Mary Louise Kelly

Steve Barrett

2009 sees Mary Louise Kelly take up a new beat: the Pentagon. As part of NPR's national security team, she reports on a range of defense and foreign policy issues. Kelly chronicles the Obama administration's tactics and strategy for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. She is particularly interested in how the U.S. projects its military muscle overseas, how it will respond to rising military powers such as China, and how U.S. foreign policy is often conducted through defense and intelligence channels.

Prior to her current assignment, Kelly launched NPR's intelligence beat. She spent four years covering 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. She also tracked threats to national security from terrorism (Al Qaeda and others), and rising nuclear powers.

Kelly's first assignment at NPR was 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 mosques in Hamburg, 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.