The CIA awarded IWP Adjunct Professor Brian Kelley the Distinguished Career Intelligence Medal on the occasion of more than 40 years of service to the U.S. counterintelligence community. The medal recognizes "service reflecting a pattern of increasing levels of responsibility or increasingly strategic impact and with distinctly exceptional achievements."
In a private event at headquarters on October 19, a senior CIA official praised Professor Kelley’s work against adversary intelligence organizations. Of his four decades of service, Kelley spent more than 24 years as an operations officer within the CIA’s National Clandestine Service.
A large number of senior intelligence officials and veterans attended the event, including most of the IWP intelligence faculty. In his remarks, Professor Kelley recognized Kenneth deGraffenreid, IWP Professor of Intelligence, thanking him for believing in his innocence during a dark period in 2000 when he was under FBI investigation after the Bureau mistakenly suspected he was a traitor spy for Soviet and Russian intelligence. In reality, the spy was one of the FBI’s own, Robert P. Hanssen. Kelley was fully exonerated.