The Wrong Man
In The Most Damaging Spy Case Ever, The FBI Had One Suspect And One Alone
December 8, 2002
WASHINGTON -- Brian Kelley says he felt like the Harrison Ford character in
"The Fugitive" - an innocent man desperately eluding a single-minded lawman
played by Tommy Lee Jones.
His life had become a surreal reflection of one of the movie's pivotal
scenes, when the ruthless hunter confronts the hunted.
"In the movie, Harrison Ford says, `But I didn't kill my wife,'" Kelley
said. "And Tommy Lee Jones replies: `I don't care.'"
The FBI had become Kelley's zealous hunter, hellbent on proving he was
spying for the Russians and had been betraying his country for years.
They had the facts, they told him: Diamonds and strip clubs. Trips to
Panama and New York. Visits to parks. Access to the right information at
the right time.
In other words, Kelley, a CIA agent who'd long been trusted with some of
the government's most sensitive tasks, fit the FBI's "matrix."
He was, they said, the most damaging mole the U.S. intelligence community
had ever pursued, a traitor code named "Gray Deceiver" who caused the
executions of informants abroad and put into the hands of the Russians
highly sensitive information about American military capability and security.
Kelley, who grew up in Waterbury and attended St. Michael's College in
Vermont, served in the Air Force for 20 years and worked in its office of
investigations before signing up with the CIA in 1982. Until that summer
day 3½ years ago when he was accused of spying and escorted out of the
CIA's George Bush Center for Intelligence, his career in the dangerous,
secret world had been filled with accomplishment.
One of his greatest triumphs was discovering a deep undercover Russian spy,
known as an "illegal," who was the KGB's contact with American diplomat and
notorious suspected traitor Felix Bloch.
"He was working on some of the agency's most difficult cases," said
Kathleen Hunt, Kelley's friend and a former CIA agent.
The FBI suspected that Kelley actually tipped off Bloch, the very man he
was investigating. To prove their espionage case, agents secretly searched
Kelley's Vienna, Va., home. They tapped his phone and tried to trap him
into confessing. They said a park map found in his home was marked with
places where he would leave secret documents for the KGB.
After the FBI laid out its accusations to Kelley's superiors at the CIA, he
was put on paid leave, suspected of espionage - a crime punishable by death.
His two sisters, schoolteachers in Waterbury, were confronted and
interrogated by the FBI, as were his three adult children, his friends and
his colleagues. His daughter, who followed in Kelley's footsteps and was
working at the CIA, was taken into an interview room and told her father
was a spy.
Agents even threatened to go to the Connecticut nursing home where Kelley's
ailing, 84-year-old mother was living and tell her that her only son was a
traitor.
"It was so far over the top," said Kelley, who is in his late 50s.
It would be nearly two years before the FBI announced the arrest of the
real spy of the century. And his name wasn't Brian Kelley.
"This investigation is a mirror of the dysfunctionality in the FBI. It
highlights their ineptitude," Kelley, speaking out for the first time
publicly about his ordeal, said in a telephone interview with The Courant.
"They had gotten it so wrong, for so long. They drove at me to the
exclusion of all others. Some of the people there got medals for this
investigation, for God's sake."
`Maybe I'm Wrong'
Kathleen Hunt, a Wethersfield native and Kelley's friend at the agency,
didn't think it out of the ordinary when a CIA officer called on a March
morning in 1999 and asked her to report to headquarters for a meeting.
An 18-year veteran of the CIA, Hunt figured she was heading into a routine
briefing about a counter-intelligence case she had worked on, or maybe an
undercover operation she helped plan.
Instead, she was buzzed into the headquarters' inner sanctum and led to a
small, windowless interview room where two female FBI agents waited. The
door closed behind her.
Immediately, they accused Brian Kelley of being a spy and began to pepper
Hunt with questions.
She burst into tears. It couldn't be true, she thought - not Brian, her
friend who shared her Connecticut roots, pride in their Irish heritage and
devotion to Catholicism.
