Robert Hanssen, a former FBI agent who was one of the most damaging spies in American history, was found dead in his prison cell Monday morning, according to the Bureau of Prisons. Hanssen, 79, was arrested in 2001 and pleaded guilty to selling highly classified material to the Soviet Union and later Russia. He was serving a life sentence at the federal penitentiary in Florence, Colorado. Hanssen was found unresponsive and staff immediately initiated life-saving measures, Bureau of Prisons spokeswoman Kristie Breshears said in a statement. "Staff requested emergency medical services and life-saving efforts continued," Breshears said. "The inmate was subsequently pronounced dead by outside emergency medical personnel." Hanssen appears to have died of natural causes, according to two sources briefed on the matter.
Three years after he was hired by the FBI, Hanssen approached the Soviets and began spying in 1979 for the KGB and its successor, the SVR. He stopped a few years later after his wife confronted him. He resumed spying in 1985, selling thousands of classified documents that compromised human sources and counterintelligence techniques and investigations in exchange for more than $1.4 million in cash, diamonds and foreign bank deposits. Using the alias "Ramon Garcia," he passed information to the spy agencies using encrypted communications and dead drops, without ever meeting in-person with a Russian handler.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/robert-han ... =218390396He really wanted to catch spies. He was a James Bond fanatic, loved the movies," O'Neill said. "He could quote them chapter and verse. He wanted to be a spy. He was joining the FBI to do that — not to spy against the U.S., but to go in and hunt spies." But he was angry when he didn't get the exact job he wanted at the FBI, and taking care of his growing family while living in New York and later the Washington, D.C., area was expensive. "And that led him to decide that he was going to get everything he wanted — become a spy," O'Neill said. His job in the FBI gave him unfettered access to classified information on the bureau's counterintelligence operations. His disclosures included details on U.S. nuclear war preparations and a secret eavesdropping tunnel under the Soviet embassy in Washington, D.C. He also betrayed double agents, including Soviet Gen. Dmitri Polyakov, who were later executed. Hanssen was arrested after making a dead drop in a Virginia park in 2001 after the FBI had been secretly monitoring him for months. His identity was discovered after a Russian intelligence officer handed over a file containing a trash bag with Hanssen's fingerprints and a tape recording of his voice.
Hanssen and his wife were members of an ultra conservative Catholic group called Opus Dei, it helped his cover as a spy. The last big American who spied for Russia is still in prison at 82, Aldridge Ames was a CIA agent. Ames betrayed many Russians who spied for the US and were caught and executed.