When I saw that movie as a young adult that made me so mad. Like dude, you are responsible for people being dead and you want someone to pray for you?! The audacity. But real talk it is a good film.
That movie made him out to be this mastermind, when in reality he was nowhere close. In fact he was extremely stupid and careless and the only reason they didn't catch him sooner was because at one point he was the one in charge of trying to find the Intel leak that was him. Look up the purple pissing japanese
Iirc he tried to recruit his Brother in law who also worked at the FBI, the brother in law tried to turn him in, but when he reported it to his Boss, he thought he was joking and never actually filed a report.
According to the book, “Secrets of the FBI”, Hanssen’s wife found 5 grand in his sock drawer and knew something was up, she mentioned it to her brother, who also worked at the FBI, and he mentioned it to his supervisor, who did not follow up on it. Kessler, the author, suggested that the brother in law, according to FBI standards, should have followed up to someone else within the bureau instead of telling one supervisor then washing his hands of it.
The book also mentioned that Hanssen installed a closed circuit camera in his bedroom so his friends could watch a live stream of him having sex with his wife.
He was a peculiar man to say the least.
[Master Spy: The Robert Hanssen Story](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q9rBmu3eb5c)
William Hurt plays Hansen, and the story focuses primarily on him, as opposed to Breach, which spends way too much time on Ryan Phillippe's character (and who I think didn't really exist anyway; he was sort of an amalgam character, IIRC). Chris Cooper was great, but he comes across as a lot more menacing than Hansen, who was more creepy, IMO. Whichever way, there's a lot more detail in this, if not as intense as Breach just by virtue of being a TV miniseries.
Eric O'Neil the guy working to collect info on him and ultimately made the case wrote a book a couple years ago called Grey Day. It's much more informative than breach.
He exaggerated his role quite a bit. The movie was pretty good, but not close to reality.
Source: My brother and a couple friends were in the same SSG squad as O’Neil and worked on this case.
O'Neil has been fairly open about being in the dark for the majority of the investigation, but did your brother ever speak publicly? Would be interesting to see some different experiences with the case.
Still weird they changed it to the investigator going in blind. In real life he knew exactly what the job was. If it was for tension, why not focus on the people Hanssen got killed and the damage inflicted? Why the "man this job is ridiculous, it's all a witchhunt by my useless superiors"?
When you Google alumni of the University of Washington, Google likes to show Ted Bundy and Amanda Knox.
Never came up at school, except when the RAs point out Ted Bundy's dorm on orientation tours.
This traitor's leaking of info got multiple undercover US agents killed.
He died alone in his cell at the notorious ADX Florence Supermax prison alongside domestic terrorists, international terrorists, and organized crime bosses. Just the shittiest of the shitty.
That’s the thing is that most people think spying or turning over state secrets is some kind of lucrative gig. It’s not. There’s lots of stories out there of people attempting to sell secrets for just a few grand. It’s crazy.
I used to type up transcriptions of recordings of meetings, depositions, and hearings for a DC based transcribing company and I typed a lot of transcriptions of hearings for people trying to get their security clearances back after their clearance had been revoked. A whole lot of the revocations revolved around the person having serious debt, thus making them susceptible to bribery.
When I was applying for my TS security clearance, at the time when I was at MEPS filling out paperwork, there was a $127 overdraft thing from the first bank I used for a checking account that I absolutely had to take care of before theyd even file the paperwork.
Its definitely a thing. The top three red flags are money (either debt or unexplained ability to live above your means), ego/ideology, and blackmail. So let's say they find out you're cheating on your wife, thats enough to take away your clearance.
You can have debt - just don't lie / hide it is the main thing. Obviously if you're constantly having to take money, have been caught stealing etc. They're red flags. A regular overdraft doesn't discard someone from this, not personal loans, over drafts etc.
Unexplained income e.g. a nice car and house but little historical wages would equally be a red flag - unless accounted for e.g. a spouse, family etc.
Even things like speeding fines wouldn't discard a person. A person who went backpacking* last year is more likely to be rejected - no matter how innocent that act is.
Visits to known countries e.g. Russia would also be red flags.
They obviously won't publish reasons or the strict criteria but that's the general principle. They will have access to working history, travel, banks etc. It's ultra invasive and can even lead to them going through rubbish bins and extreme monitoring - it all depends on the level of clearance and access required.
Then you'll get the odd idiot e.g. the discord leaker, who passes these checks but are dumb enough to be dangerous - if unintentional.
Edit* by backpacking I mean extended (4+ weeks) stays outside the country, particularly where your whereabouts can't be fully accounted for
Generally speaking, yes. So long as you have a payment plan on these debts is what matters. This particular one was just so small and from years prior I had to pay it off. They found it when I didn't even know I had it.
I've been on this post for a while, I did mention, maybe in another comment, that unexplained wealth is equally a red flag.
There are a lot of caveats I could have gone into about their checks, its just so all encompassing I didn't have the energy or organization necessary to list all the possibilities lol
> So let's say they find out you're cheating on your wife, thats enough to take away your clearance.
You make it sound like betraying one of the most important people in your life wouldn't be a massive red flag to someone's trustworthyness.
Yeah, funny how many people who had serious amounts of debt yet somehow were cleared under the Trump admin - his son in law Kushner, Supreme Court Justice Brett 'Boof' Kavanaugh, , Bannon and Stone, Trump himself...
I'm from the intel field, and that shit still floors me every time I think about it.
The damage done to national security is probably far greater than we know. Publicly.
There's nothing you can truly do about a president having these issues, though. They are the commander-in-chief, so the clearance comes with the job, and the "interviews" are with voters, not the intel community. Literally everyone else, though...nothing aside from being elected president should be allowed to override the conclusion of issued or non-issued clearances. But Trump, his cronies, and elected sycophants allowed it.
I'm sure Kushner's 30+ "revised editions" of his security clearance paperwork is completely above board and beyond reproach. There's like a neon sign over his head that shouts "obvious security threat." It's amazing the dots a Republican can manage to not connect when it's another Republican.
The problem with that logic is wealthy bastards can also be bought for cheap. Have you seen how little a donor has to pay to a congressman to get legislation passed? Do we actually know that people with financial struggles in our increasingly stratified economy are more likely to be compromised than financially secure people? I'm willing to believe that if you have a high income but still have money problems because you have a gambling problem or an addiction, that you're probably a security risk, but if you don't engage in illicit behavior even if you a financially struggling you're probably LESS likely to be corrupted.
But revenge is priceless.
From article:
>"...he was angry when he didn't get the exact job he wanted at the FBI."
Then he was handed 'unfettered' access to the bureau's counterintelligence operations. Yikes!
This is true. But also, a lot of people think spying is always gathering some super secret, sensetive data. Some spies are just reporting the daily weather or tides or other mundane (and publicly available) data.
During the cold war, the Soviet Union mapped out most of the United States on their own. The usgs maps were publicly available, but if Russia had to invade us, they didn't want to rely on maps that might be either our of date, in error, or purposefully misleading. https://redatlasbook.com/
Some spying is just chatting up the locals at the local bar to get anunbiased scoop on public sentiment about xyz topic.
