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Filler Episode - Robert Hanssen is Dead
42 Plays1 year ago
More filler, this time ripped from the week's headlines! Josh is talking about the life and recent death of Robert Hanssen, FBI mole, Opus Dei member, doer of dodgy sex stuff. This episode contains all you could want to know about what he did (sell secrets to the Russians), why he did it (they gave him money), how he got caught (the FBI gave someone else money) and everything in between (dodgy sex stuff).
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Transcript
Introduction and Context
00:00:05
Speaker
The Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy featuring Josh Addison and Em Denteth. Hello and welcome to the Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy. I am approximately 75% of Josh Addison, accompanied by precisely 0% of Dr. Em Denteth. Dr. Denteth is once again overseas doing denteth-y things.
00:00:33
Speaker
And so here I am putting in another filler episode for you. Another one of those weird fisto-episto things show up. And unless you're talking about classic Masters of the Universe figures, I don't think there's any cause to be using the word fisto anywhere. Sounds...
00:00:49
Speaker
Sounds a little bit suspect to me, but anyway, they keep going up in our feed. I'm not quite sure what the explanation is, but that's no, neither here nor there. Em's not around, so I need to give you a little filler episode.
A Shift to Current Events
00:01:01
Speaker
I say 75%, I'm not 100% well, so if my voice starts to go, that's why. But what can you do? What you can do is do another filler episode, and for once,
00:01:13
Speaker
I have not gone to our little list of possible episodes. I say our em's the one who mostly put all this stuff there, so I'm just kind of piggybacking off of their work, but I didn't do that this time anyway. No, even more lazily, I've just put together an episode inspired by current events. So let's play a little chime and get right into it.
The Double Life of Robert Hanson
00:01:40
Speaker
And what current events would those be? Well, it would be the fact that Robert Hanson died in prison this week, aged 79. This isn't an Epstein kind of thing, no cause of death has been given, but it's believed to be natural causes. Again, 79 years old, not an unheard of age for a person to die in prison.
00:01:58
Speaker
But who was Robert Hanson? If you don't know, and I didn't until I saw people talking about this. Robert Hanson was an FBI agent who was convicted of selling secrets to Russia. All up, he got $1.4 million out of the Russians. And this was in the currency of the time, which was sort of the 80s and 90s. So that amounts to a larger sum these days, I believe. Apparently got about $600,000 in cash and diamonds and another $800,000 placed in a bank account. According to Mr. Hanson, he was just in it for the money.
00:02:28
Speaker
There's no, he claims there's no greater ideological motivation behind it. He didn't hate America. He wasn't a secret communist. He was just after the cash. Some of the agents who worked with him, in particular agents who worked on capturing him, or on proving he was guilty and getting him arrested, thought that there was possibly an element of narcissism in play.
00:02:51
Speaker
one of the agents called Richard Garcia, who we'll get to later on in the piece, said of Robert Hanson, he felt he was God and he was going to be able to control the United States and Russia. So maybe that was part of it. Maybe he liked imagining, you know, he's this
00:03:06
Speaker
single individual playing off the two mightiest nations in the earth against each other, deceiving them. But I don't know. All we know for sure is he said it was just about the cash. He was arrested in 2001, so it must have made the news at the time, but I mean I guess that's 22 years ago now, so I can be forgiven for having forgotten about it.
00:03:26
Speaker
and I'm sure you can too. He was fairly quickly convicted of 15 charges, 14 counts of espionage and one count of conspiracy to commit espionage. So I see it's okay for me to be talking about him now.
00:03:39
Speaker
He apparently pleaded guilty to all of those charges to avoid the death penalty and was instead sentenced to life in prison without parole, which he had been serving in an accident security prison in Colorado until his death earlier this week. He was also a Catholic and a member of Opus Dei, which apparently, now I haven't read or seen the book or movie of the Da Vinci Code, but apparently this earned him a mention in the Da Vinci Code when Opus Dei comes up. Apparently there is a section where they mention Robert Hanson as sort of one of the more
00:04:09
Speaker
the more well-known at the time people connected to Opus Dei, and apparently he brought Opus Dei into some disrepute with his high treason and also deviant sex stuff, which are not actually related to the spy stuff, but I feel like we need to talk about that as well just because it's fun.
