By CHRISTOPHER MANION
Robert Hanssen, one of the most destructive American spies since Alger Hiss, died this week.
For over twenty years, Hanssen, an agent with the FBI specializing in counter-espionage, provided the Soviets with information that was so highly classified that the Justice Department called his betrayal “possibly the worst intelligence disaster in U.S. history.”
Hanssen’s Soviet handlers would pay him cash in U.S. currency. They gave him packages of $100 bills in exchange for secrets that led to several deaths of American intelligence sources, not to mention the collapse of highly sophisticated and costly American intelligence operations.
The FBI had known for years that there was a mole in the counterterrorism since Aldrich Ames, a CIA employee who spied for the Soviets, was arrested in 1994. Both arrests involved years of work by dozens of investigators taken off other vital operations, compounding the untold damage done by the traitors.
On February 18, 2001, seven years after Ames was taken into custody, Hanssen was arrested. He had finally been caught after leaving a package of highly-classified documents for his Soviet contact at a “dead drop” in Foxstone Park in northern Virginia.
Five months later, he pled guilty to fifteen counts of espionage. In May 2002, he was sentenced to life in prison without parole, and sent to the federal “supermax” security prison in Florence, Colo., where Unabomber Ted Kaczynski and other notorious criminals were housed.
“The system” doesn’t like spies, and prison rules were strict: Hanssen was in solitary confinement 23 hours a day. He was to be addressed only as “the prisoner.” The only time he ever heard his name spoken was in visits with his wife.
The Hanssen family is Catholic, a fact which most secular accounts of his death mention, some briefly and some at length. While interesting in themselves, those details are ancillary to one that didn’t appear at all.
Not one of the major media accounts of Hanssen’s death mentions a Catholic who played a vital role in the investigation that led to his capture. So I will.
His name is Brian Kelley.
The Wake-Up Call
But first a sidebar.
I am a member of a group so small that we do not have a formal name. We do, however, share a common experience: We have all been falsely accused of a serious crime. In every case, the accusations against us were covered widely in the media, and in every case the media reported that we were guilty, because their anonymous “reliable sources” said we were.
Some of us lost our jobs, some didn’t. Some went to trial, some didn’t. Some lives changed profoundly, some. . . .
Well, one reflection, all of our lives changed. But not all of them changed for the better.
Brian Kelley’s life changed for the worse.
After Hanssen had been selling out for years, the foul fruits were there — sources disappeared and killed, secrets mysteriously revealed — but the CIA and FBI couldn’t find the right tree. So they went after the wrong one.
Brian Kelley was a senior counterintelligence agent who had spent twenty years in the Air Force and twenty more with the CIA before the FBI showed up at his CIA office, called him a traitor, and took him into custody in August 1999.
Why they got the wrong guy isn’t the story here — that’s the CIA’s problem, the FBI’s problem. It’s tough catching a spy, and countless thrillers tell the tale in countless ways.
But the consequences for Kelley weren’t exactly thrilling. In fact, they were depressing. And they profoundly challenged his faith – every single day.
For two years he was confined to his home, forced to wear an ankle bracelet around the clock. He couldn’t leave — he had to be able to answer the phone within five rings.
The world thought he was guilty. His family was shattered, his life turned upside down. And friends? How do you spell that word? Never heard of it.
Kelley was subjected to constant interrogation, all of it designed to “break” him so he’d admit that he was, in fact, the spy they had successfully tracked down. The pressure was intense, intentionally, which made it worse, since these same men came from a uniquely close-knit profession. They had been his trusted, and trusting, colleagues for years.
And then came the phone call in the middle of the night.
“Hello?”
“Dad?”
“Yes.”
Pause.
“Thank God.”
“What do you mean, son?”
“They’ve caught him.”
His son had seen the news. The spy had been arrested — and Dad was not in jail. He was in bed, asleep, at home.
His ordeal was over.
Well, that part of it was over. But there was more to come.
Brian Kelley had been placed on paid leave during the investigation of “his” case. When Hanssen’s arrest cleared him of all suspicion, he went back to work at the CIA. But things had changed. Career “advancement”? No way. Friends? Well, how do you repair two years of being everybody’s most detested traitor?
And then there was Hanssen. Kelley told me that Hanssen had used his insidious skills to finger him as the spy. So many agents were tied up trying to nail Kelley that the highly trusted Hanssen was freed up to be even more audacious in conducting espionage for the Soviets.
The case broke when a Soviet defector was brought to the U.S. He was offered protection and paid big-time to give the FBI a tape recording of the unidentified spy’s conversation with his Soviet handler.
This kind of information is so delicate that it was tightly “compartmentalized”: no one outside the small investigative team — not even Hanssen — knew about it.
Investigators played the tape and waited to hear Kelley’s side of the conversation.
But the spy’s voice wasn’t Kelley’s. It was Hanssen’s.
The team had their man and waited for a “drop.” When Hanssen was arrested, the money bag was in his hand.
Forgive? What’s That?
When Raymond Donovan, Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of Labor, was acquitted on fraud and grand larceny charges in 1987, he asked, “Which office do I go to get my reputation back?”
Well, not to The New York Times. When Donovan died a year ago this week, The New York Times, which had hounded Donavan throughout his ordeal, couldn’t let it go: “Labor Secretary Quit Under a Cloud,” read the bitter headline on his obit.
In 1987, The Washington Post Ombudsman justified the elite media’s arrogance: “When you were accused, it was news but it wasn’t true. Now you’re cleared — that’s true, but it isn’t news.”
Brian Kelley died in 2015. When he retired from the CIA in 2007, he was awarded the Distinguished Career Intelligence Medal. And things finally got better. He taught counter-intelligence courses at the CIA and the Institute of World Politics.
Did his students know about his ordeal? Maybe. Could they understand what he’d been through?
Some folks must have. At his funeral, the line went all the way around the church.
Could he forgive Hanssen?
From a distance, it’s easy to recommend forgiveness. But every time we say the “Our Father,” we are reminded to “Forgive those who trespass against us” so constantly because forgiveness isn’t easy at all.
Especially when it’s close up and personal.
In prison ministry, the question arises: “Don’t they have to say they’re sorry first?”
Well, the way I see it, we don’t wait. We can’t.
The world is roiled in a chaos of calumny. One by one, the liars are going to have to repent — or be damned sorry that they haven’t.
“For nothing is secret, that shall not be made manifest; neither any thing hid, that shall not be known and come abroad” (Luke 8:17).
Jesus doesn’t wait. Why should we?
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