World Espionage Wars and Famous Spies Revealed: The "Epoch Spy" Robert Hansen of Double-Sided Espionage

The great spy Hansen who shocked the new era

February 18, 2001 was a Sunday. Like all Sundays, Farkstone Park in the small town of Vijay, Virginia, is calm as usual. Dozens of FBI agents dressed as tourists are scattered around the park. They pretended to be visiting the park and watched closely the movement on a wooden bridge, and recorded it all with a video camera.

At 5 p.m., a man in a black shirt walked across the wooden bridge. He stopped, bent down to tie his shoelaces, saw that no one was paying attention, and dropped a small package off the small wooden bridge.

As soon as the man in black left, FBI agents immediately retrieved the package he had left with a garbage bag bandaged and water-treated. A floppy disk containing top-secret documents was found in an abandoned car manual in the package.

As the man in black continued to pace to another corner of the park, the agents who were ambushed around rushed up and threw him to the ground, and the panicked man in black only had time to say "Hello fellow travelers" and was taken to the car. Agents then found $50,000 in cash in a nearby hidden corner.

Two days later, on February 20, 2001, FBI Director Forley announced that on February 18, the FBI had arrested Robert Hansen, a Russian spy and senior agent of the bureau. Since then, a shocking spy case has surfaced, and this man named Hansen has been called the biggest spy who shocked the new era.

Hansen's betrayal

Hansen was born in Chicago on April 18, 1944. He received his bachelor's degree in chemistry from Knox University in Galesburg in 1966 and later studied dentistry at Northwestern University until 1968. He received his master's degree in accounting from the school in 1971 and became a certified public accountant in 1973. From 1971 to 1972, Hansen worked as a junior accountant for a Chicago company. During his school days, Hansen also learned Russian. In the early 1970s he was hired by the Chicago Police Department to work in the Internal Reconnaissance Division. In 1976, Hansen was transferred to the FBI, where he was tasked with tracking Russian diplomats in New York.

Before his arrest, Hansen was a father of six and lived in a wealthier suburb of Virginia. Hansen, 56, and his wife own a duplex brick house with a garage worth $300,000. He also owns a Ford sedan and a minivan with basketball hoops on it.

Hansen worked for the FBI for 27 years, and he hid very cleverly, even passing several times the polygraph checks personally carried out by the head of the FBI Polygraph Bureau. He lost face to the U.S. Anti-Japanese General Administration: for 15 years, he had not found this super "mole" hidden in the FBI.

Hansen's code name at the KGB headquarters was "Ramon", or simply "B". Hansen never had contact with any Russians, but continued to pass on information and receive remuneration to Russian agents through "secret mailboxes". Hansen was convinced that even if Moscow leaked the sky, he would not be revealed, because his name was unknown. The Hansen family's ordinary life is very simple. He is like a typical middle-class American, housing is the kind that middle-class people can afford, and driving a car is also the most common "Ford". After Hansen's arrest, neighbors were shocked. They said Hansen was a devout Catholic. Every Sunday he took his whole family to church to pray. Hansen's wife teaches religious history at a local secondary school. The 6 children love their father very much, the oldest just got into college in 2000. Neighbors analyzed that it may be because of the large number of children and the lack of living conditions that prompted Hansen to betray intelligence.

This is not the case, according to the US media reports, Hansen's service to the Soviet Union and Russia is not entirely out of economic considerations. In a letter to his headquarters in Moscow six months after working with the KGB, Hansen said he admired the famous British-Russian double agent Philby, saying: "I made up my mind to choose this path from the time I read Philby's memoirs when I was 14 years old."

Colleagues call Hansen a veteran expert, but much like the psychologically shady bad guys in horror movies. Usually, Hansen often wears a dark suit, and colleagues call him "doctor of death" or "director of the funeral home". Hansen often denounced the United States as a "big, irritable, and dangerous dementia."

