car.²⁵

Plea and Life Sentence

On July 6, 2001, Hanssen pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit espionage, 13 counts of espionage, and one count of attempted espionage. In exchange for his full cooperation with intelligence community debriefings on the scope and damage of his activities, the government agreed to forgo the death penalty. The FBI, CIA, and prosecutors ultimately found that he had met the agreement’s requirement for “candid, forthright, truthful, and complete participation.”¹⁴

He forfeited up to $1,437,000 in assets received from Soviet and Russian intelligence, along with his government pension. His wife Bonnie was allowed to keep about 55% of that pension, roughly $39,000 a year, so long as she kept cooperating with investigators; she also had to give up any rights to profit from publicity about the case.¹⁵¹⁶

On May 10, 2002, a federal judge in Northern Virginia sentenced him to life without the possibility of parole. “I am humbled by your generosity, your goodness and your charity,” Hanssen told the court.¹¹

The Double Life

The strange thing about Hanssen was the distance between the man he presented and the man he was. He was a Catholic convert and a supernumerary member of Opus Dei, the ultraconservative Catholic organization. He preferred the Latin Mass and followed the group’s ascetic routines.¹⁷

In late 1989 he began a year-long relationship with a stripper named Priscilla Sue Galey, which he said was an attempt to save her from exotic dancing and bring her to his faith. Using money from his espionage, he bought her a Mercedes-Benz, took her along on an FBI trip to Hong Kong, gave her jewelry, and handed her an American Express card. By Galey’s account there was no sexual relationship. He cut her off in 1992 after traveling to reclaim the card when she used it for personal expenses.¹⁸

Separately, Hanssen installed a hidden camera in his own bedroom so his lifelong friend Jack Hoschouer could watch him with his wife Bonnie. He also posted sexually explicit stories about the two of them to internet bulletin boards under their real names. According to a book on the case, he once asked Hoschouer to drug Bonnie with a sedative and have sex with her. Hoschouer refused.¹⁹

In a letter to his Russian handlers around March 2000, Hanssen called himself “insanely loyal” to them and described the United States as “a powerfully built but retarded child, potentially dangerous but young, immature, and easily manipulated.”²⁰

Why the FBI Missed Him So Long

A 2003 Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General report concluded that during the years Hanssen was spying, “there was essentially no deterrence to espionage at the FBI.”²¹ In 25 years at the Bureau he was never required to take a polygraph and never had to file a financial disclosure form, even as he kept as much as $100,000 in cash in a bedroom closet. He received only one background reinvestigation in that entire time. His unauthorized searches of the Automated Case Support system, including for his own name and for sensitive counterintelligence cases, went unnoticed because the FBI did not review audit trails without an allegation of wrongdoing. He removed hundreds of classified documents, including original and numbered Top Secret items, without being detected. His six-year State Department assignment was described as “wholly unsupervised,” with no performance evaluations during that span. The OIG concluded that Hanssen succeeded because of “longstanding systemic problems in the FBI’s counterintelligence program and a deeply flawed internal security program.”²²

Death at the Supermax

Hanssen arrived at USP ADX Florence, the federal supermax in Colorado often called the “Alcatraz of the Rockies,” on July 17, 2002.²³ Inmates there are typically held in solitary confinement 23 hours a day in small concrete cells, with any movement outside the cell requiring leg irons, handcuffs, and a guard escort.²⁴

On the morning of June 5, 2023, Bureau of Prisons staff found him unresponsive in his cell just before 7 a.m. and attempted life-saving measures before pronouncing him dead.²⁵ An autopsy by the El Paso County coroner gave the cause as metastatic colon adenocarcinoma, advanced colon cancer, and ruled the death natural. He was 79 and had spent just over 21 years inside the supermax.¹

1
San Bernardino Sun. Robert Hanssen FBI Agent Autopsy Report
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FBI. Robert Hanssen
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Britannica. Robert Hanssen
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FBI. Robert Hanssen Business Cards, Chalk, and Thumbtacks
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Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General. A Review of the FBI’s Performance in Deterring, Detecting, and Investigating the Espionage Activities of Robert Philip Hanssen
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CNN. Hanssen’s Wife Told Investigators of 1979 Confession
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Center for Development of Security Excellence. Case Study: Robert Hanssen
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CBS News. A Not So Secret Tunnel
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The Guardian. FBI’s Secret Tunnel Under Soviet Embassy Disclosed
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FBI. Hanssen Affidavit
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Voice of America. Former FBI Agent Hanssen Sentenced to Life
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New York Times. Brian J. Kelley, Onetime Spying Suspect, Dies at 68
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BBC. Robert Hanssen: FBI Mole Who Spied for Russia Dies in Prison
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Department of Justice. Robert Philip Hanssen Pleads Guilty to Espionage
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Department of Justice. Hanssen Plea Agreement Details
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Los Angeles Times. Hanssen’s Wife Speaks Out
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Commonweal Magazine. Agent Hanssen
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The Guardian. The Spy Who Wanted to Save a Stripper
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New York Post. Spy Asked Pal to Drug, Bed Wife
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ODAN. Hanssen
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National Security Archive, George Washington University. OIG Report on FBI Performance in Deterring, Detecting, and Investigating the Espionage Activities of Robert Philip Hanssen
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Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General. A Review of the FBI’s Progress in Responding to the Recommendations in the OIG Report on Robert Hanssen
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KTLA. Robert Hanssen, FBI Agent Convicted of Spying, Dies in Colorado Supermax Prison
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CNN. Life Inside the Supermax Prison
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ABC News. FBI Agent Turned Notorious Spy Robert Hanssen Dies