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Brian J. Kelley: My Friend the Spy Expert

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Brian Kelley telephoned me shortly after my book,  Confessions of a Spy: The Real Story of Aldrich Ames, was published in 1997 and invited me to lunch. At the time, he was working at the CIA and was especially interested in my trip to Moscow where I had met with the KGB (now called the SVR) and also with the relatives of Soviet General Dmitri Polyakov, one of the CIA’s most important assets until he was exposed and executed.  

Soft spoken, intelligent and personable, Kelley impressed me with his knowledge of the Ames case and his questions about Polyakov. I liked him instantly, but didn’t think much about our lunch until August 1999 when I got a telephone call from a friend who worked at the CIA.

“Brian Kelley has been accused of being a Russian spy?” he declared.

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Europe’s Biggest Thief

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Advocating for better mental health care is a top priority to me, but it’s not my only interest. I took time last week to have lunch with a friend of mine who works for a U.S. intelligence agency and our conversation quickly turned to Russia.

   I have been fascinated with the Kremlin and Moscow much of my life.  Perhaps, it started when I was a youngster living in Pueblo, Colorado when my mother began storing food items in the bathroom closet in 1962. The bathroom was the only room in our small house that didn’t have windows, which was why it was chosen as our family’s emergency bomb shelter if the Soviet Union attacked.

For those too young to remember, 1962 was when the Cuban Missile Crisis happened and at the elementary school that I attended, we did drills where we either hurried into hallways or ducked under our desks. That was supposed to help us if  bombs fell.

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A Spy Story: Ames, Blood Money and Me

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If you’ve read my book, Confessions of a Spy: The Real Story of Aldrich Ames,you already know that I was able to interview the CIA traitor, Aldrich Ames, for eleven  days without government censors listening to our conversations.    This is because federal  prosecutors had notified everyone – Ames’ defense attorneys, the FBI, the CIA, and Justice Department – that Ames was not to be interviewed by the media, except for the officials who mattered the most — the deputies in charge of the jail.

When the U.S. Attorney prosecuting the case discovered that I had slipped into the jail, he was not happy.

Ames asked me to go to Moscow and gave me a handwritten letter to show his KGB (now called SVR) handlers. He also told me his “parole,” which in spy lingo, is the secret word that only his SVR contact would know. Using that word would verify that he’d sent me.

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Of Your Books, Which Is Your Favorite?

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Which book that you’ve written is your favorite?
It’s a question I get asked a lot. 
Answering it isn’t as easy as you might think. For an author, picking a favorite book is a little like asking a father if he loves one of his children more than the others. That’s an exaggeration, of course, but when you spend several years of your life consumed in writing a book, the finished manuscript becomes much more to its creator than ink, paper, or in today’s world, electronic text.

Sergei Tretyakov, Nathan Hale, and Benedict Arnold? Is there a difference between our traitors and their’s?

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The CIA turncoat, Aldrich Ames told me that one country’s traitor is another country’s hero.
But is that true?
Ames said it was true because the end result was betrayal — the breaking of an oath and allegiance to one’s homeland.