Espionage

Spying Doesn’t Pay — Unless You’re Really Good At It

Earlier this month, the Justice Department announced the arrest of Ron Hansen, a former Defense Intelligence Agency officer. Hansen is accused of receiving at least $800,000 from Chinese sources in exchange for information he learned from “military and intelligence conferences in the U.S.” and for sensitive technology that the U.S. government had banned from being shared with China.

Hansen is the fourth former intelligence officer — along with Jerry Chun Shing Lee, Joshua Schulte¹ and Kevin Mallory — arrested for espionage or attempted espionage in just the last year. But one part of his story sets him apart: Hansen’s payoff — at least $800,000 — is more than the vast majority of people arrested for spying over the past few decades were paid.

Of course, we’re talking about spying here, so there’s only so much we know about these cases — even the spies who get caught are pretty good at keeping secrets, and the people who catch them are even better. But we can get at least a rough overview of how much spies get paid using two sources: the Defense Personnel Security Research Center’s research into espionage from 1975 to 2008, and its report from last year updating the data to 2015. For cases since 2015, we can use Justice Department press releases.