Yet, as the gap between Regan’s debt and his income widened, he became increasingly worried about the future. Anette had begun taking classes at Prince George’s Community College to meet the prerequisites for entering a nursing program there, but it was going to take a few years for her to become a nurse. For now, the classes were simply adding to the family’s debt burden. There didn’t seem to be any relief in sight. Regan was so desperate to get away from it all that there were times when he would leave home, telling Anette that he had to travel for work, check into a motel room, and binge-drink for an entire weekend.
One day, he sat down with Anette and suggested they file for bankruptcy. Although she knew enough about their finances to understand that they could no longer get by on a single income, she had been oblivious to how dire the situation was. Regan hadn’t given her any warnings earlier, and his suggestion struck her like a bolt from the blue. But rather than recognize that drastic measures were needed to avert financial doom, she chose to worry about the social stigma the family would suffer if they declared bankruptcy. Her answer was a firm no.
Regan didn’t press her. What he needed now, more than ever, was a plan that would make him rich in a short span of time.
• • •
On a pleasant summer evening in 1999, Regan drove to Michael Gould’s house in Farmingdale. He was in town for a few days visiting his parents. Anette and the kids hadn’t come with him on the trip, and Regan wanted to make the most of his stay. In earlier years, when he and Gould used to go clubbing, he would show up at Gould’s house with a bottle of vodka bought from the liquor store so that the two could drink on the way to nightclubs rather than have to buy expensive drinks once they got there. On this evening, though, the two headed to a bar.
They stayed there for several hours, knocking back vodka shots and beers and reminiscing about the old days—the movies they’d watched together at the Sunrise multiplex, the experience of delivering newspapers, the good times they had shared in Hawaii. They could have spent all night drinking and talking, but a little past one a.m., with not much time to go before the bar’s closing, the two got in the car and drove back to the neighborhood. Regan pulled up next to Gould’s house. The two sat in the parked car and continued to talk, as they drank some more beers.
It was a beautiful night. Regan had rolled down the car’s windows, letting in the breeze. The conversation turned to Glen Brausch, the classmate whom Regan had once protected from bullying in middle school. Brausch had died young, not long after his bar mitzvah, at the age of sixteen. Regan remarked how sad it was that Brausch never got the chance to grow up and see the world.
“Well, at least he’s in a better place now,” Gould said, hoping that Regan would find solace in his words.
Regan turned to him with a stoic gaze.
“I don’t believe in the afterlife,” he said. “I don’t believe in God.”
Gould was taken aback, both by Regan’s statement and by the absoluteness with which he had made it. He knew Regan’s parents to be devout Catholics. He knew they had given Regan and his brothers and sisters a religious upbringing, making sure to take them to church. Regan had never before said anything to Gould suggesting that he wasn’t a man of faith. To learn that Regan had somehow turned into a nonbeliever was troubling to Gould, who was Jewish.
“But don’t you believe in heaven and hell?” he asked.
“I don’t,” Regan said. There was a finality to his tone that suggested he had given the question a fair amount of thought before arriving at his stance.
Gould attempted to persuade him. “I think that’s a very morbid thing to think, that there’s no afterlife,” he told Regan. “To think that there are no consequences for your actions.”
It was evident to Regan that his friend felt disappointed and hurt. But he was unmoved. He cared only about this existence, he told Gould, because in his mind, there was nothing beyond it.
“You only get a onetime shot at life, and that’s it.”
Gould didn’t give up. “Listen, you really should try to change your position if you don’t want a broken path,” he said before getting out of the car and saying good night. As Regan drove off, the sound of his car fading into the night, Gould had the disturbing thought that his friend was perhaps losing his moral compass. Little did he know that Regan was about to walk down a treacherous path—one that led to treason.
• • •
The idea of committing espionage began taking shape in Regan’s mind through the early months of 1999 as he found himself in the vortex of a perfect storm created by the continuing humiliations at work, the worsening of his financial situation, and the growing rift in his marriage. From the average evaluations he had been getting, he knew he wasn’t going to be promoted anytime soon. The Air Force wanted to transfer him to Europe, but Regan wasn’t willing to move because of the disruption it would cause his family. When the Air Force turned down his request to defer overseas deployment, he had to choose between accepting the transfer and retiring a year later, on August 31, 2000, when he would complete twenty years of service. Grudgingly, he opted for the latter.
