Author David Wise Squares Off with The CIA

By Vernon Loeb, Washington Post, Nov 18, 2002

Tenet took the unusual step in June of writing to author David Wise's publisher, Random House, to ask that the name of a CIA counterintelligence operative be omitted from Wise's forthcoming book, "Spy: The Inside Story of How the FBI's Robert Hanssen Betrayed America."

Tenet noted that the operative "had the misfortune" of being the FBI's prime suspect in the hunt for the Russian mole that turned out to be Hanssen, the FBI's own. Withholding the operative's identity, Tenet said, "is key to his continued effectiveness and travel overseas."

After Wise and Random House refused and revealed the operative's name, Brian Kelley, in publishing "Spy" last month, Tenet's request would have remained private and gone no further.

But then Wise alleged in a Nov. 7 op-ed piece in The New York Times that Tenet had "attempted to censor the book merely to avoid embarrassing publicity." The CIA, Wise explained last week in an interview, had done nothing to stand up for one of its own and banished Kelley to administrative leave for 21 months, despite the FBI's paucity of hard evidence against him.

I agree with Wise that the CIA should be embarrassed for not standing by Kelley. And I accept his argument that Kelley was such a central figure in the Hanssen saga that it would have been hard to write the story without naming Kelley (although perhaps a pseudonym, identified as such, might have sufficed). But I don't think Tenet tried to censor Wise's book. He didn't ask that embarrassing facts about the agency's conduct be left out, only that Kelley's name not be used. With Kelley's attorneys making the same request to Wise, it seemed like the least Tenet could do. Finally, the agency was coming to Kelley's aid.

The FBI Pays $7 Million for Hanssen's Case File

Before Wise picked his censorship fight with the CIA, I hadn't read his book, the fourth-I believe-about the weird, paradoxical world of Robert Hanssen, the devout Catholic and strident anti-communist who shockingly betrayed American and, perhaps even more shockingly, betrayed his own wife by allowing a friend to watch videotapes of him and her in bed.

The book, I think, is far better than the unfortunate sideshow it has now generated. Its dust jacket calls Wise "America's leading writer on intelligence and espionage," and that may not be hyperbole. Among his 10 nonfiction books is "The Invisible Government," a groundbreaking work on the CIA he wrote with Thomas Ross back in the 1960s before many people even knew the agency existed.

"Spy" is up to Wise's standards, thoroughly researched and replete with new information. With so much junk being written these days about the intelligence world, Wise's books have one overarching virtue: What he says in them is actually true.

Having covered the Hanssen case, I knew that the blockbuster behind the blockbuster of Hanssen's betrayal and arrest was how the FBI came into possession of Hanssen's KGB case file-a treasure trove of information that finally exonerated Brian Kelley and led directly to Hanssen's arrest. Well, Wise breaks the story, and it's even better than his superb account of how the FBI hounded Kelley.

Frustrated by its inability to nail Kelley with solid evidence (because there was none), the FBI decided to look for a Russian intelligence officer with inside knowledge of the American mole. FBI agents chose a retired KGB officer-turned-businessman and set up a phony business meeting to lure him to the United States.

Once the FBI revealed its true interest at the meeting in New York, the Russian said he could indeed help FBI agents unmask the American mole. Then, to the agents' astonishment, he revealed why: He had absconded with the mole's case file from Russian foreign intelligence headquarters when he retired "as insurance against a rainy day," Wise writes.

The FBI eventually paid the Russian-whose identity Wise says he still does not know--$7 million for the file, which included a tape recording of Hanssen's voice and, even more remarkably, a carefully preserved plastic bag which Hanssen had used to pass top secret intelligence documents to the Russians. On the bag, FBI forensic specialists found two of Hanssen's fingerprints, the final nails in his coffin. Part of the deal also required that the U.S. government bring the Russian and members of his extended family to the United States and create new identities for them like the Witness Protection Program the CIA maintains for resettling defectors.