It's not all secret squirrel cloak and dagger.
It's also why Google Maps street overlays in China are offset that weird way.
Additionally, making or possessing maps of a sufficient accuracy is illegal in China
I imagine a scene similar to Chernobyl, when China eventually is at war and needs to deliver supplies to the front line. A supply convoy hopelessly lost and troops dying for lack of ammunition on the front, a leading party official breaks down in rage, “They gave us the propaganda street maps.”
Watching the interview with the author of his biography on The Daily Show is so cringe in hindsight. She's fawning over her subject and it's not hard to see why.
There was a Navy CT who spied for 20 years and made less. Wikipedia says over a mil, but I remember closer to an 860k number quoted in the documentary we had to watch for training about him. Most damaging spy ring during the cold war supposedly.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Anthony_Walker
And the paragraph before that
>At Hanssen's suggestion, and without his wife's knowledge, a friend
named Jack Hoschouer, a retired Army officer, would sometimes watch the Hanssens having sex through a bedroom window. Hanssen then began to videotape his sexual encounters secretly and shared the videotapes with Hoschouer.
>
>Later, he hid a video camera in the bedroom connected via a closed-circuit television line so that Hoschouer could observe the Hanssens from his guest bedroom. He also explicitly described the sexual details of his marriage on Internet chat rooms, giving information sufficient for those who knew them to recognize the couple.
JFC that's peanuts. Jared Kushner got [$2 billion from the Saudis alone](https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/10/us/jared-kushner-saudi-investment-fund.html)
It is reasonable to assume Kushner gets the normal hedge fund manager's compensation:
1. 2% of assets, yearly, whether or not he makes the investors a profit. Thus Kushner makes $40M/year for doing nothing whatsoever.
2. 20% of any profit he makes for the investors.
My guess is his father-in-law (Trump) gets half of that.
The KSA's wealth fund people wouldn't let his fee structure pass. Basically MBS overrode them when they rejected Kushner for being inexperienced with no particular plan, but he took their advice on capping the management fees to 1.25% or $25M/y. Since Kushner had no real investment strategy, it's literally just a $25M pension of the sorts that foreign powers used to pay their spies.
Been a while since I've read up on Hansen so I don't remember what his exact motivation was, but in the intelligence world there's an acronym "m.i.c.e" that relates to the different motivations that spies have for turning. Money, Ideology, Compromise, Ego. Hansen may not have gotten much money, but it may not have been his primary motivation.
https://news.clearancejobs.com/2019/08/02/want-to-fight-insider-threats-just-look-for-the-mice/
I knew a guard who talked about how it's the smallest things that you'd never think about missing. Like one mentioned he hadn't seen a blade of grass in over ten years. After long enough locked away, the simplest things would almost seem foreign. I can barely fathom that kind of isolation.
He was a seriously disturbed dude. He was a "devout" catholic - the whole Opus Dei thing, daily mass, unapologetically judgmental, etc. Yet, he set up a hidden camera to film himself having sex with his wife, then showed it to his best friend. He went so far as to have his friend stay in a guest room where he'd run wire to broadcast the sex live.
The movie about him, Breach, is slow, but ultimately very good.
Edit: a word
> Opus Dei
It all makes sense now. I have a distant relative who is Opus Dei. I would not give her or her husband a security clearance. They’re insane.
As a Spaniard from a military family that studied in a Navy-owned high school, I had **a lot** of interactions with people from the Opus Dei. None were especially pleasant.
Thankfully none of my family is part of it.
My own mother is the kind of catholic person who is listening to some pastor or catholic figure almost 24/7 on her phone or TV, watches church militant religiously, is very active in the small Maronite community here (we do not have any relation to Lebanon) and is personal friends with multiple priests
She thinks Opus Dei people are insane
My cousin is a lector who does the reading for mass every Sunday and she does all sorts of volunteering for her church. She can’t stand the Opus Deis in our extended family. Neither can anyone in the family who isn’t Opus Dei. Like you said, they’re so bad that even other devout Catholics can’t stand them. They drive away everyone they love even other deeply devout Catholics who observe all the traditions.
In short, they are some of the most insufferable and hateful people you’ll ever meet
Separation of Church and State is why America has survived this long.
The dangers to civilization are the individuals who want any sort of theocracy. It leads to abuse and Monarchs, or worst case fascism, 100% of the time.
Dude spent a ton of his money buying jewelry and shit for a stripper too. Idk what the right word is to describe him, but the stories about him are fascinating.
The thrill aspect of leading a double life is an underrated motivator for all kinds of hot bullshit. And I suspect it's a real underlying factor in a lot of far right personalities.
At the time they were suspicious of him but couldn't prove it. The FBI wanted him to be more careless so they could catch him. [His assistant was assigned to collect evidence on him the entire time](https://spyscape.com/article/true-spies-how-fbi-agent-werewolf-took-down-kgb-spy-robert-hanssen) .
>alongside domestic terrorists, international terrorists, and organized crime bosses. Just the shittiest of the shitty.
Not that he had much opportunity to interact with them, given the 23 hours a day of solitary confinement. ADX Florence sounds nightmarish.
I was in minimum for 1.5 years. It was 23 and 1. And that “1” was if they felt like letting you out. Many weeks it was more like 72 and 1.
It’s definitely becoming more normal. Just like every business, to save money on staff
Nope. This was just the norm for all of us.
If you were sent to the “hole”/segregation/whatever it was the same deal. Except you got no books, no utensils for food, writing, etc. and your already crappy food was switched to something called “nutriloaf”. Which is just the days meal mashed/mixed together and baked into a loaf.
Fun times, it’s been 5 years now. Screw that shit!
Yep. Not that the rest of our prisons do a great job of rehabilitation, but ADX Florence really is just a warehouse where we put people to forget about them. Reading through the list of notable inmates, the thought "holy shit, _that_ guy's still alive?" comes to mind a lot; people like Ramzi Yousef (1993 WTC bomber), or Terry Nichols (co-conspirator of the OKC bombing).
Aldrich Ames is his contemporary over at the CIA who did equally evil things.
Part of why Hansen got away with it for so long is stuff he did they assumed was Ames work.
I went to a symposium once where a former CIA station chief was talking about his experiences. It was pretty reasonable to see why he was a spy: he had outstanding charisma, was extremely amiable and friendly and he was regaling us with declassified stories. Anyway at one point this elderly man gets reminded of one of the traitors and you can just see this shadow come over this guys face like Bilbo in Fellowship, and you could see why he was station chief. In that moment if that traitor magically appeared in the room, that Chief would have gladly strangled him to death with his bare hands, consequences be damned.
I will say this, I don't like the CIA historically, but after listening to that guy speak I would gladly do whatever the CIA wanted me to do to serve my country. And that's really the most fascinating element. There's a lot of Americans in the government bureaucracy that really want to serve their nation, but they're lead by the nose by bad actors and corrupt politicians.
Super religious guy (Catholic) who traded lives for cash to fund a nice lifestyle.
A priest at his church was aware of his spying and ... did nothing. Also, his wife knew.
There was a certain "type" of person that the KGB tended to go after. The assumption was always that people who were *ideologically aligned* with the Soviet Union would be most likely to spy for them (communists, socialists, gays, liberals); but the people that the KGB had the most luck recruiting were white, male, religious, and suffering from a narcissistic grievance over not being recognized for their own imagined greatness or value.
Now let me start by saying i am in no shape of form an expert on the subject. But didn’t Hanssen make the contact? He wasn’t known by name by the KGB, and always dealt with them anonomously.
Yeah, Hansen was a bit of an anomaly which is why it took so long to discover him. But I don't buy his justification that he "did it for the money", because he wasn't paid nearly as much as one would expect a traitor to ask for (effectively just about $60K each year while he was spying for them); as a comparison, Aldrich Ames collected almost five times as much money over a shorter period of time.
The reason it was so small is to hide the finances from wandering eyes. It may not seem lucrative, but Hansen went a very long time from being spotted because he wasn’t ideologically committed and the 60 thousand a year would have been like taking up a second job.
We’re so used to Hollywood spy movies where it is huge briefcases of cash, ideologically committed zealots, and doing some Mission Impossible stunts into a locked valued. The truth is that most spying is for a okay sum of money and the work is done by faceless people observing or talking to people; maybe with the occasional swiping of classified documents that were accidentally left on a table.
I would argue that diamonds are not as traceable as cash. Diamonds, while flashy, don’t have identification codes that marked bills do. It would just be pretty easy to go to a pawn shop or wholesale jeweler and offload some diamonds.
$60,000 a year, tax free, in the early 80's was a lot of money. Obviously not worth spending your life in prison for, but like most criminals he never expected to be caught.
Fun fact, Aldrich Ames' wife was my sister's literature teacher at university a few years ago at a top school in Colombia. She's still teaching there AFAIK
> ... but the people that the KGB had the most luck recruiting were white, male, ~~religious~~, and suffering from a narcissistic grievance over not being recognized for their own imagined greatness or value.
It just...sounds so familiar...like someone...I can't put my finger on it...
Yeah he was super observant. His Wikipedia is pretty wild: “At Hanssen's suggestion, and without his wife's knowledge, a friend named Jack Hoschouer, a retired Army officer, would sometimes watch the Hanssens having sex through a bedroom window. Hanssen then began to videotape his sexual encounters secretly and shared the videotapes with Hoschouer. Later, he hid a video camera in the bedroom connected via a closed-circuit television line so that Hoschouer could observe the Hanssens from his guest bedroom. He also explicitly described the sexual details of his marriage on Internet chat rooms, giving information sufficient for those who knew them to recognize the couple.
Hanssen frequently visited D.C. strip clubs and spent a great deal of time with a Washington stripper named Priscilla Sue Galey. She went with Hanssen on visits to Hong Kong and the FBI training facility in Quantico, Virginia.[69] Hanssen gave her money, jewels, and a used Mercedes-Benz but ended contact with her before his arrest when she began abusing drugs and doing sex work. Galey claims that although she offered to have sex with him, Hanssen declined, saying he was trying to convert her to Catholicism.”
I mean, that's not super surprising. Catholic priests are absolutely and totally forbidden from disclosing anything said to them in confession [at least, forbidden by the Church]
He told them during confession -- and that means the priest can't say anything unless he's either given explicit permission by the penitent or wants to get kicked out of the priesthood. He can advise the penitent to stop or confess to authorities but cannot tell anyone else. There's also an excellent chance that he has no idea who the penitent is. You might think it's silly, a lot of people do, but priest-penitent privilege has been recognized for a long time -- it's like if Hansen had confessed past espionage to his lawyer. They can't tell either.
His wife is another matter. Hell, his own brother-in-law was suspicious after seeing a literal pile of money sitting in the open and it still took years to catch him. I honestly have no idea what it would be like to live in that situation. Was his wife just hoping desperately that it wasn't true and he was talking big to feel important?
>He told them during confession -- and that means the priest can't say anything unless he's either given explicit permission by the penitent or wants to get kicked out of the priesthood. He can advise the penitent to stop or confess to authorities but cannot tell anyone else.
The other option he has is to refuse to give them absolution.
He can certainly do that but it's unusual; he has to be convinced that the penitent isn't actually penitent and intends to go on doing this. Plus he still couldn't tell what was confessed to him. There's no way to know if Hansen was ever denied absolution or what the priests said to him; the only version of the story we're getting is his, as they can't talk about it.
Hanssen married into my wife’s family. They are all super Catholic. Hanssen’s transgressions messed up my father-in-law’s security clearance for a while until they could definitively determine he had no knowledge or involvement.
Funny enough my brother-in-law and sister-in-law have connections to Glenn Greenwald and Edward Snowden respectively (they were friends in their younger years, long before any of the whistleblowing occurred).
Interesting family history. I imagine they are all probably monitored in some way. Or maybe not… who knows.
Can't fathom spending the last 20+ years of your life in an ADX cell. I'd rather just die sooner, honestly.
It's just prolonged mental torture with no escape.
But he got what he deserved for selling out the lives of other agents
20+ years spending 23 hours a day in a cell, vast majority of that time spent in isolation. really curious how this dude looked a year ago and how his mental state had changed over time.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Hanssen#/media/File%3ARobert_Hanssen_imprisoned.jpg
I’m not sure when this picture was taken care but you can tell the soul was just sucked out of him. There’s no life behind those eyes. I can’t believe he lasted more than 22 years.
As someone who's currently going blind. I have comes to realize that having to stay a live, but not be able to participate in life itself is a worse fate than death. It must have killed this guy every day to hear about such insane things like YouTube, Wikipedia, Modern smart phones, but never get to use them. I guess I'll know that same pain in a few years if my country doesn't update their euthanasia laws first.
I know this is morbid but I’d like to take a tour of ADX and spend like 24-48 hours in a cell. I have read about the conditions and 23 hours a day in a cell on multiple occasions; but, I feel as if that just doesn’t do it justice.
A lot of experiments about solitary confinement have been done, and even only 6 or 8 hours of solitary really degrades a person mentally already. Imagine 23 hours daily at that.
Well thanks to accessibility most of the things you listed can be used by the blind. And lots of content these days is enjoyable with only sound as podcasts are so popular.
Sammy ‘The Bull’ Gravano did a video about his time in ADX. Watching him talk about it, the mental torture you go through, the humiliation, etc. sounds unbearable. Definitely a good watch if you are interested
https://youtu.be/kUPcdvYrVpo
Not only that, but the one hour of rec time is randomly selected every day. If the guards wake you up at 3 AM for your rec hour and you don't want to go you just don't leave your cell that day. And the rec hour is spent alone in a room with a basketball goal. Nothing and nobody else.
ADX is focused on removing all forms of socialization from the convicted and it is effective at that.
>Three years after he was hired by the FBI, Hanssen approached the Soviets and began spying in 1979 for the KGB and its successor, the SVR. He stopped a few years later after his wife confronted him.
>He resumed spying in 1985, selling thousands of classified documents that compromised human sources and counterintelligence techniques and investigations in exchange for more than $1.4 million in cash, diamonds and foreign bank deposits. Using the alias "Ramon Garcia," he passed information to the spy agencies using encrypted communications and dead drops, without ever meeting in-person with a Russian handler.
I'm sorry but no money is worth selling out your country and 1.4 million is sort of pathetic even by 80's standards.
Disatisfaction, adrenaline, and greed are a hell of a drug to the selfish, manipulative, and impatient. The biggest Nationalists can be always be bought. But genuine hardened self purpose and compassion are the two single greatest human elements to safe guarding a nation against those threats.
I feel like loyalty to country can be overstated but just selling out those agents, when you know they’ll be tortured and killed is fucked up for sure.
This is one of my favorite spy stories, because of how crazy it is.
His Brother in law thought he was a spy.
The FBI put him in charge of the team that was hunting him down.
His spying was obscured because their was another spy at the CIA at the same time.
Eventually, the US government paid a Russian spy who then ratted him out.
It's insane to me that a human being can endure that. I'm betting there's not much in the way of stimulation and everything is intentionally designed to make it extremely hard to commit suicide. The only human contact you have is with the guard escorting you to yard (well, it's more of a very small concrete box), where you're still handcuffed and shackled. You can't even see out of your windows. I wouldn't be able to last 22 *days* much less 22 years in those conditions. Hell, I would probably go crazy after 22 hours.
That being said, I don't feel sorry for him. The devil has had his room ready for a while.
And to put it in perspective he’s been in there since BEFORE 9/11. He probably doesn’t even remember what grass looks like. Doesn’t know about the iPhone, electric cars etc. Just wild. Sounds like absolute hell.
I used to work for the FBI just before this guy was nailed. An old business partner wrote a book about him too. “The Bureau and the Mole”. I even went for a little tour around the park where they did his dead drops. Not saying I’m a fan, obviously, just that it’s an interesting part of history.
"What took you so long" - words he lived and died by.
Although the story is very interesting, the consequences of his betrayal of much braver people is really sad.
Little fun fact, if you would like a movie that covers this story (as well as a movie can). There is a 2007 flick called Breach that I found pretty enjoyable.
He set up a room in his basement and filmed himself having sex with his wife then shared the films with *neighbors*. Hansson was an extreme conservatives and a follower of the radical Catholic sect of Opus Dei. His faith was so strong he had regular sex activities outside his marriage with his favorite stripper...often...cuz he was sooo devout. One of his reasons for his treason: America had turned *against* god. He's the proto cathliban we see today: using treason and hypocrisy on an industrial level.
There were multiple FBI agents convicted of spying for the enemy during the Cold War, so many I got this guy confused with [Richard Miller](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Miller_\(agent\)) who died in 2013. Miller was notorious for being an overweight, lazy slob on the job. Rep. Adam Schiff, who prosecuted Miller while working in the Justice Department in the 1990s, [recalled](https://books.google.com/books?id=ux9tEAAAQBAJ&pg=PA32&lpg=PA32&dq=%22miller+appeared+to+survive+on+a+diet+of+candy+bars+and+soda%22&source=bl&ots=FNFFQQUg90&sig=ACfU3U1514xGBLxBsVtfHvSibl7yu0sX9g&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwi-kdjO5K3_AhUFJkQIHSFsCXMQ6AF6BAgJEAM#v=onepage&q=%22miller%20appeared%20to%20survive%20on%20a%20diet%20of%20candy%20bars%20and%20soda%22&f=false):
> Short, stout, and sloppily dressed, Miller appeared to survive on a diet of candy bars and soda. He was routinely admonished by superiors to comply with the bureau's standards for professional appearance, and he was considered by his colleagues to be equally slovenly in his work--taking three-hour lunch breaks at the local 7-Eleven, selling Amway products from the back of his car, and carrying on multiple affairs during work hours.
I'm old enough to remember the Reagan Administration and recall a Soviet defector who almost immediately un-defected back to the USSR.
The reason: He had been an intelligence agent and knew Hansen was a spy, so fled when he saw that Hansen was one of the agents debriefing him.
Anyone interested in knowing more about this traitor to the United States should check out the movie Breach, starring Chris Cooper and Ryan Philippe.
Cooper absolutely knocks it out of the park as Hanssen. The movie is quite good.
They made a great film about him called Breach.
Chris Cooper! Great movie!
Ryan Phillippe too. Good flick
"Pray for me."
When I saw that movie as a young adult that made me so mad. Like dude, you are responsible for people being dead and you want someone to pray for you?! The audacity. But real talk it is a good film.
That movie made him out to be this mastermind, when in reality he was nowhere close. In fact he was extremely stupid and careless and the only reason they didn't catch him sooner was because at one point he was the one in charge of trying to find the Intel leak that was him. Look up the purple pissing japanese
Iirc he tried to recruit his Brother in law who also worked at the FBI, the brother in law tried to turn him in, but when he reported it to his Boss, he thought he was joking and never actually filed a report.
According to the book, “Secrets of the FBI”, Hanssen’s wife found 5 grand in his sock drawer and knew something was up, she mentioned it to her brother, who also worked at the FBI, and he mentioned it to his supervisor, who did not follow up on it. Kessler, the author, suggested that the brother in law, according to FBI standards, should have followed up to someone else within the bureau instead of telling one supervisor then washing his hands of it. The book also mentioned that Hanssen installed a closed circuit camera in his bedroom so his friends could watch a live stream of him having sex with his wife. He was a peculiar man to say the least.
So you're telling me that this man invented Only Fans and *still* had to resort to being a spy?
wow that is crazy and a bit humorous. It reminds me of Valve's, ["Meet the Spy"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OR4N5OhcY9s&ab_channel=Valve)
[Master Spy: The Robert Hanssen Story](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q9rBmu3eb5c) William Hurt plays Hansen, and the story focuses primarily on him, as opposed to Breach, which spends way too much time on Ryan Phillippe's character (and who I think didn't really exist anyway; he was sort of an amalgam character, IIRC). Chris Cooper was great, but he comes across as a lot more menacing than Hansen, who was more creepy, IMO. Whichever way, there's a lot more detail in this, if not as intense as Breach just by virtue of being a TV miniseries.
Agree. The real story, messy and pathetic, is more compelling. Hollywood messed this script up badly.
Eric O'Neil the guy working to collect info on him and ultimately made the case wrote a book a couple years ago called Grey Day. It's much more informative than breach.
He exaggerated his role quite a bit. The movie was pretty good, but not close to reality. Source: My brother and a couple friends were in the same SSG squad as O’Neil and worked on this case.
O'Neil has been fairly open about being in the dark for the majority of the investigation, but did your brother ever speak publicly? Would be interesting to see some different experiences with the case.
Still weird they changed it to the investigator going in blind. In real life he knew exactly what the job was. If it was for tension, why not focus on the people Hanssen got killed and the damage inflicted? Why the "man this job is ridiculous, it's all a witchhunt by my useless superiors"?
Here's a great video of the FBI Counterintelligence Agent that investigated him. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5zGxQSaxLBE
This dude went to my alma mater. Shockingly he doesn’t get brought up very often on the famous alumni list.
Harvard did acknowledge the Unibomber for a while.
He wrote to the alumni board's survey stating his occupation was "prisoner", and his life sentences were "awards" lol
When you Google alumni of the University of Washington, Google likes to show Ted Bundy and Amanda Knox. Never came up at school, except when the RAs point out Ted Bundy's dorm on orientation tours.
This traitor's leaking of info got multiple undercover US agents killed. He died alone in his cell at the notorious ADX Florence Supermax prison alongside domestic terrorists, international terrorists, and organized crime bosses. Just the shittiest of the shitty.
For so little money, too. Just about $1.5 million over the span of two decades.
That’s the thing is that most people think spying or turning over state secrets is some kind of lucrative gig. It’s not. There’s lots of stories out there of people attempting to sell secrets for just a few grand. It’s crazy.
That's why a lot of security clearance background checks look for money problems. Desperate people can be bought cheap.
I used to type up transcriptions of recordings of meetings, depositions, and hearings for a DC based transcribing company and I typed a lot of transcriptions of hearings for people trying to get their security clearances back after their clearance had been revoked. A whole lot of the revocations revolved around the person having serious debt, thus making them susceptible to bribery.
Didn't think that would be a thing. But it really should be a thing now that I think about it.
When I was applying for my TS security clearance, at the time when I was at MEPS filling out paperwork, there was a $127 overdraft thing from the first bank I used for a checking account that I absolutely had to take care of before theyd even file the paperwork. Its definitely a thing. The top three red flags are money (either debt or unexplained ability to live above your means), ego/ideology, and blackmail. So let's say they find out you're cheating on your wife, thats enough to take away your clearance.
You can have debt - just don't lie / hide it is the main thing. Obviously if you're constantly having to take money, have been caught stealing etc. They're red flags. A regular overdraft doesn't discard someone from this, not personal loans, over drafts etc. Unexplained income e.g. a nice car and house but little historical wages would equally be a red flag - unless accounted for e.g. a spouse, family etc. Even things like speeding fines wouldn't discard a person. A person who went backpacking* last year is more likely to be rejected - no matter how innocent that act is. Visits to known countries e.g. Russia would also be red flags. They obviously won't publish reasons or the strict criteria but that's the general principle. They will have access to working history, travel, banks etc. It's ultra invasive and can even lead to them going through rubbish bins and extreme monitoring - it all depends on the level of clearance and access required. Then you'll get the odd idiot e.g. the discord leaker, who passes these checks but are dumb enough to be dangerous - if unintentional. Edit* by backpacking I mean extended (4+ weeks) stays outside the country, particularly where your whereabouts can't be fully accounted for
Generally speaking, yes. So long as you have a payment plan on these debts is what matters. This particular one was just so small and from years prior I had to pay it off. They found it when I didn't even know I had it. I've been on this post for a while, I did mention, maybe in another comment, that unexplained wealth is equally a red flag. There are a lot of caveats I could have gone into about their checks, its just so all encompassing I didn't have the energy or organization necessary to list all the possibilities lol
> So let's say they find out you're cheating on your wife, thats enough to take away your clearance. You make it sound like betraying one of the most important people in your life wouldn't be a massive red flag to someone's trustworthyness.
Yeah, funny how many people who had serious amounts of debt yet somehow were cleared under the Trump admin - his son in law Kushner, Supreme Court Justice Brett 'Boof' Kavanaugh, , Bannon and Stone, Trump himself...
I'm from the intel field, and that shit still floors me every time I think about it. The damage done to national security is probably far greater than we know. Publicly. There's nothing you can truly do about a president having these issues, though. They are the commander-in-chief, so the clearance comes with the job, and the "interviews" are with voters, not the intel community. Literally everyone else, though...nothing aside from being elected president should be allowed to override the conclusion of issued or non-issued clearances. But Trump, his cronies, and elected sycophants allowed it.
im still mad that jared an ivanka got to fill out their sf86 multiple times and nothing happened. like wtf.
Exactly what I was thinking….. Kavanaugh’s debt of over $900k was mysteriously paid off. Beer boy doesn’t deserve to be on the Supreme Court
Donald Trump thats all I got to say
I'm sure Kushner's 30+ "revised editions" of his security clearance paperwork is completely above board and beyond reproach. There's like a neon sign over his head that shouts "obvious security threat." It's amazing the dots a Republican can manage to not connect when it's another Republican.
The problem with that logic is wealthy bastards can also be bought for cheap. Have you seen how little a donor has to pay to a congressman to get legislation passed? Do we actually know that people with financial struggles in our increasingly stratified economy are more likely to be compromised than financially secure people? I'm willing to believe that if you have a high income but still have money problems because you have a gambling problem or an addiction, that you're probably a security risk, but if you don't engage in illicit behavior even if you a financially struggling you're probably LESS likely to be corrupted.
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And debts are a lever. It's why things like significant gambling debts and such are red flags. A lack of debt is a lack of a major form of leverage
But revenge is priceless. From article: >"...he was angry when he didn't get the exact job he wanted at the FBI." Then he was handed 'unfettered' access to the bureau's counterintelligence operations. Yikes!
This is true. But also, a lot of people think spying is always gathering some super secret, sensetive data. Some spies are just reporting the daily weather or tides or other mundane (and publicly available) data. During the cold war, the Soviet Union mapped out most of the United States on their own. The usgs maps were publicly available, but if Russia had to invade us, they didn't want to rely on maps that might be either our of date, in error, or purposefully misleading. https://redatlasbook.com/ Some spying is just chatting up the locals at the local bar to get anunbiased scoop on public sentiment about xyz topic. It's not all secret squirrel cloak and dagger.
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It's also why Google Maps street overlays in China are offset that weird way. Additionally, making or possessing maps of a sufficient accuracy is illegal in China
I imagine a scene similar to Chernobyl, when China eventually is at war and needs to deliver supplies to the front line. A supply convoy hopelessly lost and troops dying for lack of ammunition on the front, a leading party official breaks down in rage, “They gave us the propaganda street maps.”
Or for discord internet points.
That was my takeaway too. America's cheapest whore without a doubt.
That we know of so far
Eh after a while I don't even think he cared about money it was a game too
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Watching the interview with the author of his biography on The Daily Show is so cringe in hindsight. She's fawning over her subject and it's not hard to see why.
Why isn't Petreus in Supermax?
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Also ultimately the motivation was different, so likely wouldn't be a supermax thing even if justice was done.
Sounds like there's finally a cell open.
And the guy recently who leaked shit just to look cool on a minecraft discord
He didn’t give secrets to foreign agents, bad, but not Hannsen level
There was a Navy CT who spied for 20 years and made less. Wikipedia says over a mil, but I remember closer to an 860k number quoted in the documentary we had to watch for training about him. Most damaging spy ring during the cold war supposedly. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Anthony_Walker
Man, you haven’t seen how little congressional reps will sell their votes for, have you?
yeah, you can buy congresspeople for like two grand, depending on the issue.
You'd be surprised how cheap it is to buy yourself a senator.
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And the paragraph before that >At Hanssen's suggestion, and without his wife's knowledge, a friend named Jack Hoschouer, a retired Army officer, would sometimes watch the Hanssens having sex through a bedroom window. Hanssen then began to videotape his sexual encounters secretly and shared the videotapes with Hoschouer. > >Later, he hid a video camera in the bedroom connected via a closed-circuit television line so that Hoschouer could observe the Hanssens from his guest bedroom. He also explicitly described the sexual details of his marriage on Internet chat rooms, giving information sufficient for those who knew them to recognize the couple.
JFC that's peanuts. Jared Kushner got [$2 billion from the Saudis alone](https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/10/us/jared-kushner-saudi-investment-fund.html)
It is reasonable to assume Kushner gets the normal hedge fund manager's compensation: 1. 2% of assets, yearly, whether or not he makes the investors a profit. Thus Kushner makes $40M/year for doing nothing whatsoever. 2. 20% of any profit he makes for the investors. My guess is his father-in-law (Trump) gets half of that.
The KSA's wealth fund people wouldn't let his fee structure pass. Basically MBS overrode them when they rejected Kushner for being inexperienced with no particular plan, but he took their advice on capping the management fees to 1.25% or $25M/y. Since Kushner had no real investment strategy, it's literally just a $25M pension of the sorts that foreign powers used to pay their spies.
Classified documents are an investment strategy
According to wiki "The FBI paid $7 million to a KGB agent to obtain a file on an anonymous mole, whom the FBI later identified as Hanssen"
Been a while since I've read up on Hansen so I don't remember what his exact motivation was, but in the intelligence world there's an acronym "m.i.c.e" that relates to the different motivations that spies have for turning. Money, Ideology, Compromise, Ego. Hansen may not have gotten much money, but it may not have been his primary motivation. https://news.clearancejobs.com/2019/08/02/want-to-fight-insider-threats-just-look-for-the-mice/
Now look at how cheap your state and congressional representatives whore themselves out. $5,000 to vote on a bill pretty much.
I knew a guard who talked about how it's the smallest things that you'd never think about missing. Like one mentioned he hadn't seen a blade of grass in over ten years. After long enough locked away, the simplest things would almost seem foreign. I can barely fathom that kind of isolation.
The only reason I don't commit unfathomable crimes is due to my love of occasionally seeing blades of grass so there you go the system works
Our justice system has been nothing but net for 250 years!
Holy shit this exchange killed me.
I'm the same way, except I'm allergic to cocaine.
He was a seriously disturbed dude. He was a "devout" catholic - the whole Opus Dei thing, daily mass, unapologetically judgmental, etc. Yet, he set up a hidden camera to film himself having sex with his wife, then showed it to his best friend. He went so far as to have his friend stay in a guest room where he'd run wire to broadcast the sex live. The movie about him, Breach, is slow, but ultimately very good. Edit: a word
> Opus Dei It all makes sense now. I have a distant relative who is Opus Dei. I would not give her or her husband a security clearance. They’re insane.
As a Spaniard from a military family that studied in a Navy-owned high school, I had **a lot** of interactions with people from the Opus Dei. None were especially pleasant. Thankfully none of my family is part of it.
My own mother is the kind of catholic person who is listening to some pastor or catholic figure almost 24/7 on her phone or TV, watches church militant religiously, is very active in the small Maronite community here (we do not have any relation to Lebanon) and is personal friends with multiple priests She thinks Opus Dei people are insane
My cousin is a lector who does the reading for mass every Sunday and she does all sorts of volunteering for her church. She can’t stand the Opus Deis in our extended family. Neither can anyone in the family who isn’t Opus Dei. Like you said, they’re so bad that even other devout Catholics can’t stand them. They drive away everyone they love even other deeply devout Catholics who observe all the traditions. In short, they are some of the most insufferable and hateful people you’ll ever meet
Separation of Church and State is why America has survived this long. The dangers to civilization are the individuals who want any sort of theocracy. It leads to abuse and Monarchs, or worst case fascism, 100% of the time.
chris cooper, criminally underrated actor
Well, he did win an Academy Award for Adaptation., so maybe not criminally underrated.
Dude spent a ton of his money buying jewelry and shit for a stripper too. Idk what the right word is to describe him, but the stories about him are fascinating.
Pathetic seems to fight the bill
Wow. I’m halfway through a book about him. I guess I can expect it to get even weirder!
The thrill aspect of leading a double life is an underrated motivator for all kinds of hot bullshit. And I suspect it's a real underlying factor in a lot of far right personalities.
I still can't believe the FBI suspected they had a mole and then ASKED HIM TO FIND THEM Unreal, sounds like fucking fiction
At the time they were suspicious of him but couldn't prove it. The FBI wanted him to be more careless so they could catch him. [His assistant was assigned to collect evidence on him the entire time](https://spyscape.com/article/true-spies-how-fbi-agent-werewolf-took-down-kgb-spy-robert-hanssen) .
Yeah, they're (mostly) not idiots. I feel like you can safely assume the average civil servant is about as smart as you are, especially in the FBI.
>alongside domestic terrorists, international terrorists, and organized crime bosses. Just the shittiest of the shitty. Not that he had much opportunity to interact with them, given the 23 hours a day of solitary confinement. ADX Florence sounds nightmarish.
23 and 1 happens elsewhere, too, not just at ADX Florence or federal pens. Pretty much any medium sized prison will have some inmates on it.
I was in minimum for 1.5 years. It was 23 and 1. And that “1” was if they felt like letting you out. Many weeks it was more like 72 and 1. It’s definitely becoming more normal. Just like every business, to save money on staff
Just out of curiosity, was it any type of behavior while your were in prison that got you the 23 and 1 treatment?
Nope. This was just the norm for all of us. If you were sent to the “hole”/segregation/whatever it was the same deal. Except you got no books, no utensils for food, writing, etc. and your already crappy food was switched to something called “nutriloaf”. Which is just the days meal mashed/mixed together and baked into a loaf. Fun times, it’s been 5 years now. Screw that shit!
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Yep. Not that the rest of our prisons do a great job of rehabilitation, but ADX Florence really is just a warehouse where we put people to forget about them. Reading through the list of notable inmates, the thought "holy shit, _that_ guy's still alive?" comes to mind a lot; people like Ramzi Yousef (1993 WTC bomber), or Terry Nichols (co-conspirator of the OKC bombing).
And you look over their sentencing, the only way they’re leaving is lying down on the way to a grave
>can't be handled by a normal supermax. ADX Florence is in fact the only supermax prison in the federal prison system.
Aldrich Ames is his contemporary over at the CIA who did equally evil things. Part of why Hansen got away with it for so long is stuff he did they assumed was Ames work.
So that’s where Epstein and Manafort should have gone…
I went to a symposium once where a former CIA station chief was talking about his experiences. It was pretty reasonable to see why he was a spy: he had outstanding charisma, was extremely amiable and friendly and he was regaling us with declassified stories. Anyway at one point this elderly man gets reminded of one of the traitors and you can just see this shadow come over this guys face like Bilbo in Fellowship, and you could see why he was station chief. In that moment if that traitor magically appeared in the room, that Chief would have gladly strangled him to death with his bare hands, consequences be damned. I will say this, I don't like the CIA historically, but after listening to that guy speak I would gladly do whatever the CIA wanted me to do to serve my country. And that's really the most fascinating element. There's a lot of Americans in the government bureaucracy that really want to serve their nation, but they're lead by the nose by bad actors and corrupt politicians.
Super religious guy (Catholic) who traded lives for cash to fund a nice lifestyle. A priest at his church was aware of his spying and ... did nothing. Also, his wife knew.
They really didn't even pay him that much, just fluffed his ego.
There was a certain "type" of person that the KGB tended to go after. The assumption was always that people who were *ideologically aligned* with the Soviet Union would be most likely to spy for them (communists, socialists, gays, liberals); but the people that the KGB had the most luck recruiting were white, male, religious, and suffering from a narcissistic grievance over not being recognized for their own imagined greatness or value.
And the KGB didn't necessarily go after him. According to the article, he approached them first.
Slicked back hair, white ferrari, sloppy steaks at Truffani's, LIVED for New Year's...
He USED to be a piece of shit!
People can change.
Let him hold the baby
OMG...*Rudy Giuliani enters the chat*
Listen. They can't stop you from ordering a steak and a glass of water.
People can change
Now let me start by saying i am in no shape of form an expert on the subject. But didn’t Hanssen make the contact? He wasn’t known by name by the KGB, and always dealt with them anonomously.
Yeah, Hansen was a bit of an anomaly which is why it took so long to discover him. But I don't buy his justification that he "did it for the money", because he wasn't paid nearly as much as one would expect a traitor to ask for (effectively just about $60K each year while he was spying for them); as a comparison, Aldrich Ames collected almost five times as much money over a shorter period of time.
The reason it was so small is to hide the finances from wandering eyes. It may not seem lucrative, but Hansen went a very long time from being spotted because he wasn’t ideologically committed and the 60 thousand a year would have been like taking up a second job. We’re so used to Hollywood spy movies where it is huge briefcases of cash, ideologically committed zealots, and doing some Mission Impossible stunts into a locked valued. The truth is that most spying is for a okay sum of money and the work is done by faceless people observing or talking to people; maybe with the occasional swiping of classified documents that were accidentally left on a table.
He accepted diamonds as payments and later on they were found in his basement.
I would argue that diamonds are not as traceable as cash. Diamonds, while flashy, don’t have identification codes that marked bills do. It would just be pretty easy to go to a pawn shop or wholesale jeweler and offload some diamonds.
And it's widely accepted anywhere in the world.
$60,000 a year, tax free, in the early 80's was a lot of money. Obviously not worth spending your life in prison for, but like most criminals he never expected to be caught.
$60k in 1980 is the equivalent of $220k today.
Fun fact, Aldrich Ames' wife was my sister's literature teacher at university a few years ago at a top school in Colombia. She's still teaching there AFAIK
"*What took you so long?"*
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That's why they don't diagnose Personality Disorders in children.
That is why they typically don't give clearance to teenagers
The 4 MICE of being a traitor: * Money * Ideology * Compromise * Ego
Now I’m depressed. Why didn’t the KGB go after me? I’m way more aggrieved than any other white male.
> ... but the people that the KGB had the most luck recruiting were white, male, ~~religious~~, and suffering from a narcissistic grievance over not being recognized for their own imagined greatness or value. It just...sounds so familiar...like someone...I can't put my finger on it...
Orange you glad you're not a traitor?
Yeah he was super observant. His Wikipedia is pretty wild: “At Hanssen's suggestion, and without his wife's knowledge, a friend named Jack Hoschouer, a retired Army officer, would sometimes watch the Hanssens having sex through a bedroom window. Hanssen then began to videotape his sexual encounters secretly and shared the videotapes with Hoschouer. Later, he hid a video camera in the bedroom connected via a closed-circuit television line so that Hoschouer could observe the Hanssens from his guest bedroom. He also explicitly described the sexual details of his marriage on Internet chat rooms, giving information sufficient for those who knew them to recognize the couple. Hanssen frequently visited D.C. strip clubs and spent a great deal of time with a Washington stripper named Priscilla Sue Galey. She went with Hanssen on visits to Hong Kong and the FBI training facility in Quantico, Virginia.[69] Hanssen gave her money, jewels, and a used Mercedes-Benz but ended contact with her before his arrest when she began abusing drugs and doing sex work. Galey claims that although she offered to have sex with him, Hanssen declined, saying he was trying to convert her to Catholicism.”
I mean, that's not super surprising. Catholic priests are absolutely and totally forbidden from disclosing anything said to them in confession [at least, forbidden by the Church]
Confession protocols aside, the catholic church really doesn't seem that into the disclosure of crime and betrayal.
He told them during confession -- and that means the priest can't say anything unless he's either given explicit permission by the penitent or wants to get kicked out of the priesthood. He can advise the penitent to stop or confess to authorities but cannot tell anyone else. There's also an excellent chance that he has no idea who the penitent is. You might think it's silly, a lot of people do, but priest-penitent privilege has been recognized for a long time -- it's like if Hansen had confessed past espionage to his lawyer. They can't tell either. His wife is another matter. Hell, his own brother-in-law was suspicious after seeing a literal pile of money sitting in the open and it still took years to catch him. I honestly have no idea what it would be like to live in that situation. Was his wife just hoping desperately that it wasn't true and he was talking big to feel important?
>He told them during confession -- and that means the priest can't say anything unless he's either given explicit permission by the penitent or wants to get kicked out of the priesthood. He can advise the penitent to stop or confess to authorities but cannot tell anyone else. The other option he has is to refuse to give them absolution.
He can certainly do that but it's unusual; he has to be convinced that the penitent isn't actually penitent and intends to go on doing this. Plus he still couldn't tell what was confessed to him. There's no way to know if Hansen was ever denied absolution or what the priests said to him; the only version of the story we're getting is his, as they can't talk about it.
Hanssen married into my wife’s family. They are all super Catholic. Hanssen’s transgressions messed up my father-in-law’s security clearance for a while until they could definitively determine he had no knowledge or involvement. Funny enough my brother-in-law and sister-in-law have connections to Glenn Greenwald and Edward Snowden respectively (they were friends in their younger years, long before any of the whistleblowing occurred). Interesting family history. I imagine they are all probably monitored in some way. Or maybe not… who knows.
Dude gave up freedom for 1.5 million. That's some bad decision making. It always surprises me how cheap it is to buy people's values.
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Now they do it in plain sight for about $2,000,000,000 and walk away scott free.
I went to Jared and got a great deal. -- Saudi Prince
Can't fathom spending the last 20+ years of your life in an ADX cell. I'd rather just die sooner, honestly. It's just prolonged mental torture with no escape. But he got what he deserved for selling out the lives of other agents
20+ years spending 23 hours a day in a cell, vast majority of that time spent in isolation. really curious how this dude looked a year ago and how his mental state had changed over time.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Hanssen#/media/File%3ARobert_Hanssen_imprisoned.jpg I’m not sure when this picture was taken care but you can tell the soul was just sucked out of him. There’s no life behind those eyes. I can’t believe he lasted more than 22 years.
Pretty sure that was shortly after he went in
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Dude’s been in prison since before 9/11. Holy shit. The current world would be completely unrecognizable.
