Robert Hanssen, the former FBI agent turned spy who the bureau describes as the most damaging in its history, was found dead in his prison cell on Monday, US authorities said.
Robert Hanssen died in prison
Hanssen, 79, was sentenced in 2002 to life in prison after pleading guilty to spying for the Soviet Union and later Russia for more than 20 years.
Prison staff initiated life-saving measures after finding Hanssen unresponsive on Monday morning, but were unsuccessful, the Bureau of Prisons said in a statement. He did not provide a cause of death.
Hanssen joined the FBI in 1976 and began selling classified information to the Soviet Union in 1985, according to the FBI website.
By the time of his arrest in 2001, he had been rewarded with more than $1.4 million in cash, bank funds and diamonds in exchange for compromising numerous human sources, intelligence techniques and classified US documents, the website said. the FBI.
FBI investigators worked for years to try to identify the spy from their ranks. In the weeks leading up to his arrest in February 2001, about 300 people were working on the investigation and monitoring Hanssen, according to the FBI.
Convicted for life
An arrest team took Hanssen into custody after catching him making a “classified material delivery” in a suburban Virginia park, the FBI said.
He was serving a life sentence in a maximum security prison in Colorado.
He is believed to have been partially responsible for the deaths of at least three Soviet officers working for US intelligence who were executed after being exposed.
He received more than $1.4 million in cash, bank funds, diamonds and Rolex watches in exchange for providing top secret national security information to the Soviet Union and later to Russia.
He did not adopt an obviously lavish lifestyle, but lived in a modest house in suburban Virginia with his family of six children and drove a Taurus and a minivan.
Hanssen would later say that he was motivated by money rather than ideology, but a letter written to his Soviet superiors in 1985 explains that a large payment could have caused complications because he could not spend it without setting off signals of alarm.
Using the alias “Ramon Garcia,” he passed about 6,000 documents and 26 diskettes to his supervisors, according to authorities. They detailed eavesdropping techniques and helped confirm the identities of Russian double agents and revealed other secrets.
Authorities also believe he tipped off Moscow about a secret tunnel the Americans had built under the Soviet embassy in Washington for eavesdropping.
His story was made into a movie called Breach in 2007, starring Chris Cooper as Hanssen and Ryan Phillippe as a young FBI agent who helps catch him.