"The FBI had followed a false trail for three years, stumbling in the dark, but now it had pulled off an impressive and unprecedented counterintelligence feat," Wise writes. "There had been defectors and walk-ins over the years who had provided valuable information, but nothing had ever happened like this. The bureau had engineered the source's travel to New York and had managed to pull off the seemingly impossible-to extract a file on the most damaging mole in the history of the FBI from the most guarded building in Russia."

November 15, 2002:  Statement by David Wise, author, "Spy: The Inside Story of How the FBI's Robert Hanssen Betrayed America," who submitted this to the CI Centre:

The CIA, having tried and failed to censor my book on the Robert Hanssen spy case, has now launched a regrettable personal attack on me and the book. 

The facts are beyond dispute.  On June 14, the CIA director, George Tenet, wrote to Peter Olson, the chairman of Random House, invoking "national security" and attempting to remove from the manuscript of "Spy" the name of Brian Kelley, a CIA officer who had been falsely accused as a Russian spy but was innocent.  I disclosed this approach to the publisher on the Op-Ed page of The New York Times on November 7. 

The CIA treated Brian Kelley shabbily.  I suggested in my article that it sought to suppress his name to avoid further embarrassing publicity over the case.

Astonishingly, the CIA denies that the pressure on my publisher was an effort to censor the book.  The dictionary is helpful here.  "To censor" means to remove something objectionable from a work.  Or as Webster's New World Dictionary puts it, "to subject (a book, writer, etc.) to censorship."  That is exactly and precisely what the CIA was trying to do.  Fortunately, Random House wouldn't let them. 

The CIA's press release claims the book landed with a "thud."  I don't understand this; any readers can look at the laudatory reviews of "Spy" (Washington Post Book World Nov. 3, The New York Times Book Review, Nov. 17) and draw their own conclusions.  The reviews are calling the book the definitive work on the Hanssen case.  The CIA's timing was exquisitely bad.  One day after their screed was published, the book appeared on the Washington Post's nonfiction bestseller list as #4, reflecting sales well before my article or the CIA's attack were published. 

What is a little scary here is that the CIA, which is in the business of gathering intelligence, would be so far off the mark. 

By ascribing venal motives to my Op-ed article the CIA and its friends reveal more about how their own minds work than mine. I wrote my Op-ed piece for only one reason: to expose George Tenet's effort to censor my book.  No writer should tolerate the Director of Central Intelligence or any other government official pressuring a publisher to alter a manuscript. I could not and did not remain silent.

The FBI was badly mistaken in its pursuit of Mr. Kelley, as my book reports. However, when the FBI opens an investigation on an employee of the CIA or any other agency, the law requires only that it notify the agency.  There is absolutely no legal requirement that the CIA roll over and punish the employee on the basis of mere allegations.  Instead of supporting its own officer, the CIA stripped Mr. Kelley of his badge, abruptly escorted him out of headquarters, and damaged his career.  If the CIA was so concerned about the welfare of Brian Kelley, why did it suspend him for 21 months?

My treatment of Brian Kelley in the book is entirely sympathetic. Although Mr. Tenet in his letter to the publisher insists that Brian Kelley was working in a "covert status," that in itself is subject to question.  He was never given his old counterintelligence job back.  Since a wide circle of journalists and others inside and outside the CIA had become aware of his identity, it would have been irresponsible for the CIA to continue him in a covert role. Mr. Kelley has lectured outside the CIA under his own name, and appeared under his own name at the gala opening of the International Spy Museum in July-- long before my book was published-- he was recently interviewed on television for the Discovery Channel, and reportedly has been talking with CBS's "60 Minutes."  I sincerely hope he will be compensated by the CIA for what happened to him.

As for the letter to the editor of The New York Times by Anthony Lapham and John Moustakas, shouldn't Mr. Lapham have disclosed to readers of the Times that he is the former general counsel of the CIA?  Would it not also have been less disingenuous if Mr. Lapham had revealed that last May he sought to arrange a meeting between CIA officials and Random House to try to alter my manuscript?  