With the clock ticking toward retirement, Regan’s anxieties about the future transformed into a rising sense of panic. Because of the narrow scope of the work he’d been doing at the NRO, he wasn’t sure he would be able to find a well-paying job in industry, certainly not with the ease that his coworkers expected to. Clutching at straws, Regan finally saw a way out of this insecurity.
He would cash in on the nation’s secrets.
Growing up, he had learned that getting what he wanted sometimes meant having to break the rules. He hadn’t experienced any negative consequences for having stolen the ceramic art tools from his neighbor’s house, or for cheating on his military entrance test. Those might have been small misdemeanors, but the principle he’d taken away from them applied equally to the crime he was now planning to commit.
All that mattered was not getting caught. As long as he could get away with it, espionage was a legitimate answer to his troubles.
It was also one that seemed to lie within easy grasp. One of Regan’s secondary responsibilities at his job was to help maintain his division’s Web page on Intelink, the intranet of the U.S. intelligence community and a platform for the sharing and dissemination of information among the country’s various intelligence agencies. In doing that part of his job, Regan had become keenly familiar with Intelink and what it held. Resident on the intranet’s thousands of Web pages and databases, he knew, was an array of secrets the United States had spent billions to acquire, from reports of intelligence gathered by American spies around the world to analyses of images and signals captured through reconnaissance. The way Regan came to see it, Intelink was the doorway to a basement stuffed with treasures waiting to be sold to enemies of the United States.
Regan began exploring the depth and breadth of Intelink, browsing content that went far beyond his assigned responsibilities. To do his job as an exercise agent, he mostly needed to access pages relating to signals intelligence, as well as air defenses in the Middle East and North Africa. But through the fall and winter months, Regan accessed a diverse selection of images and intelligence reports—a profile of a Libyan general, the United States’ capabilities for destroying military sites hidden deep underground, an adversary’s handbook for conducting biological warfare. His surfing sessions became longer and more frequent. By early 2001, he was spending hours on Intelink every week.
Regan devoted part of his surfing to educating himself about espionage. He searched Intelink for reports by analysts on how spies through U.S. history had committed their acts of betrayal—how these men and women went about stealing secrets and transferring them to other governments, how they were discovered and investigated, and how they were brought to justice. While researching this literature, Regan learned about a counterintelligence course that he was eligible to
take as a member of the intelligence community. His supervisor didn’t ask any questions when he requested approval to attend the course, for even though Regan’s job had nothing to do with counterintelligence, learning about it could help him become more alert to potential espionage in his environment, making him a better sentinel of the nation’s secrets. And so, for a few days in late 1999, Regan took time out of his job at the NRO to attend classes at Tysons Corner, Virginia, where he heard former FBI and CIA agents present espionage case studies.
By learning about these cases in detail, Regan hoped to gain insights that would help him craft his own plans. He wished to avoid the mistakes that traitors before him had made. With sufficient foresight and planning, he told himself, he would pull off the perfect espionage conspiracy. Unbeknownst to all those coworkers and classmates who had ever doubted his intelligence, he would transform himself into the ultimate spy.
• • •
Starting in the fall of 1999, Regan’s visits to the printer at his office grew increasingly frequent. He was printing out hundreds of pages of classified information from Intelink. He would first compile the information digitally, on his desktop, using a program called Snagit that allowed him to copy several pages into one file. He could then print out a large set of pages with a single command, saving himself the trouble of walking back and forth to the printer too many times.
In his four years at the NRO, Regan had never been a heavy user of the printer. If his coworkers had paid any attention, they would have wondered why he was collecting printouts with such regularity. But luckily for Regan, nobody noticed.
