'Most Damaging Spy in FBI History' Found Dead in His Cell

Robert Hanssen, a former FBI agent, served a life sentence in a maximum security prison in the US state of Colorado. He had pleaded guilty in 2001 to selling classified information to the Soviet Union and later to Russia.

Former FBI agent Robert Hanssen, who was sentenced to life imprisonment as a Russian spy, was found dead on Monday in his cell at the maximum security prison Florence ADMAX in the US state of Colorado, according to the US Bureau of Prisons.

Prison spokeswoman Kristie Beshears said in a statement:

"When prison staff discovered Hanssen, they tried to resuscitate him and called for emergency medical service [...] The detainee was then pronounced dead by external emergency doctors."

No information was given on the cause of death. Hanssen, 79, was serving a life sentence in the so-called Administrative Maximum Facility, a maximum security prison notorious for requiring inmates to spend 23 hours a day in solitary confinement.

Hanssen was arrested on February 18, 2001, at Foxstone Park near his home in Virginia. He pleaded guilty to selling classified information to the Soviet Union and later to Russia and was sentenced to life imprisonment on July 6, 2001.

His career as a "mole" within the FBI dates back to 1979. In over 20 years, Hanssen has never visited Russia or met his contacts directly. The KGB and its successor organization, the SWR, knew him only under the code name "Ramon Garcia". They communicated via "car for sale" advertisements in a local newspaper.

"Worst intelligence disaster in history"

Due to his position in U.S. counterintelligence, Hanssen knew almost all the details of the secret operations against the Soviets. Among the secrets Hanssen passed on to Moscow in exchange for money and diamonds were the identities of at least three KGB officers secretly working for the Americans, U.S. preparations for nuclear war, and the existence of a secret tunnel beneath the Soviet embassy in Washington, D.C.

The FBI called Hanssen "the most damaging spy in the history of the FBI," while his activities were described as "possibly the worst intelligence disaster in U.S. history."

Hanssen's revelations, along with those of CIA double agents Edward Lee Howard and Aldrich Ames, were "responsible for the literal destruction of the CIA's human intelligence networks operating in the USSR in the mid-1980s," according to former U.S. weapons inspector Scott Ritter.

Prior to his arrest, Hanssen lived a quiet life in the suburbs with his wife, Bonnie, and six children. Bonnie later told journalists that she confronted him about espionage in 1979, but he was apparently able to convince them that he was "deceiving" the Soviets by providing them with false information.

In a March 2020 interview, SWR chief Sergei Naryshkin said that Ames and Hanssen had "made a very outstanding contribution to the security of the Soviet Union."

From around the world