The agents were stoic and condescending. Did Kelley ever visit New York
City, they asked. Did he talk to you about diamonds? Did he ever take you
to a strip club? Did he ever ask you what cases you were working on? Did
Kelley, who was long divorced, use women at the agency to get information?
No, Hunt answered again and again.
Had she placed an advertisement in the Washington Times for Kelley, they
asked, something about a Dodge Diplomat? An ad that was a secret signal to
his KGB contact?
No, she answered.
She had placed an ad for Kelley when she worked briefly with him on the
Felix Bloch case years ago, she told them, but it was in the Washington
Post. And the ad wasn't for a car; it was a personal ad intended to entice
Bloch into re-contacting a KGB source, part of a CIA plan to entrap the
American diplomat.
Back and forth they went, the agents insisting Hunt had placed a car ad in
the Times, Hunt countering that it was a personal ad in the Post. Under the
barrage of questions, even the seasoned CIA agent was worn down.
"I finally said `maybe I'm wrong,'" Hunt, 43, said during a recent
interview. "When someone badgers you, it wears you down. I was at a point
where I didn't know if my memory was faulty."
The agents continued to press. They wanted to find a reason Kelley was
spying. Tell us, they told Hunt, about the most traumatic event in Kelley's
life.
Over and over, Hunt said that she didn't know, that it would be
presumptuous of her to answer. The agents told Hunt she was being
uncooperative.
Hunt finally answered with what she characterized as a guess: Kelley had
told her that when he was a boy his father died, and that he had felt a new
responsibility as the man in the family.
Four hours later, Hunt signed a secrecy agreement and left the room. She
was prevented from talking about what had just happened with anyone -
especially Brian Kelley.
Hunt would be subjected to the same questions once more that month at CIA
headquarters, and again five months later when two FBI agents approached
her outside a suburban commercial mail center she had just left.
This time, however, Hunt was done talking. Over sodas at the nearby Three
Pigs barbecue restaurant, she told the FBI agents they were wrong about
Brian Kelley.
"This guy is not the man," Hunt told the agents. "What you're saying about
him is so alien to me that I can't even comment on it."
The Real Spy
On Feb. 20, 2001, Hunt heard a radio announcer tease the top-of-the-hour
newscast: "Vienna man arrested on espionage charges."
Stunned, Hunt swung her car off the road and into a CVS store parking lot.
She had one thought: "Brian lives in Vienna."
Seconds later, the announcer was back, reading the name of the accused:
"Robert Hanssen of the FBI."
Hunt clenched her fists and exhaled a joyous, "Yes," then drove home,
anxious to share the news with her husband.
Kelley was equally relieved.
The following day, Hunt called Kelley to explain that she hadn't been able
to tell him she'd been questioned or to offer him support over the 18
months his career - and life - were in limbo.
"Brian was clearly thrilled, and charitable," Hunt said. "He understood."
But Hunt was chilled when Kelley told her the FBI had taken her guess about
the emotional trauma of his father's death and used it to build a
psychological case for why he may have begun spying.
The map the FBI found in his apartment, Kelley also told her, was one he
used to plot his jogging routes. And it turns out Kelley knew Hanssen -
they'd worked on cases together, and had gone on a couple of work-related
trips together.
Kelley said he's convinced that once the FBI began targeting him as the
mole in 1999, Hanssen found out. And it was then that Hanssen, after a
number of dormant years, began spying again, secure in the knowledge the
FBI did not suspect him, Kelley said.
Hunt had something to tell Kelley, too: She had decided to resign from the
CIA. She felt that her career had come under a cloud because of the
investigation, that the FBI had clearly suspected her, too.
She now is working as a real estate agent and running a non-profit that
helps persecuted Catholics worldwide.
"This experience totally changed me," she said.
`Shameful' Pursuit
About three months after Hanssen's arrest, Kelley was reinstated at the CIA
and preferred to remain anonymous, he says, to be known only as the man who
was wrongly targeted by the FBI. He wanted to return to his undercover job,
and to deal with his concerns about the FBI privately.
His name had been kept out of news stories by reporters aware of his
identity, and he was largely unknown outside the small intelligence
community until the recent publication of "Spy: The Inside Story of How the
FBI's Robert Hanssen Betrayed America" by David Wise.
