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Robert Philip Hanssen, who received payments of $1.4 million in cash and diamonds for the information he gave the Soviet Union and Russia, has died at the age of 79, the Federal Bureau of Prisons announced Monday. Hanssen had been in custody at Colorado’s USP Florence ADMAX since July 17, 2002. In 2001, he pleaded guilty to 15 counts of espionage and conspiracy in exchange for the government not seeking the death penalty. He was sentenced to life in prison...

Robert Hanssen, 79, a former FBI agent who admitted to spying for Moscow, has been found dead in prison. He was discovered unresponsive at a maximum-security facility in Florence, Colorado, on Monday morning.

A former FBI agent convicted of espionage for Russia and serving a life sentence in a Colorado Supermax prison has died at the age of 79. The bureau confirmed Monday that Robert Hanssen was found unresponsive in his supermax federal prison cell at the ADX in Florence, Colorado around 6.55am. A cause of death has not yet been released, but officials say there is no threat to the public. Hannsen became notorious in the United States when he was arrested in 2001 and pleaded guilty to selling highly classified materials to the Soviet Union and later Russia for more than...

At approximately 8 PM on Sunday, February 18, 2001, there was a knock on my front door. At the time I was a Special Agent (SA) with the FBI, so imagine my shock when I opened the door and found the two top officials in the Division on my doorstep. I knew this couldn't possibly be good news, but they quickly sought to reassure me. "Everything is all right, but Bob Hanssen has been arrested." All right? Bob Hanssen was my brother in law, and a longtime counterintelligence (CI) official at FBIHQ, privy to a vast range of sensitive intelligence...

On this date in 1987, a once-promising American intelligence asset was executed with a single gunshot to the head in Moscow — his treachery exposed by two of the most infamous Soviet moles in U.S. intelligence history. A Lieutenant Colonel in the KGB posted to the Soviets’ official Washington, D.C. offices in 1980, Martynov had turned in 1982 and begun funneling intelligence to the CIA and FBI under the cryptonym “Gentile”. Truth be told, he was a mediocre source, but he was a younger officer with the chance to grow into a more important asset in the years ahead. Fate...

SAN DIEGO -- An Egyptian-born financial analyst charged in a nationwide stock swindle may have known about the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and tried to profit from them, a federal prosecutor said Friday. Amr I. "Tony" Elgindy telephoned his broker on Sept. 10 and asked him to liquidate his children's $300,000 trust account, Assistant U.S. Attorney Ken Breen told a federal judge at Elgindy's detention hearing. "He made a comment predicting the market would drop to 3,000" at a time when the Dow Jones stock index was at 9,600, Breen said. "Perhaps Mr. Elgindy had pre-knowledge of the Sept....

WASHINGTON - One of the most damaging espionage cases in U.S. history was more the result of poor oversight by the FBI than master spying by Robert Hanssen, said a Justice Department report released Thursday. The FBI's deficiencies, including an almost blind trust in its own agents, enabled Hanssen to spy for the Soviet Union and Russia for more than two decades, according to the investigation by inspector general Glenn A. Fine. The report concluded that Hanssen, a top FBI counterespionage official, received little supervision and the bureau had few checks in place that would deter him from spying or...

What's up in the spy world? William F. Buckley (archive) The Big Bad Russians have pulled a fast one which bears pondering. The victim is one Aleksandr Zaporozhsky, by U.S. lights a hero, by Russian lights, a traitor. We learn that in November, 2001, he was enticed to revisit his homeland, on stepping foot in which he was whisked off, tried, and sentenced to 18 years in prison. Several questions immediately arise. True, Zaporozhsky spied against Moscow, but when he did that, he was spying against a Soviet regime ultimately repudiated by the Russian people. It was ten years between...

Arguing that the CIA has no right to withhold records that are more than 30 years old, a watchdog group filed a motion this week seeking a federal court to compel the spy agency to reveal what it knows about the conservative Catholic group that is the stuff of legend. Public Citizen is working on behalf of Harry Cason, a Ph.D. student at the City University of New York who filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to the CIA in 2009 for research he was doing on the U.S. role in Spain’s Franco regime, where Opus Dei allegedly played...

The FBI was warned 11 years ago that agent Robert P. Hanssen might be spying for the Russians, but the bureau failed to investigate for nearly a decade, according to a new book on one of the most damaging espionage cases in U.S. history. In "The Bureau and the Mole," Washington Post reporter David A. Vise writes that Hanssen's brother-in-law, Mark Wauck, an FBI agent in Chicago, discovered in 1990 that Hanssen "was hiding thousands of dollars in cash" in his house and "spending too much money for someone on an FBI salary." Wauck reported his suspicions to his supervisors ...

