Foxston Park, Virginia, U.S., early Sunday morning,메이저사이트 February 18, 2001. A man in a suit hid a briefcase with white tape under a small wooden bridge over a creek. As he climbed over the bridge and returned to his car, two sport utility vehicles (SUVs) blocked his path in front and behind him. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agents heavily armed with automatic rifles shouted at him, “You’re under arrest for espionage.” This was the moment former FBI agent Robert Hanson (79, pictured), a double agent who spent 22 years passing thousands of pieces of classified U.S. information, including nuclear war plans, to the former Soviet Union and Russia, was caught.
Hanson, who has been called the worst espionage disaster in U.S. history, died in prison on June 6. “Mr. Hanson was found unconscious at the ADX Florence Federal Correctional Center in Colorado and was pronounced dead after failing to respond to emergency measures,” the NYT reported.
The wooden bridge used to pass secrets to Russia A small wooden bridge in Foxston Park, Virginia, where Robert Hanson, one of the “worst spies” in US intelligence history, used to leave classified US documents for his former Soviet and Russian counterparts. Courtesy of the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)
A former Chicago Police Department accountant who became an FBI agent in 1976, Hanson first became a double agent in 1979 when he was paid to pass information to the former Soviet military intelligence service (GRU). While working to identify former Soviet informants in the U.S. who were double agents, he passed along a list of Russian Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) agents who had operated in the former Soviet Union. All were executed.
Moving to FBI headquarters in Washington, Hanson passed on a wealth of classified information to the Soviet Union and Russia, including U.S. strategy in the event of a nuclear war, U.S. military weapons development plans, and U.S. intelligence wiretap networks. Using the pseudonym “Ramon Garcia,” he would disappear, leaving a briefcase hidden at an agreed-upon location.
The double-agent scheme was uncovered when the FBI, which had obtained a list of KGB spies from a Russian informant, used Hanson’s briefcase prints to identify him.
After 22 years and $1.4 million in cash and diamonds, Hanson was sentenced to life in prison without parole in Florence. Dubbed a “clean hell,” it is a maximum-security, solitary confinement prison where escape is impossible. It houses felons such as Mexican drug lord Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, the Boston Marathon bombers, and the 9-11 terrorists.