by David Wise
24
The Wrong Man
In 1998, a year after Brian Kelley had returned to CIA headquarters from overseas, he was invited to join a supersecret counterespionage operation.
The agency, he was told, had snared a Russian intelligence agent who was ready to defect, to come to the West and solve at last the mystery of who had compromised the Felix Bloch case. It was an exciting assignment, particularly for Kelley, the counterintelligence officer who was first to discover the trail that led to Bloch.
To join the secret operation, Kelley was told he would have to submit to a lie detector test. Kelley had taken a routine polygraph a year earlier and had no objections to undergoing another. Once he was strapped to the machine, the examiners questioned him, probing his reaction to the possibility that the mole who had warned the KGB about Felix Bloch was soon to be unmasked.
Kelley was assured he had passed the polygraph test. But soon afterward, his superiors in the directorate of operations told him that the anticipated Russian defector had changed his mind and would not be coming to the United States after all; as a result, Kelley was no longer needed for the special operation.
The entire business was an elaborate ruse to deceive Kelley into taking a new polygraph, where he could be questioned about the betrayal of the Bloch case. There was no Russian defector, no secret operation.
Unbeknownst to Brian Kelley, he had emerged as the prime suspect in the secret FBI and CIA mole hunt that had begun after the arrest of Aldrich Ames four years earlier. And, ironically, it was the Bloch case that had cast the dark shadow of suspicion on Kelley, an innocent CIA officer.
The FBI gave the effort to uncover the mole a new code name: GRAYSUIT.
As suspects emerged, they would be given cryptonyms as a subset of the word GRAY. Thus it was that in the innermost sanctum of the bureau’s mole hunters, Brian Kelley became GRAY DECEIVER.
Kelley was well known in the counterintelligence world, for he had built his career as a specialist in illegals, the Russian spies sent to the West without benefit of diplomatic cover. Kelley had headed the illegals group at the CIA.
His was an arcane, difficult specialty, because illegals are rarely detected. They do not pose as diplomats and often steal the identities of long dead or living persons—they can be anybody.
It was Kelley who was credited with unmasking Reino Gikman, the KGB illegal who turned up in Vienna when Felix Bloch was deputy chief of mission. And it was Gikman, metamorphosing into “Pierre Bart,” who dined in Paris with Bloch in mid-May 1989 and left with the airline bag that Bloch had placed under the table. It was Gikman as well who had called Bloch a month later to warn him of “a contagious disease.”
Although Bloch was not arrested or charged with espionage, inside the CIA Brian Kelley was widely known and admired as the officer who had made the Bloch case. He received a medal at an awards ceremony, and among his colleagues he was given credit for his detective work. It was not his fault, after all, that an unknown mole inside American intelligence had warned the KGB so that it, in turn, could warn Bloch, to the great and continuing frustration of the FBI.
And it was precisely because Kelley had broken the Bloch case that he fell under suspicion. When the mole hunters hunt, they construct a matrix, matching the nature of the secrets believed to have been compromised with the names of the people who had access to those secrets. Then they attempt to winnow down the list, eliminating the names, for example, of those whose access might have occurred only after the suspected date that the information leaked.
Brian Kelley had joined the CIA after twenty years in the Air Force. He was persuaded to join the agency by Gus Hathaway, who as the CIA chief of counterintelligence had appointed the mole hunt team that eventually unmasked Aldrich Ames as a KGB spy.
At the agency, Kelley was a career officer in the directorate of operations. He had carved out his illegals specialty almost from the start. He worked counterintelligence cases in New York City in the early 1980s, and later was posted to Panama for a time, returning to headquarters at the end of 1997. Long divorced, he had a daughter who also worked at the CIA, and two sons.
Kelley was dedicated to his work. But he told friends he felt he was never fully accepted in the agency because he had been a military man, not a career CIA employee from the start. A former colleague described him as “balding, nondescript, very serious, not outgoing, not joking, always cautious, always protective.”
