FBI agent and Russian spy Robert Hanssen found dead in Colorado supermax prison

A former FBI agent convicted of spying for Russia and serving a life sentence at a Colorado Supermax prison has died aged 79.

The agency confirmed Monday that Robert Hanssen became unresponsive at about 6:55 a.m. in his federal prison cell at the ADX in Florence, Colorado.

A cause of death has not yet been released, but authorities say there is no danger to the public.

Hannsen gained notoriety in the United States when he was arrested in 2001 and pleaded guilty to selling top secret material to the Soviet Union and later to Russia for more than 20 years.

He was sentenced to life in Supermax Prison, where he has languished for the past two decades.

After his arrest, details of Hanssen’s sordid life as a sexual deviant came to light when he allowed a friend to watch him and his wife have sex without her knowledge. Hanssen then began secretly recording the encounters and described his sex life in online chat rooms.

Hanssen – a devout member of the Opus Dei sect of the Catholic Church – also spent time with a stripper named Priscilla Sue Galey, giving her money, jewelry and even a 1985 Mercedes-Benz 190E sedan.

Bureau of Prisons officials said Monday that Hanssen had been found dead and no other staff or inmates were injured.

Responding prison staff took lifesaving measures, the agency said in a statement, but Hanssen was eventually pronounced dead by outside medical staff.

He was only 20 years into his 15 consecutive life sentences for espionage, conspiracy to commit espionage, and attempted espionage at the time of his death.

Hanssen began his operation just three years after being hired by the FBI, when he personally approached the Soviets.

He started spying for the KGB in 1979 until he was finally confronted by his wife

But in 1985, Hanssen continued his operation, selling thousands of classified documents related to human sources, counterintelligence techniques and investigations in exchange for more than $1.4 million in cash, diamonds and foreign bank deposits.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Hanssen again suspended his espionage operation, fearing he would be exposed, but he initiated communications with the KGB’s successor the following year.

Some of the information he was able to relay included details of US nuclear war preparations and a secret eavesdropping tunnel under the Soviet embassy in Washington, DC.

Throughout his career, Hanssen never personally met a Russian handler, instead using the alias ‘Ramon Garcia’ to relay encrypted communications and execute dead drops.

Hanssen was finally arrested on February 18, 2001, at a park near his home in the Washington DC suburb of Vienna, Virginia, where he was seen attempting a death fall.

Authorities first began to distrust Hanssen in the mid-1990s, after the arrest of Aldrich Ames, a former CIA counterintelligence officer who also spied for the USSR and Russia.

Both the FBI and CIA realized at the time that Ames had not been able to provide the KGB with all of the information it had obtained, and the two agencies formed a joint mole hunting team in 1994.

FBI agents later said it was complicated by the fact that several of Hanssen’s colleagues were investigating him, and that he had a habit of checking FBI records in a constant effort to see if he was being watched .

“He made no mistakes,” said Vincent Cannistrano, the former CIA director of counterintelligence. ABC news at the time.

But while they were investigating him, the FBI decided to transfer Hannsen from the State Department post he had held since 1995 and return him to FBI headquarters, where he was not authorized to contact him. have with Russian agents.

Hanssen’s identity was finally revealed after agents paid the KGB $7 million to obtain a file on their mole, and a Russian intelligence officer provided the FBI with a file containing a trash bag containing his fingerprints and a tape recording of his voice.

After his arrest, friend and neighbors seemed shocked by the allegations and many said Hanssen did not fit the profile. In articles shortly after his arrest in 2001, they described him as a man who didn’t swear, who sent his children to a private school of the Opus Dei Church, and a flimsy dress who didn’t have the makeup to move up the FBI ladder. to come.

Hanssen’s former colleagues said they would have been shocked if he spent the money he earned from espionage on women.

Instead, they told the New York Timesthey suspected that he probably used the money to pay for his sons’ prep school and his daughters’ Catholic school.

Religion played a central role in Hanssen’s life, as he was a regular attendee of St. Catherine of Siena Catholic Church in Great Falls, Virginia. Other members included former FBI Director Louis J Freeh and Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.

When his wife first learned of his espionage, she did not force him to confess to the authorities, but admitted his crimes. in confession with Catholic priests.

Hanssen was respected at the FBI, though friends said he looked like he was at the pinnacle of his career and was just months away from retirement when he was arrested. He often denounced the Russians as “godless,” despite his years of association with them.

The colleagues also described how he didn’t spend time with them in strip clubs and passed up the opportunity.

But he had a secret relationship with a stripper, which she said was not sexual.

The two would only meet in private, according to one Washington Post interview with Galey, who said he would never allow her to take a picture of him. When he found out there was one shot of him from Hong Kong, Galey said he took it from her and quickly destroyed it.

“I had the courage to ask him a few times what was going on, and he always laughed and said, ‘I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you,'” she said at the time.

Hanssen cut off contact with her before his arrest, claiming he was trying to convert her to Catholicism.