[21] Yuzhin had returned to Moscow in 1982 and had been put under intensive investigation by the KGB there due to having lost a concealed camera in the Soviet consulate in San Francisco, but he was not arrested until being exposed by Ames and Hanssen. Following confirmation by the FBI CART Unit, Sullivan filed a report with the Office of Professional Responsibility requesting further investigation of Hanssen's attempted hack. His new job in the FBI's budget office gave him access to information involving many different FBI operations. After his first wife left him, Hansen was released from prison in late 1962. His case is considered one of America's greatest intelligence failures, as Hanssen operated as a mole within the bureau's counterintelligence division, the highly sensitive part of the FBI tasked with tracking foreign spies. He also designated a code to be used when dates were exchanged. In the letter, he gave the names of three KGB agents secretly working for the FBI: Boris Yuzhin, Valery Martynov, and Sergei Motorin. [7][8] On May 10, 2002, Hanssen was sentenced to fifteen consecutive sentences of life in prison without the possibility of parole. Who were Robert Hansen's wives and children? Galey claims that although she offered to sleep with him, Hanssen declined, saying that he was trying to convert her to Catholicism. Hanssen is also mentioned in the seventh episode of The History Channel series America's Book of Secrets. "I apologize for my behavior. In January 1976, Robert Hanssen joined the FBI. Robert Hanssen – FBI Double Agent While betraying his country as a spy, Hanssen seemed to become even more committed in his devotion to the Opus Dei organization, attending meetings and rallys fervently and sending his children to Opus Dei schools. Three years later, Hanssen transferred to the FBI's Soviet analytical unit, which was responsible for studying, identifying, and capturing Soviet spies and intelligence operatives in the United States. [69] Hanssen gave her money, jewels, and a used Mercedes-Benz, but cut off contact with her before his arrest when she fell into drug abuse and prostitution. Robert Hansen was a serial killer from America who murdered at least 17 women. [55][56], Hanssen never told the KGB or GRU his identity and refused to meet them personally, with the exception of the abortive 1993 contact in the Russian embassy parking garage. He went in person to the Russian embassy and physically approached a GRU officer in the parking garage. It was after the transfer, while on a business trip back to Washington, that he resumed his career in espionage. [37], The existence of two Russian moles working in the U.S. security and intelligence establishment simultaneously—Ames at the CIA and Hanssen at the FBI—complicated counterintelligence efforts in the 1990s. In the end, officials believed his claim that he was merely demonstrating flaws in the FBI's security system. [36], During the same time period, Hanssen searched the FBI's internal computer case record to see if he was under investigation. When O'Neill was able to briefly obtain Hanssen's PDA and have agents download and decode its encrypted contents, the FBI had its "smoking gun. Despite having shown his face, disclosed his code name, and revealed his FBI affiliation, Hanssen escaped arrest when the Bureau's investigation into the incident did not advance. [43] FBI agent Michael Waguespack felt the voice was familiar, but could not remember who it was. Only what appears to be two children (playing in the yard) are shown in the movie Breach. It belongs to his wife now, and … [4][30], When the Soviet Union collapsed in December 1991, Hanssen, possibly worried that he could be exposed during the ensuing political upheaval, broke off communications with his handlers for a time. Darla also supported Hansen financially when he was incarcerated for theft, and later when he was charged with abducting and sexually abusing a housewife and a prostitute. [76] David Wise wrote Spy: The Inside Story of How the FBI's Robert Hanssen Betrayed America. Pitts was the second FBI agent to mention Hanssen by name as a possible mole, but superiors were still unconvinced and no action was taken. [14] The next year, Hanssen was moved into counterintelligence and given the task of compiling a database of Soviet intelligence for the Bureau. He stuck a piece of white medical tape on the sign outside the entrance of the park. [60], Despite these efforts at caution and security, Hanssen could at times be reckless. A TV movie called "Master Spy: The Robert Hanssen Story" was released in 2002. A child learning their father was this person performing these acts is a very different absorbtion of feelings. He placed a white piece of tape on a park sign, which was a signal to his Russian contacts that there was information at the dead drop site. [16] CIA and FBI officials, including Deputy Director William Sullivan, believed that, at some point, Polyakov was turned by the Soviets and made into a triple agent who deceived the West with misinformation. Robert told her that he had given up minor and unimportant information for the money. Hanssen's wife Bonnie retired from teaching theology at Oakcrest in 2020. [70], The Hanssen spy case is told in Ronald Kessler's book The Secrets of the FBI in chapter 15, "Catching Hanssen," chapter 16, "Breach", and chapter 17, "Unexplained Cash", based in part on interviews with Michael Rochford, who headed the FBI team that eventually caught Hanssen after initially wrongly focusing on a CIA officer as the master spy. The investigation is covered in O'Neill's memoir