On May 10, 2002, Robert Hanssen, a former FBI agent who intermittently sold state secrets to Russia over the course of two decades, receives his sentencing for espionage: life in prison without the possibility of parole. “I apologize for my behavior. I am shamed by it,” said Hanssen. “I have opened the door for calumny against my totally innocent wife and children. I have hurt so many deeply.”
Hanssen, who began working with Soviet military intelligence in 1979, was arrested in 2001 after an ex-KGB officer revealed information to the FBI that identified him as a double agent. He took a plea bargain, which reduced the 21 counts against him to 15, guaranteed his wife a portion of his pension and ownership of their Virginia home and took the possibility of the death penalty off the table. In return, Hanssen agreed to provide federal investigators with detailed accounts of his years as a spy.
Disneyland, Walt Disney’s metropolis of nostalgia, fantasy and futurism, opens on July 17, 1955. The $17 million theme park was built on 160 acres of former orange groves in Anaheim, California, and soon brought in […]
Flight attendant Paula Prince buys a bottle of cyanide-laced Tylenol. Prince was found dead on October 1, becoming the final victim of a mysterious ailment in Chicago, Illinois. Over the previous 24 hours, six other […]
Following the defeat of his proposals for constitutional reform in a national referendum, Charles de Gaulle resigns as president of France. A veteran of World War I, de Gaulle unsuccessfully petitioned his country to modernize […]
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