John Moustakas is simply wrong (in the longer text of the letter posted on the Cicentre website) in claiming he spoke to me with the understanding that Brian Kelley's name would not be used.  Mr. Moustakas knows full well that I already knew Brian Kelley's name when I walked in the door and that there was no agreement, stated or implied, that I would not use Brian Kelley's name.  Anyone who knows me, my work, and my reputation would know that Mr. Moustakas's assertion is simply not possible.  As a member of the bar, he should retract his erroneous statement.  I trust he will.

I have been critical at times of the government's intelligence agencies but, as I have publicly stated, I have always respected the vast majority of the dedicated men and women who serve in intelligence.  Many of them have helped me in my writings.  But when the Director of Central Intelligence, one of the most powerful officials in Washington and the head of a huge secret agency, attempts to pressure a publisher, as happened in this case, it is not a minor matter, and it deserved the public exposure it has now received.  Even more troubling is the fact that the CIA is still reluctant to admit that it sought to censor the book.        

In its reproach of the government for manipulating what the public is permitted to see and hear, David Wise's November 7, 2002 Op Ed piece, "Spies as Censors," commits the very sins it purports to expose. To be sure, recent judicial revelations about FBI misconduct in procuring secret "foreign intelligence" wiretaps and search warrants is but a single example that the government can and does invoke the need for secrecy to hide both its shortcomings and its misconduct (e.g., "Secret Court Says FBI Aides Misled Judges in 75 Cases," August 23, 2002 (A1)). And there is little doubt that the same national security and intelligence establishment trying to inspire confidence post-9/11 would just as soon we forget the rank incompetence that ironically permitted the FBI's own Robert Hanssen to continue his treacherous espionage undetected while threatening a wholly innocent Brian Kelley with capital crimes for Hanssen's offenses. But the example Wise has chosen to prove his thesis has more to do with selling books than exposing the truth.

Because it comports with that kind of natural public skepticism of government secrecy that might sell more of his books about a subject in which the public's interest has waned, Wise makes the C.I.A. the boogey man in a morality play about censorship. Wise tells us he came under "intense pressure from the C.I.A." which "attempted to censor the book merely to avoid embarrassing publicity." And while explaining that he "could not fully report the story of Robert Hanssen's espionage without telling what happened to Brian Kelley" and how the intelligence community got "sidetracked in pursuit of the wrong man," Wise he implies that efforts were made prevent him from exposing Kelley's wrongful implication as a spy.

Wise knows this isn't true. But the truth won't help sell his books; trumped up censorship claims might. It was not the C.I.A., but Brian Kelley, who, through lawyers who volunteered to work for his exoneration and return to work at the C.I.A, repeatedly begged Mr. Wise to guarantee Mr. Kelley's anonymity in the telling of his story. I know because I am one of those lawyers.

When I spoke to Wise of my client's ordeal it was with the understanding that his name would not be used. This newspaper, the Washington Post, and several other reports published an account of his ordeal on that condition. Mr. Kelley's wrongful implication as a spy nearly cost him a long and storied career. His best chance to return to the covert work at which, by Mr. Wise's own admission, Mr. Kelley excelled was for his identity to be protected in Mr. Wise's book. But Wise didn't care; he even refused to listen to a personal plea from Mr. Kelley how the publicity would harm his career, his family, and his own personal life.

What the FBI did to Mr. Kelley in indiscriminately accusing him of espionage in the face of overwhelming evidence of his innocence is disgraceful. The C.I.A.'s complicity in that grave error is hardly better. Blame them for that. But when the C.I.A. and Director Tenet urged Wise, and later his publisher, to honor Mr. Kelley's covert status and forego using his real name, they did so at our request, not to "avoid embarrassing publicity." No one ever asked Wise to bury his story, just a name - a name that made all the difference to a victim named Brian Kelley. Apparently Wise and his publisher, Random House, ascribed some financial value to using Mr. Kelley's name. Shame on both of them. In telling half the story, it is they who have manipulated the facts to conceal their failings. The preceding was written 08 Nov but not published due to excessive length.

