FBI's Most Valuable Spy Dies in Prison

Bureau of Prisons (BOP) spokeswoman Kristie Beshears said that when they discovered Hanssen's condition, prison staff attempted to resuscitate him and "requested emergency medical services." Emergency medical personnel outside later pronounced Hanssen dead.

Hanssen is believed to have died of natural causes, AP sources said.

According to RT , Hanssen (79 years old) is serving a life sentence in the highest security prison in the US. Florence ADMAX prison is famous for keeping prisoners in solitary confinement for up to 23 hours a day.

Hanssen was arrested in February 2001 after dumping a body in a Virginia park. He pleaded guilty to selling classified information to the Soviet Union and then Russia and was sentenced in May 2022.

Gián điệp gây thiệt hại nặng nề nhất cho FBI vừa chết trong tù - Ảnh 1.

Robert Hanssen after his arrest in 2001. Photo: Wikimedia Commons

His undercover work with the FBI began in 1979. For more than 20 years, Hanssen never visited Russia or met his handlers in person.

The KGB and later the SVR knew him only by the alias "Ramon Garcia". They contacted each other through a "car for sale" advertisement in a local newspaper.

Working in American counterintelligence, Hanssen knew almost every detail about secret operations targeting the Soviet Union.

Among the secrets Hanssen traded to Russia in exchange for money and diamonds were the identities of at least three KGB officers secretly working for the Americans, American preparations for nuclear war, and the existence of a secret tunnel beneath the Soviet embassy in Washington, DC.

According to FBI records, Hanssen earned about $1.4 million in cash and diamonds from selling intelligence over 16 years.

The FBI called Hanssen "the most damaging spy in the history of the bureau." His activities "may have been the worst intelligence disaster in American history."

Hanssen's revelations, along with those of CIA double agents Edward Lee Howard and Aldrich Ames, completely destroyed the CIA's intelligence network operating in the Soviet Union in the mid-1980s, according to former US weapons inspector Scott Ritter.

Meanwhile, Hanssen lived a quiet life in the suburbs with his wife, Bonnie, and their six children. Bonnie later told reporters that she had confronted her husband about the spying in 1979, but he had convinced her that he was only fooling the Soviets by giving them false information.

In an interview in March 2020, SVR chief Sergey Naryshkin said that Hanssen and Ames "made a simply outstanding contribution to the security of the Soviet Union."

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