Spy: The Inside Story of How the FBI's Robert Hanssen Betrayed America (33 page)

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.
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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.
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“The Gs were on him for a long time,” one former FBI man said.

Try as it might, Rochford’s squad, even with 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.
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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.
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“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.

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.