Spy: The Inside Story of How the FBI's Robert Hanssen Betrayed America

by David Wise

  Kelley and his children lived with uncertainty for eighteen months, until February 19, 2001, when he received a telephone call from an FBI agent asking to meet him at the bureau’s office in Tysons Corner, in northern Virginia. At the office, Kelley was shown a heavily censored report of his interview at CIA headquarters in 1999. He was asked to read it and to make any corrections. That seemed to be the first hopeful sign; he was not told, however, that Robert Hanssen, the real mole, had been arrested the previous afternoon.

  On the Today show the next morning, NBC News broke the story of Hanssen’s arrest, and six hours later Louis Freeh, then the FBI director, held a press conference to make the official announcement. Kelley’s nightmare was over, but not quite.

  The FBI asked Kelley whether he would be willing to take yet another polygraph test to confirm that he was not a Russian spy, and he agreed. When the test was over, the operator told him he had shown no evidence of deception.

  He was not immediately reinstated at the CIA, however, and was not allowed to return to work until May. In the meantime, he considered whether to sue the government or seek some other legal remedy for what had happened to him and his family. Having spent his life in the service of his country, first in the Air Force, then in the agency, he decided, for the moment at least, to soldier on. But he no longer worked on Russian illegals and was reassigned by the CIA to a different job.

  What he did want was an apology, and a statement that he was officially cleared, but both were slow in coming. In late April, two months after Hanssen’s arrest, Kelley and the female ex-CIA officer contacted James Woolsey, the former director of the CIA, at his Washington law firm, Shea & Gardner. Woolsey promised to help and referred them to his associate, John Moustakas.

  In a letter to Freeh in June 2001, Moustakas pointed out that Kelley and his family had lived for eighteen months with “espionage accusations involving death penalty offenses” and was barred from work for twenty-one months, including opportunities for advancement in his career at the CIA. The experience, he wrote, “left indelible personal scars that will never fully heal and a cloud that will continue to mar his impressive career unless it is explicitly dispelled.”

  What Brian Kelley wanted, his lawyer wrote, was “an unequivocal statement … that the espionage activities leveled against him as early as February 1999 have proved to be unfounded and that he has been exonerated unconditionally. We believe that you are the correct government official to issue such a statement.”

  Freeh didn’t.

  Instead, he ducked and had his deputy director, Thomas J. Pickard, write back. Finding the penetration, Pickard wrote on June 14, was a top priority because the information lost “was extraordinarily sensitive and damaging to the national security.” He added: “Given your background as an Assistant United States Attorney, I know that you understand the need to fully pursue this type of investigation. I do not doubt the necessity of the investigation, nor the integrity of the personnel who carried it out.”

  Pickard went on to throw Kelley a small bone. “I acknowledge and regret the impact of this investigation on the life of your client … and his family.” But in view of the pending prosecution of Hanssen, the FBI could not discuss the matter, although the bureau would deal with “any concerns” his client had after the prosecution was concluded.

  Moustakas was furious when he read the letter. The FBI had refused to declare that Kelley was innocent! He wrote back to Pickard in July. No one was doubting that the FBI had to investigate the losses, he agreed. But there was a big difference between pursuing leads and “accusations of espionage … the threat of arrest for capital crimes” and the treatment of his client’s family, “including threats to interrogate his eighty-four-year-old mother.

  “Under the circumstances it is simply not enough for the FBI to say that it ‘regrets’ the impact its investigation had.… That is the sort of thing an airline might say to a passenger whose flight had been delayed for a few hours. But my client was not merely inconvenienced; his life was turned upside down.… I do not accept your claimed inability to exonerate an innocent man because of the pending prosecution of a guilty one.”

  Moustakas added: “Why then is it so hard for the FBI to say, in point-blank fashion and just as a matter of honesty and fairness, that its suspicions about [Kelley] and its espionage accusations against him turned out to be totally unfounded and that … it was on the wrong track?”