On October 1, 1985, Hansen voluntarily placed a letter in a mailbox in front of the residence of intelligence officers at the Soviet Embassy in the United States. In this letter, typed out on a typewriter, a man signed "B" promised to provide the Soviet Union with "the top secret archives of the United States intelligence agencies, all of which are originals, in the shortest possible time, and I am sure that the experts of your country will make a proper assessment of these documents." The experts must have thought that I should be paid $100,000. In this letter, he stated that for security reasons, he would never reveal his identity and would only use pseudonyms such as "B" or "Baker" to contact Soviet intelligence officials, and would not use his real name and refuse any face-to-face contact. Because Hansen was extremely shrewd, not only did the U.S. side not know of its existence for many years, but even Russia did not know his real name and position and rank in the FBI before he was arrested.

Hansen has his own unique approach to spying. He asked Soviet intelligence officials to publish an advertisement in the Washington Times when they needed it, which read, "Dodge Cars, Shipped from the Factory in 1971, Diplomat Series, Engine Repair Required." If you are interested, please call us on the afternoon of Next Monday, Wednesday or Friday. "When the two sides have to speak code words when communicating, Hansen will call himself "Ramon" on the phone, and the other party will say, "Sorry, the car seller is not there, please leave your phone number." In his correspondence, Hansen added 6 to all the numbers for the year, month, day, and time. For example, February 10 will be written as August 16, and 6 p.m. will become 00:00 a.m.

Secret delivery locations arranged in advance for the exchange of intelligence and money are usually in the forests of the suburbs of Washington. Hansen prescribes a seemingly ordinary approach: "The code I give you is to stick white tape on the side of the road sign, indicating that I have prepared a package that can be taken." "The code you gave me was white tape laterally, indicating that the thing was put away." "The code I'll give you again is: Vertical white tape, indicating that the thing has been received." Hansen was familiar with computer technology, and in 2000 he suggested using handheld communication to transmit data at high speeds.

According to the FBI, starting in 1985, Hansen provided the Russians with a total of 27 letters and 22 parcels of top-secret intelligence of about 6,000 pages. These include top-secrets such as the U.S. nuclear weapons development program, electronic reconnaissance technology, and the president's security program.

Hansen was well aware of his motives and risks as a spy, and in 1987 he said very frankly in a letter to a KGB spy officer: "The severity of the punishment of my behavior in American law can be imagined, so all I do is for money." In another letter, Hansen suggested that the KGB pay with diamonds, which he intended to use for the children's future expenses, and that in 15 years Hansen had received a total of about $1.4 million, including cash and diamonds, from Soviet and Russian intelligence agencies.

According to the U.S. government, Hansen's relationship with the Soviet Union has a long history. It began as early as 1985 when he was sent to the FBI's new York bureau. Hansen also frequently checked the FBI's security system to see if authorities had ever been suspicious of him until 2000, when this did not happen.

From February 1995 to January 2001, Hansen was the FBI's senior representative to the Diplomatic Mission Office of the State Department, where he was responsible for counterintelligence against Russian agencies abroad. Hansen had an office in the State Department Building that monitored the activities of foreign diplomats in the United States on behalf of the FBI and coordinated with the State Department. The State Council granted him the privilege of not being inspected, accessing confidential information about the activities and identities of foreign envoys and officials, and freely entering and leaving the security restricted areas of the State Council Headquarters. Some people say that Hansen "can turn over the american family bottom." This statement is not false at all. According to media reports, the case of Russian security agents installing eavesdropping devices near Albright's office revealed in 2000 was related to Hansen. Hansen's value

During Hansen's 15 years of espionage, because he held a number of positions directly related to U.S. national security, he had reasonable access to a large amount of top-secret intelligence related to the Soviet Union and Russia, even the most sensitive and confidential information within the U.S. government, so the intelligence Hansen sold to the Soviet KGB and the Russian Foreign Intelligence Agency shocked the U.S. government in terms of quantity and quality.

Broadly speaking, the information Hansen provided to the KGB and the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service included: a list of U.S. spies lurking in the Soviet Union and Russia, especially within the KGB, U.S. espionage operations against the Soviet Union and Russia, U.S. counterintelligence techniques, resources, and means, and top-secret intelligence on U.S. investigations into Russian espionage cases.

What shocked the U.S. government and intelligence services the most was that Hansen provided intelligence on American spies lurking inside the KGB. The U.S. intelligence services spent a lot of effort to pull two senior KGB officials into their camp and act as spies for the U.S. government. These two senior KGB officials who betrayed their homeland sent considerable information to the US intelligence services and the US government, and the US government once proudly called these two KGB officials "two nails wedged into the heart of the KGB"!

