Hanssen Pleads Guilty to Spying for Moscow

July 6 -- Former FBI agent Robert Hanssen pleaded guilty today to spying for Moscow, after striking a plea deal that will spare him a possible death sentence and prevent national security secrets from being spilled in court.

Under the deal, Hanssen will be sentenced to spend the rest of his life in jail without the possibility of parole or a reduced sentence for any reason. He must tell the government all about his spying and how he managed to remain undetected for so long.

He pleaded guilty to engaging in a conspiracy to commit espionage, committing 13 separate acts of espionage and one act of attempted espionage.

"He very much wanted to make amends. That's a big reason for this disposition today," Hanssen's lawyer, Plato Cacheris, said after the former FBI agent pleaded guilty in U.S. District Court in Alexandria, Va., to 15 counts of espionage and conspiracy to commit espionage. "And he wanted to tell his former agency what he had done and how he had done it, matters of interest to them."

Avoiding the Death Penalty

If convicted in a trial, Hanssen could have been sentenced to death because prosecutors alleged his spying led to the death of two double agents. Cacheris asked the judge to set sentencing for Jan. 11, giving the FBI, CIA and other government agencies six months to pick Hanssen's brain.

"Given the gravity of Hanssen's betrayal and the strength of the government's case, the decision to forego the death penalty in this case was a difficult one," Deputy Attorney General Larry Thompson said.

"In reaching this decision, we determined that the interest of the United States would be best served by pursuing a course that would enable our government to fully assess the magnitude and scope of Hanssen's espionage activity, an objective we could not achieve if we sought and obtained the death penalty against him."

The government has already learned something it didn't know before — that Hanssen began spying for Moscow in 1979, not 1985 as the FBI thought, according to Cacheris.