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New York Times, November 13, 2002

Writer Wasn't Censored

To the Editor:

David Wise, in his book about the spy Robert Hanssen, cursorily tells the story of our client, a highly regarded C.I.A. officer who for nearly two years was wrongly accused of Mr. Hanssen's espionage. Now Mr. Wise flatteringly paints himself as David to a C.I.A. Goliath using all its might to censor the story of how the F.B.I. botched the Hanssen investigation so badly (Op-Ed, Nov. 7).

No one censored Mr. Wise's story. To the contrary, we helped him tell it. All we asked was that he conceal our client's true identity to protect his undercover career. George J. Tenet, the C.I.A. director, merely supported our unsuccessful pleas by asking Mr. Wise's publisher to honor our simple request.

Since Mr. Wise has never explained what his book would have lost if it had merely withheld our client's true name, only he knows why he gratuitously disclosed our client's name.

Instead of concocting tales of alleged censorship, Mr. Wise should write about the virtue of a system that relies on a writer's own ethics and conscience, not government censorship, to discriminate between the newsworthy and the prurient.

JOHN MOUSTAKAS

TONY A. LAPHAM

Washington, Nov. 12, 2002

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

8 November 2002

Statement by CIA Spokesman Bill Harlow

What do you do when your new book lands on the market with a resounding thud?  One school of thought is to write something outrageous in the newspapers to try to attract attention to yourself and the book.  Sadly, that is the course author David Wise adopted.  In an op-ed piece in the November 7 edition of The New York Times he accuses the CIA of attempting to censor his work.  This is complete and utter nonsense. 

Wise’s book is the fifth or sixth attempt by someone to write about the case of convicted FBI spy Robert Hanssen.  At the CIA we have far better things to do than to worry about yet another book on Mr. Hanssen.  But we were concerned when we learned that Mr. Wise intended to name a currently serving undercover officer who had the misfortune of falling under suspicion of being a Russian agent before Hanssen was caught. Numerous respected journalists, including reporters for The New York Times, were aware of the name of the CIA officer well over a year ago.  They wrote about this officer’s ordeal in August 2001, but responsibly chose not to publish the name of an undercover officer who continues to serve his nation in a sensitive assignment.

After Mr. Wise declined requests from the CIA, and the individual himself, to act in a similarly reasonable fashion, the Director of Central Intelligence wrote his publisher to ask his assistance in maintaining this officer’s cover.  Mr. Wise misleads the readers of the New York Times by suggesting that the CIA was trying to avoid embarrassing publicity.  On the contrary, the officer involved, through his lawyer, even offered to be interviewed for the book.  His only condition was that his true name be withheld.

I respond to Mr. Wise’s diatribe reluctantly.  In doing so I know I am giving him precisely what he wants – attention for his book.  But I cannot let his accusation that CIA was trying to censor him stand. No doubt he will take our response as an opportunity to try to get himself booked on television shows to talk about his otherwise unremarkable book.

We are also concerned that the New York Times would run Mr. Wise’s accusations of censorship without checking the facts first.  Had they done so, they would have heard a much different story…and would have learned that even their own reporters long ago exercised the judgment that Mr. Wise lacks.

Spies as Censors

By David Wise

November 7, 2002

New York Times

An independent commission to investigate the intelligence mistakes before the Sept. 11 attacks is needed for one simple reason: intelligence agencies are able to use the secrecy that cloaks their operations to conceal their failings.

All government bureaucracies are reluctant to admit error, but it is so much easier for the intelligence agencies to avoid exposure. My own recent unpleasant experience with the Central Intelligence Agency is a case in point.

