Wrongly Accused

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

Targeted by the CIA: An Intelligence Professional Speaks Out on the Scandal That Turned the CIA Upside Down by Peter Karlow. Karlow was a highly decorated OSS and CIA officer who was wrongly accused of being a mole by James Angleton. Karlow was later cleared with the help of the late CIA officer Cleve Cram (a CI Centre professor) and CIA Director Bill Casey.

Molehunt: The Secret Search for Traitors That Shattered the CIA, by David Wise

book review

Of Moles and Molehunters by Cleve Cram

CI Centre Hanssen Movie website

CBS Hanssen Movie website

A Story Like This Should Never Be Forgotten

“The corrosive effects of the FBI's wrongful and indiscriminate accusations are incalculable and pervasive.....The investigation has been emotionally devastating to both him and his family......To cause my client to live one more day than necessary as the suspect in the nation's most damaging espionage case was reprehensible. But to delay longer still the exoneration to which he is manifestly entitled is unforgivable......This experience 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. Under the circumstances, our request is at the very low end of what fairness and decency require.”

John Moustakas, the lawyer for the CIA officer wrongly accused of espionage, in a letter to then-FBI Director Louis Freeh requesting a formal apology of the conduct of the investigation

'Your Father Is a Spy'

Lives of CIA Man, Family Turned Into Turmoil as FBI Pursued Wrong Guy

By Dan Eggen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, August 19, 2001; Page A01

The 28-year-old CIA personnel employee was escorted into a cramped, windowless room with a small table and four metal chairs. "Please sit down," a waiting FBI agent told her. "We have some bad news for you."

"Your father is a spy," the agent told the woman. "He's working for the Russians."

In another building on the CIA campus in Langley, in another small and windowless room, her father -- a decorated agency veteran of nearly 20 years -- was being accused of espionage.

Thus began one family's ordeal at the hands of the FBI, which fingered the wrong man in its quest to unmask a spy, upending the lives of the CIA officer and his three children for the next two years.

The accusations leveled in August 1999 prompted the CIA to suspend the officer for 21 months. He remained under surveillance, and his daughter was denied a promotion. His ex-wife, two sons and two sisters were interrogated at work and at home by FBI agents who cast doubt on the man they thought they knew. Friends and colleagues whispered about the traitor in their midst.

All of it turned out to be wrong. The real spy was Robert P. Hanssen, an FBI counterintelligence agent who pleaded guilty last month to 15 counts of espionage. The CIA officer returned to work in May with all his security clearances restored. "There are no lingering doubts or suspicions here," a CIA official said.

FBI officials say that while they regret the impact on the intelligence officer and his family, the bureau's rough tactics were justified by the magnitude of the national security breach. The FBI partly blames a startling coincidence: Both the man and Hanssen lived on the same street near Nottoway Park in Fairfax County, where Hanssen left some of the secrets he compromised to the Russians.

But the CIA officer's sons and daughter said in interviews with The Washington Post last week that they are still haunted by the actions of the FBI, which left their family in limbo for two years and has rebuffed their request for a full apology. Because The Post does not identify covert U.S. intelligence operatives except in rare circumstances, the names of the man and his family have been withheld from this article.

His children wonder what would have happened if the FBI had not obtained a KGB dossier that pointed to Hanssen. The daughter says she still has nightmares about the investigation. The sons are suspicious of a government they once revered.

"We were raised to be patriotic, to love our country and respect authority," said the youngest son, 32, who co-owns a copy-machine business in Virginia. "I'm still patriotic today, but I don't feel the same way about a lot of things -- about the FBI, about people in power. They're not always telling the truth like they say they are."

'We Know What He Did'

The CIA officer's youngest child loved and revered her father. She followed in his footsteps by joining the agency, thrilled by its clandestine side and comforted by its familial culture. When the FBI accused her father of treason, her world was set on end.

Trapped in the stifling room, she began to weep uncontrollably. She stood up and turned away from the two FBI agents and the CIA representative who were there, facing the wall as the sobs came in waves. "I was hysterical," recalls the woman, now 30. "I was ashamed."

When she resumed her seat, an older male agent began the interrogation while a younger female took notes. The agent showed the daughter one of her father's jogging maps, alleging it pinpointed the location of "dead drops," hiding places for passing secrets to Russian operatives. He said her father -- who clips coupons and drives to Woodbridge for less expensive gasoline -- had a fascination with diamonds and other luxuries. He said that the man who typed with two fingers on his outdated Tandy PC was a mastermind of computer codes.

Her denials only angered him. "Come on!" the agent screamed, pounding the table repeatedly. "We know what he did!"

The story was similar from Virginia to Connecticut, from New York to Kentucky. FBI agents fanned out in pairs on Aug. 18, 1999, descending on scattered members of the family wherever they could be found.

