Robert Philip Hanssen (April 18, 1944 – June 5, 2023) was an American Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agent who spied for Soviet and Russian intelligence services against the United States from 1979 to 2001.

[2] In 1979, three years after joining the FBI, Hanssen approached the Soviet Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU) to offer his services, beginning his first espionage cycle, lasting until 1981.

Hanssen sold about six thousand 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 was arrested on February 18, 2001, at Foxstone Park,[4] 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, diamonds and Rolex watches over twenty-two years.

[3][12] Hanssen graduated from William Howard Taft High School in 1962 and attended Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois, where he earned a bachelor's degree in chemistry in 1966.

[18] During his first espionage cycle, Hanssen provided a significant amount of information to the GRU, including details of the FBI's bugging activities and lists of suspected Soviet intelligence agents.

[24] In the letter, he gave the names of three KGB agents secretly working for the FBI: Boris Yuzhin, Valery Martinov, and Sergei Motorin.

[25] Yuzhin had returned to Moscow in 1982 and had been subject to an intensive investigation by the KGB because he had lost a concealed camera in the Soviet consulate in San Francisco, but he was not arrested until exposed by Ames and Hanssen.

Martynov and Motorin were executed via gunshot to the back of the head; Yuzhin was imprisoned for six years before he was released by a general amnesty granted political prisoners and he subsequently immigrated to the U.S.[27] Because the FBI blamed Ames for the leak, Hanssen was neither suspected nor investigated.

He was tasked with studying all known and rumored penetrations of the FBI to find the man who had betrayed Martynov and Motorin; this meant, in effect, that he was charged with searching for himself.

The FBI could not produce any good evidence, and as a result, Bloch was never charged with a crime, although the State Department later terminated his employment and denied his pension.

[3][35] When the USSR disbanded in December 1991, Hanssen, possibly worried that he could be exposed during the ensuing political upheaval, ended communications with his handlers for a time.

[36] The following year, after the Russian Federation assumed control of the defunct Soviet spy agencies, Hanssen made a risky approach to the GRU, with whom he had not been in contact for ten months.

Hanssen, carrying a package of documents, identified himself by his Soviet code name, "Ramon Garcia", and described himself as a "disaffected FBI agent" who was offering his services as a spy.

[40] IT personnel from the National Security Division's (NSD) Internet Information Services (IIS) Unit were sent to investigate Hanssen's desktop computer after a reported failure.

A digital investigation found that an attempted hacking had occurred using a password cracking program installed by Hanssen, which caused a security alert and lockup.

[45] By 1998, using FBI criminal profiling techniques, the pursuers suspected an innocent man: Brian Kelley, a CIA operative involved in the Bloch investigation.

In November 1998, they had a man with a foreign accent come to Kelley's door, warn him that the FBI knew he was a spy, and tell him to show up at a Metro station the next day to escape.

[3][46] FBI investigators later made progress during an operation where they paid disaffected Russian intelligence officers to deliver information on moles.

When O'Neill was able to briefly obtain Hanssen's PDA and have agents download and decode its encrypted contents, the FBI acquired their conclusive evidence.

In the last letter he wrote to the Russians, which was found by the FBI when he was arrested, Hanssen said that he had been promoted to a "do-nothing job ... outside of regular access to information" and that "Something has aroused the sleeping tiger".

He then followed his usual routine, taking a sealed garbage bag of classified material and taping it to the bottom side of a wooden footbridge over a creek.

[58] Represented by Washington, D.C., lawyer Plato Cacheris, Hanssen negotiated a plea bargain that enabled him to avoid the death penalty in exchange for cooperating with authorities.

[60][61][62] Hanssen never told the KGB or GRU his identity and refused to meet them personally, except for the abortive 1993 contact in the Russian embassy parking garage (see: here).

[71] Opus Dei member C. John McCloskey said he also occasionally attended the daily noontime Mass at the Catholic Information Center in downtown Washington, D.C.. After being imprisoned, Hanssen claimed he periodically admitted his espionage to priests in confession.

[73] He also explicitly described the sexual details of his marriage in Internet chat rooms, giving information sufficient for those who knew them to recognize the couple.

[74] Hanssen frequently visited D.C. strip clubs and spent a great deal of time with a Washington stripper named Priscilla Sue Galey.

The investigation was further covered in Eric O'Neill's memoir Gray Day: My Undercover Mission to Expose America's First Cyber Spy, published by Penguin Random House in the spring of 2019.

[81] Hanssen was mentioned in chapter 5 of Dan Brown's book The Da Vinci Code as the most noted Opus Dei member to non-members.