In the course of researching my book on the Robert Hanssen espionage case, I realized early on that the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the C.I.A. had for three years pursued the wrong suspect, a C.I.A. officer named Brian Kelley. In August 1999, the C.I.A. suspended Mr. Kelley who was falsely accused of being a spy for Russia when all along it was Robert Hanssen. Mr. Kelley is identified in the book for the first time. He was entirely innocent, but his career was damaged by the false accusations against him. He was not allowed back into the agency until May 2001, three months after Robert Hanssen was arrested.

It seemed obvious that one could not fully report the story of Robert Hanssen's espionage without telling what happened to Brian Kelley and how the hunt for the mole inside the two intelligence agencies had gotten sidetracked in pursuit of the wrong man.

At one point, F.B.I. officers gathered to listen to a tape, smuggled out of K.G.B. headquarters in Moscow, on which the mole's voice had been recorded. They fully expected the voice to be Mr. Kelley's. But to their surprise, the voice that boomed out of the speakers was that of Robert Hanssen.

The Brian Kelley story was an integral part of the Hanssen case. Yet I soon came under intense pressure from the C.I.A. to suppress his name. I was told that revealing Mr. Kelley's identity would interfere with his duties as a counterintelligence officer, that he had suffered enough and so on. When I declined, the C.I.A. went over my head to my publisher.

On June 14, George Tenet, the director of central intelligence, wrote to Peter Olson, the chairman of Random House, my publisher, invoking "national security" in urging him to remove Brian Kelley's name from the book. Mr. Tenet did not threaten legal action, but when the director of central intelligence attempts to pressure a writer and a publisher in the name of "national security," it is a serious, even frightening business.

When I explained to my publisher why the Kelley story was essential to the book, Ann Godoff, the president and editor in chief of Random House, and her colleagues stood firm and fully supported me. Not one word of the book was changed.

It seems clear that the C.I.A. attempted to censor the book merely to avoid embarrassing publicity. This episode shows just how far intelligence agencies will go to avoid scrutiny. If that was the case with my book, how much more intense would the instinct be to avoid divulging errors made prior to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11?
 

David Wise is author of  "Spy: The Inside Story of How the FBI's Robert Hanssen Betrayed America.''

The following is the text of a June 14, 2002 letter from Director of Central Intelligence George J. Tenet to the Chairman of Random House, asking that the name of a covert CIA employee not be included in a book by author David Wise that Random House planned to publish. 

Dear Mr. Olson:

I am writing to ask that you maintain the covert status of one of CIA’s employees who had the misfortune of being the FBI’s prime suspect in what turned out to be the Hanssen spy case.  Mr. David Wise has been writing a book on Hanssen for publication by Random House and has told both the employee’s private counsel and officers from our Public Affairs Office that he intends to use the employee’s true name in the book.  On a purely personal level, the employee has already endured an eighteen-month counterintelligence investigation that was devastating to him and his family.  Moreover, many of his colleagues, friends and neighbors do not know that he was the officer wrongly accused, and exposing his name will only cause him additional emotional stress that appears both unnecessary and gratuitous.

Beyond the personal consideration, the exposure of the officer’s name would also be harmful on a national security level as his exposure would result in a loss to our efforts in the counterintelligence area.  The employee is one of the Agency’s experts in counterintelligence, including initiatives to thwart the activities of foreign intelligence organizations in the United States. 

His cover status, that is, remaining unidentified to potential adversaries, is key to his continued effectiveness and travel overseas.

Mr. Wise’s book will not suffer if the officer’s true name is not used.  His name has not yet appeared in the press even though many other journalists know it.  They have agreed not to use it based on their understanding that the story can be told without it, without damaging national security or this man personally.  This officer’s attorney recently wrote to Mr. Wise asking for a meeting with your staff to discuss this issue.  Mr. Wise declined.  I understand that our officer even offered to be interviewed by Mr. Wise to provide additional detail on his difficult ordeal that could be used in the book.  His only condition was that his true name be withheld.  That offer too was declined.

I request that the employee’s true name not be published in the book.  To reveal his name is unnecessary and will simply add further harm to an employee who has already endured more than many of us ever will.

Sincerely,


George J. Tenet
Director of Central Intelligence