The story delves into the life of Robert Hanson, an FBI agent who, in an unparalleled manner, leaked numerous classified secrets to the Russians for money. Hanson managed to remain undetected for over two decades, sharing sensitive information such as secret U.S. war plans and the identities of Russian spies working for the U.S. Despite leading a seemingly mundane and devoted family life, he was deeply involved in espionage and multiple secret lives, which he concealed from everyone, including his family and church.

Hanson's personal life was as complicated as his espionage activities. He maintained a facade of a devoted family man and a staunch church-goer, involved with Opus Dei, yet he engaged in acts of betrayal. He clandestinely shared intimate moments with friends and exploited his technological prowess for his secretive activities, including setting up secret cameras. Additionally, his strange pursuits extended into his interactions online, where he shared explicit details about his personal life.

Main takeaways from the video:

Please remember to turn on the CC button to view the subtitles.

Key Vocabularies and Common Phrases:

1. unassuming [ˌənəˈswo͞omiNG] - (adjective) - Not pretentious or arrogant; modest. - Synonyms: (modest, humble, unpretentious)

Everyone who knew him at the FBI thought Robert Hanson was a quiet, unassuming computer nerd.

2. compromised [ˈkämprəˌmīzd] - (verb) - To expose or make vulnerable to danger, suspicion, scandal, etc. - Synonyms: (jeopardized, endangered, weakened)

For $600,000 in cash and diamonds from the Russians, Hansen compromised, among other things, the existence of a top secret surveillance tunnel under the russian embassy in Washington DC

3. peccadilloes [ˌpekəˈdilōz] - (noun) - Minor faults or sins. - Synonyms: (misdemeanors, lapses, indiscretions)

Nobody knows more about spies and their peccadilloes than John Martin.

4. compartmented [kämˈpärtmentid] - (adjective) - Divided into sections or categories to control access or distribution. - Synonyms: (segmented, isolated, divided)

They are from certain of the most sensitive and highly compartmented projects of the US intelligence community.

5. epiphany [iˈpifənē] - (noun) - A sudden, intuitive perception of or insight into the reality or essential meaning of something. - Synonyms: (revelation, realization, insight)

He is a genius. You said that he liked the game. He liked living in the game.

6. treachery [ˈtreCHərē] - (noun) - Betrayal of trust; deceptive action or nature. - Synonyms: (betrayal, disloyalty, duplicity)

The treachery of it. The treachery.

7. amoral [āˈmôrəl] - (adjective) - Lacking a moral sense; unconcerned with the rightness or wrongness of something. - Synonyms: (unethical, unprincipled, unscrupulous)

You have to find a new word. It's sort of dramatically amoral.

8. exhibitionist [ˌeksəˈbiSHənəst] - (noun) - A person who behaves in an extravagant way in order to attract attention. - Synonyms: (show-off, performer, narcissist)

He, the exhibitionist, trying to save an exhibitionist.

9. shrewdness [ˈSHro͞odnəs] - (noun) - The quality of having or showing good powers of judgement. - Synonyms: (astuteness, sharpness, cleverness)

But Martin tips his hat to Hansen for his shrewdness in covering his tracks.

10. devout [diˈvout] - (adjective) - Having or showing deep religious feeling or commitment. - Synonyms: (pious, religious, faithful)

He's an absolutely devout man.

Robert Hanssen - 60 Minutes Archive

60 minutes. Rewind. Everyone who knew him at the FBI thought Robert Hanson was a quiet, unassuming computer nerd. But it turns out this FBI agent gave away more secrets than any spy in the history of the bureau. For $600,000 in cash and diamonds from the Russians, Hansen compromised, among other things, the existence of a top secret surveillance tunnel under the Russian Embassy in Washington DC. Secret U.S. war plans and the identity of Russians working as spies for the U.S. for over 22 years. He went undetected as he worked his way up to chief of the Soviet analytical unit, which has been described as a supermarket of classified information on U.S. operations against the Russians. What's more, he not only betrayed his country, he also betrayed his church and his wife in an almost unimaginable way. Betrayal was at the very core of his soul.

