Politics

Inside the Minds of Infamous Americans Who Sold US Secrets Abroad

Drew Wood

Published: January 23, 2025 6:13 am

Despite all the government’s efforts to vet applicants for government jobs requiring security clearances, sometimes the system breaks down. Here are some of the most notorious stories of Americans who sold out vital government secrets to foreign governments. What motivated them to betray their country? Let’s find out. 

Why Do Some People Sell Government Secrets?

Some of the main reasons people with access to government secrets sell them to our enemies are:

• Ideology: They have sympathies with a foreign country or its system of government, or anger at their own government that makes them seek revenge.
• Money: Although some spies received relatively small amounts of money for the highly sensitive intelligence they sold, even a few tens of thousands of dollars could be life-changing for a middle-class civil servant with serious financial problems.
• Power: Some people get a psychological thrill out of doing something taboo. Breaking rules without being detected for a long time can make them feel powerful. 

1. Robert Philip Hanssen

Robert Philip Hanssen was an FBI Special Agent who worked in counterintelligence. He sold classified information to the Russian KGB for over $1.4 million, some of which was paid in diamonds. Some of the most damaging information he leaked included identities of American spies working in Russia and nuclear secrets. Psychological testing indicted that he had a high opinion of himself and felt superior to others in the intelligence community. He was convicted of espionage in 2002 and sentence to life in prison without parole. Hanssen passed away in prison in 2023 aged 79. 

2. Aldrich Ames

Aldrich Ames, a CIA Counterintelligence Officer, raked in about $4.6 million by spying for the Soviet Union and then Russia from 1985-1994. Among other things, he betrayed the identity of CIA agents spying in Russia, getting at least 10 of them killed. Ames used the money to live in luxury and confessed that his motivations were purely financial. The CIA discovered his crime when its agents began getting systematically killed. Ames was arrested in 1994 and is currently serving a sentence of life in prison without parole. 

3. Ana Montes

Ana Montes was a Defense Intelligence Agency Senior Analyst. She had broad access to classified information, which she memorized and then relayed using encryption to her Cuban contacts. She received some reimbursement for expenses, but otherwise did this espionage for 16 years for free because she supported Cuban ideology. She was arrested in 2001 and sentence to 25 yers in prison, but was released in 2023. 

4. John Walker

The Soviet Union paid John Walker from 1967-1985 more than $1 million for secrets about American naval operations. He had access to cryptographic technology used by the Navy in his job as a U.S. Navy Warrant Officer and Communications Specialist. His espionage helped the Soviets decrypt U.S. navy messages for years. Justice caught up to him in 1985 when his ex-wife reported him to the authorities. He was sentenced to life in prison and died in 2014 at age 77 while incarcerated. 

5. Daniel Hale

Hale, an Air Force Veteran and NSA Intelligence Analyst, printed classified information about drone warfare and leaked it to a reporter with no indication that he received compensation for it. He did this because, having seen how deadly drones could be, he had moral objections to their use in warfare and wanted to expose this part of the government’s activities to the world. In 2021 he was sentenced to 3 years and 9 months in prison. 

6. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg

Julius worked as a Civil Engineer with the U.S. Army Signal Corps. He passed classified documents about the American atomic bomb program to his wife Ethel, a secretary, to forward to the Soviets. They received about $2.7 million. However, in addition to the money, they believed in the ideals of socialism and felt they were doing their part to promote it. The information they leaked considerably accelerated the Soviet’s nuclear weapons program. The couple were arrested in 1951 and put to death by electric chair in Sing Sing prison, New York, in 1953. 

7. Kendall Myers 

Myers worked as a U.S. State Department senior intelligence analyst focused on Europe. With his high level security clearance, he learned secrets related to American policy in Cuba and, together with his wife, passed them on to the Cuban government. This went on for about 30 years until he was arrested in 2009 and sentenced to life in prison, while his wife received 6 years. Myers was an admirer of Fidel Castro and sympathetic to communist revolutionary ideology. 

8. Jonathan Pollard

Pollard was a civilian working as an intelligence analyst for the U.S. Navy. In the 1980s, he turned over sensitive data about Arab countries and the Soviet weapons they used to Israel. A Jewish American, Pollard was a supporter of Israel who thought the United States should share more of this kind of information with them, as an allied country. Pollard was sentenced to life in prison in the U.S. in 1987 but was released on parole in 2015. In 2020 he moved to Israel.