  As it happened, three days later, President Bush appointed Robert Mueller to replace Freeh. Perhaps that made it easier for the FBI to do what it should have done all along. The following month, on August 16, Neil J. Gallagher, the assistant director in charge of the National Security Division, wrote to Kelley.

  “I sincerely regret the adverse impact that this investigation had on you and the members of your family,” Gallagher wrote. “It was not the intent of the FBI to either discredit you or to cause you or your family any embarrassment. If this has occurred, I am sorry.”

  Gallagher assured Kelley he was no longer a suspect and that “the FBI has ceased its investigation of you.” He offered to place the written exoneration in Kelley’s CIA personnel file.

  Kelley finally had the apology and declaration of innocence he had wanted. Neil Gallagher had done the right thing, and GRAY DECEIVER was found guiltless at last.

  Moustakas said he was “generally pleased.” He added, “The letter makes clear what everyone has known forever; that he’s not a spy, that he never was a spy, and that the nightmare should be over.” Moustakas’s only objection was that “it happened way too late.”

  Some remarkable coincidences were apparent once the FBI realized that Robert Hanssen, not Brian Kelley, was the long-sought mole. Kelley had once lived on the same street as Hanssen, five houses away from the real spy. He jogged in Nottoway Park, the location of Hanssen’s favorite dead drop, the one he had used seventeen times. The two men were about the same age and both worked in counterintelligence. Sometimes their paths crossed; they had once traveled to the same conference and another time had participated in a briefing of senior military officials. Kelley had on one occasion gone to Latin mass at the same church, St. Catherine, that Hanssen and his family had attended.

  However, these coincidences, while intriguing in retrospect, were wholly irrelevant. Until the FBI zeroed in on Robert Hanssen, it did not know that the mole had lived on the same street as Kelley, or used Nottoway Park, or that the two men had once gone to the same Catholic church. The similarities simply had nothing to do with the FBI’s erroneous belief that Brian Kelley was a traitor.

  How could it have happened?

  Partly it was bureaucratic blinders, the FBI’s ingrained belief that the mole was more likely to be a CIA officer than one of its own. Partly, it was the nature of counterintelligence. Unmasking a mole is a difficult business. The job of the counterspies is to suspect everyone and trust no one. When they think they have a suspect, they may tend to seize on that person to the exclusion of all others. And once under scrutiny, Kelley’s every move fueled the bureau’s distrust.

  “They will be very reluctant to let you go once you are under suspicion,” said Paul Moore, the former FBI counterintelligence analyst. “The principle is, there are no coincidences. But there are coincidences in life.”

  As the mole hunters reassure one another that they are on the right track, they become caught up in a self-reinforcing mechanism, and belief gradually hardens into reality. In time, not only Rochford but almost the entire senior echelon of the FBI’s counterintelligence managers became absolutely convinced that Kelley was their man.

  In retrospect, a high-level FBI official strongly defended the FBI’s three-year investigation of Brian Kelley, arguing that it acted on evidence that appeared valid at the time and only later proved wrong. “He fit all the descriptors in the matrix, had all the right accesses, was in right places at right times. He lived in northern Virginia, where we knew the Soviets were active. There was some stuff in his co
mputer that was suspicious. He was discovered surreptitiously doing things that appeared to be espionage-related. He had some strange overseas travel and strange contacts.” It ought not to be surprising, however, that a CIA officer might have unusual contacts. Brian Kelley, as the bureau finally admitted, was entirely innocent.

  One who did not agree with the pursuit of Brian Kelley was Ed Curran, the FBI agent who headed the Counterespionage Group inside the CIA and supervised the Special Investigations Unit hunting for the mole. He maintained that he, for one, opposed the intense focus on Kelley. “I was very vocal that Kelley was not the guy,” Curran said.

  One source close to the mole investigation declared: “Rochford couldn’t let go of this thing. WFO was totally in charge. They had a big success with Ames, they were walking on water, and nobody was going to get in their way. It was arrogance.

  “Why weren’t we looking at a dozen people? A lot of people fit the criteria; why weren’t we looking at them?”

