Robert Philip Hanssen (born April 18, 1944) is an American former FBI double agent who spied for Soviet and Russian intelligence services against the United States from 1976 to 2001. His espionage was described by the Department of Justice as "possibly the worst intelligence disaster in U.S. history." Hanssen is currently serving 15 consecutive life sentences without parole at ADX Florence, a federal supermax prison near Florence, Colorado.
Hanssen sold thousands of classified documents to the KGB that detailed U.S. strategies in the event of nuclear war, developments in military weapons technologies, and aspects of the U.S. counterintelligence program. Hanssen also revealed a multimillion-dollar eavesdropping tunnel built by the FBI under the Soviet Embassy. The FBI paid $7 million to a KGB agent to obtain a file on an anonymous mole, whom the FBI later identified as Hanssen through fingerprint and voice analysis.
Hanssen was arrested on February 18, 2001, at Foxstone Park near his home in the Washington, D.C. suburb of Vienna, Virginia, after leaving a package of classified materials at a dead drop site. He was charged with selling U.S. intelligence documents to the Soviet Union and subsequently Russia for more than $1.4 million in cash and diamonds over a 22-year period.
