The difference that this type of intelligence could make was evident in 1991 during the First Gulf War. The real-time availability of photoreconnaissance—combined with signals intelligence collected by satellites as well as ground stations—enabled U.S. commanders to anticipate and counter various Iraqi offensives with an ease that even the most optimistic military planners couldn’t have expected. Where U.S. combat forces could have suffered hundreds of casualties, they lost relatively few soldiers, and the U.S.-led coalition won a swift victory in less than seven weeks of operations.
Despite the success, Pentagon officials realized that the tactical advantage conferred by the satellites hadn’t been fully utilized. They identified a host of problems with how the intelligence had been pushed out to the field. There were times when the imagery was “late, unsatisfactory or unusable,” a House Armed Services Committee found. While the war had demonstrated the usefulness of the spy satellites in supporting combat operations, it had also underscored the imperative for the reconnaissance program to quickly deliver specific intelligence requested by war fighters on the ground.
It was against this backdrop that the then director of the agency, Marty Faga, recommended that the government make the NRO’s existence public. That the United States had a reconnaissance program was by now an open secret. Many other countries were known to have their own spy satellites in space, which lessened the weight of any international objections. Faga made the argument that it would be hard to disseminate the NRO’s intelligence products widely and effectively within the military if the NRO continued to stay in the shadows.
The government agreed to lift the veil, and on September 18, 1992, the Defense Department issued a quiet memorandum declassifying the NRO and naming its top three officials, including Faga. At an all-hands meeting at the agency, Faga told employees the rationale behind the declassification. At the end of the meeting, an employee came up to him with a question.
“So now can we have coffee cups with the NRO logo?” she asked.
“Well, yeah,” Faga replied. By 1995, after the agency had moved into its spanking-new headquarters in Chantilly, it had its own souvenir shop offering golf balls, coasters, and mugs bearing the NRO insignia.
• • •
Brian Regan came to the NRO in 1995 as the organization, responding to pressure from Congress and the Pentagon, was in the middle of ramping up its tactical support to the military. Regan was assigned to an office responsible for helping military units in the field access and utilize intelligence collected by spy satellites. His primary job was to support training exercises in which soldiers and their command structures are put in battle-like situations similar to what they might encounter in an actual war.
The U.S. military conducts these exercises not just on U.S. soil but also in other parts of the world where it has a military presence. The aim is to keep soldiers and commanders and the entire war machine ever ready to engage in conflict anywhere in the world. Making the simulations realistic is key to the quality of the training. The military devotes considerable resources to creating mock theaters of battle to mimic conflict zones that U.S. soldiers expect to fight in, for instance, re-creating Afghan villages—complete with mosques and shops and hired Afghan men—in the middle of California’s Mojave Desert.
The exercises include ground offensives as well as air campaigns flown against air defense systems that mimic those used by adversaries. In the mock battle theaters where such campaigns are conducted, pilots must contend with radar and antiaircraft artillery and surface-to-air missiles deployed against them, just as they would in enemy territory.
Regan’s role in these exercises was to help set up the air defenses pilots had to train against. He had to draw upon his knowledge of how countries like Iraq and Libya deployed their radar and antiaircraft weaponry, and recommend where all of that equipment needed to be positioned in a replicated battle zone. He helped write scripts for how these defenses would work in an exercise, how they would communicate with one another, and how they would attempt to conceal themselves to deceive U.S. commanders and pilots. It was part of his job to think like an enemy.
Regan also helped train pilots and ground fighters to monitor these defenses by accessing signals intelligence gleaned from their emissions by NRO satellites. For instance, if a surface-to-air missile were moved from one location to another during an exercise, the war fighter had to be able to discern that movement from signals picked up by satellite reconnaissance. Another part of Regan’s job was to go out to where the defense systems had been deployed and determine their geocoordinates using a GPS, as well as ascertain other characteristics of their operations, such as when a radar was turned on and turned off. By comparing information collected on the ground to similar information derived through observations from space, the NRO was able to test the accuracy and timeliness of its signals intelligence data.