00:04:27
Speaker
There's been a movie where there's actually been several movies about him, I believe, a couple sort of made-for-TV types. But then in 2007, there was the movie Breach, which was a bigger budget one in that he's played by Chris Cooper. The movie also features Ryan Phillipi, Laura Linney, Gary Cole. It was a decent sized one. As you'd expect from a more sort of Hollywood
00:04:47
Speaker
treatment of a real life case it does take some liberties with the facts although apparently over the end credits they do sort of there there is some sort of disclaimer or something where they say you know we change the details of some stuff because that's that's that's just what we do so let's talk about
00:05:02
Speaker
the life and times of Robert Hanson. He started in the Chicago Police Department in internal affairs, I think, but left the police to join the FBI. He became a special agent on the 12th of January 1976. Now, friends of the podcast might recognize the 12th of January 1976 as the literal date of my birth.
00:05:25
Speaker
The day that I was being born, Robert Hanson was being sworn into the FBI. Could that be coincidence? I guess it would have to be, but still. That's an interesting thing to read when you're reading up on the guy. So in 76 he joins the FBI in 1979.
Espionage and Its Consequences
00:05:43
Speaker
He approached the GRU, which is the Soviet Military Intelligence. GRU stands for a bunch of Russian words that I don't know how to pronounce correctly, so I'll just stick with the acronym. And he offered, basically said, hey, would you like to buy some American secrets? I'm in the FBI. I can sell you some. So in all of his communications, he used the alias Ramon Garcia.
00:06:06
Speaker
and never directly revealed his identity to the Soviets, except for one time, perhaps, which we'll get to. I mean, I have to assume the Soviets would have looked into this guy who's selling them secrets and probably knew who he was, perhaps, but if they did, we haven't seen direct evidence of that as far as I'm aware.
00:06:27
Speaker
So he started selling stuff to the Soviets. He provided them information about the FBI's bugging activities, where they'd been, where and who they had been bugging stuff. He also gave them lists of suspected Soviet intelligence agents and his treason. I mean, this surely counts. He wasn't charged specifically with treason, but it sounds like that's what it would count as. Well, it was not without harm. You know, this isn't this isn't just
00:06:57
Speaker
sticking it to the man or the government or whatever, his deeds came with a body count. In this earlier phase, he gave up a CIA informant by the name of Dmitry Poliakov. Now, it should be said that at this time, he was not the only person doing this. In particular, there was a mole in the CIA, a man called an agent called Aldrich Ames.
00:07:18
Speaker
And as we'll see, Ames often, he sort of stole Hanson's thunder a little bit. Some of the information that Hanson leaked to the Soviets had already been leaked to the Soviets by Aldrich Ames, although this kind of, this worked out in his favor a little bit, because as we'll see, Ames was caught before he was. And at that point, people sort of thought they, okay, well, so we know the Soviets got this information because Ames leaked it to them, and then they weren't looking for someone else such as Hanson.
00:07:47
Speaker
But we'll see how that turns out shortly. And of course, Dmitry Poliakov was arrested back in the USSR and executed. And this was not the last time that would happen. In 1981, Hanson was transferred to the FBI headquarters in Washington. And that put a stop to his treasoning for a little while. I assume simply because being right in the FBI headquarters, right in the heart of the FBI, probably made it a lot harder to get information out without getting caught.
00:08:15
Speaker
Interesting, in one of several instances of irony that we'll be seeing, he ended up working on counterintelligence against the Soviets, which included basically evaluating people like him. But from the other side, when they had Soviet agents who had contacted the US saying, I'd like to leak Soviet secrets to you, he was one of the people who would sort of vet them to see if they were genuine leakers, or if they were just double agents, or I guess sort of disinformation agents selling
00:08:45
Speaker
them bogus secrets. Nevertheless, he was eventually was reassigned. He got moved around a bit. I assume that's fairly probably standard for agents in the FBI. By 1985, he was transferred out of FBI headquarters and assigned to New York, and this gave him the opportunity he needed to get up to his old tricks. He apparently sent an anonymous letter to the KGB, basically once again saying, hey, I've got secrets. Give me money for them, please.
