Mary Louise Kelly
Mary Louise Kelly is a co-host of All Things Considered, NPR's award-winning afternoon newsmagazine.
Previously, she spent a decade as national security correspondent for NPR News, and she's kept that focus in her role as anchor. That's meant taking All Things Considered to Russia, North Korea, and beyond (including live coverage from Helsinki, for the infamous Trump-Putin summit). Her past reporting has tracked the CIA and other spy agencies, terrorism, wars, and rising nuclear powers. Kelly's assignments have found her deep in interviews at the Khyber Pass, at mosques in Hamburg, and in grimy Belfast bars.
Kelly first launched NPR's intelligence beat in 2004. After one particularly tough trip to Baghdad — so tough she wrote an essay about it for Newsweek — she decided to try trading the spy beat for spy fiction. Her debut espionage novel, Anonymous Sources, was published by Simon and Schuster in 2013. It's a tale of journalists, spies, and Pakistan's nuclear security. Her second novel, The Bullet, followed in 2015.
Kelly's writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Politico, Washingtonian, The Atlantic, and other publications. She has lectured at Harvard and Stanford, and taught a course on national security and journalism at Georgetown University. In addition to her NPR work, Kelly serves as a contributing editor at The Atlantic, moderating newsmaker interviews at forums from Aspen to Abu Dhabi.
A Georgia native, Kelly's first job was pounding the streets as a political reporter at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. In 1996, she made the leap to broadcasting, joining the team that launched BBC/Public Radio International's The World. The following year, Kelly moved to London to work as a producer for CNN and as a senior producer, host, and reporter for the BBC World Service.
Kelly graduated from Harvard University in 1993 with degrees in government, French language, and literature. Two years later, she completed a master's degree in European studies at Cambridge University in England.
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In Las Vegas, NPR's Mary Louise Kelly takes stock of the mood amid vigils to those who lost their lives on Sunday and tourists returning to the city as usual.
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The State Department will pull out all nonessential staff, citing mysterious attacks on diplomats that have caused symptoms including dizziness and hearing problems. The U.S. Embassy will remain open.
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NPR's Mary Louise Kelly talked to Mélisande Short-Colomb, whose family was once enslaved by Georgetown University. Now, at 63, Short-Colomb has enrolled as a freshman there. -
An operation is underway for Irma survivors in the U.S. Virgin Islands. Florida gets a visit from President Trump, who displayed more bipartisanship after another meeting with Democratic leaders.
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President Trump said, "We are not nation building again. We are killing terrorists." Ex-intelligence officers say expect a more intense CIA role on both the Afghan and Pakistani sides of the border.
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President Trump's national security team has been trying — and failing — for months to come up with a new plan for Afghanistan. On Friday, they will meet again at Camp David to plot a way forward in the longest war in U.S. history. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis says all options are on the table. What are they, and what's the country's goal at this point?
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Former CIA operative Daniel Hoffman spent five years in Moscow. He's certain the Russians meddled in last year's presidential election and intended that some of their activities be exposed. -
It hasn't been confirmed, but North Korea says it successfully tested an intercontinental ballistic missile. At least 41 states say they won't hand over information to Trump's election commission.
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In light of Friday's meeting between President Trump and Russia's Vladimir Putin, NPR's Rachel Martin speaks with Sen. James Lankford on the state of U.S.-Russian diplomacy.
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Joel Brenner, now an MIT senior researcher, says President Trump's statement that he might partner with Putin on cyber issues is a reversal of decades of well-founded American suspicion of Russia.
