Mary Louise Kelly, NPR Biography
Correspondent, Intelligence, Foreign Desk
Mary Louise Kelly is NPR's intelligence correspondent. She reports on spy agencies such as the CIA and the National Security Agency, and the policy-makers that oversee them, including the Senate and House intelligence committees. As part of NPR's national security team, she also covers threats to national security from terrorism (Al Qaeda and others), and budding nuclear powers.
Before becoming NPR's intelligence correspondent in 2004, Kelly was the senior editor of NPR's award-winning evening newsmagazine, All Things Considered.
Kelly's journalism career began in newspapers. A Georgia native, her first job was reporting on local politics for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. She made the leap to broadcasting in 1996, when she joined the team that launched Public Radio International's The World. The following year Kelly moved to London, working as a producer for CNN and as a senior producer, host, and foreign correspondent for the BBC World Service. Her assignments have taken her around the world: to the Afghan-Pakistan border, to radical Hamburg mosques, to refugee camps during the Kosovo conflict, to rural Cambodia, and to the peace talks that ended decades of violence in Northern Ireland.
Kelly graduated from Harvard University in 1993 with a degree in Government and French history and literature. She completed her masters in European Studies two years later, at Cambridge University in England. She and her husband, Nick Boyle, have two sons and live in Washington, D.C.