Being assigned to the NRO was a blessing for Regan, who might otherwise have had to move out of Washington, D.C., for his next posting in the Air Force. By 1995, he and Anette had already spent seven years in the D.C. area, the longest they had lived anywhere. They had bought a small town house in Bowie, Maryland, a place to finally call home. Regan was glad not to have to pack up and settle in a new town, as men and women in the military must do every few years.
The couple now had three children—two little girls and a boy. Raising them was more than a full-time job for Anette, especially since Regan was often out traveling to the venues of military exercises within the United States and abroad. He had to drive forty miles to get to his office in Chantilly, a joyless commute that took him an hour and a half each way, making him unavailable to lend Anette much of a helping hand. The carefree existence the two had known in Hawaii was a thing of the past, replaced by the stresses of parenting.
Regan had never been one to socialize with neighbors or colleagues, and as he got older, he became increasingly reclusive. At the NRO, where he shared an office with three others, he wore earplugs to block out noise, including coworkers’ conversations. During meetings in which he and other enlisted staffers like him had to take orders from commissioned officers—usually younger and better paid—Regan often wore an unsmiling expression that exuded resentment. He visited the vending machine periodically to buy cans of Mountain Dew, guzzling large volumes of the soda at his desk through the day. Perhaps in part because of all the sugar he was consuming, Regan acquired a bulging midriff, which made him stand out among his mostly trim coworkers.
Regan’s job, too, set him apart from colleagues in his unit, known as the Performance and Evaluation division. While his role was to set up exercises and collect field data, most of his coworkers were assigned to higher-order tasks that were more intellectually demanding: assessing the quality of the signals intelligence gathered, writing reports on the performance of the NRO systems, making recommendations to improve them. The division was staffed by some of the brightest men and women from the enlisted ranks, and Regan, who had fought an uphill battle since childhood to prove his intellectual mettle, couldn’t help feeling inadequate in their midst. Since the nature of his work was different from what the others did, Regan’s presentations were quickly dispensed with in staff meetings, so that the group could move on to more interesting things. As a coworker would later recall: “It was almost like—OK, Brian, just make sure you are doing your thing and being productive. The rest of us were involved in doing more cutting-edge stuff.”
Regan may have been able to brush off the dismissive vibe he experienced in these interactions if he hadn’t suffered other insults. As had been the case in his middle and high school years, his odd personality made him a butt of jokes within the group. Some coworkers made fun of him, not quite good-naturedly, for being overweight. It didn’t help that he wasn’t as sharply dressed as them, or that his desk was always an untidy mess, or that his car frequently broke down on his commute to work. The impression that took hold w
as that Regan wasn’t competent to manage his daily life in the way that a responsible adult should be able to.
More than his appearance, it was the situations Regan got into that invited gibes from some in the group, especially from a coworker named Ken Jackman, who may have been Regan’s biggest tormentor. Not long after Regan’s fourth child was born, he accidentally dropped the infant boy on his head. When he shared the incident with coworkers, Jackman—whose low opinion of Regan’s intelligence was no secret around the office—turned the story into a running joke. On another occasion, Regan’s coworkers were amused that he spent days trying to guess the four-digit code needed to make his car radio work. The easier option would have been to go to an automobile dealership, but Regan didn’t want to pay. That he could crack the code if he just kept trying, and that the few bucks he’d save was worth this much effort: both seemed like foolish convictions to the others. It was the kind of behavior that, in the words of one coworker, made people chuckle and say, “I can’t believe Brian’s doing that again.”
