Who was Robert Hanssen? Former FBI agent convicted of spying for Russia dead at 79

Robert Hanssen was an American Federal Bureau of Investigation agent who spied for Soviet and Russian intelligence services against the United States from 1979 to 2001. His espionage was described by the Department of Justice as “possibly the worst intelligence disaster in US history”.

In 1979, three years after joining the FBI, Hanssen approached the Soviet Main Intelligence Directorate to offer his services, beginning his first espionage activities in 1985. 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. Hansden restarted communications the next year until his arrest.

Hanssen sold thousands of classified documents to the KGB that detailed US strategies in the event of nuclear war, developments in military weapons technologies, and aspects of the US counterintelligence program. He was saying at the same time as Aldrich Ames in Central Intelligence Agency.

Hanssen was arrested on February 18, 2001, at Folkestone Park, near his home in Washington, DC, a suburb of Vienna, Virginia, after leaving a package of classified materials at a dead drop site.