  Even after it was over, there were some lingering questions about the Kelley case, at least for John Moustakas. He said that when the FBI had interviewed his other client—Kelley’s friend and former colleague—she had been asked about diamonds, parks in northern Virginia, and other matters later associated with Robert Hanssen; that led him to think that perhaps the bureau knew about Hanssen much earlier than late 2000, as it stated publicly.*

  Moustakas’s conjecture was understandable. However, the FBI had learned about the KGB and diamonds years earlier; it gave that information the code name KARAT. “There was a ‘diamond connection’; we heard from a defector that somebody was being paid in diamonds,” said John Lewis, the former chief of the FBI’s National Security Division. “It goes back at least ten, fifteen years, maybe more. But source accounts were often vague as to which agency the mole was in. Sometimes it was the bureau, sometimes the CIA.”

  * * *

  GRAYSUIT had looked very different—and with a far less certain outcome—at the start of 2000. The arrest of Robert Hanssen and the resulting vindication of Brian Kelley were still more than a year away. The hunt for the mole was not going well.

  At the time, the FBI was still confident that Kelley, suspended from his job at the CIA, was Moscow’s penetration. But the dawn of the new millennium had not brought the bureau any closer to gathering the proof it needed. The FBI had to face the fact: the case against GRAY DECEIVER had stalled.

  *Sometimes when the bureau’s counterspies talked to each other about Kelley, they simply referred to him even more cryptically, in a sort of shorthand, as “GD.”

  *Karlow, the principal suspect in Angleton’s mole hunt, was fired by the CIA in 1963, fought for twenty-six years to clear his name, and eventually received a secret medal from the director of the CIA and close to half a million dollars from the agency under a “Mole Relief Act” passed by Congress. See David Wise, Molehunt: The Secret Search for Traitors that Shattered the CIA (New York: Random House, 1992).

  *The Gs are civil servants, not FBI agents, and earn lower pay than the agents. But all are trained in surveillance, photography, and communications. They are chosen precisely because they do not resemble the public’s concept of FBI agents.

  †Since the FBI had not yet identified Hanssen as the mole, the bureau had no way of knowing when it discovered the map in Kelley’s home that Hanssen had repeatedly used PARK/PRIME, the dead drop in Nottoway Park.

  *Moustakas did not disclose the surnames of either of his clients to the author. He offered to make Kelley available to be interviewed for this book, but only on condition that Kelley’s name not be used. That offer was declined. Kelley’s identity was learned independently and his name and case discussed with the author by several current and former intelligence officials.

  *At his February 20, 2001, press conference announcing Hanssen’s arrest, FBI director Freeh was asked when the investigation began. “I don’t want to pinpoint the exact time,” he replied. “I would say it was the latter part of last year.”

  25

  GRAYDAY

  For the FBI’s mole hunters, as 2000 began, the failure to end their search with an arrest was as frustrating as it was intolerable.

  The problem had to be solved, even if it cost millions of dollars. Brian Kelley, the FBI believed, might yet be flushed from his burrow with enough cash.

  BUCKLURE was still an active program, although under a new code name. It was based on the premise and the hope that money might lead to the recruitment of a KGB or SVR officer who could identify the penetration. With luck, the operation could wrap up GRAYSUIT, the overall code name for the mole hunt.

  At FBI headquarters and the Washington field office, the hunters focused on finding the right Russian source who could identify the mole, producing conclusive proof against Kelley. For security reasons, the effort was in the hands of a deliberately small number of persons, including Neil Gallagher, the senior counterintelligence official at headquarters; Sheila Horan, his deputy; Timothy Bereznay, the chief of the Eurasian section; and Mike Rochford, the unit chief for Russia.

  Gallagher, a tall New Yorker who grew up in the South Bronx, joined the FBI in 1973 and spent much of his career in criminal work and counterterrorism. But he had worked as a counterspy in New York for five years and at headquarters in the early 1980s.

