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20021776 Club

Judge Hilton sentences Hanssen to 15 consecutive life terms; the FBI agent will never leave prison

Over 22 years, Hanssen sold six thousand classified documents, nuclear war strategies, and the names of double agents to Moscow for $1.4 million in cash, diamonds, and Rolex watches.

On May 10, 2002, U.S. District Judge Claude Hilton sentenced FBI agent Robert Hanssen to 15 consecutive life terms without the possibility of parole. Hanssen had spent 22 years selling some six thousand classified documents to Soviet and Russian intelligence — nuclear war strategies, double-agent identities, and the location of a secret FBI eavesdropping tunnel beneath the Soviet Embassy — all for $1.4 million in cash, diamonds, and Rolex watches. The Department of Justice called it "possibly the worst intelligence disaster in U.S. history."…

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More from May 10
1775

Allen and Arnold take Ticonderoga; not a shot is fired

83 Green Mountain Boys cross Lake Champlain before dawn and walk out with a British fort's entire stockpile of heavy artillery.
1775

Twelve colonies convene in Philadelphia; no army, no treasury, a war already begun

Delegates gather at the Pennsylvania State House three weeks after Lexington and Concord, with no authority from the Crown and no clear path forward.
1946

A V-2 rises over White Sands; America fires a German rocket on its own soil for the first time

The missile that killed an estimated 9,000 civilians in London and Antwerp flies without a warhead, guided by manuals translated from German, as its builders work nearby under Operation Paperclip.
17731776 Club
Lord North's bill rescues the East India Company's eighteen million pounds of unsold stock, but colonists see the bargain price as bait to make them accept Parliament's right to tax.
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More from Modern America
1997

Old Ironsides sails again; Cronkite takes the helm off Marblehead

The 1797 frigate moves under her own canvas for the first time in 116 years, on sails paid for through a national campaign of citizen and student donations.
1999

Collins becomes first woman to command a shuttle; Columbia loses an engine on the way up

A loose pin ruptures coolant tubes during ascent, but Columbia still reaches orbit to release the heaviest payload NASA had ever flown.
1998

Clinton tells grand jury of "improper" ties to Lewinsky, then tells the country he misled them

Seven months after denying it on camera, the president reverses himself twice in one day.
1998

Thirteen Tomahawks hit a Khartoum medicine factory; Washington says it made nerve gas

The strike came thirteen days after the embassy bombings in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, and the target was a plant that made most of Sudan's antibiotics.
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