the spy and the traitor the greatest espionage story

Hanssen graduated from William Howard Taft High School in 1962 and attended Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois, where he earned a bachelor's degree in chemistry in 1966. His father, Howard, a Chicago police officer, was allegedly emotionally abusive to Hanssen during his childhood. Robert Hanssen was born in Chicago, Illinois, to a Lutheran family who lived in the Norwood Park neighborhood. He was sentenced to fifteen life terms without the possibility of parole, and was promptly transferred to ADX Florence. To avoid the death penalty, Hanssen pleaded guilty to fourteen counts of espionage and one of conspiracy to commit espionage.

After his arrest, he was initially detained at the Alexandria Adult Detention Center. intelligence documents to the Soviet Union and subsequently Russia for more than $1.4 million in cash and diamonds over twenty-two years. Hanssen was arrested on February 18, 2001, at Foxstone Park, near his home in the Washington, D.C., suburb of Vienna, Virginia, after leaving a package of classified materials at a dead drop site.

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. After Ames' arrest in 1994, some of these intelligence breaches remained unsolved. Hanssen also revealed a multimillion-dollar eavesdropping tunnel built by the FBI under the Soviet Embassy. Both Ames and Hanssen compromised the names of KGB agents working secretly for the U.S., some of whom were executed for their betrayal.

He was spying at the same time as Aldrich Ames in the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). strategies in the event of nuclear war, developments in military weapons technologies, and aspects of the U.S. Hanssen sold thousands of classified documents to the KGB that detailed U.S.

Throughout his spying, he remained anonymous to the Russians. Hanssen restarted communications the next year and continued until his arrest. He restarted his espionage activities in 1985 and continued until 1991, when he ended communications during the collapse of the Soviet Union, fearing he would be exposed. In 1979, three years after joining the FBI, Hanssen approached the Soviet Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU) to offer his services, beginning his first espionage cycle, lasting until 1981. history.' Hanssen is currently serving fifteen consecutive life sentences without parole at ADX Florence, a federal supermax prison near Florence, Colorado. His espionage was described by the Department of Justice as 'possibly the worst intelligence disaster in U.S. Robert Philip Hanssen (born April 18, 1944) is an American former Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agent who spied for Soviet and Russian intelligence services against the United States from 1979 to 2001.

The spy and the traitor the greatest espionage story