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Norman Mailer and filmmaker Lauren Schiller have spent the last ten months investigating the Hansen case for an upcoming CBS television movie and a book called Into the Mirror. Here he is with one of his sons teaching him how to shoot James Bond. For their research, Schiller and Mailer have gone through a family album that depicts an image of your normal, healthy, middle-class, all-American family man. Now this is the picture of them getting married. Look how happy he is. And he's tall and handsome and she looks like Natalie Wood. This is the perfect couple. Here's the whole family. Look at that. Just gorgeous. All six members of his family. By all outward appearances, Hansen was devoted to his kids and Bonnie, his wife of 33 years. They sent their children to private religious schools so they could be instilled with solid Christian values. But this was all an illusion.

Bob Hansen wasn't just a double agent. He had multiple secret lives at the office and at home. Just right after being married, he started to photograph his wife. He started taking pictures of her. Nude pictures. A little more risque, pretty strong pictures that may not sound all that strange, but what was even stranger was that he was sending those nude pictures. Unbeknownst to his wife, to his best friend, now retired U.S. army officer Jack Horshower. And if that's not enough, Hansen showed his best friend even more. He had immense knowledge of technology. So he was able to put a closed-circuit television camera in his bedroom, hidden away behind a photograph with a little hole in the photograph. And it was piped into a television set someplace else in the house. And when Jack Kershawer would visit, he'd say, just turn on the television. And if you want to watch something interesting, let me know. And he would watch Robert Hanson making love to his wife.

His wife didn't know about that. You're telling this in the most matter of fact tone of voice, as if, hey, he set up a camera and let his friend watch him in bed with his wife. This is over the top. It's not only over the top, but then he would ask Jack Hershauer, well, would you like to see me do something else in bed? What else would you like? What do you call that? I call it wicked to the nth degree.

And there's even more. Incredible as it sounds, Hansen published stories about his sexual life with his wife on adult-oriented websites and used his own name. He lived a life of treachery and betrayal, and he betrayed everyone. Nobody knows more about spies and their peccadilloes than John Martin. He oversaw the investigations and prosecutions of some 76 spies when he was a senior official at the justice department out of government. Now he has followed the Hansen case closely.

Do you know that Hansen wrote pornographic stories on the Internet? I did not know that until recently. If the bureau had found out about that, would that have rung the bell? He would have been removed from access and an investigation would have been conducted. Now, he used his own name and the name of his wife. How come that wasn’t caught? They just weren’t looking or I don't know. If the FBI is surfing the pornographic net looking for spies, they may be doing it after this case.

Hansen began feeding the Soviets valuable information. In 1979, just three years after joining the FBI, he communicated with the Russians in writing. This is a copy of one of his actual letters sent in 1985 to his handler, Victor Circassian. Soon I will send a box of documents to Mister Degtyar. They are from certain of the most sensitive and highly compartmented projects of the U.S. intelligence community. In his letters, he gave up the identity of soviet spies like Tophat, a high-ranking and highly productive Soviet officer who was on the CIA payroll. When you give up the names of live sources, you're doing the maximum damage that you can. Were they really the top of the line sources? They were top of the line sources, and they were pulled back. And two of the three sources were executed after he gave them up.

Do you think that was deliberate, that he knew exactly who he was targeting? Absolutely. He was getting rid of his competition. The treachery of it. The treachery.

But Martin tips his hat to Hansen for his shrewdness in covering his tracks. He was as much a mystery to the KGB as he was to the FBI. Never allowing his Russian handlers to meet him. He communicated with them only in writing. They didn't know he was with the FBI and they assumed, probably assumed, that he was with the CIA. That’s because he threw them off his track by often signing his message with the pen name Ramon Garcia, which ends quite deliberately with the letters CIA. And the information he gave up concerned the CIA as well as other intelligence agencies, but never the FBI, where he worked.

So what kind of man would betray his country so secretly and his wife so publicly? Jean le Carre could not write a novel about Hanson. Graham Greene couldn't. Even Norman Mailer couldn't. It takes Dostoevsky. No, he's the most complex, probably the most complex real character that I've ever had to contend with. He says the contradictions involving his wife alone were extraordinary, by the way. He adored her. He worshipped her. He loved her. You can't imagine how much he loved her. But he's a man of parts. So not only did he love her and adore her, he also had to betray her. You see, what you find there is that next to his most noble and loving emotions are his most evil emotions. And they alternate. They alternate.

How does he keep from going insane? Good question. Since he was also betraying the church he was seemingly devoted to. Hanson was, and still is, a member of a conservative order within the Roman Catholic Church called Opus Dei, Latin for work of God, a group dedicated to fighting communism. He attended mass and took communion daily. So he'd go to church, this very conservative Opus Dei order, and pray on his knees. Pray on his knees. Right. And tremble while he prayed.

