The next year, Hanssen was transferred to counterintelligence and given the task of compiling a database of Soviet intelligence for the FBI. In 1978, he and his growing family of three (eventually six) children relocated to New York City when the bureau transferred him to its field office there. Upon becoming a special agent on January 12, 1976, Hanssen was transferred to the FBI's field office in Gary, Indiana. Career and espionage FBI career and first espionage activities (1976–1981)
The couple married in 1968, and Hanssen converted from Lutheranism to his wife's Catholicism. Hanssen met Bernadette "Bonnie" Wauck, a staunch Roman Catholic, while attending dental school at Northwestern. In January 1976, Hanssen left the Chicago police to join the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). He quit after one year and joined the Chicago Police Department as an internal affairs investigator, specializing in forensic accounting. Hanssen received an MBA in accounting and information systems in 1971 and took a job with an accounting firm.
He enrolled in dental school at Northwestern University, but he switched his focus to business after three years. Hanssen applied for a cryptography job at the National Security Agency following his college graduation but was turned down due to budget setbacks. Hanssen graduated from William Howard Taft High School in 1962 and attended Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois, where he earned a bachelor's degree in chemistry in 1966. His father, Howard (died 1993 ), a Chicago police officer, was allegedly emotionally abusive to Hanssen during his childhood. Robert Hanssen was born in Chicago, Illinois, to a Lutheran family who lived in the Norwood Park neighborhood. He was sentenced to fifteen life terms without the possibility of parole, and was incarcerated at ADX Florence until his death in 2023. To avoid the death penalty, Hanssen pleaded guilty to fourteen counts of espionage and one of conspiracy to commit espionage. intelligence documents to the Soviet Union and subsequently Russia for more than $1.4 million in cash and diamonds over twenty-two years. Hanssen was arrested on February 18, 2001, at Foxstone Park, near his home in the Washington, D.C., suburb of Vienna, Virginia, after leaving a package of classified materials at a dead drop site. The FBI paid $7 million to a KGB agent to obtain a file on an anonymous mole, whom the FBI later identified as Hanssen through fingerprint and voice analysis. After Ames' arrest in 1994, some of these intelligence breaches remained unsolved, and the search for another spy continued. Hanssen also revealed a multimillion-dollar eavesdropping tunnel built by the FBI under the Soviet Embassy. Both Ames and Hanssen compromised the names of KGB agents working secretly for the U.S., some of whom were executed for their betrayal. He was spying at the same time as Aldrich Ames in the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). strategies in the event of nuclear war, developments in military weapons technologies, and aspects of the U.S. Hanssen sold thousands of classified documents to the KGB that detailed U.S. Throughout his spying, he remained anonymous to the Russians. Hanssen restarted communications the next year and continued until his arrest. He restarted his espionage activities in 1985 and continued until 1991, when he ended communications during the collapse of the Soviet Union, fearing he would be exposed. In 1979, three years after joining the FBI, Hanssen approached the Soviet Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU) to offer his services, beginning his first espionage cycle, lasting until 1981. His espionage was described by the Department of Justice as "possibly the worst intelligence disaster in U.S. Robert Philip Hanssen (Ap– June 5, 2023) was an American Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agent who spied for Soviet and Russian intelligence services against the United States from 1979 to 2001.
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