FBI Spy Contrite, Gets Life Sentence

FBI spy Robert Philip Hanssen, speaking publicly for the first time about his crimes, apologized in court Friday for disgracing himself and his family, as he was ordered to spend the rest of his life in prison for selling the Russians reams of valuable state secrets.

“I apologize for my behavior. I am shamed by it,” a sullen Hanssen told a packed federal courtroom in Alexandria, Va. “I have opened the door for calumny against my totally innocent wife and children. I have hurt so many deeply.”

Hanssen’s remarks in court were brief, and he said his defense attorney, Plato Cacheris, had suggested he make them. Though he expressed regret to his family and friends and said he was “humbled” by their generosity, he did not apologize specifically to the FBI or the country.

Moments later, U.S. District Judge Claude Hilton sentenced Hanssen to life in prison without the possibility of parole as punishment for his 22 years of spying.

The sentence became a foregone conclusion this week when federal prosecutors, despite concerns that Hanssen had lied to them during hundreds of hours of debriefing sessions, decided not to try to scrap a plea agreement reached with Hanssen last year. The deal spared Hanssen a possible death sentence in exchange for a life sentence and his full cooperation.

Although the life sentence itself was anticlimactic, the scene was nonetheless an emotional one for Hanssen’s friends and enemies, many of whom turned out to mark the end of one of the worst episodes of espionage in U.S. history.

“Justice was served. This is closure to the darkest chapter in the history of the FBI,” said Van Harp, head of the FBI’s Washington field office.

Former FBI analyst Paul Moore, a longtime friend of Hanssen’s who used to carpool to work with him, sat in the courtroom wearing a black tie that he said he normally reserves for funerals.

“I dreaded this day, and I also couldn’t wait for it to happen. This is over now.... It’s still hard to believe he did what he did,” said Moore, who continues to support Hanssen and has provided his family with Amazon.com gift certificates so he can read in prison.

Even Hanssen’s former boss, retired FBI counterintelligence supervisor David Major, who also attended the sentencing, said outside the courthouse that he still respects the positive contributions Hanssen made to the FBI and that Hanssen’s apology appeared “heartfelt.”

“I knew part of him,” Major said. “There’s lots of Bob Hanssens. The good Bob Hanssen was a great guy. The bad Bob Hanssen I never knew.... He swam in two worlds.”

Others were less forgiving.

Assistant U.S. Atty. Randy Bellows, who prosecuted the case, called Hanssen “the cruelest kind of thief,” responsible for stealing valuable national secrets and jeopardizing many U.S. lives in the process.

And Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft said Hanssen “was trained and trusted by Americans and by our American government to sustain, support and secure the safety of America. He used the training and abused the trust in a way which threatened the safety and security of America. And I’m pleased that this chapter in American history has been closed on this day.”

Beginning in 1979, Hanssen gave his Russian handlers more than 6,000 pages of classified material and 26 computer discs with information on national security secrets. Sometimes he would simply grab whatever classified report he could find on his way out of the office. He would leave his cache at designated “dead drop” spots at a park near his home in Vienna, Va., and prosecutors say he received $1.4 million in cash, diamonds and gifts in exchange.

Hanssen told debriefers in recent months that he began spying mainly for the money because he felt strapped for cash from the pressure of supporting six children and buying a home in the metropolitan New York area, where he was assigned in the late 1970s.

“There were a lot of complex reasons as to why he did it,” Cacheris said after the sentencing. But whether it was the money, the ego boost or some other motive, the defense attorney said, “none of them are valid.”

Hanssen was arrested in February 2001 after he left a batch of stolen secrets at a drop site. Although the FBI had missed years of warning signs about Hanssen, information from a Russian defector alerted U.S. officials to his spying months earlier, and investigators then began aggressively monitoring his activities.

Authorities are still assessing the damage that Hanssen’s espionage did to U.S. national security.

But they have already determined that he prompted the Russians to execute at least three double agents by revealing that they were working for the United States, that he compromised national security by selling U.S. nuclear assessments, and that he exposed gaps in U.S. intelligence capabilities that the Russians were able to exploit.

The case sparked months of embarrassing revelations about lax security at the FBI, and Director Robert Mueller has now moved to shore up counterintelligence by forcing more agents to take polygraph tests and by improving computer security, among other measures.

Hanssen is often ranked with former CIA agent Aldrich H. Ames at the top of the list of U.S. spies based on the damage done to national security. Hanssen is expected to serve his time at a federal prison in Allenwood, Pa.--where Ames is housed.

“They’ll be in the same facility,” Cacheris said. “I suppose they’ll run into each other in the chow line.”

Hanssen’s wife, Bonnie, who will receive nearly $40,000 a year from his FBI pension and has stood by her husband throughout the 14-month ordeal, did not attend the sentencing, and neither did any other family members. But with no cameras allowed inside, throngs of reporters, FBI agents, avid court watchers and others packed the Virginia courtroom.

Among the spectators was actor Ron Silver, who appears in a recurring role in the television series “West Wing” and is appearing in a TV movie on the case that is expected out in the fall. William Hurt plays Hanssen, and Silver plays a boss at the FBI.

“It was all very businesslike,” Silver said of the sentencing. “But for me it was all very interesting ... just to see his last moment in public like that.”