How the FBI Caught Americas Greatest Traitor

Transcript

00:00it's a cold Sunday evening on February 18th 2001 a man in his late 50s walks alone through

00:09a quiet suburban park just outside Washington DC to anyone watching he seems unremarkable

00:15he isn't nervous he isn't rushed just a regular man taking an evening walk he pauses near a wooden

00:24footbridge looks behind his shoulder reaches into his coat and then carefully places a small

00:30plastic bag beneath the bridge a routine drop simple quick and no mistakes after all he's done

00:39this before many times but what he doesn't know is that this time he's not alone all around him

00:48they wait watching listening holding their breath for months the FBI had been preparing for this

00:55moment hundreds of agents had worked relentlessly to track this man down now they were finally ready

01:03after more than 20 years of betrayal the hunt for America's greatest traitor was about to come to an

01:08end in 1979 a former Chicago cop walks into a Soviet business in New York one that everyone knows is a

01:24front for Cold War intelligence operatives he has no contacts no experience and no plan but he does have

01:32something to sell Robert Hansen who jumped from Chicago's police department to the FBI just three

01:39years earlier offers to hand over top secret details to the GRU the Soviet Union's military intelligence

01:46agency for $20,000 Hansen provides the names of at least three Soviet double agents working for the US

01:53men who were later executed one of them was Dmitry Polyakov a legendary Soviet general and a crucial CIA

02:02informant for decades Polyakov had secretly provided intelligence that shaped US foreign policy but

02:09thanks to Hansen he was arrested tortured and executed a betrayal that sent shockwaves through

02:16American intelligence it's an act of betrayal so severe that it should have been a career-ending

02:21mistake but the Soviets never revealed their source and the FBI never suspected a thing when the FBI didn't

02:30come knocking Hansen realized that he was invisible a realization that made him extremely dangerous for

02:36the years to come and so he did it again for the next two decades Hansen perfected his craft he never met

02:45his Russian handlers in person never spoke to them on the phone instead he operated in the shadows

02:52exchanging information through dead drops in parks coded messages left under bridges encrypted files hidden in

03:00inside seemingly innocent letters the perfect mole hiding in plain sight but

03:06who was Robert Hansen and how on earth did he deceive the world's most powerful intelligence agency for more

03:14than two decades to those who knew him Hansen was the last person anyone would suspect of espionage he

03:21wasn't a flashy high rolling spy straight out of a Hollywood movie he was quiet reserved a devout

03:28Catholic a family man with six children he lived in a modest home in the suburbs of Washington drove an

03:34old tourist station wagon and attended church every Sunday without fail but what no one sees is the dark

03:41double life he's been living one built on deception secrets and betrayal by the mid-1980s he suddenly

03:50stopped maybe it was paranoia maybe it was guilt but a few years later he returned to the game this time

03:59selling secrets to the KGB the Soviet Union's main security agency under the alias Ramon and later B and

04:06the worst was yet to come one of his most devastating leaks came in the late 1980s when he exposed one of

04:15America's most classified intelligence operations a secret underground tunnel beneath the Soviet embassy

04:21in Washington built for surveillance millions of dollars had been spent constructing the tunnel but after

04:27Hansen tipped off the KGB it became useless the Soviets knew about it feeding misinformation to the FBI and

04:35rendering years of work worthless with every leak his price grew higher in total Hansen made more than 1.4 million

04:43dollars in cash diamonds and foreign bank deposits but this wasn't about the money not really Hansen wasn't

04:52desperate he wasn't drowning in debt and he wasn't coerced by a foreign power either he did it because he could

05:00because it made him feel untouchable for years Hansen walked freely through the halls of the FBI