2023-06-06 16:49:23
When FBI agents surrounded Robert Hanssen on February 18, 2001, after he had dropped a package of classified information under the bridge at Foxstone Park in Virginia, the spy remarked relatively calmly, “Guns aren’t necessary.” And, when they put the handcuffs on him, he added that, in fact, he had been waiting for this moment for a long time. He had spent that cloudy and cold Sunday with his family and his friend Jack Hoschouer, whom he took to the airport before going to his office to collect the files that he was about to sell to the Kremlin. for the last time.
Hanssen was confined in the Florence prison, considered the Alcatraz of the Rockies, after pleading guilty to 15 counts of espionage and conspiracy in exchange for the withdrawal of the death penalty petition. After two decades behind bars, and with just turned 79, the spy who did the most damage to the United States during the Cold War has been found dead in his cell this Monday. “He was found unconscious at 6:55 p.m. The staff immediately took action to save his life. They requested the assistance of emergency medical services and resuscitation work continued. Finally, Hanssen has been declared dead,” reported the Federal Bureau of Prisons, according to CNN.
Hanssen’s double life as an agent for the United States and a spy for the Soviet Union and Russia was so surprising that, a year after his arrest, Hollywood dedicated a film starring William Hurt. It is estimated that, during the 23 years that he sold relevant information to the Kremlin, he received $1.4 million in cash and diamonds. He started working for Moscow in 1979, taking advantage of his position as head of the FBI’s homeland security department.
His deliveries made it possible to uncover dozens of spies working for Washington, some of whom were executed by the enemy in the last years of the Cold War and those that followed after the dismemberment of the USSR. It also sent information on technical operations for wiretapping, surveillance and interception of communications and delivered the United States response protocols in the event of a Soviet nuclear attack. “I want to apologize, I’m ashamed,” Hanssen told the court before hearing his sentence, who dodged the death penalty but not life imprisonment.
“I would never amount to anything”
Hanssen was born in Chicago in 1944, into a Lutheran family of Danish, Polish, and German descent. His father, a Chicago police officer, psychologically abused his son throughout his childhood. The contempt was continuous, repeating that he “would never amount to anything in life.” He first enrolled in the School of Dentistry, although at the age of three he changed majors and finally graduated in Business Administration. However, that was not his place either and he quit his job as an accountant to join the Police Department in his hometown.
He was assigned to internal affairs, specializing in forensic accounting. He only lasted two years, because in 1976 he requested his transfer to the FBI, where his life was twisted forever. He first worked in the city of Gary, 40 kilometers from Chicago, but in 1978 he moved with his wife and three children to New York, where he was finally assigned to the counterintelligence area, dedicating himself to compiling information and creating a large database. on Soviet intelligence. That, however, he used for his own benefit, since it was he himself who offered his services to the enemy, in 1979, in exchange for money.
Hanssen never alleged any ideological motive for his crime of treason. When he was captured by the FBI, he claimed that his only motivation had been money. For many years he managed to keep his work as a double agent under the radar of the United States, until Earl Edwin Pitts, another agent convicted of being a spy for Russia in 1996, singled him out as a possible double agent. Since at that time the FBI lacked evidence to arrest him, he commissioned Eric O’Neill to gather enough information to be able to arrest him.
Robert Hanssen’s FBI credentials
“Doctor Death”
Although she didn’t know it at the time, that would end up being her life’s mission. The US agency decided to appoint him chief supervisor of computer security at the end of the 90s and place him as Robert Hanssen’s personal assistant with the aim of hunting him down. O’Neill soon gained the trust of whom he was known among his peers as “Dr. Death” and respected as an active member of Opus Dei who regularly attended mass. His faith seemed so solid that he even gave his assistant a copy of ‘Camino’, the book by the founder of the Work, Escrivá de Balaguer.
From the beginning O’Neill began to record every movement and every conversation that Hanssen had, to deliver the information to his superiors almost daily. At the beginning of 2001, he realized that the key to solving the case would be found in the PDA (personal digital agenda) in which his boss recorded all the information related to their meetings and routines. The problem is that he always carried it with him in the back pocket of his pants and he kept it in a briefcase that he never left when she sat down. It was not going to be easy to access it.
One day, taking advantage of an appointment with Hanssen outside the office, an FBI team accessed the personal files he had in his office. To give him time, O’Neill drove on a route that he knew would always back up. Among Gray Day’s documentation, as the spy was known by his code name, they found information regarding the United States nuclear arsenal and numerous communications with Russian agents that were signed as Ramón García or, simply, as B. However, that It was not enough, since he could claim that he had all that sensitive material to prove the security breaches for which he was responsible.
sexual encounters
In a subsequent search of his vehicle, they found adhesive tape and waterproof material that made them suspect that Hanssen was about to make a new delivery of material to the Russians. O’Neill then decided to spring into action to stop him red-handed, so he scheduled a sudden shooting session with a superior, leaving him no time to think much. So he got her to forget about his PDA in the briefcase. In a few minutes, he entered, picked her up and took her to another office where several colleagues were to copy all the encrypted information and return it to the briefcase.
Upon his return, Hanssen suspected something and asked O’Neill if he had entered his office. Her response was convincing, and he let it slide: ‘We’ve both been, boss. I left the memory on the tray. Did he see her?” When our protagonist went to leave the files under the bridge in Foxstone Park, the FBI intervened to stop him. In addition to what they expected to find, his colleagues received a surprise that was not typical of such an active member of the FBI who attended mass daily: a bunch of videos in which he appeared having sex with his wife and that, according to he learned later, he shared with his friend Jack Hoschouer.
They also seized Internet messages describing details of his sex life and records of numerous encounters with a Washington strip club dancer whom he had courted with lavish gifts, including a Mercedes. For twenty years, neither his wife nor his family knew of his double life. Nor did they suspect that he could be one of the most dangerous spies in the history of his country, responsible for one of the biggest intelligence disasters in the United States.
#Opus #Dei #spy #dead #cell