The message was always the same: Your beloved relative, awarded five commemorative medals for his work on behalf of the United States, is really a Russian spy. We have all the proof we need, and only need to confirm a few basic facts.

In Connecticut, two agents warned one of the officer's sisters that, if she didn't cooperate, the FBI would go to a nursing home to interrogate her infirm mother, 84.

In Kentucky the next morning, two agents caught up with the officer's youngest son at his office. He had just returned to work after the birth of his second child.

They accused the son of holding property he did not really own, and of using a Social Security number that was not his. They asked about his father's alleged financial extravagance, and showed him a map he did not understand. The agents said it came from his father's den, and that it reflected a secret life of espionage.

After more than an hour, the son stumbled out of the interrogation, past whispering co-workers and into the drizzle outside.

"I felt like I didn't want to be alive," recalls the man, who has since moved back to Northern Virginia. "You believe your father and all that. But when they come in like that and say they have it all locked up, it's hard not to wonder: Could it be true?"

By the end of the second day, Aug. 19, the FBI had tracked down the last of the CIA officer's direct relatives. His oldest son was in Manhattan on business, and was about to catch a flight back to Washington when his phone rang. Three FBI agents insisted on giving him a ride to LaGuardia Airport, quizzing him while trapped in rush hour traffic.

He called his father the minute he got home that night, and drove over to his Vienna house, which happens to be on the same street as Hanssen's. His father met him in the driveway.

"I just want to make sure you believe me," the father said.

"You never have to worry about that," the son replied, and they hugged.

'Wrong Conclusions'

The investigation that eventually netted Hanssen was not the first time that the FBI, or any other intelligence agency, has been so terribly wrong.

Just last week, the Justice Department released portions of a report on the investigation of Los Alamos nuclear scientist Wen Ho Lee. It concluded that the FBI and the Energy Department may have gotten the wrong man, and for a crime that might not even have been committed in the first place. Meanwhile, a fugitive abortion clinic bomber is now the suspect in the Atlanta Olympics bombing case, first pinned on security guard Richard Jewell.

Yet many intelligence experts are particularly discomfited by the emerging details of the case against the CIA officer, which sources said was based largely on the man's circumstantial connections to several cases that later turned out to have been compromised by Hanssen.

One of these was the investigation of Felix Bloch, a State Department official suspected of, but never charged with, spying. The CIA officer was awarded a medal for his role in unmasking a Soviet agent who had telephoned Bloch and thus cast Bloch under suspicion. But Bloch was soon warned by the KGB, derailing a planned arrest.

The interrogations also indicate that the FBI placed a great deal of stock in the mysterious map recovered from the officer's home, which turned out to be the jottings of an avid distance runner with meticulous record-keeping habits. He also keeps a list of radio stations he tunes in during trips to Connecticut, and maps out all journeys before departing, his family says.

The man jogged in Nottoway Park near his home, an area that the FBI learned had been used for exchanges with Russian agents. In hindsight, there are other connections between the CIA officer and Hanssen -- besides living near each other, they were companions on an intelligence-related trip, for example -- but those connections were coincidences learned after the probe shifted to Hanssen, sources said.

"There are a whole litany of examples throughout the western world of counterintelligence services jumping to the wrong conclusions," said David Major, a former FBI counterintelligence official. "This phenomenon of putting people on lists and investigating them goes with the territory. But if you can't prove it, you have a responsibility not to go too far in your tactics."

The tactics used against the CIA officer were many and varied. Before the FBI confronted him as a suspect, for example, the man was subjected to a polygraph test under false pretenses, which he passed, according to his attorney, John Moustakas of Shea & Gardner. Later, a person posing as a Russian emissary was sent to his house to say that his espionage had been detected and to offer an escape plan; the CIA officer reported the incident the next day, the lawyer said.

The FBI also engaged in secret searches of the man's garbage and of his home, which turned up the alleged spy map. He was put under physical and electronic surveillance. His family says they had chronic telephone problems during that period, and a Bell Atlantic technician discovered a bug on the line at his Vienna home.

FBI officials did not respond to three telephone calls seeking comment for this article. But in a June letter to the man's attorney, Acting FBI Director Thomas J. Pickard said that while he regretted the investigation's impact on the officer and his family, "I do not doubt the necessity of the investigation, nor the integrity of the personnel who carried it out."

Moustakas compared that response to the form letter that an airline would send a passenger whose flight was delayed. "My client was not merely inconvenienced," Moustakas wrote Pickard. "His life was turned upside down."

The FBI had no other contact with the officer or his family after he was placed on paid administrative leave in August 1999, according to his relatives and Moustakas. For 18 months, the family said, they were left hanging, wondering when a knock would come on the officer's door or if his name would suddenly flash on television.

"What hurts most is having to keep it all inside," said the officer's eldest son, 36, who is married and has a young daughter. "You can't tell anyone what you're going through."