00:09:13
Speaker
In the initial letter he gave up the names of three KGB double agents. Now what he didn't know is that again all three of those had already been given up by Ames, and indeed two out of those three, a Valeri Matinov and Sergei Motorin, were eventually executed. The third one I think was just imprisoned for a while but was let out. In 1987 he was once again back in Washington and in another spectacular display of irony he was included in
00:09:43
Speaker
a group that was compiling a report on the search for the person who had betrayed those two executed agents. So he was hunting for himself, which of course nobody knew but him. I had to look it up no way out, which we've talked about on the podcast before. It involves at one point Kevin Costner being tasked with finding out who a suspected mole is, knowing full well that the person who they think is the mole is him,
00:10:08
Speaker
It turns out No Way Out came out in 1987, the same year that this was going on. So unless Hollywood's moles were even better than the moles of the USA and the USSR, probably just a coincidence that those two things came out at the same time. Obviously he was, if not in charge of, then at least had influence over this report and so was able to make sure that it didn't include anything that might have incriminated him.
00:10:34
Speaker
Although being a good little leaker, he then, once the report was complete, leaked the report to the Soviets, just to let them know what the US was doing while trying to hunt down their sources.
00:10:46
Speaker
So he continued, at this point on, he was just a leaking machine. Notable among his leaks were, at one point, he warned the Soviets that the FBI was investigating a Department of State official called Felix Block, who apparently was working with Soviets, but because Hanson was able to warn them that the FBI was onto it, they cut off all communication with Block, which meant that the FBI was then known, you know, that they had no more
00:11:12
Speaker
communications to intercept or whatever weren't able to gather any more evidence on him at the time. And so the case at the time fell apart. He also told Soviets about the fact that when the Russian embassy was being constructed in Washington, the FBI had apparently secretly
00:11:27
Speaker
seen too that a tunnel was constructed underneath the embassy that would allow them to potentially eavesdrop on communications from inside it. Apparently they never actually used the tunnel. I guess it seemed like it was a good idea at the time but then once it was all up and running they apparently they decided no it would be too too easy for them to get caught using it. So it was there but it was supposedly never used but he told the Russians about that.
00:11:50
Speaker
Now 1991 rolled around bringing with it the fall of the Soviet Union and Hanson was not without some justification worried that this could work out badly for him because the Soviet Union falls and there's all this sort of secret information that's potentially in the wind that could end up anywhere.
00:12:09
Speaker
he was a little bit concerned that maybe the information that he or information that would allow them that allow people to identify him as a mole in the FBI might find its way into the hands of people who would like that information. But it turns out it didn't.
00:12:25
Speaker
and the GRU, the various security services sort of got a hold of things in Russia fairly quickly. And so his secret was safe for a while. So in 1982, he went straight back to it. And this was the point where he started getting a little bit ballsy, a little bit less cautious than you would think a person committing multiple acts of treason would be. Apparently in 1992, he just showed up at the Russian embassy
00:12:53
Speaker
He just walked in carrying a bunch of classified documents in a bag with him, apparently, walked right up to an agent of the GRU and basically said, hi, I'm the guy you know me as Ramon Garcia. I'm a disaffected FBI agent. Would you like to buy some more secrets off me?
00:13:12
Speaker
Unfortunately for him, this particular GRU agent didn't know who Ramon Garcia was, didn't know that they had a mole who used that alias, and basically just said, what the hell are you talking about? Go away. And indeed, the Russian
00:13:27
Speaker
then complained to the U.S. State Department, assuming that this had been some sort of a setup, that this guy shows up offering point blank to sell them secrets. Surely either it's just a setup to catch us buying state secrets or it's disinformation and the secrets he would be selling us would be nonsense or whatever. The American authorities were informed
00:13:53
Speaker
that this random guy had shown up claiming to be an FBI. Specifically, he turned up in person, so the agent who he spoke to saw his face, he told the agent that he worked at the FBI, and yet that did not end his spying career.
00:14:09
Speaker
The FBI never progressed the investigation to the point that they were able to identify, I don't know, maybe they thought that this guy was just some sort of a nutcase, maybe a prankster or a, you know, they obviously didn't take it seriously enough to try particularly hard to find out who this might have been because Hanson was never caught. And when I say never caught, he was never caught for that. Obviously, he was caught eventually. So let's look at that.
