Mark Kelton retired from CIA as a senior executive with 34 years of experience in intelligence operations including serving as CIA’s Deputy Director for Counterintelligence. He is currently a partner at the FiveEyes Group and is Board Chair of Spookstock, a charity that benefits the CIA Memorial Foundation, the Special Operations Warrior Foundation and the Defense Intelligence Memorial Foundation.
Cipher Brief Expert and retired CIA Senior Executive Mark Kelton took part in a Russia panel during the recent Cipher Brief Threat Conference, along with […] More
Toby Esterhase: “You’re an old spy in a hurry, George. You used to say they were the worst.” “The Cipher Brief has become the most […] More
OPINION — “The beginning of wisdom”, according to a quote ascribed to Confucius, “is to call things by their proper name.” That saying came to […] More
EXPERT PERSPECTIVE — “Nothing”, Fyodor Dostoevsky observed in Crime and Punishment, “is easier than to denounce the evildoer; nothing is more difficult than to understand […] More
EXPERT PERSPECTIVE — I hope CIA has an agent like Dmitry Polyakov operating in Moscow right now. A Major General in Soviet Military Intelligence (the […] More
Mark Kelton, Former Deputy Director, CIA’s Counterintelligence, National Clandestine Service Cipher Brief Expert Mark Kelton is a retired senior Central Intelligence Agency executive with 34 […] More
Ties between Russia and China go far beyond mutual lessons-learned and policy coordination. They have entered into cooperative arrangements that pose clear dangers for the […] More
In 1937, Winston Churchill contrasted the “two rival religions” of Nazism and Communism then afflicting the world. Those fascist and communist “infernal twins”, he wrote, […] More
OPINION — A recent email from the current Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Chief of Counterintelligence (C/CI), wherein Agency retirees were reminded of their life-long obligation […] More
Counterintelligence in a Time of Crisis Mark Kelton is a former senior Central Intelligence Agency executive who retired in 2015 with 34 years of experience […] More
(Editor’s Note: Understanding the life of a spy is often difficult, especially understanding the experiences of those who spend much of their careers working undercover. […] More
CIPHER BRIEF EXPERT VIEW — Mark Kelton is a retired senior Central Intelligence Agency executive who retired in 2015 with 34 years of experience in intelligence […] More
Cipher Brief Expert and former CIA Deputy Director for Counterintelligence, Mark Kelton wrote for The Cipher Brief back in 2017 that, The Man in the […] More
Cipher Brief Expert Mark Kelton is a retired senior Central Intelligence Agency executive who retired in 2015 with 34 years of experience in intelligence operations. He […] More
In part two of ‘The Coming Chinese Storm’, former Deputy Director for Counterintelligence at the CIA’s National Clandestine Service, Mark Kelton, lays out the Chinese […] More
The Cipher Brief is engaging with dozens of Cipher Brief experts, government speakers and private industry executives this week on the national security challenges that […] More
“The concept of plausible denial had an undeniable flavor of wishful thinking about it”, wrote CIA veteran William Hood in his book on Soviet military […] More
In the version of Aesop’s fable, “The Farmer and the Viper,” as recounted by Roman fabulist Gaius Julius Phaedrus, a farmer finds a viper freezing […] More
President Donald Trump is not the first American public figure to go to war with the press, nor is he the most extreme in his […] More
Intelligence officers must often use a false identity — a legend or cover. How has social media and digital technology changed how they create and […] More
There is no adjective to which I have a greater aversion than “unprecedented.” Such language is most often intended to describe challenges more daunting than […] More
Vladimir Putin is smiling because he thrives on chaos, particularly in the camp of the “Main Enemy,” a term the Soviet and Russian intelligence services […] More
In the wake of the arrest of Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officer Aldrich Ames as a spy, then-CIA Chief of Counterintelligence Paul Redmond commented, “There […] More
The Cipher Brief asked our network member Mark Kelton, the former CIA Deputy Director of the National Clandestine Service for Counterintelligence, for his impressions of […] More