Being held in low esteem by peers—no matter how jovial the banter—was a depressingly familiar situation for Regan, a throwback to life as a kid in Farmingdale. In the years since, he had learned not to shrink away from barbs, to stand his ground and reclaim respect through any means possible. At the NRO, he responded to the teasing and humiliation with a defiance he had cultivated since high school. Every now and then, he would come out of his shell of introversion to brag about his knowledge of the financial market and to advise coworkers on what stocks to buy. His claim of being a wise investor poised for big gains in the market struck his colleagues as oddly discordant with his shabby clothes, his barely drivable car, and his penchant for thrift. When members of the group were about to travel to another city for work, he boastfully claimed to know which hotel would be the best for them to stay at. His coworkers found out later that the advice wasn’t based on his own experience, as he had been pretending, but was borrowed from someone else.
To boost his status in the outside world, he came up with the idea of using a fake CIA placard in his car. He created it by taking a printout of the CIA emblem and pasting it on a piece of cardboard, along with the words: “On Official Business.” He would often take the placard with him on his travels around the United States and put it up on the windshield when going out to restaurants and bars, aiming to impress women he hoped to meet, as well as lower his chances of getting a parking ticket. There was something comical about these shallow attempts to inflate his importance, and it didn’t exactly build the respect he was seeking. “We would joke about how he thought he had the right answers to everything, and he didn’t,” a coworker would later recall.
Regan strived, in more earnest ways, to improve his self-image and social standing. He worked out at the gym in the basement of his office building, hoping to shed some pounds. He had never developed a reading habit because of his dyslexia, and the resulting lack of erudition bothered him. To compensate, he borrowed audiobooks from the library to teach himself history, sociology, and other subjects. He suspected, rightly, that others saw him as unsophisticated, and he believed he could change that by walking his own path of self-development.
Yet navigating everyday life itself was a challenge for Regan. Like many other dyslexics, he was in the habit of making lists to get things done. Written on index cards and sheets of paper, hundreds of such lists lay strewn all over his house and in his car, mirroring the chaos they were intended to manage. Some contained tasks to be done at the office: “Clear off desk, pass on duty to other.” Others were detailed checklists in preparation for a trip: “Lock doors, electric off, towels, underwear, undershirt, snacks, drinks, Vodka bottle.” Some read like self-motivational scripts: “Education, Read, Go to school, Follow it step by step, Every day do a little studying towards your goal.” He jotted down aphorisms—“Repetition is the mother of skill”—and notes to remind himself of priorities: “Spend more time with family.” On his day-to-day lists, he sometimes included mindless instructions that seemed scripted by, and for, an automaton: “Get up.” “Take the bus to work.” “Shower.” “Change clothes.”
Perhaps these jottings were clues to the tragic dysfunction of a man isolated and unmoored from the world. Regan seemed to be alone, not just at his job but also in his personal life. His relationship with Anette had been fraying for years. The pressure of raising four children, one of them a newborn, had put a severe strain on the couple. The marriage wasn’t loveless, but it was in choppy waters.
Anette had once dreamed of becoming a Hollywood star, of living a life of luxury. She loved horseback riding, which she dabbled in at considerable expense, and wanted to own a horse ranch someday. But after nearly a decade and a half with Regan, she could see her dreams crumbling. It made her hard and bitter. A neat and organized person by nature, she hated Regan’s habit of visiting thrift stores to buy collectible items—McDonald’s toys, figurines, Barbie dolls. He thought they would be valuable one day. It drove her crazy that he hoarded them in the basement of their cramped house, along with the comics and toys and baseball cards he’d collected since childhood. She grumbled about it to neighbors.
The day’s grind left her with little energy at the end of the day to connect with Regan, who would call her before leaving work to ask, in a predictably expressionless monotone, what she had made for dinner. When one of her neighbors was going through a divorce, Anette told her: “Be happy you are alone, because if you love somebody, you don’t know what you’ll get. Love is a crapshoot.”