But at the height of America's pride, the two senior KGB officials were suddenly urgently recalled to Moscow and never returned. The U.S. spy agency later learned that the two guys had just arrived at the Moscow airport and had been dragged straight into the KGB's interrogation room and were quickly shot. The U.S. government really couldn't figure out who had revealed the identities of these two KGB officials to the Soviet KGB, and now they finally knew that it was Hansen who made them lose these "two nails" painfully.

The more valuable intelligence Provided by Hansen is related to the security of the president. During the Cold War, in order to achieve the purpose of balancing each other, the United States and the Soviet Union committed themselves to the development of nuclear weapons and delivery technology for their own security, and both had the ability to accurately strike and destroy each other. Although the overall strength of the United States is far stronger than that of the Soviet Union, it still often feels the threat of the Soviet Union's nuclear shadow. If hit by a large-scale nuclear strike, how will the President of the United States and his successor survive? How can we ensure that the supreme command is not paralyzed? This is the problem that the "Plan to Protect the President," or "Government Continuity Program," which is classified as the number one state secret in the United States, is addressed.

For a long time, military experts wanted to explore this plan, but they could not get it. The grand spy Robert Hansen not only got the number one secret, but also revealed the specifics of the plan to the Soviet Union. The plan includes a "central positioning system" that tracks presidential succession candidates 24 hours a day, ensuring that the president and those successors do not appear in the same place at the same time. When the president spoke, at least one cabinet member was not present, and he hid in a secret location to prevent a sudden catastrophe in Congress, which killed all cabinet members and paralyzed the regime.

In the 1980s, the United States made major changes to the "Plan for the Protection of the President." The reason is that American intelligence experts were surprised to find that soviet reconnaissance satellite technology has developed by leaps and bounds, and although large bunkers such as American command centers have been specially reinforced and cleverly camouflaged, they can no longer escape the eyes of Soviet satellites. The revisions were soon introduced, and the U.S. security services decided to build emergency command centers in several national parks and resorts.

According to the design, in the event of special circumstances, the president and advisers will travel to the emergency command center in a large truck or other vehicle suitable for running on various roads in a large truck that is not significantly different from other vehicles running on American roads, followed by an 18-wheeled truck. Upon arrival, they will immediately enter a specially fortified basement where they will direct a nuclear counterattack. It is reported that in the late 1980s, the U.S. military built at least one emergency command center in the famous scenic Shenandoah Valley.

During his presidency, President Bush changed the name of the "Plan to Protect the President" to "Lasting Constitutional Government." Subsequently, the United States passed the National Security Reorganization Act, which established a relatively decentralized system consisting of a major command center and a secondary command center.

In addition, the "Plan to Protect the President" has other ancillary means, such as the "Emergency Missile Communication System", which maintains cryptographic contact with ground forces by radio after the missile is launched. In the early 1990s, the system was suspended, but everything was intact and ready to be reactivated. There is also an auxiliary system called the Post-Strike Command and Control System, a network of aircraft capable of launching retaliatory strikes. Hansen gave all this top-secret information to the Soviet Union, and the losses of the United States could not be measured in numbers.

With the trial of The Hansen espionage case, the New York Times broke a shocking news on March 4, 2001; The United States dug a secret passage under the former Soviet Embassy in the United States for eavesdropping, and this secret had long been revealed to the Soviet side by Hansen.

The Russian Embassy in the United States sits on a small hill called "Otto" on Wisconsin Avenue in Washington. Construction of the embassy began in the early 1980s, but it was not until the 1990s that it began to be used. The New York Times reported that the secret tunnel was just below the building, and the exit of the tunnel was hidden in a small two-story building with a very ordinary appearance in a residential area not far away. The tunnels, dug more than a decade ago and cost hundreds of millions of dollars and a variety of top-notch eavesdropping devices, were considered the most sophisticated, expensive and effective system for U.S. espionage of the Soviet Union. Conversations in various rooms of the embassy can be heard in the passageway, and the telecommunications between the embassy and Moscow can be intercepted and intercepted.

