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. His espionage was described by the Department of Justice as "possibly the worst intelligence disaster in U.S. history".
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. He restarted his espionage activities in 1985 and continued until 1991, when he ended communications during the collapse of the Soviet Union, fearing he would be exposed. Hanssen restarted communications the next year and continued until his arrest. Throughout his spying, he remained anonymous to the Russians.
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.[3] He was spying at the same time as Aldrich Ames in the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Both Ames and Hanssen compromised the names of KGB agents working secretly for the U.S., some of whom were executed for their betrayal. Hanssen also revealed a multimillion-dollar eavesdropping tunnel built by the FBI under the Soviet Embassy. After Ames's arrest in 1994, some of these intelligence breaches remained unsolved, and the search for another spy continued. 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,[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.[5][6] To avoid the death penalty, Hanssen pleaded guilty to fourteen counts of espionage and one of conspiracy to commit espionage.[7][8] He was sentenced to fifteen life terms without the possibility of parole, and was incarcerated at ADX Florence until his death in 2023.[9]
Robert James Woolsey Jr. (born September 21, 1941) is an American political appointee who has served in various senior positions. He headed the Central Intelligence Agency as Director of Central Intelligence from February 5, 1993, until January 10, 1995. He held a variety of government positions in the 1970s and 1980s, including as United States Under Secretary of the Navy from 1977 to 1979, and was involved in treaty negotiations with the Soviet Union for five years in the 1980s. His career also included time as a professional lawyer, venture capitalist and investor in the private sector.
David Wise (May 10, 1930 – October 8, 2018) was an American journalist and author who worked for the New York Herald-Tribune in the 1950s and 1960s, and published a series of non-fiction books on espionage and US politics as well as several spy novels.[1] His book The Politics of Lying: Government Deception, Secrecy, and Power (1973) won the George Polk Award (Book category, 1973), and the George Orwell Award (1975).
In 1951, Wise joined the New York Herald-Tribune and became the paper's White House correspondent in 1960. He was chief of the paper's Washington, D.C. bureau from 1963 to 1966.[3] In 1970–71 he was a Fellow of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and in 1977–79, he lectured in political science at the University of California, Santa Barbara.[3] He was later a commentator on intelligence issues for CNN for six years.[3]
Beginning in 1962 with an examination of the Lockheed U-2, Wise published a series of non-fiction books, the first three with Thomas B. Ross. Their book Invisible Government (1964), exposed the role of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in foreign policy. This included CIA coups in Guatemala (Operation PBSuccess) and Iran (Operation Ajax) and the Bay of Pigs Invasion. It also revealed the CIA's attempts to overthrow President Sukarno in Indonesia and the covert operations taking place in Laos and Vietnam. Wise and Ross claimed that the CIA considered buying up the entire printing of Invisible Government, but this idea was rejected when Random House pointed out that if this happened they would have to print a second edition.[4] A confidential CIA review of Invisible Government, declassified in 1995, declared that "In Great Britain, which is second to none in its devotion to liberty, there exists an Official Secrets Act under which the authors would have been tried and sentenced to prison..."
Информация по комментариям в разработке