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Robert HanssenRobert Philip Hanssen (born April 18, 1944) was an FBI agent who was convicted of spying for the Soviet Union, later Russia. He was arrested on February 20, 2001 at a park near his home in Vienna, Virginia, and charged with selling American secrets to Moscow for $1.4 million in cash and diamonds over a 15-year period. Born in Chicago, he was son of a policeman. Court documents say he told his Moscow handlers that he read Kim Philby's book (autobiography My Silent War was published in 1968, so he meant a different book, or was lying to his Moscow handlers, or mistaken) at age 14 and thought of him as a hero. Philby was a mole in British intellegence who eventually defected to the Soviet Union. He attended Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois, and studied chemistry, Russian; enrolled and dropped out of dentistry school, got a masters of accounting, got a business job but quit to join the Chicago police as an internal corruption investigator, before joining the FBI counterintelligence unit. In 1979 he made his first traitorly act, revealing to the Soviets that Soviet official General Dmitri Fedorovich Polyakov of the GRU was selling Soviet secrets to the USA, mostly out of hatred for the current "corrupt" Soviet leadership. He was the most important mole of this period. Hanssen's wife Bonnie found out from Hanssen due to some strange behaviour; Hanssen half-confessed that he sold some worthless facts for $20,000. Bonnie made him confess to a priest, identified by the New York Times as the Reverend Robert P. Bucciarelli, former head of Opus Dei in the USA. (Shannon, page 82). The actual confession and advice is privileged; the priest did not break his vow of confidentiality; the spying continued for years. Hanssen was transferred to the Washington, DC, office and moved to suburb Vienna, Virginia. In 1986 he sold to the Soviets the names of three KGB agents in America secretly working for the FBI. (Boris Yuzhin, Valery Martynov, Sergei Motorin). However, these three may have already been betrayed by traitor CIA agent Aldrich Ames; they were soon recalled to Russia to their fate. Because the FBI could attribute the leak to Ames, the trail to Hanssen was diverted. According to USA Today, "those who know the Hanssens describe them as a close family. They attended Mass weekly. Four of the children attended Our Lady of Good Counsel Catholic School, which now covers kindergarten through eighth grade, in Vienna. Only two of the children remain at home, a comfortable brown frame house with a basketball hoop on the side of the house." Other accounts say Hanssen attended Mass daily. USA Today: "His biggest fear, Hanssen confided, was "someone like me" an agent on the Russian side with knowledge of Hanssen's spying who decided to work for the Americans. A former CIA counterintelligence expert, Vincent Cannistraro, suspects that that is what happened." Hanssen hired lawyer Plato Cacheris. On May 10, 2002 in exchange for cooperating with authorities, he was spared the death penalty and sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole, and his wife Bernadette ("Bonnie") (with six kids) does get the survivor's part of her husband's pension, $39,000 per year. (Shannon, page 229). Hanssen was also a member of the arch-conservative Catholic semi-secret organization Opus Dei, as was, according to some rumours, the head of the FBI at the time, Louis Freeh. They attended the same church; other church members include Suupreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and Senator Rick Santorum (R-Pa). His favorite novel was The Man who was Thrusday, G K Chesterton, about a group of policemen with secret lives. He liked to post stories to alt.sex.stories about his wife: http://groups-beta.google.com/group/alt.sex.stories/msg/4727dea24ebc8e94 From: "Robert P. Hanssen" Subject: Bonnie (wife, exhib, true) Date: 1998/06/05 Message-ID: <357804BB.43053579@nova.org> Newsgroups: alt.sex.stories It was only around four in the afternoon, and Bonnie still had plenty of time as she walked over and perched on the high wooden stool. She sat, freshly showered and still naked,... If his internet postings can be believed, Robert P. Hanssen shared pornographic photos of his wife with his best friend, drugged his wife with Rohypnol so his friend could have sex with her, secretly broadcast his sex acts over closed-circuit television to his guest room, and perhaps cheated on his wife with a stripper, (although the stripper denies it was a sexual relationship) --- all while working as an FBI agent and selling secrets to the Soviets. Also, he was a ham radio operator since childhood, liked computers and was techically savvy, and used Linux: From: "Robert P. Hanssen" Subject: Panasonic DC1080 Date: 1998/06/11 Message-ID: <357FF6E9.6A0FB8E@nova.org>#1/1 Newsgroups: rec.photo.digital Does anyone know the protocol for downloading the images from this camera? Trying to get a program that works under LINUX. Further reading - Kim Philby, My Silent War, 1968, Granda Publishing, ISBN 0-586-02860-9
- Lawrence Schiller, Master Spy: The Life of Robert P. Hanssen, (original title, Into the Mirror), based upon an investigaion by Norman Mailer, HarperCollins, 2002, ISBN 0-06-051281-4
- Elaine Shannon and Ann Blackman, The Spy Next Door : The Extraordinary Secret Life of Robert Philip Hanssen, The Most Damaging FBI Agent in US History, Liittle Brown, 2002 ISBN 0-316-71821-1
- David Vise, The Bureau and the Mole: The Unmasking of Robert Philip Hanssen, the Most Dangerous Double Agent in FBI History, Grove Publishers, 2001, ISBN 0641579985
External link Hanssen, Robert Hanssen, Robert
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