By Mark Kelton
Kelton is a retired senior Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) executive with 34 years of experience in intelligence operations. Mr. Kelton’s CIA career included more than sixteen years of overseas service, to include four assignments in key field leadership positions. He also served as Chief of European Operations at CIA. Mr. Kelton concluded his career in 2015 as Chief of CIA’s Counterintelligence Center.
Contrary to the claims and insinuations made in Bob Baer’s appalling book, Paul Redmond is not a spy. Based on personal experience and knowledge, I think I can say that definitively. Nor is he the so-called ‘Fourth Man’ —assuming any such person exists or existed—which I very much doubt.
I served as a junior officer in CIA’s Soviet-East European (SE) Division during the last decade of the Cold War when Paul was a senior leader there. I knew Paul then as a demanding, tough-minded—if sometimes acerbic—intelligence professional. As is well known, CIA suffered significant compromises amongst its Soviet agents in the mid-1980’s.
At the same time, however, we were securely running other operations both inside and outside the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc that Moscow would have wrapped up had they known of them. Paul knew of, or had a hand in the direction of, all those operations.
Moreover, he played the crucial role in the detection of Aldrich Ames, one of the American traitors responsible for those losses. The theory that Ames was somehow sacrificed to enhance the position of some sort of ‘master spy’—even one operating at the most senior levels of their main enemy—is the stuff of espionage fiction. Russian intelligence would never have allowed the compromise of so valuable an agent had they known he was under investigation. Had Paul been a spy, he would have been able to inform Moscow of the details of that investigation. In fact, Paul put in place the counterintelligence investigative methodology and structures that led us not only to Ames, but to Robert Hanssen.
In a subsequent assignment, I inherited responsibility for productive and secure operations in which Paul had been involved with earlier in his career. All those cases remained secure and continued to produce valuable intelligence.
In the late 1990’s, Paul headed counterintelligence at the Agency. In that position, he had knowledge of some of the same operations I was briefed on before I went out to take over CIA operations in Russia. Once again, we were securely running operations that wouldn’t have been allowed to run had a spy in Paul’s position known of them. And he had knowledge of aspects of yet another spy hunt; one that would ultimately lead us to Hanssen. There were no indications Moscow had significant insights into that investigation beyond that provided to them by Hanssen himself.
I would also note that before I took over Russian operations in the field in 1999, two of the principal sources for the Baer book asked to meet privately with me to brief me on a sensitive matter. During that meeting, they made me aware of their suspicions that Paul was a Russian mole. I listened to what they had to say with incredulity, not just because I knew Paul but also because I knew that if the Russians had a spy with the broad access to sensitive information granted CIA’s Chief of Counterintelligence, we would have seen reflections of it in the form of the compromise of ongoing, very productive operations, particularly those directed against the Russian target. I had not seen—and did not subsequently see—any such indices.
Spy hunts are not linear in nature. By that I mean, not every piece of information uncovered about a suspected spy leads immediately and directly to him. An investigation of those with access to information on a compromised agent or operation is a good, indeed necessary, place to start. However, information collected on a prospective spy does not always fit neatly into a pattern like the pieces of a puzzle. Much if it is garbled, partially accurate or simply erroneous. Only over time, with the benefit of additional information and insights, is the spyhunter able to reconcile that information with what is uncovered during the detection, arrest and questioning of actual spies.
When the principal sources cited in this book lost access to information on the spy hunt that ultimately led us to Robert Hanssen, many of those questions remained unanswered. By the time I took over from Cindy Webb as Chief of Counterintelligence at CIA in 2011, we had been able to run down—or otherwise explain—all significant leads engendered by a hunt for traitors in US intelligence agencies that spanned more than two decades. Are there still American spies out there? As Paul himself is fond of saying, it is an ‘actuarial certainty’ that there were, and are, as yet undetected spies operating within the US national security community. But the record conclusively shows that Paul was not, and is not, one of them.
Perhaps it was a settling of old scores, bitterness over decades-old slights, a desire for attention or a base desire of money that drove those cited as sources in this book to participate in such a disgraceful project. Whatever their motives, their conduct is inexcusable.
I’ve heard it said that honor is the only thing in life—including life itself—that cannot be taken from you. Only you can give it away. The people behind this book have given up their honor. In so doing, they have impugned the reputation of an honorable man who rendered a lifetime of extraordinary service to CIA and to our country. They should be ashamed of themselves.