00:14:36
Speaker
Now, Aldrich Ames, the CIA mole, he would be arrested in 1994. And so at that point, as I say, they could blame a whole bunch of stuff on him, which meant that they weren't looking for someone like Hanson in connection to those particular leaks. But
00:14:53
Speaker
They couldn't blame everything on Ames. There were some US operations that they knew had been compromised that they knew Ames couldn't have had anything to do with. So things like the warning, warning the Russians that they were investigating Felix Block. Apparently at the time, Ames was stationed in another country or something and wouldn't have had any way of accessing information about that. And the tunnel under the embassy was done entirely by the FBI.
00:15:20
Speaker
So the CIA wouldn't have known anything about that one either. And Ames being a CIA agent wouldn't have known about that. So they knew Ames was a mole, but he couldn't have been their only mole. So they knew they had to keep looking for someone else. And so the FBI and the CIA started working together to look for someone.
00:15:36
Speaker
Now for quite a while it turns out they focused on the wrong man. In 1998 they hadn't been able to find any concrete evidence that would allow them to identify this mole so they turned to criminal profiling basically. Apparently the FBI worked up a profile of what their leaker must be like and based on that profile they identified a CIA agent called Brian Kelly as the person who they thought was the most likely leaker.
00:16:04
Speaker
But they were wrong, unfortunately for them and unfortunately for Agent Kelly. So he was, he was investigated thoroughly. They tried to catch him out. Apparently at one point they had someone show up on his doorstep speaking in a foreign accent and say something on lines of, they are wrong to us comrade, you must flee country, come meet me at train station tomorrow or something.
00:16:27
Speaker
expecting that if he, you know, assuming that if he really was the mole and if he believed this, he would have to go on the run and they would catch him when he did it. But obviously he wasn't the mole, so he didn't go on the run. He instead talked to his superiors at the CIA and say, hey, this weird guy showed up on my doorstep acting like I'm some sort of a mole. What the hell is going on there? And but they they still wouldn't be deterred that
00:16:49
Speaker
They hauled him and his entire family, including his children, in for interrogation and questioned them all, but were unable to uncover anything that proved he was the mole, because again, he wasn't. But he was still put on administrative leave and wouldn't be cleared until they found out who the real mole was, which of course we know was Robert Hanson.
00:17:09
Speaker
Now, there had been some suspicions within the FBI about Hanson being a possible mole for quite a while. He had done a few sort of sketchy things. He at one point hacked into another agent's computer, stole a classified document off of it, and then printed that document out and handed it to the agent, basically saying, look, you thought your computer was secure? Well, it's not. Look, see, I just stole this classified document from you, which of course he shouldn't.
00:17:36
Speaker
shouldn't actually do, no matter what his intentions were. After the fact, people thought that possibly what he was really up to was that he was checking this other agent's computer to see if there were any records of him, Hanson, being investigated by the FBI to make sure he was still in the clear, and then did the stealing a
00:17:55
Speaker
stealing a classified document, giving it back thing as a pretext for why he was in this guy's computer in the first place. You know, so you could just say, Oh, look, see, I was just, I was testing your security and look, look, I found out you weren't as secure as you thought you were. You're welcome. He was apparently, he was known as he was sort of the computer guy in his area of the FBI had been into, I think he started on sort of surveillance technologies and stuff like that, but he was relatively knowledgeable about computers
00:18:22
Speaker
at times when not many people were particularly knowledgeable about the computers they were using. He got in trouble another time. His computer was impounded because there had been signs of dodgy software on it, and sure enough they found some password cracking software on his computer, but he was able to talk his way out of that. His story was that he just wanted to connect his
00:18:46
Speaker
computer to an office printer, but because you needed administrative privileges to install the printer stuff, which he didn't have, he'd installed instead this password cracking software so he could crack the admin password on his own PC, which would allow him to install the printer. And apparently they bought that again. He was the computer guy, so I guess he could spin that convincingly enough that that go along with him.
