(FLORENCE, Co.) — CBS News reports that Robert Hanssen, former FBI agent who spent two decades selling highly classified material to the Soviet Union and later Russia, died in prison Monday morning. He was 79 years old.
Hanssen was arrested in 2001, and pleaded guilty to selling classified information to foreign actors. At the time of his death, he was serving a life sentence in a federal penitentiary in Florence, Colorado.
“Staff requested emergency medical services and life-saving efforts continued,” Kristie Breshears, Bureau of Prisons Director of Communications said. “The inmate was subsequently pronounced dead by outside emergency medical personnel.”
Hanssen’s position in the FBI gave him extensive access to classified information about the bureau’s counterintelligence operations, on multiple occasions passing along information which lead to the death of human sources and double agents working for the United States. He was finally caught after the FBI monitored him making a dead drop in a park in Virginia.
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