Chicago and the U.S. have a long history of dealing with spies who have caused immense damage to the country. Among the most dangerous double agents were Robert Hanssen, Richard Miller, Aldrich Ames, and Earl Pitts. Each of them handed over thousands of pages of classified information to the Soviet Union and, later, Russia. These documents exposed critical national security secrets, including details of America’s nuclear operations and the existence of a tunnel the FBI built under the Soviet embassy in Washington chicago-yes.com.
Robert Hanssen’s Treachery
Born in Chicago in 1944 to a police officer, Robert Hanssen graduated from Knox College in 1966. He briefly attended Northwestern University’s dental school before earning a master’s degree in business administration. Hanssen worked as an investigator for the Chicago Police Department before joining the FBI in 1976, serving in Indiana and New York.
Hanssen’s life of deception began in 1979 when he volunteered to spy for the GRU, the Soviet military intelligence agency. He quickly informed the Soviets that a high-ranking general, Dmitri Polyakov, was actually a CIA informant who had been spying for the U.S. since the 1960s. Polyakov was later executed.
In 1980, after his wife caught him with suspicious documents, Hanssen admitted to selling classified information to the Soviets, though he claimed it was worthless. At his wife’s urging, he promised to cut all ties with the Soviet Union and confessed his crime to a priest, who advised him to donate his ill-gotten gains to charity. However, something went wrong, and in 1985, Hanssen resumed his spying career, this time working with the KGB. He provided them with the names of three Soviet officers who were working with the CIA and FBI. All three were arrested and executed.
Meanwhile, Robert continued to climb the ranks of the FBI, eventually holding leadership positions in counterintelligence. In 1991, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, he stopped spying, possibly fearing exposure. But in 1999, while serving as an FBI liaison to the U.S. State Department, he resumed his double agent career, this time with the SVR, Russia’s post-Soviet foreign intelligence service.
Hanssen’s downfall came in 2000. The FBI, which had by then suspected a mole in its ranks, paid $7 million to a former KGB employee for information from SVR headquarters. This information helped identify Hanssen as the traitor. The FBI began surveillance on him in late 2000, and on February 18, 2001, he was arrested in a park in Vienna, Virginia, as he was dropping off secret documents in a plastic trash bag. Nearby, agents found a bag containing $50,000 in cash, intended as a payment for Hanssen’s services.
Facing the death penalty, Robert made a deal with the government, agreeing to cooperate fully. In July 2001, he pleaded guilty to 15 counts of espionage. In May 2002, he was sentenced to life in prison without parole. He spent the rest of his life in a supermax federal prison near Florence, Colorado. On June 5, 2023, Hanssen was found dead in his cell.
Richard Miller: Selling Secrets for Profit
In 1984, 17 years before Hanssen’s arrest, Richard Miller—a 20-year FBI veteran assigned to the Los Angeles foreign counterintelligence division—was arrested for selling classified documents to Russian agents. Miller was sentenced to life in prison in 1986. The conviction was later overturned, but he was found guilty again in a retrial in 1990. Miller was eventually released from prison in 1994.
Spies Earl Pitts and Aldrich Ames
The second FBI agent to be caught spying for Moscow was Earl Pitts, who volunteered to become a “mole” for the KGB in 1987. He passed classified information to the Russians starting in 1992, for which he was paid over $220,000 at the time. Pitts was caught in a sting operation in 1996. He pleaded guilty to espionage and was sentenced to 27 years in prison in 1997.
Another particularly dangerous agent for the U.S. was Aldrich Ames. A CIA officer who worked for the agency for over 30 years and specialized in Soviet and Russian intelligence services, Ames was arrested for spying for Moscow in the winter of 1994. The son of a CIA employee, Ames began working for the CIA in the early 1960s and started selling classified information to the Soviet Union in 1985. It’s noteworthy that he did so voluntarily and consciously. Apparently driven by greed, Ames earned around $2.5 million in illegal payments from the KGB and other Soviet intelligence organizations over the years. CIA agents began to suspect him in 1993. After his arrest and confession in 1994, he was sentenced to life in prison without parole. His wife was also found guilty of conspiracy to commit espionage and sentenced to five years in prison. As a result of Ames’s espionage, more than 100 U.S. intelligence operations were exposed, and several U.S. presidents were given false intelligence.