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A Reel Spy The Washington Life-sponsored screening of Breach brought out the spooks ... including one ex-CIA man whose story could be its own spy thriller By Jeff Stein
When I got an invitation for an advance screening last month of Breach, the espionage thriller "based on" the true story of Robert Hanssen, the FBI official caught spying for the Russians in 2001, they said I could bring along a guest. So I invited my pal Brian Kelley, a veteran spy-catcher who had just retired after three decades with the Central Intelligence Agency. Brian had more than a passing professional interest in the flick. In fact, he was at the center of the Hanssen case for almost two years. But he doesn't even have a bit role in Breach, which features a Lois Lane-Jimmy Olsen style duo whom the FBI deployed to nail Hanssen, a sexually twisted and ultra-religious computer dork who first volunteered to spy for the Russians in 1979. Indeed, Kelley's story presented the producers with an inconvenient truth: His career - and nearly his life - was ruined by FBI agents who were certain he was the Russian mole, not Hanssen. For 21 months beginning in 1999, a top FBI counterintelligence official pursued Kelley like a modern-day Inspector Javert. Agents followed him around, bugged his house and threatened his family. Then finally one day a Russian defector showed up with internal KGB documents pointing toward Hanssen. Nevermind. In the end, Kelley was exonerated. But not before the FBI's wrong-headed bloodhounds had chewed him a new one. Their investigation was "emotionally devastating to both him and his family," his lawyer said during the fight to salvage his reputation. Like I said, though, none of that's in the movie. So I thought it would be interesting to bring Brian along to meet Billy Ray, the film's writer and director, who was scheduled to take questions after the lights went up. Brian was game. Who knows, we thought, maybe the FBI official who hounded him - and never apologized - would be there, too. On the drive over, Kelley - ever the CIA spy - confided to me that he had already obtained and read the original screenplay. "It was borderline dreadful," he told me later, "which only buttressed my predisposition to dislike the movie."
The lights went down. About 20 minutes into the film, Kelley was surprised to find he liked it. "Very believable," he said. After it was over, I made a beeline to the writer-director. "Billy Ray," I said, "meet Brian Kelley." Ray's face blossomed. "Oh, man, Brian," he said. By the look of the red on his cheeks, he seemed both happy and embarrassed. They engaged like separated twins, and I slipped away. Later, Brian said, "He told me that he was thrilled to meet me. Of course, he wanted to know how I liked the movie. I told him - honestly - that it was terrific." They have kept in touch, Kelley said via e-mail a few days later. "We later had several conversations about parts of my story which have not been made public. In my conversations with him, it was obvious that he knew the Hanssen story very well." Says Ray: "Brian was generous enough to tell me that he felt I had gotten a lot of things right. That, of course, meant a lot to me." Maybe Kelley will have his own movie someday, about a dark side of the Hanssen case that few people know - and is not explained in the movie. They could call it Nightmare. Story line: A CIA spy hunter becomes the hunted when a fanatical FBI agent insists he's a Russian mole. In Breach, there's only the thinnest hint of the emotional sinkhole Kelley was dragged into by the FBI. There is a scene near the beginning of the movie, when Hanssen, played to creepy perfection by Chris Cooper, is trying to impress a young subordinate secretly assigned to spy on him. Hanssen stops outside a restricted office in a long, bare corridor in the J. Edgar Hoover Building. "Know what's going on behind that door?" he says. "Analysts, looking for a spy inside the intelligence community. Highest clearance." He stares at his supposed acolyte. "But you won't find any CIA officers in there," Hanssen says. "Know why? 'Cause it's a CIA officer we're trying to build our case against." He wags a finger, cynically. "Now, could the mole be FBI and not CIA? Of course. Are we actively pursuing that possibility? Of course not. Because we're the Bureau, and the Bureau knows all." The passing dialogue was like having an electrical current run through him, Kelley says. "It hit my nervous system." "This for me was the most important piece of dialogue in the entire movie," he adds. "Pure Hanssen, who was always dropping clues about the real mole inside the FBI, but nobody would listen."
GENERATIONENGAGE, EMBASSY OF CANADA and WL'S PREVIEW SCREENING OF "BREACH" AT THE CANADIAN EMBASSY FEBRUARY 12 · EMBASSY OF CANADA PHOTOS BY JUSTIN KRIEL
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