Six months ago, on Feb. 18, a friend of the oldest son asked if he had seen the news: The FBI had arrested a spy. The son caught his breath. "What was the name?" he asked. His friend couldn't recall.

The son picked up the phone to dial his father, fearing that he wouldn't be there because he was in jail. His father answered. Dad wasn't a spy after all.

August 11, 2001

The Wronged Man: C.I.A. Officer Mistaken for Spy Down the Street

By JAMES RISEN and DAVID JOHNSTON, New York Times

WASHINGTON, Aug. 10 — Three months ago, the Central Intelligence Agency quietly reinstated a senior counterintelligence officer who had spent 18 months under investigation as a suspected Russian spy. There was no ceremony, no fanfare, no formal apology as he returned from professional exile. But in effect, the C.I.A was saying there had been a terrible mistake.

For the C.I.A. officer, whose job is so highly classified that even his name is secret, the aftershocks of his ordeal continue to be felt as he tries to resume a life free of suspicion. He requested that his name not be used in this article because he has been advised that he could lose his covert status if he is identified.

For a year and a half, he had lived under the shadow of suspected disloyalty as he was the target of an intensive investigation by the F.B.I. Then, on Feb. 18, the F.B.I. arrested one of its own: Robert P. Hanssen, a veteran F.B.I. agent and counter- intelligence expert, unmasking him as one of Moscow's most significant cold war spies. Law enforcement and intelligence officials now say that it was Mr. Hanssen, not the C.I.A. officer, who was the mole they had been hunting.

The C.I.A. officer was the wrong man, a victim of what officials describe as an extraordinary mistake. A freakish web of coincidences had led the investigators to think that the C.I.A. employee was a spy. Among other things, he lived down the street from Mr. Hanssen, jogged in the same park, was about the same age, and had even traveled with Mr. Hanssen.

Investigators now acknowledge that they wrongly suspected him.

Mr. Hanssen pleaded guilty to espionage last month and is being interrogated by the F.B.I.

Law enforcement officials say they believe that Mr. Hanssen knew, before his arrest, that the C.I.A. officer was under scrutiny. Knowing that the spotlight was focused elsewhere, the real spy felt less vulnerable to detection, the officials said.

Now, more than five months after Mr. Hanssen's arrest, the C.I.A. officer still regards his treatment by the F.B.I. as unfair. While the C.I.A. has brought him back from a paid leave to working full time, and, he feels, has treated him with some dignity, the F.B.I. has not officially cleared him or apologized.

The F.B.I. used covert surveillance, electronic eavesdropping, trash searches, lie detector tests administered under false pretenses, break-ins, interviews with his former wife and adult children, even sting operations set up by his colleagues, according to law enforcement and intelligence officials.

"The corrosive effects of the F.B.I.'s wrongful and indiscriminate accusations are incalculable and pervasive," said John Moustakas, a lawyer for the C.I.A. officer.

The investigation, Mr. Moustakas added, has been "emotionally devastating to both him and his family."

Today, an F.B.I. spokesman said the bureau had privately expressed regret over the investigation of the C.I.A. officer.

"We've acknowledged and expressed regret over the impact of the investigation of this person directly to his attorney," the spokesman said. "We continue to be in discussions with his attorney to resolve remaining concerns."

Mr. Moustakas said the officer had been cautioned by C.I.A. lawyers that if he were publicly named, he would risk losing his classified status as an employee working under cover. C.I.A. officials would not discuss the matter.

The intelligence officer authorized Mr. Moustakas, a partner in the Washington law firm of Shea & Gardner and a former federal prosecutor, to speak on his behalf to The New York Times. And the officer agreed to let a former associate and members of his family discuss the case.

F.B.I. officials said that although they were sympathetic to the C.I.A. officer and convinced of his innocence, they had a legitimate basis to investigate him based on available information and used legally accepted techniques. They said that they had been careful not to name him publicly, even though the investigation became well known within the C.I.A.'s closed world of intelligence.

"Everybody who knew about the investigation at the F.B.I. and the C.I.A. was convinced that he was the most logical suspect," said a senior law enforcement official. He added that he was convinced of the officer's guilt until late last year, when he first read secret Russian documents that unexpectedly shifted the focus of the investigation to Mr. Hanssen.

F.B.I. officials have been criticized for failing to suspect that the spy might be within the bureau's own ranks. Instead, they focused their attention on the C.I.A., even though it later turned out that Mr. Hanssen, one of their own counterintelligence experts, fit the profile of the elusive mole even more closely than the C.I.A. officer did.

The personal and professional resemblances between the C.I.A. officer and Mr. Hanssen are striking.

The C.I.A. officer lived on the street in suburban Vienna, Va., where Mr. Hanssen had lived during his early days as a Russian spy. The C.I.A. officer jogged in the same park that Mr. Hanssen often used to drop off materials for the K.G.B., leaving plastic garbage bags filled with secret documents under a footbridge in Nottoway Park.