  At the Washington field office, the effort was led by Tim Caruso, the special agent in charge (SAC) for counterintelligence, who was respected as one of the bureau’s top counterspies and had been involved almost continuously in the search for penetrations. Caruso’s number two was Leslie Wiser, who had won recognition in 1994, when he ran the innovative and successful surveillance that culminated in the arrest of Aldrich Ames.

  The counterspies and the analysts who worked with them drew up a wish list of potential recruitments, many of whom at one time or another had been KGB or SVR American targets officers in Washington or New York. Some were still active at SVR headquarters in Moscow and could not, for the moment, be approached; others had turned up in various capitals abroad. Still others had retired to their dachas.

  As the mole hunters studied the names on the list, they tried to correlate their presence in Washington, or the years they held management positions in the KGB, with known intelligence losses. In narrowing the list, they were helped by Yevgeny Toropov, a KGB officer in Ottawa, listed as first secretary of the Russian embassy, who was a secret source of U.S. intelligence.

  The FBI counterspies began to focus more and more on one former KGB officer. When he was stationed in Washington, he had been of interest to the FBI. The Russian had gone into private business after he retired from intelligence work and was living in Moscow.

  Mike Rochford had managed to make contact with him outside the United States on more than one occasion when the Russian had traveled abroad, and the former KGB man had seemed willing to talk further. But an approach in Moscow would be risky; CIA and FBI agents were closely watched in the Russian capital.

  Then the counterspies hit on a possible solution. The FBI knew that the Russian was interested in expanding his business overseas. The bureau approached an executive of an American corporation who agreed to help by inviting the Russian to a fictional business meeting that would supposedly take place in New York in the late spring of 2000. The invitation would seem plausible because the company that issued it was in an industry related to the business that the Russian was in.

  It was much easier in 2000 for a Russian citizen to travel to the West than in the days of the Soviet Union, when it was virtually impossible, except as part of an official delegation. Still, the former KGB officer had to provide a convincing explanation for his trip. The FBI, the secret sponsors of the sham meeting, arranged to have an invitation sent to the Russian on the company’s letterhead.

  “It was just to give him plausible cover to make the trip,” one FBI official said. The invitation was the document that the ex-KGB spy needed to show to the authorities in Moscow to justify his travel to New Yo
rk.

  The Russian may have suspected that the FBI was behind the invitation, but there was no way he could be sure of that. “We invited him,” the FBI official said, “but he did not know it was us.”

  And the ploy worked. The news was electrifying when it reached FBI headquarters. The Russian was coming. The plan was operational.

  Mike Rochford, because of his experience and previous contacts with the former KGB man, was selected as the agent to make the approach in New York, and if successful, to negotiate the terms with the Russian.

  Rochford was not only fluent in Russian but a man who might inspire confidence in his talks with the ex-KGB officer. His appearance helped. Although only in his mid-forties, he was gray-haired, with a gray mustache. A bit heavyset, calm, and soft-spoken, Rochford looked more like an English professor at an Ivy League college than a counterspy.

  Rochford had started out at age twenty-three on CI-4, the KGB squad at the Washington field office, targeting Soviet counterintelligence officers for a decade. There followed three years in Nashville, where he acquired a taste for country music. Later, he moved up to a key counterespionage post at headquarters. He went back to Washington field in 1994 and for five years was in charge of the squad assigned to find the suspected penetration inside American intelligence.

  Only Rochford was to meet the former KGB man. But a support team of half a dozen FBI agents accompanied Rochford to New York in April 2000. They included Les Wiser; Jim Milburn, the veteran FBI Russian analyst; Special Agent Debra Smith, now the squad supervisor for the mole hunt at the Washington field office; and special agents Ben Gessford and Gwen Fuller from the field office. The CIA also dispatched its own officers to work with the FBI agents.

  The Russian, to the enormous excitement of the counterspies gathered in New York, indicated he was willing to deal—but slowly. Such matters were difficult, the Americans should understand, and would require extended discussions. He could not be expected to make a hasty decision. Still, it was not impossible that, providing various conditions were met, some accommodation could be reached of mutual interest.