Brian Kelley, 1943–2011

last updated 8 January 2015

As one of the CIA’s top counterintelligence officers, Brian Kelley spent his career rooting out double agents and Russian moles. But in August 1999, Kelley found himself labeled a turncoat. FBI agents hauled him into an interrogation room and accused him of passing secrets to Moscow. “They said, ‘We know who you are. We know what you’ve been doing,’” Kelley recalled in 2003. His leaks, investigators alleged, had led to the deaths of three FBI agents in Russia. But as the FBI later discovered—after almost wrecking his life and career—Kelley wasn’t a traitor. In fact, the real double agent wasn’t working at the CIA, but within the FBI itself.

Until that summer, Kelley had been one of the intelligence community’s stars. Born in Waterbury, Conn., he served in the U.S. Air Force’s Office of Special Investigations for 20 years before moving to the CIA in 1984. Five years later, Kelley “figured out a still-classified method used by Moscow to clandestinely communicate with deep-cover agents called ‘illegals’,” said The Washington Times. That discovery resulted in the unmasking of U.S. diplomat Felix Bloch, who was photographed exchanging a briefcase with a KGB “illegal” in Vienna. Kelley came under suspicion of having alerted Bloch to the investigation, said The New York Times, because the FBI was convinced that the mole had to be in the CIA. “They couldn’t conceive it was one of their own,” said intelligence historian David Wise.

Kelley was suspended for 21 months, and his friends and family were confronted and questioned by the FBI. His daughter—who’d followed Kelley into the CIA—was taken into an interview room and told that her father was a spy. Kelley was exonerated in November 2000, when the FBI secured audiotapes of the real mole talking to his handler. The voice on the recordings belonged to senior FBI agent Robert Hanssen, who was later sentenced to life in prison.