He pleaded guilty to espionage and in 1997 was given 27 years in prison. In 1996, Pitts was caught in an FBI sting operation. He handed over classified information to the Russians until 1992, by which point they’d paid him more than $220,000. The second FBI agent caught spying for Moscow was Earl Pitts, who volunteered to become a mole for the KGB in 1987. His conviction later was overturned but at a second trial in 1990 he was again found guilty. In 1986, Miller was convicted and sentenced to life in prison. In 1984, 17 years before Hanssen’s arrest, Richard Miller, a 20-year veteran who was stationed at the FBI’s foreign counterintelligence unit in Los Angeles at the time of his arrest, was arrested for selling classified documents to Russian agents, one of whom he was having an affair with. Hanssen wasn’t the first FBI agent arrested for spying for the Russians. Hanssen was found dead in his cell on June 5, 2023. He spent the remainder of his life at the federal supermax prison near Florence, Colorado, along with such notorious fellow inmates include “Unabomber” Ted Kaczynski, Oklahoma City Bombing co-conspirator Terry Nichols and Ramzi Yousef, who carried out the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. The following May, he was sentenced to 15 consecutive life sentences behind bars with no possibility of parole. In July 2001, he pleaded guilty to 15 counts of espionage. In order to avoid the death penalty, Hanssen struck a deal with the government and agreed to cooperate. When he was arrested, Hanssen reportedly exclaimed, “What took you so long?”Īn artist’s drawing shows alleged US spy Robert Hanssen during Hanssen’s arraignment on spying charges. Nearby, FBI agents discovered a bag with $50,000 in cash, intended as Hanssen’s payment. The FBI put Hanssen under surveillance in late 2000, and on February 18, 2001, he was arrested at a park in Vienna, Virginia, after making a drop of classified documents in a plastic garbage bag for the Russians. Hanssen’s downfall came in 2000 when the FBI, which by then suspected there was a mole in its ranks, paid $7 million to an ex-KGB officer to procure information from SVR headquarters that helped identify Hanssen as the turncoat. State Department, he once again resumed his double-agent career, this time for the SVR, a post-Soviet, Russian intelligence service. But In 1999, while serving as the FBI liaison to the U.S. In 1991, with the Soviet Union breaking apart, he stopped spying, possibly due to fears that he’d be found out. Meanwhile, Hanssen continued to rise through the FBI’s ranks, eventually working in senior counterintelligence roles. He worked for the agency in Indiana and later New York City. He went on to work as an investigator for the Chicago Police Department then joined the FBI in 1976. He graduated from Knox College in 1966 then attended dental school at Northwestern University before quitting the program to earn an MBA. Hanssen was only the third agent in FBI history charged with spying.īorn in 1944, Hanssen was a Chicago native and son of a police officer. While covertly working for Moscow on and off over the years, he was paid $600,000 in cash and diamonds, with another $800,000 supposedly held for him in a Russian bank. A church-going father of six, Hanssen was thought to have been motivated by money rather than ideological beliefs. Hanssen’s double life began in 1979 and ended in 2001, when he was arrested after the FBI discovered, thanks to help from an ex-KGB officer, that Hanssen was a mole. One of the most damaging double agents in modern American history, Robert Hanssen gave the Soviets, and later the Russians, thousands of pages of classified material that revealed such sensitive national security secrets as the identities of Soviets spying for the U.S., specifics about America’s nuclear operations and the existence of an FBI-built tunnel underneath the Soviet Embassy in Washington.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |