Robert Hanssen, the FBI agent who spied for Moscow
Washington and Vienna (Virginia), United States, 1979 to 2001
This case is a work of fiction. The characters, names, places and events in the game do not portray real people. The account below is a factual summary, based on public sources, of the case that served as inspiration.
Robert Hanssen joined the FBI on January 12, 1976, and built a career in counterintelligence against the Soviets. In 1979 he offered his services to Soviet military intelligence and, on October 1, 1985, sent an anonymous letter to the KGB asking for $100,000. Over more than twenty years he handed over thousands of secret documents, the names of KGB officers who were working for the Americans (two of them were executed in Moscow) and even the eavesdropping tunnel the FBI had dug under the new Soviet embassy. He received more than $1.4 million in cash, diamonds and watches and never revealed his name to the Russians, who knew him as "Ramon Garcia".
Hanssen chose his own dead drops, almost always in parks near his home, and used a code that added 6 to the month, the day and the hour of the exchanges. There were ignored warning signs: in 1990 his brother-in-law, also in the FBI, reported that the family had found a wad of cash at his house, and nothing was done. After the arrest of Aldrich Ames in 1994, the FBI and the CIA hunted for a second spy and, for about two years, mistakenly investigated a veteran CIA officer, Brian Kelley, who lived near the park Hanssen used.
Sources
In the game
White Tape
Washington, Monday, February 19, 2001, 10 pm. At the headquarters of a federal counterintelligence bureau, a black plastic bag, still dirty with soil, rests in an evidence envelope.
In 2000 the FBI paid $7 million to a former Russian agent for the spy's file, with a recording of a 1986 conversation and a garbage bag bearing two fingerprints, which were Hanssen's; an analyst recognized in the letters a quote from General Patton that he used to repeat. Hanssen was promoted to a front position at headquarters, watched by a young assistant, Eric O'Neill, who managed to copy the contents of his pocket computer. On February 18, 2001, he stuck a strip of white tape on a sign in Foxstone Park, in Vienna, taped a bag of documents under a wooden bridge and was arrested on his way back. He pleaded guilty to 15 counts of espionage, said the motive was money and was sentenced to life in prison; he died in jail in 2023.
