When authorities arrested Robert Hansen, the FBI’s most accomplished double-personal agent, he had only one question for his colleagues: “What took you so long?”
Hansen, who was found dead this week in his Supermax prison cell in Colorado, was serving a life sentence after being convicted of spying for Moscow for more than $1.4 million, for more than two decades.
The Hansen case was described as “perhaps the worst intelligence disaster in US history” in a government report. He compromised more than 50 FBI human sources (including many who were later executed), turned over thousands of classified documents and revealed top-secret intelligence-gathering techniques as well as the US strategy to respond to nuclear conflict.
Ostensibly a suburban dad and patriot, Hansen drove his six children in vintage cars and was devoted to Opus Dei, a conservative movement within the Catholic Church. But the spy lived a secret life that has inspired six books and several films for television and cinema.
“What made him so egregious was that he was in a rare class of people with significant access . . . he blatantly betrayed that trust,” said Paul McNulty, a former senior Justice Department official who oversaw the case.
The son of a Chicago police officer, Hansen dropped out of dental school and joined the FBI in 1976. He imitated former director J. Edgar Hoover by wearing dark suits, but his quick temper and stern manner made him unpopular.
Hanssen first began working for KGB in the late 1970s, helping blow the cover of American double agent Dmitry Polyakov, a later executed Soviet general. His work in American counterintelligence gave him access to classified information and an understanding of how badly the FBI guarded nascent computer databases.
The agent’s betrayal extended to his personal life as well. He lets a friend spy on himself and his wife Bonnie having sex, and strikes up an odd friendship with a stripper who trips and buys her gifts, even as he lectures her about going to church.
Hansen became a sleeper hitter in the early 1980s, after Bonnie caught him trying to stash some papers in their home in Scarsdale, New York. She confronts him, gets him to meet their chaplain and donate the proceeds of Soviet espionage to charity.
But with his FBI career on hold, Hanssen begins working in Moscow again. His therapist lavished praise and money on him, exploiting his need for acceptance.
There was certainly a financial benefit, but Hansen was more complex psychologically. He had very conservative views and was deeply religious but at the same time he betrayed his country. “It was a very strange set of competing beliefs and behaviors,” said Preston Burton, one of his defense attorneys.
The piles of cash that Hanssen kept around the house aroused the suspicion of his brother-in-law, who was also working for the FBI. He reported to Hansen to their superiors in the early 1990s. But nothing happened.
FBI investigators leave Robert Hansen’s home in Vienna, Virginia, in 2001 © Manny Ceneta / AFP / Getty Images
Instead, after the fall of the Soviet Union, Hanssen backed out of espionage for nearly a decade. When he called back in 1999, the Russians were ecstatic, writing, “Dear friend: You’re welcome!”
By now, the FBI had been on the trail of a super spy who had been passing thousands of documents to Russia since at least 1985. After accidentally focusing on a CIA officer, they tape a fingerprint to a garbage bag used to drop documents to Hanssen. He is transferred to a dummy job in an office full of wiretaps, and an assistant is assigned secretly assigned to monitor him.
By February 2001, Hansen, whose every move was being watched by a team of 300, had been spooked. He wrote a letter to his Russian handlers warning that “something has stirred the sleeping tiger,” and saved it on an encrypted computer disk and wrapped in a garbage bag, along with confidential documents.
After he drops the package in a Virginia park, he is arrested. He pleaded guilty to 15 counts of espionage, and agreed to talk about his treason to escape the death penalty.
During his questioning, Hanssen was scathing about the FBI’s internal security, saying “It was pathetic . . . what I did was criminal, but criminally negligent.”
“In some ways, Hanssen is the architect of the modern FBI,” said Eric O’Neill, who wrote a book about his work as a young agent assigned to win Hanssen’s trust. “He exposed the many flaws of the FBI, and he rebuilt the FBI in a way that it would never allow for another Hansen.”