Who was the NCIS mole? The show has run the storyline more than once — start with the season 6 traitor on Gibbs's own team
NCIS has put a traitor inside its own building more than once, and the two versions play out very differently. Where the storyline started, who it burned, and how the show reran it fifteen seasons later.
Ask about the NCIS mole and you'll get two different answers depending on which decade the person watched. The original is the one that cost a character her life.
It begins at the end of season 5, when Director Leon Vance dismantles Gibbs's team for no reason he's willing to explain — Ziva back to Israel, DiNozzo to a carrier, McGee to cybercrime. The season 6 premiere, "Last Man Standing," aired September 23, 2008, and supplies the reason: Vance has been told there's a leak feeding US military intelligence out of the building, and he's narrowed it to three agents. He staffs Gibbs's gutted team with all three and waits.
The three suspects
- Michelle Lee (Liza Lapira) — a lawyer out of the Legal department, first seen in the season 4 premiere "Shalom," Harvard Law, briefly and secretly involved with Jimmy Palmer.
- Daniel Keating — from Cybercrime, and the first one hauled into interrogation.
- Brent Langer — a transfer from the FBI.
Langer dies in the premiere. He and Lee go to the computer archive center while Keating is being questioned; Lee calls Gibbs in a panic naming Langer as the mole; there are gunshots; Gibbs arrives to find Langer dead and Lee claiming self-defense. Case closed, as far as anyone knows. The final scene of the episode is Lee getting a text from her handler asking whether the team suspects her.
Her answer is one word: "No."
How they caught her
"Cloak" and "Dagger," episodes 8 and 9, aired in November 2008. The team runs an elaborate misdirection — Abby performs guilt to make the real mole relax, and Vance conspicuously skips Lee while scanning everyone for tracking powder. The trap works. Lee is arrested and confesses in interrogation that her daughter Amanda is being held hostage.
Her personnel file lists Amanda as her sister. Both are true: their parents died, Lee raised her, and she calculated that "daughter" would land harder with Gibbs. "I'm done trying to explain," she tells Ziva while being wired up. The intelligence she'd been ordered to deliver was Domino, a file detailing how the US military would respond to an attack on Israel.
Lee works with Gibbs to draw out her handler, Ted Bankston (David Eigenberg). It ends on a city bus, Bankston using Lee as a shield, Gibbs already shot through the hand and grazed across the head. Lee gives him the signal. One round kills them both. The episode's last image is Amanda holding Lee's NCIS badge.
Read more: Which NCIS episode do Ziva and Tony get together?
The season 22 rerun
Fifteen years later the show ran the shape again and inverted it. Deputy Director Gabriel LaRoche (Seamus Dever) spends all of season 22 behaving exactly like a mole — he takes the promotion McGee wanted, and Nick Torres's cover inside the Nexus cartel gets burned on his watch. The finale, "Nexus," aired May 5, 2025 and revealed he was deep cover for the Department of Justice and had blown Torres's cover deliberately to sell himself to the cartel as a replacement leak.
The actual villain was Carla Marino (Rebecca De Mornay), the Kansas City mob boss who'd been presented as a possible ally. Nexus's shadowy head, "The Butcher," turned out to be AI- generated by Marino herself. She killed Parker's father and escaped; NCIS finished her off early in season 23, in the two-part "Prodigal Son."
LaRoche came back. By the season 23 episode "Sons and Daughters" he's the U.S. Associate Attorney General, investigating Kayla Vance's Archive operation, and glancing at the chair her father used to sit in.
Earlier we wrote: Why did Spencer leave Criminal Minds? The reason, and what Matthew Gray Gubler has said since