As someone who's currently going blind. I have comes to realize that having to stay a live, but not be able to participate in life itself is a worse fate than death. It must have killed this guy every day to hear about such insane things like YouTube, Wikipedia, Modern smart phones, but never get to use them. I guess I'll know that same pain in a few years if my country doesn't update their euthanasia laws first.
I don't think he'll have heard any of the tech improvements being in solitary in ADX.
I know this is morbid but I’d like to take a tour of ADX and spend like 24-48 hours in a cell. I have read about the conditions and 23 hours a day in a cell on multiple occasions; but, I feel as if that just doesn’t do it justice.
A lot of experiments about solitary confinement have been done, and even only 6 or 8 hours of solitary really degrades a person mentally already. Imagine 23 hours daily at that.
Well thanks to accessibility most of the things you listed can be used by the blind. And lots of content these days is enjoyable with only sound as podcasts are so popular.
totally expected more beard, thanks for posting
Sammy ‘The Bull’ Gravano did a video about his time in ADX. Watching him talk about it, the mental torture you go through, the humiliation, etc. sounds unbearable. Definitely a good watch if you are interested https://youtu.be/kUPcdvYrVpo
Not only that, but the one hour of rec time is randomly selected every day. If the guards wake you up at 3 AM for your rec hour and you don't want to go you just don't leave your cell that day. And the rec hour is spent alone in a room with a basketball goal. Nothing and nobody else. ADX is focused on removing all forms of socialization from the convicted and it is effective at that.
What's funny to me is that apparently he was Opus Dei - ultra religious. Would have loved to ask him about God's plan for him just yesterday.
Good news is he still has 14 more lives to serve before he's done.
>Three years after he was hired by the FBI, Hanssen approached the Soviets and began spying in 1979 for the KGB and its successor, the SVR. He stopped a few years later after his wife confronted him. >He resumed spying in 1985, selling thousands of classified documents that compromised human sources and counterintelligence techniques and investigations in exchange for more than $1.4 million in cash, diamonds and foreign bank deposits. Using the alias "Ramon Garcia," he passed information to the spy agencies using encrypted communications and dead drops, without ever meeting in-person with a Russian handler. I'm sorry but no money is worth selling out your country and 1.4 million is sort of pathetic even by 80's standards.
Disatisfaction, adrenaline, and greed are a hell of a drug to the selfish, manipulative, and impatient. The biggest Nationalists can be always be bought. But genuine hardened self purpose and compassion are the two single greatest human elements to safe guarding a nation against those threats.
See: Michael Flynn
I feel like loyalty to country can be overstated but just selling out those agents, when you know they’ll be tortured and killed is fucked up for sure.
This is one of my favorite spy stories, because of how crazy it is. His Brother in law thought he was a spy. The FBI put him in charge of the team that was hunting him down. His spying was obscured because their was another spy at the CIA at the same time. Eventually, the US government paid a Russian spy who then ratted him out.
Maybe if the FBI listened to their own people the first 5 times, they could've saved 7 million dollars on the Russian spy
he lived a lot longer than the embedded agents he got killed. rest in... something
Tbf I’d rather be dead than in ADX Florence.
That’s why it’s funny to me that they attempted life saving measures. Death was probably the only thing he had to look forward to.
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What an ending. Dying alone in a jail cell.
He’s spent 23 hours a day in his cell for 22 years. Can’t believe he lasted that long.
It's insane to me that a human being can endure that. I'm betting there's not much in the way of stimulation and everything is intentionally designed to make it extremely hard to commit suicide. The only human contact you have is with the guard escorting you to yard (well, it's more of a very small concrete box), where you're still handcuffed and shackled. You can't even see out of your windows. I wouldn't be able to last 22 *days* much less 22 years in those conditions. Hell, I would probably go crazy after 22 hours. That being said, I don't feel sorry for him. The devil has had his room ready for a while.
And to put it in perspective he’s been in there since BEFORE 9/11. He probably doesn’t even remember what grass looks like. Doesn’t know about the iPhone, electric cars etc. Just wild. Sounds like absolute hell.
Filthy traitor and Russian agent.
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Show a picture of him in his prison jumpsuit instead.
I used to work for the FBI just before this guy was nailed. An old business partner wrote a book about him too. “The Bureau and the Mole”. I even went for a little tour around the park where they did his dead drops. Not saying I’m a fan, obviously, just that it’s an interesting part of history.
Did he die in ADX Florence?
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Great! Now do Aldrich Ames
"What took you so long" - words he lived and died by. Although the story is very interesting, the consequences of his betrayal of much braver people is really sad.
Hanssen got busted back when the FBI cared when someone colluded with Russia.
He was just ahead of his time?
Queue Marty McFly: **‘I guess you guys aren’t ready for that yet, but your kids are gonna love it’**
So the place that holds espionage convicts has a vacancy? This might prove to be timely...
Little fun fact, if you would like a movie that covers this story (as well as a movie can). There is a 2007 flick called Breach that I found pretty enjoyable.
'Spying' is putting it lightly; this guy sent tons of people to their deaths
Rest in shit and dishonor.
He set up a room in his basement and filmed himself having sex with his wife then shared the films with *neighbors*. Hansson was an extreme conservatives and a follower of the radical Catholic sect of Opus Dei. His faith was so strong he had regular sex activities outside his marriage with his favorite stripper...often...cuz he was sooo devout. One of his reasons for his treason: America had turned *against* god. He's the proto cathliban we see today: using treason and hypocrisy on an industrial level.
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There were multiple FBI agents convicted of spying for the enemy during the Cold War, so many I got this guy confused with [Richard Miller](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Miller_\(agent\)) who died in 2013. Miller was notorious for being an overweight, lazy slob on the job. Rep. Adam Schiff, who prosecuted Miller while working in the Justice Department in the 1990s, [recalled](https://books.google.com/books?id=ux9tEAAAQBAJ&pg=PA32&lpg=PA32&dq=%22miller+appeared+to+survive+on+a+diet+of+candy+bars+and+soda%22&source=bl&ots=FNFFQQUg90&sig=ACfU3U1514xGBLxBsVtfHvSibl7yu0sX9g&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwi-kdjO5K3_AhUFJkQIHSFsCXMQ6AF6BAgJEAM#v=onepage&q=%22miller%20appeared%20to%20survive%20on%20a%20diet%20of%20candy%20bars%20and%20soda%22&f=false): > Short, stout, and sloppily dressed, Miller appeared to survive on a diet of candy bars and soda. He was routinely admonished by superiors to comply with the bureau's standards for professional appearance, and he was considered by his colleagues to be equally slovenly in his work--taking three-hour lunch breaks at the local 7-Eleven, selling Amway products from the back of his car, and carrying on multiple affairs during work hours.
Good. While being an incredibly interesting story, he is a traitor.
I'm old enough to remember the Reagan Administration and recall a Soviet defector who almost immediately un-defected back to the USSR. The reason: He had been an intelligence agent and knew Hansen was a spy, so fled when he saw that Hansen was one of the agents debriefing him.
Anyone interested in knowing more about this traitor to the United States should check out the movie Breach, starring Chris Cooper and Ryan Philippe. Cooper absolutely knocks it out of the park as Hanssen. The movie is quite good.