The C.I.A. officer was about the same age as Mr. Hanssen, who is 57, and took at least one business trip with Mr. Hanssen on counterintelligence matters. The C.I.A. officer had once attended the same Latin Mass at the same Roman Catholic Church in Northern Virginia that Mr. Hanssen and his family attended.

And, like Mr. Hanssen, he was a career counterintelligence expert who had rare access to many of the same highly secret operations that the authorities have now accused Mr. Hanssen of betraying. One of those was the 1989 investigation of Felix Bloch, a State Department official who the F.B.I. believes was able to thwart their inquiry after he was tipped off by the K.G.B. that he was under suspicion. The F.B.I. believed that the mole they were hunting for was the person who had warned the K.G.B. about the Bloch investigation.

While under surveillance, the C.I.A. officer went to shopping malls and stores that were visited at the same time by Russian intelligence agents, whose movements are routinely monitored by the F.B.I.

In the upside-down world of counterintelligence investigations, innocent habits became incriminating actions, leaving the suspect no escape from his nightmare.

At one point, he kept a map of Nottoway Park, marking his jogging times from point to point. Investigators who found it during a surreptitious search of his house saw it as proof of his betrayal.

On Aug. 18, 1999, he was summoned to a cramped conference room at C.I.A. headquarters, where two F.B.I. agents shoved in front of him a copy of his old jogging map, stamped "Secret" by the F.B.I.

The map, the agents told him, was solid evidence that he was the Russian mole. The "X" marks and time notations were seen as telltale signs of where and at what time he had dropped off classified information. They called it a "spy map" and demanded that he confess. "How do you explain this?" one shouted.

"Where did you get my jogging map?" he asked in return.

In the four-hour F.B.I. interrogation, the C.I.A. officer offered to answer all questions without a lawyer, and to take a lie detector test. But his lawyer says the F.B.I. declined to take him up on the offer. He was escorted out of C.I.A. headquarters, stripped of his security badge and put on administrative leave.

The C.I.A. officer was a veteran of the shadow world. After serving as an Air Force intelligence officer, he joined the Central Intelligence Agency in 1982, where he spent most of his career hunting Soviet spies.

He played an important role in identifying a deep-cover Soviet agent named Reino Gikman. Agents monitoring Mr. Gikman's phone calls traced a call from his house in Austria to Mr. Bloch's home in Washington. That call led to the government's 1989 investigation of Mr. Bloch.

But soon after the F.B.I. started investigating Mr. Bloch, he was warned by the K.G.B. With their investigation compromised, the F.B.I. was unable to arrest Mr. Bloch, who was eventually forced out of the State Department but was never charged with a crime.

The mystery of how the Soviets knew of the Bloch investigation haunted American officials for years afterward. When Aldrich H. Ames, another C.I.A. officer, was charged in 1994 with spying for Moscow, officials concluded that he could not have known about the Bloch case. They surmised that Mr. Ames was not Moscow's only mole.

The C.I.A. officer was rewarded for his work investigating Mr. Bloch, a former senior C.I.A. official said. But the C.I.A. officer's knowledge of the case later added to the suspicion that he was working for Moscow.

By the late 1990's, the United States received tips from Russian agents about somebody who had been spying for Moscow for years, and who had disclosed the Bloch investigation, among other things. The spy was said to have taken diamonds in partial payment, and to have used Nottoway Park to do business with the K.G.B. He was believed to be at the C.I.A.

To begin their search for a spy, F.B.I. and C.I.A. experts used a standard investigative approach: a "matrix," or database, matching clues about possible espionage against the profiles of American officers who had access to the material that was being purloined.

As they received more information, the investigators fed the tips into the matrix and narrowed the list of potential suspects. By 1998, they had narrowed the search down from more than 100 people to one prime suspect: the C.I.A. officer.

In an apparent effort to expose him, he was asked to join a supposedly sensitive joint operation involving a Russian agent who was about to come to the West, and who could solve the riddle of who sabotaged the Bloch case. But he was told that to join the team, he had to take a lie detector test. When he agreed, the investigators subtly probed his reaction to the possibility that the government would soon learn who compromised the Bloch investigation. He was told that he passed the test. But then he was told that the Russian defector was not arriving after all, and that he was no longer needed in the investigation.

In retrospect, the C.I.A. officer and his lawyer suspect that the operation was a ruse. Law enforcement officials would not discuss the matter.

Then in November 1998, a stranger appeared at the C.I.A. officer's home. Saying in an accent that the authorities were now aware of his espionage, the stranger handed him a written "escape plan." The man told him to be at a nearby subway station the next evening, and then quickly walked away. The next morning, the C.I.A. officer went to work and told the F.B.I. about the incident, describing the stranger for an artist to sketch. Law enforcement officials declined to comment on whether the incident was a sting operation.

