Former FBI agent Robert Hanssen, who was a Soviet and later Russian spy for many years, died Monday at the age of 79 in a federal prison in Florence, Colorado. An American website reported on the death CBS News.
“Service of Corrections found him unconscious in his cell and immediately began CPR on Hanssen,” U.S. Bureau of Corrections Communications Director Kristie Breshears said in a statement. “The prisoner was subsequently declared dead by the called medical service,” she added.
Hanssen was arrested in 2001 and convicted of selling classified documents to the Soviet Union and later to Russia.
His career began in 1976 when he joined the US FBI. However, three years later he approached the Soviets and began to pass valuable information to the Soviet KGB secret service. He ended his espionage activities after a few years thanks to his wife’s pressure. But he started delivering to the Soviets again in 1985, and after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, he continued spying for the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service.
He sold thousands of secret documents to the Soviets and later to the Russians in exchange for more than one and a half million US dollars in cash, diamonds and other valuables.
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He used the alias “Ramon Garcia” for his espionage activities and communicated with foreign intelligence services via encrypted communications. He never met his counterpart in person.
His position with the FBI gave him access to a vast amount of secret documents concerning, for example, American preparations for a possible nuclear war, a secret tunnel under the Soviet embassy in Washington, DC. Soviet Union, such as Soviet General Dimitri Polyakov, who was later executed for spying for the United States.
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To his capture led to the acquisition of Hanssen’s fingerprints and a recording of his voice, which the FBI obtained after months of monitoring Hanssen. Over 300 FBI agents worked on his case.
After the spy Aldrich Hazen Ames was arrested by FBI agents in 1994, the bureau found that the leaks had not stopped. This triggered an undercover investigation of Hanssen. The FBI wanted to catch Hanssen red-handed, otherwise it would be difficult to convict him. But the problem was that he was about to quit the FBI. In order to keep him in their ranks longer, his superiors assigned him a fake task.
He accepted him, but it was already his new office riddled with hidden cameras and microphones.
2023-06-05 20:54:25
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