Gray Day: My Undercover Mission to Expose America's First Cyber Spy, published by Penguin Random House in spring 2019. Van carrying accused spy Robert Hanssen arrives at courthouse 2. Because of his sexual deviancy and espionage conviction, the organization's reputation was badly hurt. [57] Going by the alias "Ramon" or "Ramon Garcia",[58] Hanssen exchanged intelligence and payments through an old-fashioned dead drop system in which he and his KGB handlers left packages in public, unobtrusive places. The 2007 documentary Superspy: The Man Who Betrayed the West describes the hunt to trap Hanssen. Waguespack listened to the tape again and recognized the voice as belonging to Hanssen. Hanssen restored communications the next year and continued until his arrest. history. [4] He was spying at the same time as Aldrich Ames in the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Hanssen disclosed this information to the Soviets in September 1989 and received a $55,000 payment the next month. [53], With the representation of Washington lawyer Plato Cacheris, Hanssen negotiated a plea bargain that enabled him to escape the death penalty in exchange for cooperating with authorities. However, two cases—the Bloch investigation and the embassy tunnel—stood out and remained unsolved. [59] He refused to use the dead drop sites that his handler, Victor Cherkashin, suggested and instead picked his own. [34] Three years later, convicted FBI mole Earl Edwin Pitts told the Bureau that he suspected Hanssen was dirty due to the Mislock incident. Hanssen also revealed a multimillion-dollar eavesdropping tunnel built by the FBI under the Soviet Embassy. He quit after one year and joined the Chicago Police Department as an internal affairs investigator, specializing in forensic accounting. Robert Christian Hansen (February 15, 1939 – August 21, 2014), known in the media as the "Butcher Baker," was an American serial killer.Between 1971 and 1983, Hansen abducted, raped, and murdered at least 17 women in and around Anchorage, Alaska; he hunted many of them down in the wilderness with a Ruger Mini-14 and a knife. Polyakov was arrested in 1986 and executed in 1988. [35], IT personnel from the National Security Division's IIS Unit were sent to investigate Hanssen's desktop computer following a reported failure. Ames had been stationed in Rome at the time of the Bloch investigation, and could not have had knowledge of that case or of the tunnel under the embassy, as he did not work for the FBI. But what about his wife, who stayed with him for so long despite his behavior? He also became involved with the Opus Dei. Hanssen was recalled yet again to Washington in 1987. [65] Opus Dei member Father C. John McCloskey III said he also occasionally attended the daily noontime Mass at the Catholic Information Center in downtown Washington. Robert Hanssen was born in Chicago, Illinois, to a Lutheran family who lived in the Norwood Park neighborhood. history." "[48][49][50], During his final days with the FBI, Hanssen began to suspect that something was wrong; in early February 2001 he asked his friend at a computer technology company for a job. [6] To avoid the death penalty, Hanssen pleaded guilty to fourteen counts of espionage and one of conspiracy to commit espionage. The CIA and FBI searched his house, tapped his phone and put him under surveillance, following him and his family everywhere. All denied everything. He was eventually placed on administrative leave, where he remained falsely accused until after Hanssen was arrested. 9 Robert Hanssen: Russian spy. [68], Hanssen frequently visited D.C. strip clubs and spent a great deal of time with a Washington stripper named Priscilla Sue Galey. Hanssen applied for a cryptographer position in the National Security Agency, but was rebuffed due to budget setbacks. Hanssen was arrested on February 18, 2001, at Foxstone Park[5] near his home in the Washington, D.C. suburb of Vienna, Virginia, after leaving a package of classified materials at a dead drop site. [33], In 1994, Hanssen expressed interest in a transfer to the new National Counterintelligence Center, which coordinated counterintelligence activities. Hanssen ensured that he did not unmask himself with his study, but in addition, he turned over the entire study—including the list of all Soviets who had contacted the Bureau about FBI moles—to the KGB in 1988. The following year, he married Darla Henrichson, with whom he went on to have two children. Hanssen sold thousands of classified documents to the KGB that detailed U.S. strategies in the event of nuclear war, developments in military weapons technologies, and aspects of the U.S. counterintelligence program. Lawyers arrive at courthouse3. [31] The following year, after the Russian Federation took over the defunct USSR's spy agencies, Hanssen made a risky approach to the GRU, with whom he had not been in contact in ten months. Hanssen's three sons attended The Heights School in Potomac, Maryland, an all-boys preparatory school. In 1979, three years after joining the FBI, Hanssen approached the Soviet Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU) to offer his services, launching his first espionage cycle, which lasted until 1981. [9] His father Howard, a Chicago police officer, was emotionally abusive to Hanssen during his childhood. Hanssen embraced his conversion and went on to join the Catholic organization Opus Dei[13] with like-minded individuals. Eric O'Neill talked about the Robert Hanssen spy case. When Robert Philip Hanssen was arrested last month and charged with spying for Russia, his FBI colleagues