Former F.B.I. Agent Gets Life in Prison For Years as a Spy

The former F.B.I. agent Robert Hanssen was sentenced today to life in prison for spying for Moscow during and after the cold war, bringing to a close one of the most lurid and damaging espionage cases in American history.

Appearing before Chief Judge Claude M. Hilton of United States District Court in Alexandria, Va., this morning, Mr. Hanssen publicly apologized for the first time for betraying both his country and his family, saying he was shamed by his own behavior and adding, ”I have opened the door to calumny to my totally innocent wife and family.”

Yet despite his display of contrition, many of the government’s top counterintelligence experts still believe that Mr. Hanssen has not told them the whole truth about his long career as a Russian spy, which spanned more than two decades.

Complaints from investigators about Mr. Hanssen’s lack of candor since his arrest in February 2001 nearly scuttled a plea agreement that allowed Mr. Hanssen to avoid a death sentence. In the end, federal prosecutors determined that there was not enough evidence to prove that he had lied in his debriefings, and so they stuck with their deal calling for a life sentence without the possibility of parole.

Plato Cacheris, Mr. Hanssen’s lawyer, said today that Mr. Hanssen had been telling the government the truth about his espionage.

”The bottom line was that he was fully cooperative,” Mr. Cacheris said.

Mr. Hanssen’s spy case has followed bizarre twists ever since his arrest in a Virginia park after he left classified documents for his Russian handlers. The case has been marked by disclosures that his public life as a leading member of a conservative Catholic organization masked a secret life filled with sexual obsessions. This sometimes overshadowed the mounting evidence of the enormous damage he inflicted on American national security. He identified at least four Russian agents who were spying for the F.B.I. and C.I.A., and three were later executed.

Mr. Hanssen joined the F.B.I. in 1976 and began to spy for the Soviets three years later, after he was assigned to a counterintelligence unit in New York. He volunteered to spy first for the Soviet military intelligence agency, by walking into the New York offices of Amtorg, a Soviet trade organization that was well known as a front for the agency. In that first spy stint, he told the Soviets that a general in the Soviet agency, Dmitri Polyakov, code-named Top Hat, was an American spy.

But about 1980, Mr. Hanssen’s wife, Bonnie, discovered what he was doing when she walked in on him in the basement of their Westchester County home and he quickly tried to cover up his papers. He reluctantly confessed to her, and then agreed to confess to a priest affiliated with Opus Dei, the conservative Catholic organization they had joined. The priest told Mr. Hanssen that if he gave the money he had received from the Soviets to a charity and agreed not to spy again, there was no reason for him to turn himself in to the F.B.I. Mr. Hanssen agreed, and gave a large donation to a charity affiliated with Mother Teresa.

Mr. Hanssen stopped spying for several years, but in 1985 he began again, and this time he was careful to cover his tracks. He volunteered to the K.G.B. rather than to the military agency, doing so by sending an anonymous letter to a K.G.B. officer based in Washington. He refused to meet personally with K.G.B. officers, instead communicating with them through written messages and prearranged telephone calls. Identifying himself only by code names like B and Ramon Garcia, Mr. Hanssen warned the K.G.B. of three K.G.B. officers spying for the United States and also revealed the existence of an eavesdropping tunnel built by the F.B.I. and the National Security Agency underneath the Soviet Embassy in Washington. His betrayal of the tunnel cost the United States hundreds of millions of dollars, government officials say.

Mr. Hanssen has told investigators that he stopped spying again in 1991 just as the Soviet Union was collapsing. By then he had become one of the F.B.I.’s senior counterintelligence experts, and he knew that both the F.B.I. and the C.I.A. were being inundated with recruits from the K.G.B. He apparently quit out of a well-founded fear that someone from the K.G.B. who knew there was a spy code-named B at large in the United States government might defect and prompt a mole hunt aimed at him.

But he went undetected for another decade. He started to spy again in 1999, while assigned as the F.B.I. liaison to the State Department.

He was discovered thanks only to a mole inside the K.G.B. Mr. Hanssen was paid $1.4 million by the K.G.B., although he apparently received only about $600,000 of it, in cash and diamonds. The remaining $800,000, the K.G.B. told him, was set aside in a Russian bank account.

Still, he continued to live in a modest home in Vienna, Va., with his wife and six children. But he gave thousands of dollars to a stripper he befriended at a Washington bar.

Other aspects of Mr. Hanssen’s life have come to light in a series of new books that portray him as obsessed by pornography and unusual sexual fantasies, while publicly displaying deep religious convictions. An old friend of Mr. Hanssen’s has told several authors that Mr. Hanssen arranged for him to watch videotapes made without Mrs. Hanssen’s knowledge of the Hanssens having sex.

The plea agreement with the government does allow Mrs. Hanssen to keep part of Mr. Hanssen’s F.B.I. pension and also permits her to retain ownership of their home.