So while he was praying, are you saying that he didn't? He was laughing at it? No, I think he almost demands that you come up with a new kind of psychology to explain him. He's an absolutely devout man. Prayed with intensity, brought up his children. He was a model father and he would help them write essays about how good America was and that, come on. Here was a man that was always talking about fighting communism, which was one of the things that Opus Dei was very much involved in. He is at the same time giving the Soviet Union those secrets which are the most important.

This is the epitome of the amoral human being. You have to find a new word. It's sort of dramatically amoral.

The story will continue after this. Doctor Alan Solarian, a psychiatrist hired by Hansen's legal defense team who spent 30 hours interviewing him, says Hansen isn't amoral, he's ill, suffering from a severe psychological disorder. He is driven by demons. He is driven by thoughts, unwanted thoughts. Salarian says Hanson shared his whole secret life with his Opus Dei priest.

He tells the priest not only psychological demons. On top of this, he tells this priest that he's also spying. And look, the kind of advice he got, lousy advice. He was told to pray more and to turn the money to Mother Teresa. To me that's outrageous. They basically said if you give the money to Mother Teresa, everything will be okay. Yes, exactly.

Hansen has told the government that indeed he gave his spy money in the early eighties, about $12,000 up to that time, to Mother Teresa, and then went on to spy some more with Bob Hansen. The church dropped the ball. They fumbled it. The church's position is that a priest cannot reveal what he learns in confidence. But Salarian thinks the church should have encouraged Hansen to seek psychiatric help and turn himself in instead of using his $600,000 in spy money to bail his family out of debt.

Hansen has three mortgages on the house. He spent much of the money on Priscilla Gailey, whom he met at a strip club where she performed. He goes out with this stripper who was beautiful and had won awards for being the best stripper of the year in this city and that city, including Washington, D.C., and who was a charming, intelligent woman. And he spent a year with her, spent something like $80,000 on her in that year, which was almost equal to his yearly salary. And never made a pass at her, right? Never. She made a pass at him, but he never made a pass at her.

He wanted to convert her. He rejected her. Yes. There's no question he rejected her. But, you know, he still tried to convert her to Catholicism.

And this was not the only girl that he did it with. There were several other strippers. One I think he even succeeded in converting. He, the exhibitionist, trying to save an exhibitionist. You're right on that.

But there's another angle. Bob Hansen was not trying to save Priscilla. Bob Hanson was trying to save himself. It was. Maybe it's too much psychobabble, but in Zacchaeus we call it projective identification. He put himself onto somebody else and tried to help.

Something else Doctor Salerian believes Hansen did was use his spying as a way to fend off his demons. His espionage was an escape from his sexual demons. That when he found himself in an exciting, dangerous position such as espionage and spying, he found that his demons slow down. They calmed down.

You're not going to be able to dismiss Hansen by speaking of his psychiatric categories he goes beyond that. He is crazier than crazy. He comes out at the other end because his behavior is so rational, you see under immense stress and tension. Think of taking these secrets out of the FBI week after week, month after month, year after year.

He gave the Russians, you know, the average big spy like Walker or one of those would give two or three drops a year. In one year, Hanson gave something like 13 or 14 drops. It was unheard of. The Russians were just going on, who is this man? He is a genius.

You said that he liked the game. He liked living in the game. He found adventure in it. And he looked upon himself as someone who was smarter than everybody else, and he looked down upon his colleagues.

But eventually the game caught up with him when a Russian spy turned over the entire KGB file on the man known as Ramon Garcia. While the file did not contain Hansen's name, it did include a tape recording of his voice and his fingerprints, lifted from this plastic garbage bag that he once used to wrap classified documents. The perfect spy was not so perfect after all.

He got a little sloppy. And so on February 18, 2001, about a month before he was set to retire from the FBI, Hansen's worlds, all three or four of them, came crashing down. Is this a tragic figure? Is this somebody we need to reserve just an ounce of pity for? Or is this just outright pure evil? Pure criminality? How about having the difference? A little pity? And he probably is pretty damn evil.

Hansen, who will be sentenced in May, has agreed to plead guilty to espionage and cooperate with the government. In return, he avoids the death penalty and assures that his wife Bonnie will collect most of his pension from his 25 years with the FBI.

And finally, what about Bonnie? We're told that she still loves him and completely forgives him.

Espionage, Betrayal, Psychological Disorder, Technology, Science, Inspiration, 60 Minutes