1 of 1 Robert Hanssen, a former FBI spy convicted of working for Russia Photo: FBI/Via Portal Robert Hanssen, a former FBI spy convicted of working for Russia Photo: FBI/Via Portal
US officials said Robert Hanssen, the former FBI agent and spy whom the agency says is the most damaging in its history, was found dead in his cell on Monday.
Hanssen, 79, was sentenced to life in prison in 2002 after pleading guilty to spying for the Soviet Union and then Russia for more than 20 years.
After Hanssen was found unconscious early Monday morning, prison officials launched rescue efforts but were unsuccessful, the prison authority said in a statement. Hannsen’s cause of death was not mentioned in the note. Hanse
The former agent joined the FBI in 1976 and began selling classified information to the Soviet Union in 1985, according to the FBI website.
At the time of his arrest in 2001, he had received more than $1.4 million in cash, bank deposits and diamonds in exchange for compromising various human sources, intelligence techniques and confidential US documents, the FBI website said.
FBI investigators worked for years to identify the spy among their ranks. According to the FBI, in the weeks leading up to his February 2001 arrest, about 300 people worked on the investigation and monitored Hanssen.
An arrest team took Hanssen into custody after he was caught dropping classified material in a suburban park a method of transferring data and information to another location for someone else to pick up. says the FBI.
He had been serving his life sentence in a maximumsecurity facility in Colorado.