00:19:12
Speaker
But even as early as 1990, apparently his brother-in-law, who was also an FBI agent, had recommended to his superiors that Hanson be investigated as a possible mole after he sort of heard. I couldn't quite get this straight. He was Hanson's brother-in-law, so Hanson was married to his sister, and I thought I said his sister's sister, which surely would be his brother-in-law's sister.
00:19:37
Speaker
I don't know. Anyway, someone told someone that they had seen a suspiciously large pile of cash in the Hanson household and there had been other weird things he'd done. And so even back in 1990, his brother-in-law said something might be up with this Hanson guy. But in all of these cases, the higher ups never actually took the suspicion seriously enough to investigate Hanson as a mole at all until they did. So once again, ironically enough,
00:20:03
Speaker
Henson was ultimately undone by a mole by one of his counterparts on the other side. So a Russian mole selling Russian secrets to the USA. A man called Alexander Shcherbakov was paid a shitload of money by the FBI.
00:20:21
Speaker
$7 million, I think, given that Hanson only managed to amass $1.4 million over his whole spying career. That seems like a huge amount of money in exchange for handing over a file on this Russian informant who was referred to only as B. I'm not sure if that was the only thing they got for their $7 million or if it was just part of the stuff. Otherwise, that seems like a good deal for Mr. Shcherbikov.
00:20:46
Speaker
And so on a side note, this does remind me of hearing people talking about MKUltra, which we've mentioned more than once on this podcast before, which was the CIA looking into basically mind control, mind control via pharmaceuticals. They had this project. They were desperate to find some sort of a way. They're after a whole bunch of things, sort of your truth serums and all sorts of stuff, but including they wanted to find ways that they could
00:21:13
Speaker
Basically, control people could make people do what they want, either in a mandatory and candidate sort of programming thing, or simply inject people with stuff that would make them do whatever they wanted, when in fact you don't need...
Motivations and Capture
00:21:26
Speaker
Obviously, none of this ever actually worked. They managed to destroy a few people's brains, but never actually developed a way that you could just stick someone with a needle and then turn them into your robot.
00:21:38
Speaker
And they needn't have bothered because we have had a way of making people do whatever you want all along. It's called giving them a shitload of money. Or if that fails, tying them to a radiator and hitting them with a pipe. I mean, there are low-tech solutions to these sorts of things that work perfectly well.
00:21:54
Speaker
And this is one of those such cases. They gave the dude a ton of cash and in exchange, they got a file on the mysterious B. Now, it didn't give Hanson's name again. I assume the Russians must have known who they were dealing with, but if they did, they didn't say it in this particular file. However,
00:22:10
Speaker
When I say file, it wasn't just a bit of paper, it was a collection of all sorts of stuff, including an audio recording of a phone call between Hanson and a KGB agent. And so listening over this, some of the FBI agents were like, oh, that voice, that really sounds familiar, but I just cannot put my finger on it. I'm sure I know that voice.
00:22:31
Speaker
Fortunately there was other information to be gleaned. They found other notes which had written records of conversations with Hanson and noticed that at one point this mysterious mold had used the phrase had referred to the purple pissing Japanese.
00:22:46
Speaker
I don't even know what that means. I assume it's not complimentary though. Apparently it's a quote, apparently general pattern used to refer to the purple pissing Japanese. What does it mean? If you're pissing purple, I mean, surely you're not well. I can't think of anything that would make you, but I don't know.
00:23:20
Speaker
Yes, yes, that's who I was thinking of. That's bloody Robert Hanson, it is. And that's basically how they identified him. So I guess the moral there is, if you're going to betray your country, don't be racist at the same time. Or at least don't be identifiably racist, I suppose.
00:23:27
Speaker
The point is, it's a quote from General Patton that Hanson had been known to use himself.
00:23:36
Speaker
And then on further investigation, they also, they had managed to get their hands on, I don't know if that was included in this material that had been given to them by their mole, but they had managed to get their hands on one of the rubbish bags that Hanson had used for a dead drop. This was the way he would actually deliver this documentation to the Russians. This was all, this was all, I mean, it finished.