Regan made halfhearted attempts to revive the relationship. Every now and then, especially before flying off on work trips, he would write reminders to himself to bring her flowers or write her a love note. But when traveling, he wasn’t always a faithful husband and was known to look for one-night stands on Craigslist. Once, on a trip to Farmingdale by himself to visit family, he picked up a girl from a bar after an evening out with Michael Gould. In 2001, when the FBI was surveilling him, agents observed him drive up to a woman who was walking down the street, lower his car window, and proposition her. His lack of finesse was equally on display at the beach, where surveillance agents watched him unabashedly ogle women.
Most summers, Anette took the kids to Sweden. Despite traveling part of the way on military flights—a benefit granted to Air Force personnel and their dependents—the trips cost thousands of dollars that Regan could ill afford. With a take-home income of less than $40,000 a year, he was already in dire financial straits. By the late nineties, he had more than a dozen credit cards in his name, with unpaid balances in the tens of thousands of dollars. On stickers on the faces of the cards, he wrote down how much credit he had left on each and used money from one card to make payments on another. A smarter choice, instead of this accounting jugglery, might have been to stop going out all the time to eat lunch at Don Pablo’s or Talkin Turkey, a habit that helped neither his wallet nor his paunch. But Regan did little to check Anette’s spending or his own, sinking deeper and deeper into the hole.
• • •
If there was one thing Regan prided himself on, it was his resourcefulness. He believed he was inventive, even though the ideas he thought up sometimes ended up as epic failures. In the early nineties, when he and Anette lived on Bolling Air Force Base in Washington, D.C., he began riding his bike to the Pentagon to try to keep himself in shape. He didn’t want to show up for work in sweaty clothes; he decided that he needed to carry his uniform with him on the bike every morning and change when he got in. He built a suit rack for the bicycle—a metal frame bolted onto the back that he could hang his uniform on. When he rode the rigged-up bike, however, he realized that the hanging suit was a sail that slowed him down considerably as it billowed out behind him in the breeze. Once, as he was riding over the Fourteenth Street Bridge, the effect was strong enough to make the bike wobble until Regan lost control of it and fell sideways onto a grassy patch at the end of the bi
ke path.
Such debacles didn’t stop Regan from continuing to believe that he had a knack for clever solutions, no matter how intractable the problem. In the face of his worsening financial situation—his credit card debt had crossed $47,000 by the end of 1998—he nurtured dreams of becoming rich overnight. Time and again, he traveled to Las Vegas to try his luck at the casinos, succeeding only in blowing away money. He thought he could make a fortune by playing the stock market. He’d picked up the basics of how to analyze stocks from consulting books and popular articles, and although the resulting knowledge was rudimentary, he sought to apply it by engaging in online stock trading from his desktop at the NRO. The results of this gambling, as in Las Vegas, did not go in his favor.
Regan’s unshakable belief that he possessed deep insights into how markets work wasn’t his only delusion. He also came up with harebrained inventions that he thought could make him a load of cash. One was a concept for a baby-bottle dryer—a plastic stand with spokes on which to put empty bottles to dry. He sent his design, along with a fee, to a company that claimed to market innovative ideas. In due course, he realized, much to his dismay, that the company was more interested in cashing his check than in promoting what he had imagined to be a million-dollar idea.
Regan didn’t share the sorry state of his finances with anybody, not even his parents and siblings back in Farmingdale. Regan had grown up in the shadow of a father who preferred to drink away his troubles rather than discuss them, so Regan’s reluctance to ask for help wasn’t surprising. Perhaps he worried about losing the respect he’d struggled so hard to win from his birth family. In any case, he had been more successful, careerwise, than anybody else in the family: who could he really turn to for financial support? On visits to Farmingdale with Anette and their kids, he showed no signs of the stress he was under because of his mounting debt. He joked and cackled with his brothers and sisters as he’d always done. He took Anette and the children to enjoy the beaches of Long Island that he’d visited so often when growing up. He went shopping with them for toys and clothes. During these brief stays at Lois Lane, he helped fix his parents’ washing machine and did other handy jobs around the house. He wanted to be seen as a problem solver who could be relied on, not as someone who had no solutions to problems of his own.
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