By the spring of 2000, investigators had a lengthy classified report on the case, detailing the circumstantial evidence against the C.I.A. officer. It seemed tantalizingly close to proof, but contained no direct evidence that he had done anything wrong. F.B.I. officials now say that their agency, despite the confrontational tactics, was never close to arresting him.

Counterespionage officials began one more effort to recruit a source inside Russia who could finally identify the mole. That operation netted an unexpected return: a cache of documents from Russian intelligence files that law enforcement officials first thought would clinch the case against the C.I.A. officer.

Instead, the documents upended their thinking. The papers provided a detailed description of how Mr. Hanssen was recruited and how he operated. One law enforcement official remarked: "Was I surprised it was Hanssen" and not the C.I.A. officer? "I was stunned."

FBI Refuses to Apologize to Cleared CIA Officer
By Dan Eggen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, August 12, 2001; Page A02

In the nearly six months since the arrest of FBI spy Robert P. Hanssen, the bureau has refused requests for a formal apology from a CIA officer who was wrongly targeted as a suspect for Hanssen's crimes, according to documents, government officials and the man's attorney.

The officer, whose identity is secret because of his highly classified status, has been cleared and reinstated after being suspended two years ago from his CIA job. But the man has not yet received a formal apology or a letter of exoneration that he has requested from the FBI, his attorney said yesterday.

FBI officials, while acknowledging that the man was wrongly identified as a suspected spy, are proceeding cautiously out of the fear that a full-fledged apology could be used against them in court, sources said.

The case is the latest allegation of overzealous investigation by the FBI, which has faced condemnations and lawsuits over its treatment of security guard Richard Jewell in the Atlanta Olympics bombing in 1996 and its prosecution of former Los Alamos nuclear scientist Wen Ho Lee.

In all three cases, the bureau is accused of pursuing one suspect despite evidence that should have led to others, and then being reluctant to admit making a mistake.

"To cause my client to live one more day than necessary as the suspect in the nation's most damaging espionage case was reprehensible," said John Moustakas of Shea & Gardner in Washington, the CIA officer's attorney. "But to delay longer still the exoneration to which he is manifestly entitled is unforgivable."

The 19-year CIA veteran was informed that he was suspected of spying for Russia in August 1999, when agents interrogated him and family members and threatened him with arrest, according to Moustakas. Investigators also allegedly threatened to confront the man's 84-year-old mother, who was in frail health and living in a nursing home.

The man was suspended with pay from the CIA for 21 months and subjected to secret searches of his home and computers, taps on his telephone and physical surveillance of his comings and goings, according to a letter from Moustakas to the FBI.

Moustakas said yesterday that his client now believes he was targeted as a suspect by the FBI as early as 1997, when he was transferred to a job considered unchallenging for an officer of his expertise. The man continued to be treated as a suspect despite passing several polygraph examinations given to him by the CIA and the FBI over the next several years, according to his attorney and government officials.

Much of the government's suspicion was based on a map seized during a secret search of the man's home, which investigators took to be a depiction of drop-off points for Russian agents, officials said. Instead, his attorney and officials say, the officer was an avid distance runner who had merely penned a map outlining his jogging routes and times in Fairfax County's Nottoway Park.

"This experience 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," Moustakas wrote on June 1 to then-FBI Director Louis J. Freeh. "Under the circumstances, our request is at the very low end of what fairness and decency require."

But Freeh's deputy, Thomas J. Pickard, defended the FBI's investigation of the CIA officer in a June 14 response, writing that "all leads were followed to their logical conclusion."

"I acknowledge and regret the impact of this investigation on the life of your client . . . and his family," wrote Pickard, who is now the FBI's acting director. "In view of the pending prosecution of Robert P. Hanssen, the FBI is not in a position to discuss this matter at the present time. However, it is anticipated that at the conclusion of this matter, the FBI will be willing to personally address any concerns."

The FBI is continuing negotiations with Moustakas in hopes of reaching an accord, an FBI official said yesterday.

The FBI's early focus on the CIA officer was first reported by The Washington Post on Feb. 23, five days after Hanssen's arrest. The New York Times reported further details on the case yesterday, including the FBI's refusal to apologize.

Hanssen, 57, pleaded guilty last month to 15 counts of espionage as part of an agreement with federal prosecutors. He will be sentenced to life in prison, rather than the death penalty, in exchange for giving the government a full account of the material he turned over to the Soviet KGB and its Russian successor, the SVR, while working as a top counterintelligence agent at the FBI.

In hindsight, officials said, Hanssen and the CIA officer shared a striking number of similarities: Both lived on the same street in Vienna, jogged in the same park and accompanied each other on at least one counterintelligence trip.