were astonished that the alleged espionage had gone undetected for … I just watched Breach, the movie based on the capture of the mole Robert Hanssen, whose passing of information to the Russians constituted perhaps the most serious damage to U.S. national security. Rifling through the rest of the files, they found notes of the mole using a quote from General George S. Patton about "the purple-pissing Japanese. The FBI believes that the Russians never knew the name of their source. He established contact with the SVR (the successor to the Soviet-era KGB) in the fall of 1999. His credentials as a certified public accountant with a master’s degree in business administration complemented four years spent on the Chicago police force to make him a good fit for the agency’s Financial Crimes Division, and he was assigned to Gary, Indiana, right out of the FBI Academy. What Do the Families of Ted Bundy's Victims Think of the Netflix Documentary? Throughout his spying, Hanssen remained anonymous to the Russians. The couple married in 1968, and Hanssen converted from Lutheranism to his wife's Catholicism. Some promising suspects were cleared, and the mole hunt found other penetrations such as CIA officer Harold James Nicholson. "[3] Hanssen is currently serving fifteen consecutive life sentences without parole at ADX Florence, a federal supermax prison near Florence, Colorado. Hanssen's section was in charge of evaluating Soviet agents who volunteered to give intelligence to determine whether they were genuine or re-doubled agents. Robert Philip Hanssen (born April 18, 1944) is a former Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) double agent who spied for Soviet and Russian intelligence services against the United States from 1979 to 2001. Robert Hansen, also called "The Butcher Baker" because he was a baker by profession, is known to have raped and assaulted over 30 Alaskan women, who he abducted and hunted down, and to have murdered at least 17 of them, ranging from ages 16 to 41. [12] Hanssen received an MBA in accounting and information systems in 1971 and took a job with an accounting firm. [20] In 1985, Hanssen was again transferred to the FBI's field office in New York, where he continued to work in counterintelligence against the Soviets. The FBI paid $7 million to a KGB agent to obtain a file on an anonymous mole, whom the FBI later identified as Hanssen through fingerprint and voice analysis. But before he launched into his killing spree, Hansen was jailed several times for petty theft, and served three years at the Anamosa State Penitentiary for burning down a school bus garage. Bonnie had previously told her brother that Hanssen once talked about retiring in Poland, then part of the Eastern Bloc. Mislock has since theorized that Hanssen probably went onto his computer to see if his superiors were investigating him for espionage, and invented the document story to cover his tracks. After Ames's arrest in 1994, some of these intelligence breaches still remained unsolved. In 1999, the FBI even interrogated Kelley, his ex-wife, two sisters and three children. He was indiscreet enough to type his own name into FBI search engines. [25], Later that year, Hanssen handed over extensive information about American planning for measurement and signature intelligence (MASINT), an umbrella term for intelligence collected by a wide array of electronic means, such as radar, spy satellites, and signal intercepts. 22. Robert Philip Hanssen (born April 18, 1944) is a former American Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agent who spied for Soviet and Russian intelligence services against the United States for 22 years from 1979 to 2001. In November 1998, they had a man with a foreign accent come to Kelley's door, warn him that the FBI knew he was a spy and tell him to show up at a Metro station the next day in order to escape. For unknown reasons, the Soviets did not act against Polyakov until he was betrayed a second time by CIA mole Aldrich Ames in 1985. I have hurt so many deeply. Hanssen, carrying a package of documents, identified himself by his Soviet code name, "Ramon Garcia," and described himself as a "disaffected FBI agent" who was offering his services as a spy. Bonnie Hanssen, wife of former FBI counterintelligence agent Robert Hanssen who is serving life sentence for spying for Moscow on and off for 20 … Serial killer Robert Hansen confessed to killing 17 women in Alaska over a 12-year span, all while married with two children. [61] Hanssen took the risk of recommending to his handlers that they try to recruit his closest friend, a colonel in the United States Army. Robert Philip Hanssen (born April 18, 1944) is a former American Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agent who spied for Soviet and Russian intelligence services against the United States from 1979 to 2001. The FBI was unable to produce any hard evidence, and as a result, Bloch was never charged with a crime, although the State Department later terminated his employment and denied his pension. In 1979, Hanssen approached the Soviet Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU) and offered his services. Robert Philip Hanssen (born April 18, 1944) is a former Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) double agent who spied for Soviet and Russian intelligence services against the United States from 1979 to 2001. Bonnie told him that he … As so many people are fascinated with serial killers, it's no surprise that the Butcher Baker has earned something of a following. According to criminal psychologists, most of Hansen's