It has not completely stopped, and likely never will, but the mission has drastically changed on both sides, and the current state of espionage between the United States and Russia is far removed from the frenzy of intelligence activity that characterized the Cold War years. The result of these shifting priorities has been a marked decrease in U.S.-Russian espionage activity, despite what the high-profile arrests of Hanssen and others might indicate. The United States became less interested in Russia and more concerned with security threats from rogue states such as Iraq and Afghanistan, while Russia became less interested in security against American espionage and more concerned with encouraging much-needed investment from American companies in the disastrous post-Soviet economy. Priorities for both countries were suddenly quite different from what they had been during the nearly half-century of bipolar hostility and East-West alignment. Espionage between the former enemies, as evidenced by the arrest of Hanssen and others since 1991, clearly did not end with the Cold War. But with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Cold War came to an abrupt end. News of Hanssen's activities has hit the headlines after his February 2001 arrest, not because it is a unique story, but because a number of high-profile cases of American intelligence officers caught spying for Russia have come to light in the past few years.įrom 1945 to 1991, when the political culture of the Cold War draped U.S.-Soviet relations in an icy shroud of mutual mistrust and antagonism, espionage was a critical, if obviously under-publicized, game of learning the enemy's secrets before the enemy learned yours. In addition to requiring Hanssen to serve a life sentence in prison, the plea agreement orders him to cooperate with the FBI and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and be fully debriefed, in order for those agencies to ascertain the exact scope of the damage Hanssen caused to U.S. In return for pleading guilty to 15 counts of espionage and conspiracy charges, Hanssen was spared the death penalty. Hanssen himself, in the plea agreement reached in July 2001, admits that his activities stretch back even further, to 1979. Robert Hanssen was a 25-year veteran of the FBI the bureau alleges that 16 of those years were spent spying for Russia. The area was known to the FBI as a drop point for the illicit exchange of information with Russian agents and, indeed, Hanssen's arrest was the result of a lengthy FBI investigation into his activities as a spy for the Soviet Union, and after 1991, the Russian Federation. On February 18, 2001, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) arrested Robert Philip Hanssen, one of its own counter-intelligence agents, in a park in Vienna, Virginia, shortly after Hanssen had left a package under a small footbridge. Russia has concerns about the expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Alliance (NATO) along Russia's borders and the United States's use of its power around the world. ![]() The United States did not always trust the Russian reports on the poorly guarded sites of weapons of mass destruction in Russia and politically unstable former Soviet republics. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, most U.S.-Russian spying was for security purposes.spies for the Soviet Union in the early days of the Cold War were generally motivated by ideology, whereas in the 1980s and 1990s they were generally motivated by personal gain. Even during the Cold War, the nature of espionage changed noticeably.Despite the high-profile arrests of Russian spies such as FBI agent Robert Hanssen, espionage since 1991 is very different from what it was during the Cold War, and neither the United States nor Russia is a prime target of each other's spy activity. The United States, meanwhile, has made new enemies in the Middle East, and focuses its espionage on this region more than on Russia. Since 1991, Russia has been more concerned with its own internal situation, particularly its economy, than with acquiring U.S. ![]() When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 and the Cold War ended, the nature of espionage between the United States and Russia changed dramatically. ![]() ![]() Espionage between the two superpowers was a major component of the Cold War. The ideological conflict between capitalism and communism sparked the Cold War, fought by the two countries that emerged most powerful from World War II-the United States and the Soviet Union. Post-Cold War Espionage Between the United Statesand Russia: How Has the Mission Changed ? The Conflict
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