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Alleged FBI Spy Hanssen Pleads Not Guilty
WASHINGTON, May 31 (News Agencies) - Veteran former FBI agent Robert Hanssen pleaded innocent Thursday to accusations he spied for Russia, as the date for his trial in an Alexandria, Virginia, federal court was set for October 29th.
Hanssen's lawyer, Plato Cacheris, told media that his client pleaded not guilty before the Alexandria court, just outside Washington, after Hanssen was formally indicted for spying on May 16th.
"We will be filing motions in federal court attacking this indictment," Cacheris said, noting that the plea had been presented in barely two minutes.
Hanssen's son-in-law was the sole family member present in the courtroom, where the former Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agent was taken under escort.
The 56-year-old counterintelligence officer has been charged with 21 counts including espionage on behalf of Russia and the former Soviet Union.
He could face the death penalty on 14 of the counts, and life imprisonment for the other seven, according to Ken Melton, U.S. Attorney in Alexandria.
Cacheris told media Thursday that the death sentence was "probably not" constitutional in the case of his client. "We're working on that," he said.
Investigators said the former FBI agent, a devout Roman Catholic and father of six who reportedly wanted to be a spy since he was a teenager, was a meticulous double agent so secretive he never met his Russian handlers and they never knew his real identity, according to court documents.
Hanssen allegedly began to pass highly sensitive information to Moscow in 1985 and continued to do so even after the fall of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, but was arrested February 18th in a public park in Virginia after dropping a batch of documents at an agreed location.
Russian agents were due to have picked up the documents, setting down at a separate agreed "dead drop" location an envelope containing $50,000 in cash.
It is believed that Hanssen had access to state secrets and seriously compromised U.S. national security.
Prosecutors have alleged that the Soviet spy agency KGB and its Russian successor, SVR, paid Hanssen a total of $1.4 million in cash, diamonds and deposits in a Russian bank account for his services, according to court documents.
Hanssen also gave the KGB information on three Russian double agents who had been trained by the FBI and were working at their Washington embassy.
Two of them - Valeriy Martynov and Sergey Motorin - were convicted of espionage and executed when they returned to Russia. The third, Boris Yuzhin, was sentenced to life in prison, and was released under a general amnesty to political prisoners in 1992, according to the affidavit.
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