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FBI agent-turned-traitor Robert Hansen is serving a 15-consecutive life sentence on Monday for betraying his homeland, federal prison officials said. announced that he died in his cell.
Hansen, 79, was “found unresponsive” at federal supermax prison in Florence, Colorado, around 6:55 a.m., according to a release from the Prison Service.
Hansen was declared dead by paramedics who tried to rescue him, despite attempts to revive him, BOP said.
The FBI was notified, but the BOP did not say if Hansen’s death was under investigation.
Hansen began spying for the Soviet Union in 1979, three years after joining the FBI, while assigned to the counterintelligence unit in New York City.
Hansen, who was born in Chicago, used the pseudonym “Ramon Garcia” to sell “classified national security information” to Moscow for $1.4 million in cash, bank money and diamonds, the FBI said on its official biography page.
Hansen’s career as a Soviet spy was interrupted in 1980 when his wife, Bonnie, found him with classified documents.
“He told me he was just tricking the Russians and spreading false information,” she later told The New York Times. “He never said he was a spy. I told him I thought it was insane.”
Hansen’s wife forced him to confess to a priest with ties to the ultra-conservative Catholic organization Opus Dei, to which the Hansens belonged. The priest said he would not go to the authorities if Hansen vowed to stop what he was doing and donate the money to charity.
But by 1985, Hansen had again sold American secrets to Moscow, the FBI said.
In 2001, Hansen was arrested in a Virginia park near his home for dropping a large amount of sensitive material wrapped in a plastic bag under FBI surveillance, where he had been under surveillance for several months.
Hansen, who was arrested red-handed, pleaded guilty to selling thousands of classified documents over the years detailing U.S. nuclear war strategy and counterintelligence intelligence.
Hansen also revealed to Moscow spymasters the existence of a secret listening tunnel built by the FBI under the Soviet embassy.
At the time, the Justice Department described the situation as “perhaps the worst intelligence disaster in U.S. history.”
At the sentencing, Hansen said he was sorry and admitted he did it for the money.
“I apologize for my actions. I am ashamed of it,” Hansen, a married father of six, told the judge, adding, “I have opened the door for slander against my totally innocent wife and children.” It hurt so many people deeply.”
Since July 17, 2002, Hansen has been a prisoner in Florence’s highest security prison. The prison is the safest federal prison in the country and houses other high-profile prisoners, including al-Qaeda terrorist Zacharias Moussawi and Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. “Shoebomber” Richard Reed and “Unabomber” Ted Kaczynski.
Hansen’s story became the basis for the 2007 spy thriller Bleach, which starred Chris Cooper as the infamous G-Man.
Billy Ray, who directed and co-wrote the film, said Hansen’s actions “fundamentally weakened our country”.
“It’s pretty shocking given what he did, the level of disrespect it required, and the number of people who died as a direct result of his actions,” Ray told NBC News. Told. “I don’t know if there is an equivalent in American history.”
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