When Kelley returned from Panama, he was assigned to review the Bloch case files, to go over them once again to make sure nothing had been missed. But he did not know that the task was a subterfuge, designed to keep him busy and cut off from other agency operations and secrets.
As Kelley reported to CIA headquarters each day in Langley, Virginia, his life was under microscopic examination a few miles away, across the Potomac in the Washington field office of the FBI. And the agent looking through that microscope was Mike Rochford, the FBI man who had run the Cherkashin study for the bureau that reexamined the file on the KGB counterintelligence officer, including the episode with the bicycle in Rock Creek Park.
Rochford, a tall, affable man, had a background that would turn out to be remarkably similar to Robert Hanssen’s. He was born in Chicago, where his father had been a police officer for almost three decades. He was educated at Catholic schools in that city and joined the FBI in 1974. Hanssen had studied Russian in college; the bureau had sent Rochford to language school to learn Russian.
At the field office, Rochford was in charge of the squad assigned to find the suspected penetration inside American intelligence. The more he looked at Brian Kelley’s career, the more convinced he became that Kelley, GRAY DECEIVER, was the mole.*
In counterintelligence work, once a person falls under suspicion, the investigators may seize upon innocent events and circumstances that suddenly take on ominous meaning. During the era when James J. Angleton headed counterintelligence at the CIA, a score of loyal officers were shunted aside or even fired, their careers destroyed on the flimsiest of evidence. In one classic case, Peter Karlow, a CIA officer, actually fell under suspicion because his name began with the letter K. A defector had said the agency harbored a mole whose name began with that letter.*
Convinced that Kelley was their man, the FBI applied to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, the shadowy, little-known wiretap panel in the capital, and obtained permission to place the CIA man under intense scrutiny. His home was bugged and secretly searched, as was his garbage; his telephones were tapped, and his every move was carefully watched.
Once, for example, when Kelley traveled to New York and to Niagara Falls, the FBI was with him. The bureau was ready to pounce; the famed tourist attraction is on the Canadian border, and sometimes KGB agents were known to slip over the border to meet a contact. Kelley in fact was there on a trip for the CIA. But the bureau convinced itself that he was taking evasive action, known in the spy trade as “dry cleaning,” to lose a tail.
“They had surveillance on him and we lost him at the border,” a former FBI counterintelligence official said. “We thought he was cleaning himself.”
In Panama, Kelley was seen brushing past what one agent called “an individual suspected of a connection to Russian intelligence. It was a very quick pass; there could have been a verbal exchange as well.” But for all the bureau knew, the man may have been a source recruited by Kelley for the CIA; he was never asked about the contact.
The physical surveillance was carried out by “the Gs,” FBI jargon for the SSG, the bureau’s Special Surveillance Group. The Gs are a special team of surveillance experts, selected to look like ordinary citizens. A young mother with a baby in a stroller, joggers, street repair crews in hard hats, an old man with a cane, telephone linemen, white-haired grandmothers with shopping bags, young lovers necking in the park—all may be Gs on the job.* “The Gs were on him for a long time,” one former FBI man said.
Try as it might, Rochford’s squad, even wi
th the benefit of the watchers and electronic eavesdropping, was not able to nail down the evidence to make a case against Kelley. It could not do so for the simple reason that he was totally innocent.
So the FBI decided to run another sting against him. Perhaps if Kelley could be duped into thinking the FBI was on to his supposed espionage, he would try to run. In November 1998, some time after the phony assignment that tricked Kelley into taking the lie detector test, a stranger appeared at the door of his home.
In a thick foreign accent, the man said the authorities now knew about his spying. The stranger handed him a piece of paper with an escape plan and told him to be at a nearby subway station the next evening. Then the man disappeared into the night. It was an obvious FBI sting that failed for two reasons—Kelley was not a spy, and he reported the incident to the FBI the next morning. He even gave a description of the foreigner so that a bureau artist could sketch the man.