crimes were committed as an act of revenge for having been shunned by the attractive girls in his school. The Bureau planned to use it for eavesdropping, but never did for fear of being caught. ... By the time Robert Hanssen was assigned to Washington in 1981 he had begun to realize that any dreams he had of becoming part of the FBI's hierarchy were not going to be realized. When told that he would have to take a lie detector test to join, Hanssen changed his mind. He enrolled in dental school at Northwestern University[11] but switched his focus to business after three years. I read the true crime book on Robert Hansen, and I felt so sorry for his wife and children. ROBERT PHILIP HANSSEN was born on April 18, 1944, in Chicago, Illinois, where he was raised. Court sketch of Hanssen being arraigned4. With the mole finally identified, locations, dates and cases were matched with Hanssen's activities during the time period. Hanssen is also mentioned in the fifth episode of Netflix series Spycraft. Hanssen's jailers allowed him to watch this movie, but he was so angered by it that he turned it off. A few years later, he was also charged and sentenced to five years in prison for larceny after he was caught stealing a chainsaw. Robert Hanssen is a former FBI agent who sold highly classified material to Russian intelligence agents for decades before he was finally arrested in 2001. Desk: FBI and CIA Counterintelligence As Seen From My Cubicle Dog Ear Publishing 2010, U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, Spy: The Inside Story of How the FBI's Robert Hanssen Betrayed America, "USA v. Robert Philip Hanssen: Affidavit in Support of Criminal Complaint, Arrest Warrant and Search Warrant", "Federal Bureau of Prisons Inmate Locator", "A Review of FBI Security Programs (Webster Report)", "A Review of the FBI's Performance in Deterring, Detecting, and Investigating the Espionage Activities of Robert Philip Hanssen", Thompson Statement Regarding Hanssen Guilty Plea, "Spy's Wife Speaks, After Taking a Lie Test", "Riddle Resolved: Who Dimed Out American Traitor and Super-Spy, Robert Hanssen? He urged fellow Catholics in the Bureau to attend Mass more often and denounced the Russians, even though he had been spying for them, as "godless". "[51], However, Hanssen's suspicions did not stop him from making one more dead drop. When he was given a 461-year sentence for his crimes in 1984, Darla made the choice to divorce him. [67] He also explicitly described the sexual details of his marriage on Internet chat rooms, giving information sufficient for those who knew them to recognize the couple. And while Darla suspected that her husband might still be frequenting prostitutes, she never imagined that he was a serial killer who preyed on and hunted them down. A story that the Hanssen children used to laugh about concerned his wanting to give his eldest daughter Jane a head start in life. Here's what you need to know about Robert Hansen, his kids, and family life. "The kids both moved to the American midwest," the post continues, and the writer admits to having attempted to contact them numerous times. Six was to be added to the month, day, and time of a designated drop time, so that, for example, a drop scheduled for January 6 at 1 pm would be written as July 12 at 7 pm. She later sold their Alaska property and moved away. The Frozen Ground is captivating viewers on Netflix. Later, he hid a video camera in the bedroom that was connected via closed-circuit television line so that Hoschouer could observe the Hanssens from his guest bedroom. The Russians then filed an official protest with the State Department, believing Hanssen to be a triple agent. BACKGROUND OF ROBERT PHILIP HANSSEN. This included all the FBI activities related to wiretapping and electronic surveillance, which were Hanssen's responsibility. This innocent looking house in Vienna used to belong to Russian spy Robert Hanssen before he was caught by the Feds. Hanssen was born in Chicago, Illinois, in 1944. In 1968, he married Bernadette "Bonnie" Wauck, a Roman Catholic who managed to convert Robert from his Lutheranism, prompting him to become a fervent believer. The FBI waited two more days to see if any of Hanssen's SVR handlers would show up at Foxstone Park. During his first stint in prison, his wife, who he married at 21, left him. His most important leak was the betrayal of Dmitri Polyakov, a CIA informant who passed enormous amounts of information to U.S. intelligence while rising to the rank of General in the Soviet Army. Hanssen claimed that he was attempting to connect a color printer to his computer, but needed the password cracker to bypass the administrative password. 1. [17][18], In 1981, Hanssen was transferred to FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C., and he moved to the suburb of Vienna, Virginia. He once said in a letter to the KGB that it should emulate the management style of Mayor of Chicago Richard J. Daley—a comment that easily could have led an investigator to look at people from Chicago. I hope their children (now adults) were able to bring some kind of peace, forgiveness, stability to their heart, mind and soul. O'Neill ascertained that Hanssen was using a Palm III PDA to store his information. [72], Eric O'Neill's role in the capture of Robert Hanssen was dramatized in the 2007 film Breach, in which Chris Cooper played the role of Hanssen and Ryan Phillippe played O'Neill.[73]. FBI Agent Robert Philip Hanssen is shown in this undated file photo, ... (Wauck) Hanssen (August 10, 1968-present) Children: Lisa, Greg, Mark, John “Jack,” Sue and Jane