Robert Hanssen

I find Robert Hanssen one of the most unsettling figures in this database. Not a celebrity in any conventional sense, he was an FBI agent who sold out his own institution to Soviet and Russian intelligence for over two decades, a betrayal the Justice Department called possibly the worst intelligence disaster in American history. What disturbs me is the ordinariness of the man: a Chicago-born, Northwestern-educated insider who lived a double life in plain sight. To me his story is less about espionage tradecraft than about how institutions misread the people they trust most. He died in prison in 2023, a cautionary tale rather than a legend.

Robert Philip Hanssen (April 18, 1944 – June 5, 2023) was an American Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agent who spied for Soviet and Russian intelligence services intermittently against the United States from 1979 to 2001. His espionage was described by the United States Department of Justice as "possibly the worst intelligence disaster in U.S. history".

Summary adapted from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

Name (English)

Robert Hanssen

Name (Japanese)

ロバート・ハンセン

Reading

ろばーと・はんせん

Born

April 18, 1944 – June 5, 2023

Zodiac / Chinese zodiac

Aries / Monkey

Origin

Chicago, Illinois, United States

Blood type

Private

Height

Private

Agency

Private

Occupation

spy / mole / government agent / double agent

Elementary school

Private

Junior high

Private

High school

William Howard Taft High School

University

Northwestern University

Spouse

Private

Children

Private

Parents

Private

Siblings

Private

Motto

Private

• Wikipedia (Japanese)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert%20Hanssen

Tags

• Illinois
• spy
• mole
• government agent

Last updated

2026-06-11

Facts are limited to publicly available information up to 2024; non-public items are marked "Private / Unknown". English text is machine-assisted (facts translated by Sonnet, "My Take" written by Opus 4.8). The Japanese page is the source of record.