Nine Lives, The Story of Felix Bloch By William John Hagan Houston Home Journal 09/03/2005 Felix Bloch is without question one of the world's most over-qualifiedbus drivers. The former grocery store bag boy took a second job as a busdriver in North Carolina in 1992. It was a wise move, as Mr. Bloch's careerin the food industry came to a screeching halt when he stole about onehundred dollars worth of food from his primary employer. This was Felix'sonly criminal conviction and while he lost his job bagging groceries, the bus companyallowed him to stay on as a driver. Before his...

I'll get the C-SPAN link in a moment.

Recently a number of former CIA officers received an invitation from the Spy Museum in Washington to attend a luncheon for former KGB Col. Victor Cherkashin. The event, as the invitation said, would afford "a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to dine and dish with an extraordinary spymaster." In the heyday of the Cold War, such an offer, delivered with slightly more discretion, might have been the prelude to a KGB recruitment operation. Now it's merely the notice for a book party celebrating yet another memoir by a former KGB officer recounting how the KGB duped the CIA. In this case, there is...

"Espionage then and today is very real and active measures, manipulation of public opinion, was very real at that time." On the CBS Evening News on July 30th, Dan Rather acted as if he had a big scoop. He said, "Newly released FBI documents obtained by CBS News reveal a widespread domestic spying and intelligence operation. Thousands of ordinary American citizens were under surveillance throughout the 1980s." Rather said these individuals appeared in FBI files because the bureau was monitoring Soviet "active measures" or influence activities directed at Americans. Rather said they included disinformation, the use of front groups and...

<p>Two years ago, Robert Philip Hanssen, 59, a former very senior FBI official with 27 years of service, was sentenced to life in prison. Hanssen had been spying for the Russians and betrayed American intelligence sources and electronics secrets from as early as 1979.</p>

Review of the FBI's Performance in Deterring, Detecting, and Investigating the Espionage Activities of Robert Philip Hanssen August 14, 2003 Office of the Inspector General -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- UNCLASSIFIED EXECUTIVE SUMMARY I. Introduction In this report, the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) of the Department of Justice (DOJ) examines the performance of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in deterring, detecting, and investigating the espionage of Robert Philip Hanssen, a former FBI Supervisory Special Agent. Hanssen's espionage began in November 1979 - three years after he joined the FBI - and continued intermittently until his arrest in February 2001, just two...

The Moscow Military District Court has ruled that it was Colonel Aleksander Zaporozhsky who gave up Robert Hanssen to the CIA. The court ended up giving the former intelligence officer an even stiffer sentence than the prosecutor had demanded. On Wednesday the former Colonel of the Foreign Intelligence Service Aleksander Zaporozhsky was found guilty of high treason in the form of revealing state secrets to the USA. Zaporozhsky was sentenced to 18 years in a high security labour camp and stripped of his military rank and all state decorations, though his property will not be confiscated. During his service, Zaporozhsky...

<p>The head of a computer firm wants the independent commission named to investigate September 11 intelligence failures to review accusations that his software-tracking program, which he says the Justice Department stole, was diverted to Osama bin Laden.</p> <p>William H. Hamilton, president of Inslaw Inc., said the commission — headed by former New Jersey Gov. David H. Kean — should focus on the validity of published reports saying bin Laden penetrated classified computer files before the attacks to evade detection and monitor the activities of U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies.</p>

<p>The head of a computer firm wants the independent commission named to investigate September 11 intelligence failures to review accusations that his software-tracking program, which he says the Justice Department stole, was diverted to Osama bin Laden.</p> <p>William H. Hamilton, president of Inslaw Inc., said the commission — headed by former New Jersey Gov. David H. Kean — should focus on the validity of published reports saying bin Laden penetrated classified computer files before the attacks to evade detection and monitor the activities of U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies.</p>

U.S. Government Flunks Computer Security The good news is that Attorney General John Ashcroft has authorized the development of a secure computer system to help the FBI track and obtain approval for surveillance warrants in the war on terror. The bad news is that the federal government will run that computer system. According to a newly released report from the General Accounting Office (GAO), the U.S. government failed to provide adequate computer security over its own systems. The GAO report covered computer systems operated by 24 agencies, including sensitive data manipulated by the U.S. Justice Department and the U.S. Defense...