When the new Soviet embassy broke ground, the CIA and the National Security Agency arranged their own personnel for some of the "key" positions of the contractors hired by the Soviet side, and even the building materials purchased by the Soviet side were under the surveillance of the US intelligence services. Meanwhile, the CIA and the NSA decided to seize the opportunity to dig secret tunnels. Not only did it go unnoticed by the press and the public, but even the U.S. Congress did not know about it. It was not until after the collapse of the Soviet Union that the United States allowed Russian diplomats to fully move into the new embassy. By this time, the secret tunnels carefully planned by the United States had also been completed.

Initially, Americans could really gain something in the tunnels. But later, all the eavesdropping was some trivial things, and some even false information. The hundreds of millions of dollars of tunnel and related wiretapping was one of the most valuable intelligence Hansen provided to the Soviet Union and Russia, as Hansen was involved in the design and construction of the secret tunnel.

After the dissolution of the union, the Russian side did not contact Hansen for a long time, and Hansen wrote to the Russian intelligence authorities: "I am willing to sacrifice my life to help you", but you "wasted me". The above situation proves that Hansen's value as a spy is really difficult to estimate.

The FBI considered Hansen's espionage to be the worst act of treason in U.S. history and a serious hazard to U.S. national interests. The exposure of the Hansen espionage case and its impact caused great shock in the United States and the international community. Bush, who was deeply shocked when he received the report on air force one on the way to St. Louis, said: "Today is a particularly difficult day for those who love America. I want to warn those who betray their homeland that sooner or later they will be caught and severely punished!"

Hansen's arrest

Hansen's arrest was the result of a long period of close cooperation between the FBI, the CIA, the State Department, and the Justice Department since the Ames espionage case. In 194, the CIA's senior counterintelligence officer Aldridge Ames spying and his wife Rosario engaged in espionage for the Soviet Union in the process of investigation and investigation, the FBI and the CIA vaguely felt that behind this espionage case there seemed to be a bigger "mole", because the intelligence obtained by the Americans from inside the KGB was not provided by the Ems, and this "mole" was either in the FBI or within the CIA how to dig up this "mole" It became a top priority for the FBI and the CIA. The FBI then secretly dispatched the best foreign intelligence officers and counterintelligence intelligence analysts, including Hansen's colleagues, to conduct a secret investigation. The CIA, for its part, tried to get its latent spies in Russia to obtain evidence.

In the late autumn of 2000, a mysterious dossier was brought back to Washington. Inside the thick file, details of an American code-named "B" betraying intelligence to the KGB of the Soviet Union and Russia's Foreign Intelligence Service were recorded. A stone stirred up a thousand waves, but after going through the files, I couldn't find the real surname of this "mole"

If the search is carried out in a dragnet manner, the FBI alone has more than 28,000 staff, and the vastness of the investigation work is tantamount to finding a needle in a haystack.

It was at this time that Sergei Tretyakoff, the secretary of the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service to the United Nations mission in New York, and his wife Irina secretly changed their doors and defected to the United States. The man confided to the United States what he knew and gave the FBI more than a dozen handwritten letters from "Bs" to the Russians. The investigation finally made a breakthrough, and Hansen finally surfaced, because all the secret documents can be traced back to Hansen.

However, Hansen was a veteran FBI agent trained, and his anti-reconnaissance skills surprised FBI colleagues, "who often checked FBI records to find out whether he and the joint locations he used were being investigated by the FB." So the FBI and the CIA didn't hold any of his handles for more than half a year. It wasn't until the State Department wiretaps case came to light that Hansen's contact with Russian spies was finally discovered by FBI investigators.

FBI agents noted that on December 12, 2000, Hansen drove four times through a traffic sign in the small town of Farkstone Park in Vienna, Virginia, where FBI agents suspected it might be a joint signal point for Russian spies. Only then was the FBI top brass convinced that Hansen was the Russian "mole" code-named B. On Feb. 18, the FBI decided the time had come for a final showdown. Based on the clues obtained, the FBI learned that Hansen was going to deliver intelligence to the KGB in the small town of Farkstone Park in Vienna, Virginia. The FBI immediately cast a tightly controlled net in Farkstone Park, which led to the scene at the beginning of this article.

On May 10, 2002, Hansen was sentenced to life in prison without bail in a federal court in the United States for long-term intelligence work for the Soviet Union and Russia.