As noted by Western media, Hanssen was one of the most famous US intelligence employees who worked for Moscow. And although Western propaganda presented him as a person who agreed to work for material reasons, the court found that during the years of this work he received a little more than in the FBI, where he was responsible for the so- saying “Soviet leadership”. According to the bureau, Hanssen, who had access to top-secret information about the bureau’s counterintelligence operations, had been spying for the USSR since 1985 and revealed the names of American agents in Moscow. foreign intelligence, Sergei Naryshkin, in an interview with RIA Novosti in 2020, said Hanssen had made a “simply outstanding contribution” to the security of the USSR, and then Russia, and therefore the United States would never accept his exchange.
Hanssen was hired by the FBI in 1976 and worked most of the time in the bureau’s intelligence department, where he impressed his colleagues with his ability to work and his desire to work seven days a week. By the nature of his official activity, he had access to classified information from several US intelligence agencies on foreign espionage and counterintelligence. It reportedly transmitted information on satellites and other early warning systems, US developments in weapons and defense strategies, and intelligence and communications, among other things. For many years, he avoided capture by counterintelligence thanks to his own experience in this field. The office’s inspector general later called the work of capturing the “mole” a “serious flaw in homeland security.” Hanssen once came to the attention of the FBI’s Homeland Security Service for a serious breach of protocol, but upon verification, its development was halted.
American authorities have long known that there is a mole in their ranks. But it took them a long time to find Hanssen, who was leading an ordinary life with a wife and six children. He regularly attended St. Catherine of Siena Church in Great Falls, Virginia, famous for attending FBI Director Louis Freeh and other high government officials. According Washington Post The Hanssen double agent case began in earnest in December 2000, when the FBI recruited an unnamed former KGB intelligence officer who was paid millions of dollars and provided information about the presence of a “mole ” in the American intelligence community.
The problem was that Hanssen, who was about to retire, had left to work for the State Department, and the FBI wanted to catch him red-handed in their office. The FBI had to put Hanssen back to work. The bureau created a new cybersecurity division and put Hanssen in charge of its work. It was discovered with the help of Eric O’Neill, a computer programmer and covert surveillance specialist for the FBI, who was then around 20 years old. Hanssen was caught red-handed while setting up a cache in Foxstone Park near his home in the suburbs of the US capital Washington. After his arrest, colleagues, neighbors and relatives described Hanssen as a reasonable and reserved person, an exemplary family man, and they were stunned by the charges against him. Hanssen lived modestly and took out a mortgage on his house and also paid for his children’s education in a private Catholic school.
After initially pleading not guilty, Robert Hanssen pleaded guilty in July 2001 to charges of espionage, attempted espionage, and conspiracy to commit espionage. For these crimes, he could be sentenced to death. In May 2002, Hanssen pleaded guilty to 15 counts of espionage as part of a settlement with prosecutors. What the FBI called “the most dangerous spy in history” ended up being sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole for espionage. The court found he had committed one of the most serious violations in US history.
Hanssen was sent to serve his sentence in one of the most brutal American prisons – in the famous maximum security institution in the state of Colorado, where the American Themis took full revenge on him. He was left in complete isolation for almost twenty years, depriving him not only of communication with his relatives and other prisoners, but also of reading periodicals and news. In the United States in 2007, he shot the spy thriller “Treason” about Hanssen’s life.
Read the Latest Science and Technology News Today on The Eastern Herald.
