Between 1979 and his arrest in 2001, Robert Hanssen abused his position as an FBI agent by working as a spy for the Soviet Union and the post-Cold War Russian government. Hanssen secretly sold roughly 6,000 classified documents to Moscow’s intelligence operatives.
The documents detailed U.S. military secrets and exposed KGB agents who were spying on behalf of Washington. It was no small exaggeration for the U.S. Department of Justice to describe Hanssen’s shenanigans as “possibly the worst intelligence disaster in U.S. history.”
