Former FBI agent Robert Hanssen, sentenced to life in prison as a Russian spy, was found dead on Monday inside his cell at the Florence ADMAX in Colorado, the US Bureau of Prisons said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Upon discovering Hanssen, prison staff tried to revive him and \u201crequested emergency medical services,\u201d Bureau of Prisons spokeswoman Kristie Beshears said in a statement. \u201cThe inmate was subsequently pronounced dead by outside emergency medical personnel.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The 79-year-old was serving a life sentence in the Administrative Maximum Facility, the supermax security prison notorious for keeping inmates in solitary for 23 hours a day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Hanssen was arrested in February 2001, after making a dead drop in a Virginia park. He pleaded guilty to selling classified information to the Soviet Union and later Russia, and was sentenced in May 2022.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
His career as a \u201cmole\u201d inside the FBI went back to 1979. In over 20 years, Hanssen never visited Russia or met his handlers directly. The KGB and its successor agency, the SVR, knew him only by the alias \u201cRamon Garcia.\u201d They communicated via \u201ccar for sale\u201d ads in a local newspaper.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Due to his position in US counterintelligence, Hanssen knew almost all the details of secret operations targeting the Soviets. Among the secrets Hanssen traded to Moscow, in exchange for money and diamonds, were the identities of at least three KGB officers secretly working for the Americans, US preparations for nuclear war, and the existence of a secret tunnel under the Soviet embassy in Washington, DC.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The FBI called Hanssen \u201cthe most damaging<\/a> spy in Bureau history,\u201d while his activities have been described as \u201cpossibly the worst intelligence disaster in US history.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Hanssen\u2019s disclosures, along with those of CIA double agents Edward Lee Howard and Aldrich Ames, \u201cwere responsible for the literal annihilation of the CIA\u2019s human intelligence networks operating in the USSR during the mid-1980s,\u201d according to former US weapons inspector Scott Ritter<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Meanwhile, Hanssen lived a quiet life in the suburbs with his wife Bonnie and six children. Bonnie would later tell journalists that she confronted him about the spying in 1979, but he was able to convince her he was \u201cdeceiving\u201d the Soviets by feeding them false information.<\/p>\n\n\n\n