Found on Twitter

Glienicke Bridge: History: Bridge of Spies

Because the Glienicke Bridge was a restricted border crossing between the Eastern Bloc (namely Potsdam in East Germany) and territory affiliated with the Western powers (namely the American sector of West Berlin), the Americans and Soviets used it for the exchange of captured spies during the Cold War. Reporters began calling it the "Bridge of Spies."[3] When this name was later used as the title for various works, it was often taken to be a pun on "bridge of sighs" a name applied first to the bridge in Venice and then to others.[4] [5] [6]~~

Stanislav Lunev

Stanislav Lunev (Russian: Станислав Лунев; born 1946 in Leningrad) is a former Soviet military officer, the highest-ranking GRU officer to defect from Russia to the United States.

Main Intelligence Directorate(GRU): Compromise

In 2002, Bill Powell, former Moscow bureau chief at Newsweek, wrote Treason, an account of the experiences of former GRU colonel Vyacheslav Baranov, who had betrayed GRU for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and agreed to spy for it. He was exposed to the Russians by a mole in either the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) or the CIA and spent five years in prison before he was released. The identity of the mole remains unknown to this day, but speculation has mounted that it could have been Robert Hanssen.[43]

Robert Hanssen

Emphasis in the following, added by me.

Robert Philip Hanssen (born April 18, 1944) is a former Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agent who spied for Soviet and Russian intelligence services against the United States for 22 years from 1979 to 2001. He is currently serving 15 consecutive life sentences at ADX Florence, a federal supermax prison near Florence, Colorado.

Hanssen was arrested on February 18, 2001, at Foxstone Park[2] near his home in Vienna, Virginia, and was charged with selling U.S. secrets to the Soviet Union and subsequently the Russian Federation for more than US$1.4 million in cash and diamonds over a 22-year period.[3]

On July 6, 2001, in order to avoid the death penalty, he pleaded guilty to 15 counts of espionage in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia.[4][5] He was sentenced to 15 life terms without the possibility of parole. His activities have been described by the Department of Justice's Commission for the Review of FBI Security Programs as "possibly the worst intelligence disaster in U.S. history."[6]

Early life

Hanssen was born in Chicago, Illinois, to a family who lived in the Norwood Park community.[7] His father Howard, a Chicago police officer, was emotionally abusive to Hanssen during his childhood.[8][9] He graduated from William Howard Taft High School in 1962 and went on to attend Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois, where he earned a bachelor's degree in chemistry in 1966.

Hanssen applied for a cryptographer position in the National Security Agency, but was rebuffed due to budget setbacks. He enrolled in dental school at Northwestern University[10] but switched his focus to business after three years.[11] Hanssen received an MBA in accounting and information systems in 1971 and took a job with an accounting firm. He quit after one year and joined the Chicago Police Department as an internal affairs investigator, specializing in forensic accounting. In January 1976, he left the police department to join the Federal Bureau of Investigation.[8]

Hanssen met Bernadette "Bonnie" Wauck, a staunch Roman Catholic, while attending dental school at Northwestern. The couple married in 1968, and Hanssen converted from Lutheranism to his wife's Catholicism, becoming a fervent believer and being extensively involved in the conservative Catholic organization Opus Dei.[12]

FBI counterintelligence unit, further espionage activities (1985–1991)

"Ellis" dead drop site in Foxstone Park used by Hanssen, including on the day of his arrestJPG

^ "The BRIDGE"? [to be continued]

Found on Twitter [contiinued]

^ "The BRIDGE"?

Personal life

According to USA Today, those who knew the Hanssens described them as a close family. They attended Mass weekly and were very active in Opus Dei. Hanssen's three sons attended The Heights School in Potomac, Maryland, an all-boys preparatory school.[58] His daughters attended Oakcrest School for Girls in Vienna, Virginia, an independent Roman Catholic school. Both schools are associated with Opus Dei. Hanssen's wife Bonnie still teaches theology at Oakcrest.[59]

A priest at Oakcrest said that Hanssen had regularly attended a 6:30 a.m. daily mass for more than a decade.[60] Opus Dei member Father C. John McCloskey III said he also occasionally attended the daily noontime mass at the Catholic Information Center in downtown Washington. After going to prison, Hanssen claimed he periodically admitted his espionage to priests in confession. He urged fellow Catholics in the Bureau to attend mass more often and denounced the Russians, even though he was spying for them, as "godless".[61]

However, at Hanssen's suggestion, and without the knowledge of his wife, a friend named Jack Horschauer, a retired Army officer, would sometimes watch the Hanssens having sex through a bedroom window. Hanssen then began to secretly videotape his sexual encounters and shared the videotapes with Horschauer. Later, he hid a video camera in the bedroom that was connected via closed-circuit television line so that his friend could observe the Hanssens from his guest bedroom.[62] He also explicitly described the sexual details of his marriage on Internet chat rooms, giving information sufficient for those who knew them to recognize the couple.[63]

Hanssen frequently visited D.C. strip clubs, and spent a great deal of time with a Washington stripper named Priscilla Sue Galey. She went with Hanssen on a trip to Hong Kong, and on a visit to the FBI training facility in Quantico, Virginia.[64] He gave her money, jewels, and a used Mercedes-Benz, but cut off contact with her before his arrest, when she fell into drug abuse and prostitution. Galey claims that although she offered to sleep with him, Hanssen declined, saying that he was trying to convert her to Catholicism.[65]

Opus Dei

Controversies about Opus Dei

Allegations of aggressive recruiting

The Jesuit priest and writer James Martin wrote that Opus Dei puts great emphasis on recruiting, and pointed to Escriva's writings which say "You must kill yourselves for proselytism."[11] David Clark, a consultant who specialises in helping people leave cults, claimed in 2006 that Opus Dei used a cult-like recruitment technique called "love bombing", in which potential members are showered with flattery and admiration by members of the organization in order to entice them into joining.

Opus Dei and politics

Allen states: "two of the most visible Opus Dei politicians in the world—(Paola) Binetti (a senator-elect) in Italy, and Ruth Kelly, the Minister of Education in England—are now women who belong to center-left parties," [1] "still there is a sociological reality that the kind of people attracted to Opus Dei tend to be conservative, theologically and politically."

Ruth Kelly: Secretary of State for Education and Skills: Sex offenders in schools controversy

On 9 January 2006, it came to light that Kelly’s department had granted permission for a man, Paul Reeve, who had been cautioned by police for viewing child pornography images and who was on a sex offenders register, to be employed at a school in Norwich on the basis that he had not been convicted of an offence. He, and an unknown number of others on the sex offenders register, were not on the DfES prohibited list, "List 99".[25] On 13 January, Kim Howells, a Minister of State at the DfES, admitted that it was he who had actually made the decision, in accordance with advice given to him by civil servants that the "person did not represent an ongoing threat to children but that he should be given a grave warning". In response to the critical media coverage surrounding the issue, Downing Street issued a statement confirming their confidence in Kelly and denying rumours that she was to be replaced.[26]

There was further controversy when it transpired that another teacher, William Gibson, 59, who had been cleared to work at Portchester School in Bournemouth despite the fact that he had been convicted in 1980 for indecent assault on a 15-year-old girl and had been previously removed from three schools. A letter from the Department for Education that suggested the Secretary of State had considered his case and found that although his past actions had been unwise and unacceptable, he had undertaken teaching work to good effect since.[27]