He has been called “the most dangerous spy in US history United States“, given that from 1979 until 2002, the year in which he was arrested, he provided Mosca documents classified among the most sensitive of the American administration. Robert Philip Hanssen, the former Bureau agent convicted of spying for the USSR and Russia, was found dead in his cell. He was 79 years old.
Held since 2002 in the maximum security prison Florence, in Colorado, Hanssen was a strange spy: follower of theThe Work of God, conservative e anti-communist, he secretly frequented strippers who he took with him to church to convince them to a religious life. Among the many information passed on to Kremlin in exchange for payments for $1.4 million in bills and diamonds there were details of the US reaction plans in the event of a nuclear attack. After the arrest in February 2001 the then president George W. Bush expelled 50 Russian diplomats: a decision balanced by Mosca with as many expulsions, but at an international level the case ended there, it was so embarrassing.
Known as ‘Ramon Garcia‘ or under the codename ‘B’, Hanssen had at least two Russian agents on his conscience, Gennady Varennik e Dmitri Poliakovarrested in 1985 and 1986 and killed with the classic blow to the back of the head: but there could have been more victims of his betrayal since there were about twenty Russians hired by the Usa who were discovered and executed after 1985, the year of arrival in the Kremlin of Mikhail Gorbachev.
At the trial, in which he avoided the death penalty by coming out guilty, many aspects of the personality of Moscow’s unlikely ally had intrigued. Every Sunday Hanssen carried the family – wife and six children – in a church far from his home a vienna (Virginia), only because it was the only one in the area where mass was still celebrated in latino: the then director of the FBI is also on the benches Louis Freeh and the Supreme Court justice Anthony Scalia.
All children of Hanssen had attended private schools run by theThe Work of God: the cost of the fees would have been, according to him, one reason so he started spying. But there was not only this: as you told al Washington Post a former colleague, the mole aspired “to do James Bond, while the FBI had put him behind a desk. Hence the betrayalwhich began in 1979, three years after I was hired at Bureauand continued despite the end of the cold war, the collapse of the USSR, the advent of Russia and the disappearance of the old services.
In what a federal commission in 2002 he called it “the worst disaster in the history of intelligence”, the activities of Hanssen they brought to light the cracks of the secret services which then emerged even more conspicuously a few months later with the massacres of 11 September.