But the CIA officer was initially singled out because he had contact with much of the classified information that had been compromised. However, the FBI concentrated its search at the CIA, where spy Aldrich H. Ames had worked, rather than at the bureau, where Hanssen spied undetected for two decades.

By 1998, officials said, the CIA officer was the lone suspect in their hunt. The man was asked to take an FBI polygraph that year, ostensibly to take part in an ongoing intelligence operation; he passed the test, Moustakas said.

Nonetheless, in August 1999, the CIA officer was called to a meeting at CIA headquarters that turned into an interrogation for hours by two FBI agents, according to Moustakas's letter. The agents declined his offer to take another polygraph, and he was stripped of his credentials and escorted out of the building, the letter said.

Since then, Moustakas wrote, the man and his family "were made to endure an agonizing silence," without any word of the status of his case.

The focus of the FBI's probe did not shift until late last year when investigators obtained documents pointing toward Hanssen. Finally on Feb. 19 -- the day after Hanssen's arrest -- the CIA officer was contacted by the FBI and asked to take another polygraph, which he passed.

Wrongly Suspected Agent Back at Work

The Associated Press
Saturday, Aug. 11, 2001; 3:34 p.m. EDT

WASHINGTON –– A CIA officer whom the FBI wrongly suspected of espionage has returned to work, the CIA confirmed Friday.

The officer, who conducts undercover work and therefore was not identified, was investigated by the FBI during the probe that eventually led to Russian spy Robert Hanssen.

The CIA veteran spent 18 months on paid leave during the investigation, although he had passed a series of polygraph tests and some officials believed the evidence against him was marginal.

He started back at work about three months ago.

"As far as we're concerned, he's a productive part of the work force," CIA spokesman Bill Harlow said.

The heat went off the officer when FBI investigators discovered the mole in their own back yard: On Feb. 18, the FBI arrested veteran counterintelligence officer Hanssen on espionage charges. Hanssen has confessed to spying for Moscow for 15 years and is being interrogated by the FBI, which has been heavily criticized for failing to find him sooner. He is due to be sentenced in January.

The CIA officer described his ordeal to The New York Times. The newspaper reported Saturday that the man once lived down the street from Hanssen, was about the same age and even jogged in the park where Hanssen would leave materials for the KGB to recover.

Both the officer and Hanssen had knowledge of the same cases, including an investigation of a former State Department official who was suspected of spying for the Soviet Union. Counterintelligence agents believe the man was tipped off by the KGB that he was under suspicion, leading investigators to believe they had a mole in their midst, the Times reported.

In 1999, after counterintelligence agents interrogated the CIA officer, he lost his access to CIA headquarters and was put on paid leave.

Hanssen was eventually identified by documents obtained from a source in Russia.

The Wrong Man

In The Most Damaging Spy Case Ever, The FBI Had One Suspect And One Alone

By Liz Halloran, Hartford Courant
December 8 2002

WASHINGTON -- Brian Kelley says he felt like the Harrison Ford character in "The Fugitive" - an innocent man desperately eluding a single-minded lawman played by Tommy Lee Jones.

His life had become a surreal reflection of one of the movie's pivotal scenes, when the ruthless hunter confronts the hunted.

"In the movie, Harrison Ford says, `But I didn't kill my wife,'" Kelley said. "And Tommy Lee Jones replies: `I don't care.'"

The FBI had become Kelley's zealous hunter, hellbent on proving he was spying for the Russians and had been betraying his country for years.

They had the facts, they told him: Diamonds and strip clubs. Trips to Panama and New York. Visits to parks. Access to the right information at the right time.

In other words, Kelley, a CIA agent who'd long been trusted with some of the government's most sensitive tasks, fit the FBI's "matrix."

He was, they said, the most damaging mole the U.S. intelligence community had ever pursued, a traitor code named "Gray Deceiver" who caused the executions of informants abroad and put into the hands of the Russians highly sensitive information about American military capability and security.

Kelley, who grew up in Waterbury and attended St. Michael's College in Vermont, served in the Air Force for 20 years and worked in its office of investigations before signing up with the CIA in 1982. Until that summer day 3½ years ago when he was accused of spying and escorted out of the CIA's George Bush Center for Intelligence, his career in the dangerous, secret world had been filled with accomplishment.

One of his greatest triumphs was discovering a deep undercover Russian spy, known as an "illegal," who was the KGB's contact with American diplomat and notorious suspected traitor Felix Bloch.

"He was working on some of the agency's most difficult cases," said Kathleen Hunt, Kelley's friend and a former CIA agent.

The FBI suspected that Kelley actually tipped off Bloch, the very man he was investigating. To prove their espionage case, agents secretly searched Kelley's Vienna, Va., home. They tapped his phone and tried to trap him into confessing. They said a park map found in his home was marked with places where he would leave secret documents for the KGB.

