Mary Louise Kelly

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Mary Louise Kelly is National Public Radio's intelligence and security correspondent. Kelly reports on the Central Intelligence Agency and other spy agencies, such as the Defence Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency. She also covers the law-makers that oversee America's spies, including the Senate and House intelligence committees. Her brief is a broad one, ranging from threats to national security from terrorism (Al Qaeda and others), to nuclear proliferation, to the U.S. response to 9/11.

Kelly has broken numerous security and terrorism-related stories, including the CIA's recent -- and secret -- decision to disband the unit aimed at hunting Osama Bin Laden. ([1]). That story caused an uproar and led to the Senate voting on September 8, 2006 to reinstate the unit. [2] [3] Kelly was also the first reporter to interview Gary Schroen, the CIA operative who was dropped in to Afghanistan in the aftermath of 9/11 with a six man team and a directive to bring back the head of Bin Laden. [4]

Kelly's first foray into journalism was a senior editor at the Harvard Crimson in 1992, where she covered, among other things, Bill Clinton's inauguration. [5] Upon graduating from Harvard, her first paying gig was reporting on local politics for her home-town newspaper, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. After graduate school in Cambridge, England and internships at the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) in Scotland and London, she joined the Boston team that launched radio news magazine The World, a joint venture between the BBC and Public Radio International. Two years later Kelly moved back to the UK, working as a host, foreign correspondent and senior producer for the BBC World Service, and as a producer at CNN in London. She moved back over the pond to join NPR in Washington. Before becoming NPR's intelligence correspondent in 2004, Kelly edited NPR's evening newsmagazine, All Things Considered, for three years. She was recently described as a "bad-ass babe" on the NPR website. [6]

As well as her work in Washington, Kelly has earned her stripes around the world, with reports from the Afghan-Pakistan border, radical Hamburg mosques, Kosovo refugee camps, the deck of a nuclear aircraft carrier, and rural Cambodia. When at the BBC she also covered the peace talks that ended decades of violence in Northern Ireland.

Kelly has a degree in Government and French history and literature from Harvard University. She completed her masters in European Studies at Cambridge University (Emmanuel College) in England. She and her husband, Nicholas Boyle, an attorney with litigation firm Williams & Connolly, have two sons (James and Alexander) and live in Georgetown in Washington, D.C.