But the FBI simply assumed that Kelley was too clever by half to fall for their sting. He was so cool and confident, Rochford believed, that inside the Washington field office Kelley became known as “the Iceman.”
When the FBI secretly searched Kelley’s home in Vienna, Virginia, agents found a map of Nottoway Park with what it regarded as suspicious markings. Soviet intelligence officers had been seen in the vicinity of the park, and the discovery of the map added to Rochford’s and the bureau’s conviction that the investigation was on the right track.†
The FBI, meanwhile, had quietly begun questioning certain CIA officers about Brian Kelley. In February 1999, bureau agents twice interviewed a woman who was a CIA officer and a friend of Kelley. As a participant in the agency’s executive leadership program, she had recently developed a proposal to provide the services of a chaplain at CIA, an idea which the agency’s director, George Tenet, is said to have supported. Soon after, she went on leave from the agency to work with a religious organization.
According to John Moustakas, a Washington attorney who later represented both Kelley and the female former CIA officer, the FBI agents asserted that the woman was trying to cover up for Kelley, and they claimed not to believe her initial statements to them.*
“They accused her of false statements and suggested she was a cutout for Kelley. In August different FBI agents confronted her at a mailboxes-type store. The agents were a little friendlier and took her to a diner and talked to her.”
In the interim, Kelley had learned that some of his colleagues were being interrogated about him, and he asked the woman CIA officer if she had been approached. “She felt badly that, because she’d signed nondisclosure agreements, she told Brian she had not been questioned, which was not true. He thought it strange that she should not have been questioned, since a lot of other people were.”
By this time, Moustakas added, the woman decided that, because her interrogators had accused her of lying and had made clear they felt she was at least complicit in spying, her CIA career was over. “She knew she could no longer be effective in covert work and resigned from the agency.”
For a time, the CIA resisted the FBI’s concentration on Kelley, arguing that, aside from the Bloch case, he would not have had access to some of the information the bureau believed to have been compromised. According to Moustakas, the bureau had an answer for that; he said FBI agents speculated that Kelley, single and a divorcé, might have obtained the information by seducing women employees of the agency.
Espionage is a very difficult crime to prove, and when the FBI’s various stratagems had failed—the fake mole operation and the stranger at the door—it decided to confront Kelley. Sometimes in such a setting suspects confess, often in the desperate if misguided hope that they will be “turned” and played back by the bureau against the Russians.
At 1 P.M. on August 18, 1999, Kelley was summoned to a meeting in a small conference room in the Counterintelligence Center (CIC) at CIA headquarters. Awaiting him there were two special agents of the FBI, Rudy Guerin and Doug Gregory. Guerin was one of the agents who, five years earlier, had arrested Aldrich Ames.
Gregory, who also worked at WFO, the Washington field office—although not on Rochford’s mole hunting squad—was called in because he had earned a reputation as the best investigator in the FBI’s New York division. In his late fifties, of medium height, with gray hair and glasses, he was known to be methodical and thorough.
“Gregory is a very serious, a very competent guy,” one FBI colleague said. “WFO thought he was a great case agent; any hard case they turned over to Doug Gregory. No personality, difficult to get along with, and he had a real hard-on for the agency. They brought Gregory in when they were ready to do the interview with Kelley.”
The two FBI men minced no words. From the start of the interview they accused Kelley of being a Russian spy. They knew all about his activities and even knew his SVR code name, they told him. For Kelley, it was a very frightening moment; by now, Congress had changed the law, and espionage carried the death penalty. Like a character in a Kafka novel, he had no way to prove he was innocent.
The FBI agents triumphantly pulled out a copy of the marked map of Nottoway Park that they had taken from his home. The FBI had stamped it SECRET.
The “spy map,” the agents informed him, was proof that he was the long-sought Russian mole. The X marks and the times written on the map indicated when and where he had placed secret documents in dead drops.
“How do you explain this!” one of the agents shouted.