00:23:56
Speaker
in 2001 so most of the time it was done when the internet was not much of a thing so this was all this was all documentation being physically delivered to people and he just used good old-fashioned dead drops he'd wrap stuff up in a plastic rubbish bag and sellotape it to the the bottom of a park bench or the underside of a bridge or something like that and
00:24:16
Speaker
send coded messages to his handlers to tell them when and where he was going to be dropping it. So they had one of these bags that are used and they were able to get fingerprints of it and then comparing them to Robert Hanson's fingerprints, which obviously I'm sure when you're an FBI agent, your fingerprints would have to be on file. So they had a match there. So by November 2000,
00:24:34
Speaker
the FBI had their man at this point. They knew that Hanson was the mole, but they wanted 100% concrete proof. In particular, I think they really wanted to catch him in the act so that they wanted to be absolutely sure that when they got him,
00:24:50
Speaker
A, he knew they got him. He knew that there was absolutely no way he was getting out of it and they wanted to be able to get him and hold him immediately because of course the worry was that if they arrested him or charged him and they didn't have enough evidence to sort of keep him in custody or anything like that immediately,
00:25:10
Speaker
there was always the chance that out of spite or reprisal or whatever he might just just go and dump all of the information he had been hoarding at that point to the Soviets just just to piss them off just because and of course as we've seen the information he had already linked to the Soviets had resulted in deaths previously so that you know it would not be a safe thing to do that so they they were really really wanted to make sure they had absolutely nailed this guy to the wall so
00:25:37
Speaker
What happened was, Hanson was reassigned once again, not particularly suspicious as we say, that it happens to them all the time. He was put in a position where he would be supervising the FBI computer security, and this was under Richard Garcia, the man we mentioned at the start who thought that Robert Hanson thought he was God. Robert, yeah, Richard Garcia was one of the few people in this office who knew that the whole thing
00:26:00
Speaker
was a setup that, obviously, he was doing genuine work supervising computer security, but the real reason why he was there was so that they could watch him like a hawk and try to find proof, find 100% proof that he was doing the things he was doing. So he was put in an office which was bugged, and he was given an assistant who he became sort of
00:26:23
Speaker
something of a mentor to a young agent whose real job was to monitor him the whole time. So Richard Garcia knew what was going on, this assistant knew what the real deal was, but most of the other people working in this office, even they didn't actually know that the real reason this thing had been set up was specifically to catch Robert Hadson. So this assistant, 26-year-old Eric O'Neill, played by Ryan Phillippe in the movie Breach,
00:26:50
Speaker
And from what I understand, I haven't seen Breach, but I just didn't read a synopsis of it. Apparently it's mostly from this guy Eric O'Neill's perspective. It's sort of, I guess they figured the interesting story was this young, young up and coming FBI agent finding out that he's been assigned to take down one of the worst leaks the FBI has ever had.
00:27:08
Speaker
And that's what he did, essentially. He figured out that Hanson was storing a lot of this information that he would be sending to the Russians on a PDA for our younger listeners. PDA, actually it's a portable data assistant or personal data assistant.
00:27:26
Speaker
I don't actually know, but whatever it is, they were what people had before they had smartphones, essentially a little handheld device that you could store information on. He had a Palm III, apparently. And so they knew the information they were looking for could be found on this device. And eventually he was able to separate it from Hanson for long enough for the FBI experts to grab it, download all the information they could off of it and get it back to him before he suspected.
00:27:53
Speaker
Now, Hanson, he was starting to suspect that something might have been up. He had been questioning, I think, when talking to his handlers, he had sort of questioned why he had been moved into what he referred to as a do-nothing job. It certainly doesn't seem as exciting as, you know, hunting for double agents or vetting potential Soviet counterintelligence stuff.
00:28:18
Speaker
So he wondered, you know, why would they have put me in this position? Could it be because they want me somewhere where I'll have less access to secrets or something? Are they on to me? He also believed that his car might have been bugged. He had said to people that he'd heard weird interference on his car radio, which he thought might have been caused by a listening device that had been planted in his car. So he was having suspicions. But much like his FBI superiors before him, he didn't really act on those suspicions.
00:28:46
Speaker
until it was a bit late. He certainly didn't stop doing what he'd been doing. So on February the 18th, 2001, he made one of his dead drops at a park in Virginia. He taped a bag of documents under a park bench like he normally did, but this time the FBI was following him. So as soon as he made his drop, they pounced and arrested him on the spot. And apparently when they picked him up, he just said, what took you so long?
