Robert Hanssen

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. He also revealed an expensive secret tunnel dug under the Soviet embassy for the purpose of eavesdropping. He compromised the investigation of Felix Bloch, State Department official accussed of working with the Soviets; he gave them the plan of a program for the continuity of government in case of a Soviet nuclear attack, and planned defense and retaliation. And others.

According to USA Today, "[t]hose 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."

According to the New York Observer, August 6, 2001: "On July 29, the Los Angeles Times published a lengthy investigation of his role as a top F.B.I. overseer of domestic counterintelligence operations. From documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, ... the Times discovered that Mr. Hanssen spent several years directing the bureau's notorious Reagan-era probes of American liberal and peace organizations. Such groups were deemed inimical to the objectives of the conservatives then in power, who tended to regard dissent over the nuclear-arms race and war in Central America as Soviet-influenced and subversive. ... As later Congressional investigations would show, what this often meant in practice was the harassment and sometimes the smearing of Americans engaged in lawful political activity. Among the many groups under surveillance by the F.B.I. in those days were the Gray Panthers, nuclear-freeze advocates associated with SANE-and the left-leaning Catholic adversaries of Opus Dei who opposed the American-backed repression in Central America."

"Robert Novak. The conservative columnist admitted on July 12 that Mr. Hanssen had served as his main source for a 1997 column attacking Janet Reno, then the U.S. Attorney General, for supposedly covering up 1996 campaign-finance scandals. "

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 Supreme 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, [ the following in not supported in accounts I have read: 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; he would be the person in the office to fix the computers. He used Linux at home:

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