After the FBI laid out its accusations to Kelley's superiors at the CIA, he was put on paid leave, suspected of espionage - a crime punishable by death.

His two sisters, schoolteachers in Waterbury, were confronted and interrogated by the FBI, as were his three adult children, his friends and his colleagues. His daughter, who followed in Kelley's footsteps and was working at the CIA, was taken into an interview room and told her father was a spy.

Agents even threatened to go to the Connecticut nursing home where Kelley's ailing, 84-year-old mother was living and tell her that her only son was a traitor.

"It was so far over the top," said Kelley, who is in his late 50s.

It would be nearly two years before the FBI announced the arrest of the real spy of the century. And his name wasn't Brian Kelley.

"This investigation is a mirror of the dysfunctionality in the FBI. It highlights their ineptitude," Kelley, speaking out for the first time publicly about his ordeal, said in a telephone interview with The Courant.

"They had gotten it so wrong, for so long. They drove at me to the exclusion of all others. Some of the people there got medals for this investigation, for God's sake."

'Maybe I'm Wrong'

Kathleen Hunt, a Wethersfield native and Kelley's friend at the agency, didn't think it out of the ordinary when a CIA officer called on a March morning in 1999 and asked her to report to headquarters for a meeting.

An 18-year veteran of the CIA, Hunt figured she was heading into a routine briefing about a counter-intelligence case she had worked on, or maybe an undercover operation she helped plan.

Instead, she was buzzed into the headquarters' inner sanctum and led to a small, windowless interview room where two female FBI agents waited. The door closed behind her.

Immediately, they accused Brian Kelley of being a spy and began to pepper Hunt with questions.

She burst into tears. It couldn't be true, she thought - not Brian, her friend who shared her Connecticut roots, pride in their Irish heritage and devotion to Catholicism.

The agents were stoic and condescending. Did Kelley ever visit New York City, they asked. Did he talk to you about diamonds? Did he ever take you to a strip club? Did he ever ask you what cases you were working on? Did Kelley, who was long divorced, use women at the agency to get information?

No, Hunt answered again and again.

Had she placed an advertisement in the Washington Times for Kelley, they asked, something about a Dodge Diplomat? An ad that was a secret signal to his KGB contact?

No, she answered.

She had placed an ad for Kelley when she worked briefly with him on the Felix Bloch case years ago, she told them, but it was in the Washington Post. And the ad wasn't for a car; it was a personal ad intended to entice Bloch into re-contacting a KGB source, part of a CIA plan to entrap the American diplomat.

Back and forth they went, the agents insisting Hunt had placed a car ad in the Times, Hunt countering that it was a personal ad in the Post. Under the barrage of questions, even the seasoned CIA agent was worn down.

"I finally said `maybe I'm wrong,'" Hunt, 43, said during a recent interview. "When someone badgers you, it wears you down. I was at a point where I didn't know if my memory was faulty."

The agents continued to press. They wanted to find a reason Kelley was spying. Tell us, they told Hunt, about the most traumatic event in Kelley's life.

Over and over, Hunt said that she didn't know, that it would be presumptuous of her to answer. The agents told Hunt she was being uncooperative.

Hunt finally answered with what she characterized as a guess: Kelley had told her that when he was a boy his father died, and that he had felt a new responsibility as the man in the family.

Four hours later, Hunt signed a secrecy agreement and left the room. She was prevented from talking about what had just happened with anyone - especially Brian Kelley.

Hunt would be subjected to the same questions once more that month at CIA headquarters, and again five months later when two FBI agents approached her outside a suburban commercial mail center she had just left.

This time, however, Hunt was done talking. Over sodas at the nearby Three Pigs barbecue restaurant, she told the FBI agents they were wrong about Brian Kelley.

"This guy is not the man," Hunt told the agents. "What you're saying about him is so alien to me that I can't even comment on it."

The Real Spy

On Feb. 20, 2001, Hunt heard a radio announcer tease the top-of-the-hour newscast: "Vienna man arrested on espionage charges."

Stunned, Hunt swung her car off the road and into a CVS store parking lot. She had one thought: "Brian lives in Vienna."

Seconds later, the announcer was back, reading the name of the accused: "Robert Hanssen of the FBI."

Hunt clenched her fists and exhaled a joyous, "Yes," then drove home, anxious to share the news with her husband.

Kelley was equally relieved.

The following day, Hunt called Kelley to explain that she hadn't been able to tell him she'd been questioned or to offer him support over the 18 months his career - and life - were in limbo.

"Brian was clearly thrilled, and charitable," Hunt said. "He understood."

But Hunt was chilled when Kelley told her the FBI had taken her guess about the emotional trauma of his father's death and used it to build a psychological case for why he may have begun spying.