In a chapter titled "The Wrong Man," Wise names Kelley and details how FBI
agents built a circumstantial case against him while the real mole,
Hanssen, operated within their midst. The real spy was revealed, Wise
reports, only after the U.S. paid an informant $7 million to smuggle a
secret KGB file out of Russia.
The file, which the FBI was convinced would seal their case against Kelley,
contained a tape recording of Hanssen's voice as well as his fingerprint on
a plastic bag used in the delivery of secret documents to the KGB.
It was the FBI's own Hanssen who had been paid in diamonds for his spying,
who had frequented a strip club, who had been in the right places at the
right time. And, in a strange coincidence, Hanssen left documents and
collected payment from the Soviets in the same park where Kelley jogged.
The FBI had been asking the right questions; they had just settled on the
wrong suspect.
Kelley and his lawyer, John Moustakas, are critical of Wise for using
Kelley's name. But the Washington-based author said the story of Hanssen
cannot be told without Kelley.
"I had to tell the full story of the wrong man," Wise said. "Brian Kelley
is the central character of the Hanssen story. That's journalism 101.
"My position is that the pursuit of this man and what was shamefully done
to him was central to the Hanssen case," said Wise, who extends his
criticism to the CIA for suspending Kelley.
Wise said he and his publisher were pressured by the CIA to not use
Kelley's name so the agency could avoid embarrassment. The CIA said it
requested that Kelley's anonymity be preserved to protect his undercover
status and prevent any further harm to him or his family.
Nevertheless, Kelley's name is clearly out. And he and Hunt have now
decided to tell the story themselves to expose problems they believe exist
in the FBI.
They say they are not looking for compensation, or planning any lawsuits at
this time.
"We want to get the story out because we want the system fixed," Kelley said.
He believes a number of FBI agents - as many as a third of those who were
familiar with the mole investigation - did not believe he should have been
targeted. But others, Kelley said, "pushed everything in one direction."
Kelley was also stung when the FBI initially refused to apologize to him
for his ordeal; it finally came nearly six months later, and only after the
FBI director at the time, Louis Freeh, had stepped down.
The FBI declined to comment on Brian Kelley, citing his right to privacy.
What actually happened within the FBI is expected to be further illuminated
within the next month or two, when the Department of Justice's inspector
general will issue what is expected to be a massive and critical report on
the handling of the Hanssen investigation.
Kelley's lawyer, Moustakas, is limiting his client's availability to the
media until a network news program airs a segment on his experience this
month. Kelley declined an in-depth interview, but spoke briefly with The
Courant during several telephone conversations.
`They Were So Myopic'
Hunt, whose Connecticut relatives - most of whom still live in Wethersfield
- learned what happened only after Kelley was cleared, said she'd love to
say that from Day 1 she never wavered in her belief that her friend was
innocent.
"Part of my torment was that I couldn't believe it," she said. "But,
intellectually, I didn't think the FBI would accuse someone of a capital
crime without incontrovertible evidence."
Now she can scarcely contain her anger with an agency that she and Kelley
used to work closely with.
"They were so overzealous, so myopic," Hunt said. "If these kind of abuses
happen to us, what chance does the average citizen have to protect their
civil liberties?"
She wants the FBI agents and managers in charge of the operation fired, and
more safeguards set up to avoid a similar fiasco.
Strong faith got Hunt and Kelley through the past several years, they both
say, although even that part of their life wasn't without bizarre moments.
It turns out that Hunt, Robert Hanssen and Freeh, all worshipped at St.
Catherine of Siena Church, a suburban Virginia parish Kelley had
recommended to Hunt years before.
"I'm thinking there must've been a Sunday where I was there praying for
Brian, Freeh was there praying that the investigation be solved, and
Hanssen was praying he doesn't get caught," Hunt said with a laugh, adding:
"It'll all be figured out in heaven."
http://www.ctnow.com/news/nationworld/hc-cia2.artdec08.story
Help a persecuted sinner,release the hanssen files.
