On February 18, 2001, after Robert Hanssen returned his visiting friend to the airport, he drove back toward home in Vienna, Virginia and stopped at Foxstone Park. He stuck a piece of white medical tape on the sign outside the entrance of the park. Hanssen then walked through the cold park to a wooden footbridge and placed a sealed black garbage bag in a secret spot near the base of the bridge.

In a matter of moments, Hanssen briskly, but inconspicuously, darted back to his car. But before he could reach it, he was swarmed by a team of FBI officers who were pointing guns in his face and yelling, “Freeze!”

As the FBI agents clapped handcuffs on Hanssen, he had only one question: “What took you so long?”

So long, indeed.

Hanssen had already been caught spying once for the Soviet Union, just three years after he joined the FBI in 1976. But it wasn’t the intelligence community that caught him. It was his wife, Bonnie, who discovered that he was dealing with the Russians after finding him scurrying to cover up some documents in the basement of their home. When she pressed Hanssen, he told her that “he was just tricking the Russians and feeding them false information,” she later told The New York Times. “He never said he was spying. I told him I thought it was insane.”

But Hanssen, who had recently been assigned to the counterintelligence unit to focus on Soviet activity, was not tricking the Russians. He was a Russian spy and had been working for Soviet military intelligence since 1979. In that short time, he had already sealed the fate of Gen. Dmitri Polyakov, one of the most important agents to the United States, who had been spying for the American intelligence community since the early 1960s. Soon after Hanssen informed the Russians, Polyakov was forced into retirement and later executed.

As a conservative Roman Catholic, Bonnie Hanssen demanded they see a priest to discuss Robert’s activity. Robert P. Bucciarelli, a priest affiliated with Opus Dei, a conservative Catholic organization they had joined several years earlier, called on Hanssen to donate the money from the Soviets to charity, vow not to spy again, and confess his sins and ask God for forgiveness. Do these things and and the Hanssens would have Bucciarelli’s blessing to not report the matter to the FBI.

Although Hanssen had spent most of the $30,000 he received from the Soviets by that point, he began making small payments to a charity affiliated with Mother Teresa’s Catholic charity. The debt Hanssen was repaying nearly bankrupted the family of eight, but he assured Bonnie that he was making good on the plan.