The map the FBI found in his apartment, Kelley also told her, was one he used to plot his jogging routes. And it turns out Kelley knew Hanssen - they'd worked on cases together, and had gone on a couple of work-related trips together.

Kelley said he's convinced that once the FBI began targeting him as the mole in 1999, Hanssen found out. And it was then that Hanssen, after a number of dormant years, began spying again, secure in the knowledge the FBI did not suspect him, Kelley said.

Hunt had something to tell Kelley, too: She had decided to resign from the CIA. She felt that her career had come under a cloud because of the investigation, that the FBI had clearly suspected her, too.

She now is working as a real estate agent and running a non-profit that helps persecuted Catholics worldwide.

"This experience totally changed me," she said.

'Shameful' Pursuit

About three months after Hanssen's arrest, Kelley was reinstated at the CIA and preferred to remain anonymous, he says, to be known only as the man who was wrongly targeted by the FBI. He wanted to return to his undercover job, and to deal with his concerns about the FBI privately.

His name had been kept out of news stories by reporters aware of his identity, and he was largely unknown outside the small intelligence community until the recent publication of "Spy: The Inside Story of How the FBI's Robert Hanssen Betrayed America" by David Wise.

In a chapter titled "The Wrong Man," Wise names Kelley and details how FBI agents built a circumstantial case against him while the real mole, Hanssen, operated within their midst. The real spy was revealed, Wise reports, only after the U.S. paid an informant $7 million to smuggle a secret KGB file out of Russia.

The file, which the FBI was convinced would seal their case against Kelley, contained a tape recording of Hanssen's voice as well as his fingerprint on a plastic bag used in the delivery of secret documents to the KGB.

It was the FBI's own Hanssen who had been paid in diamonds for his spying, who had frequented a strip club, who had been in the right places at the right time. And, in a strange coincidence, Hanssen left documents and collected payment from the Soviets in the same park where Kelley jogged.

The FBI had been asking the right questions; they had just settled on the wrong suspect.

Kelley and his lawyer, John Moustakas, are critical of Wise for using Kelley's name. But the Washington-based author said the story of Hanssen cannot be told without Kelley.

"I had to tell the full story of the wrong man," Wise said. "Brian Kelley is the central character of the Hanssen story. That's journalism 101.

"My position is that the pursuit of this man and what was shamefully done to him was central to the Hanssen case," said Wise, who extends his criticism to the CIA for suspending Kelley.

Wise said he and his publisher were pressured by the CIA to not use Kelley's name so the agency could avoid embarrassment. The CIA said it requested that Kelley's anonymity be preserved to protect his undercover status and prevent any further harm to him or his family.

Nevertheless, Kelley's name is clearly out. And he and Hunt have now decided to tell the story themselves to expose problems they believe exist in the FBI.

They say they are not looking for compensation, or planning any lawsuits at this time.

"We want to get the story out because we want the system fixed," Kelley said.

He believes a number of FBI agents - as many as a third of those who were familiar with the mole investigation - did not believe he should have been targeted. But others, Kelley said, "pushed everything in one direction."

Kelley was also stung when the FBI initially refused to apologize to him for his ordeal; it finally came nearly six months later, and only after the FBI director at the time, Louis Freeh, had stepped down.

The FBI declined to comment on Brian Kelley, citing his right to privacy.

What actually happened within the FBI is expected to be further illuminated within the next month or two, when the Department of Justice's inspector general will issue what is expected to be a massive and critical report on the handling of the Hanssen investigation.

Kelley's lawyer, Moustakas, is limiting his client's availability to the media until a network news program airs a segment on his experience this month. Kelley declined an in-depth interview, but spoke briefly with The Courant during several telephone conversations.

'They Were So Myopic'

Hunt, whose Connecticut relatives - most of whom still live in Wethersfield - learned what happened only after Kelley was cleared, said she'd love to say that from Day 1 she never wavered in her belief that her friend was innocent.

"Part of my torment was that I couldn't believe it," she said. "But, intellectually, I didn't think the FBI would accuse someone of a capital crime without incontrovertible evidence."

Now she can scarcely contain her anger with an agency that she and Kelley used to work closely with.

"They were so overzealous, so myopic," Hunt said. "If these kind of abuses happen to us, what chance does the average citizen have to protect their civil liberties?"

She wants the FBI agents and managers in charge of the operation fired, and more safeguards set up to avoid a similar fiasco.

Strong faith got Hunt and Kelley through the past several years, they both say, although even that part of their life wasn't without bizarre moments.

It turns out that Hunt, Robert Hanssen and Freeh, all worshipped at St. Catherine of Siena Church, a suburban Virginia parish Kelley had recommended to Hunt years before.

"I'm thinking there must've been a Sunday where I was there praying for Brian, Freeh was there praying that the investigation be solved, and Hanssen was praying he doesn't get caught," Hunt said with a laugh, adding:

"It'll all be figured out in heaven."