“Where did you get my jogging map?” Kelley countered.
Moustakas, a tough, stocky, no-nonsense former federal prosecutor, was indignant as he described the scene. According to Moustakas, the FBI agents told Kelley he would already be in jail if George Tenet, the director of the CIA, had not intervened. “They told Brian he was about to be arrested; the only reason he hadn’t been is out of deference to Tenet. They said Tenet had prevailed upon them to give Brian one more chance to ‘come clean.’ It was ridiculous; anyone knows if he confessed he’d be arrested. My mother wouldn’t fall for that.”
The questioning went on for several hours, the agents urging Kelley, who had no lawyer present, to confess his capital crime. Kelley said he had nothing to confess.
The agents weren’t buying it. Unless he admitted his espionage, they said, they would have to question members of his family, including, over Kelley’s “imploring objections, his frail eighty-four-year-old mother,” who was in a nursing home.
At the end of the interrogation, Moustakas said, Kelley was escorted out of CIA headquarters by a senior counterintelligence officer, who also took his badge. He was placed on administrative leave that was to last twenty-one months. In limbo, falsely accused as a spy and facing a possible death penalty, Kelley, having served his country for thirty-seven years, had nowhere to turn. He could only wait, and hope that he would eventually be cleared of the crime he knew he had not committed.
On that same afternoon in August, while Kelley was being confronted by Gregory and Guerin, his twenty-eight-year-old daughter, a CIA employee in the agency’s personnel department, was escorted to a small windowless room with a table and four metal chairs. Two FBI agents, a man and a woman, were there. “Please sit down,” one of the agents told her. “We have some bad news for you.” Frightened, Kelley’s daughter could not imagine what had happened.
“Your father is a spy,” the FBI agent said. “He’s working for the Russians.”
The room seemed to spin. Kelley’s daughter loved her father and had followed in his footsteps by joining the CIA. When the FBI man accused her father of espionage, it was as though her world had suddenly disintegrated. She began to shake and weep uncontrollably. She stood up and turned away from the agents, facing the wall, still sobbing.
After a few moments, she regained her composure and sat down. The interview continued. The male agent did the questioning while a younger female agent took notes.
The FBI man pulled out a copy of the jogging map and informed her
it showed the location of dead drops. She denied her father could possibly be a spy, but that appeared to infuriate the agent.
He pounded the table. “Come on,” he yelled, “we know what he did!”
Agents fanned out to find the other family members, and the same scene was repeated. Over the next forty-eight hours, Kelley’s ex-wife, his two sons, and two sisters were all interrogated by the FBI.
In Connecticut, the agents warned Kelley’s sister that if she did not cooperate they would question her ailing mother in the nursing home.
In Kentucky, the FBI caught up with Kelley’s younger son at his office, flashed the map, which they said had come from his father’s den, and explained that it proved he was a Russian spy. After an hour, the distraught son lurched past his staring coworkers and out into the rain to be alone. He wondered: could it possibly be true?
In Manhattan, the FBI located Kelley’s oldest son, who was on a business trip and about to leave for a flight back to Washington. The agents escorted him to La Guardia Airport, questioning him as the car crawled through the rush-hour traffic.
As soon as he got home that evening, he called his father and drove to his house in Vienna. His father was waiting in the driveway.
“I just want to make sure you believe me,” he said.
“You never have to worry about that,” his son replied as they hugged.
In the end, after pleas by family members, the FBI did not in fact interview Kelley’s mother in the nursing home. But several of his friends and colleagues were interviewed and sworn to silence.
As summer turned to fall, Kelley was having repeated problems with the telephones at his home. In October, a technician dispatched by the telephone company to investigate the trouble found a bug on the line.
All during 2000 and into 2001, Brian Kelley remained on leave, barred from Langley headquarters. The experience, Moustakas said, was “emotionally devastating to him and his family.” Kelley told friends he never would have gotten through it all but for a parish priest in whom he confided, who took him under his wing and helped him cope.