00:29:10
Speaker
So maybe, I mean, maybe that was just bravado, but maybe it does show, you know, he had known for a while that the jig was up, that there was no way he was not getting caught. But also, if he knew that, there's no point stopping doing it anyway. He already knows that, you know, I don't know. Maybe he did. Maybe maybe he really was that sort of narcissistic and self confident that he really did still think he had them beat right up to the very end. I don't know. But
00:29:34
Speaker
That's the story of how they caught Robert Hanson. So like I say, he was arrested, he was charged, he pled guilty on all charges, he was put in prison, he died this Tuesday.
Beyond Espionage: Hanson's Personal Life
00:29:44
Speaker
And that's the story of Robert Hanson, apart from the weird sex stuff, which I did promise, I suppose, didn't I? So apparently, he was also into dodgy sex stuff, which, while it had nothing to do with his selling secrets to the Soviets, was a little bit conspiratorial, so I think I'm justified in talking about it now.
00:30:02
Speaker
Because apparently, Mr. Hanson liked it when other people watched him having sex. He cooked up, and this was all at his behest apparently, he invited a friend of his to watch him and his wife having sex without the consent or knowledge of his wife.
00:30:20
Speaker
I should point out. Essentially it was as simple as getting his mate to peek peep through the window at him and his wife and this apparently escalated to him eventually installing hidden cameras in his own bedroom and setting up a closed circuit TV system so that he could have his friend over as a guest and his friend could watch from the guest bedroom Mr Hanson and his wife having sex once again without the knowledge or consent of his wife.
00:30:50
Speaker
So that's what Robert Hanson was into, which I guess possibly feeds into the suggestion of narcissism on his part. I mean, you'd think that to want to specifically go out of your way to invite someone else to watch you having sex, you must have a fairly high opinion of what you look like while you're having sex, you would have thought.
00:31:09
Speaker
He'd also been known, he'd been hanging around with strippers, I think there was one stripper in particular that he'd been giving gifts and stuff, although he claims he'd never had sex with her or anything and would later claim that I think he was trying to convert her to Catholicism, a fallen woman or something, I don't even know.
00:31:26
Speaker
I suppose it is interesting to point out that I believe in the movie Breach that the way they run the story is that Eric O'Neill is told he's being assigned to act as the assistant to Robert Hanson, who they're investigating for some sort of sexual deviancy on becoming of an FBI agent. And eventually, once he starts to question this and says, yeah, that seems like nonsense. What's really going on? He's then eventually told
00:31:56
Speaker
I actually know that, yeah, that was the cover story. What we're really after, we think he's a, well, we know he's a Russian double agent, so we want to get information on that. Now, apparently that is one of the things the movie made up. Apparently, Eric O'Neill did know right from the start that he was, he was to be investigating Henson for leaking information to the Russians. But, but at least I guess, I guess they, like I,
00:32:21
Speaker
decided that you really had to find some way of getting the dodgy sex stuff into your production about Robert Hanson. And so they did. And so I did. And so now you know. And that is the story of Robert Hanson. May he rest in peace, I guess? I don't know. I'm sure there's quite a few people who are quite happy that he's dead. He does not seem to have been a particularly good person.
00:32:46
Speaker
And that's all I really have to say for this week. So once again, I believe EM is still in transit. I don't know if they're exact travel plans, but I'm pretty sure they're back next week. So I think next week we'll be back to normal. But if not, it'll be more filler for me.
00:33:02
Speaker
or more filler from me, for you, however that works out, you know what I mean. So, my voice seems to have held more or less throughout the recording of this episode, so I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna tax it any further, I'm just gonna sign off for a week and say to all of you, each and every one, goodbye.
Conclusion and Farewell
00:33:19
Speaker
The podcast's Guide to the Conspiracy stars Josh Addison and myself, Associate Professor M.R.X. Stentors. Our show's cons... sorry... Producers are Tom and Philip, plus another mysterious anonymous donor. You can contact Josh and myself at podcastconspiracyatgmail.com and please do consider joining our Patreon. And remember, keep watching the skis.