Former FBI agent Robert Hanssen, sentenced to life in jail as a Russian spy, was discovered useless on Monday inside his cell on the Florence ADMAX in Colorado, the US Bureau of Prisons stated.
Upon discovering Hanssen, jail employees tried to revive him and “requested emergency medical providers,” Bureau of Prisons spokeswoman Kristie Beshears stated in a press release. “The inmate was subsequently pronounced useless by exterior emergency medical personnel.”
The 79-year-old was serving a life sentence within the Administrative Most Facility, the supermax safety jail infamous for conserving inmates in solitary for 23 hours a day.
Hanssen was arrested in February 2001, after making a useless drop in a Virginia park. He pleaded responsible to promoting categorised data to the Soviet Union and later Russia, and was sentenced in Might 2022.
His profession as a “mole” contained in the FBI went again to 1979. In over 20 years, Hanssen by no means visited Russia or met his handlers straight. The KGB and its successor company, the SVR, knew him solely by the alias “Ramon Garcia.” They communicated through “automotive on the market” adverts in a neighborhood newspaper.
As a consequence of his place in US counterintelligence, Hanssen knew virtually all the main points of secret operations concentrating on the Soviets. Among the many secrets and techniques Hanssen traded to Moscow, in trade for cash and diamonds, had been the identities of a minimum of three KGB officers secretly working for the Individuals, US preparations for nuclear struggle, and the existence of a secret tunnel beneath the Soviet embassy in Washington, DC.
The FBI referred to as Hanssen “the most damaging spy in Bureau historical past,” whereas his actions have been described as “presumably the worst intelligence catastrophe in US historical past.”
Hanssen’s disclosures, together with these of CIA double brokers Edward Lee Howard and Aldrich Ames, “had been answerable for the literal annihilation of the CIA’s human intelligence networks working within the USSR throughout the mid-Nineteen Eighties,” based on former US weapons inspector Scott Ritter.
In the meantime, Hanssen lived a quiet life within the suburbs together with his spouse Bonnie and 6 youngsters. Bonnie would later inform journalists that she confronted him concerning the spying in 1979, however he was capable of persuade her he was “deceiving” the Soviets by feeding them false data.
In a March 2020 interview, SVR head Sergey Naryshkin stated that Ames and Hanssen had “made a merely excellent contribution to the safety of the Soviet Union.”
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