As he began accumulating these documents, Regan thought carefully about the next steps in his plan. Most U.S. spies who had betrayed the country were tasked by a foreign government to steal and pass information, but Regan had initiated his espionage scheme on his own, with no prior relationship with intelligence agents of another country. Unlike earlier turncoats like the CIA’s Aldrich Ames and James Nicholson, who served as U.S. spies for decades before selling out to an adversary, Regan had no experience or knowledge of how to operate in this shadowy world. He had never targeted foreign intelligence officers for recruitment, as Ames and Nicholson had done in the course of their work as CIA agents. He was going to have to devise his own way of contacting a foreign service and marketing the information he was gathering.
What countries could he target? From all the research he had done, Regan had drawn one key conclusion. He wasn’t going to engage with Russian intelligence. For in some instances, Regan had learned, Russian agents who had defected to the United States had ended up disclosing the identities of American moles working for the Russians. Regan wasn’t willing to take that risk.
He turned his sights to the Middle East and North Africa, a part of the world he’d concentrated on during much of his career. In the decade since the end of the Cold War, the region had become a focus of increasing attention for U.S. military planners. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States no longer had a single rival superpower to worry about. Instead, it had to contend with a growing military challenge from China, an emerging power, and a host of smaller adversaries, many of them oil-rich countries with a majority Muslim population: Iraq, Libya, Iran, Sudan. Each of these nations, Regan thought, would be willing to pay for secrets that might help them militarily against the United States.
Regan tailored his explorations on Intelink accordingly. He collected images and reports on China that could help the Chinese military understand precisely how much the United States knew about the country’s nuclear installations, missile systems, and other strategic sites. He entered “top secret iran” into the intranet’s search engine and sifted through the results. He cast another wide net by searching for “top secret libya,” misspelling “Libya” on more than one occasion. He looked for material that would be valuable to the Iraqi regime, whose long-standing conflict with the United States was escalating toward the possibility of another full-scale war. Regan didn’t just gather information that would help the countries he had in mind—Libya, Iraq, and Iran among them—in hostilities against the United States. He also downloaded whatever intelligence he could find on the military capabilities of regional neighbors like Israel, which he expected his target countries would be equally interested in.
Regan couldn’t simply stack this growing volume of printouts on his desk. He stored them in a credenza that sat between his cubicle and his neighbor’s. Every now and then, he would open it, add a new bundle of documents to the holdings, and lock it up again. Nobody asked him any questions.
The storage proved to be more secure than he could have imagined. Once, when Regan was traveling on assignment, members of the NRO’s building management staff came by his office looking to pick up unused furniture. Nobody spoke up for the credenza, and so they took it away. Later, when they discovered that it was locked, they used a drill to unlock it. Inside they found hundreds of documents.
When Regan returned, one of them called him to ask if the papers belonged to him. He replied in the affirmative, trying to stay calm despite feeling a wave of worry about being found out. The staff wrapped up the documents and sent them all back to him. Whether by sheer good fortune or because of complete obliviousness on the part of the NRO’s management, Regan had dodged a major bullet. Relieved, he stuffed the printouts in an overhead cabinet, which felt like a safer storage space than the credenza, even if only because it was affixed to the wall.
• • •
One day in March 2000, Regan pulled out a sheaf of documents from his stash and placed it at the bottom of his gym bag. His sweaty workout clothes lay on top of the papers in a disheveled heap. At around five p.m., he logged out of his computer, picked up the bag, and walked out of his cubicle toward the building exit.
His heart was racing, but Regan walked unhurriedly as he approached the turnstiles. As was to be expected at the end of the workday, dozens of employees were on their way out at that hour. Regan had been counting on it. He looked at the security guards who milled around at the front desk, chitchatting among themselves as people streamed out. Regan was aware that the guards had the authority to stop anybody for a search. There was a chance, however slim, that one of them would want to look into his gym bag and would rifle through the clothes and discover the classified documents concealed underneath.
But Regan was able to slide right through, unimpeded. The guards had seen him come in and go out of the building with that same gym bag hundreds of times in the past; they had no reason to suspect him. As he walked to his car, the tension draining from his body, Regan thought about how easy it had been to smuggle the documents out. He had gotten away by being just another face in the crowd, a signal drowned by a sea of noise.
In the weeks that followed, Regan removed hundreds of pages of documents from the office in his gym bag, transferring his holdings, bit by bit, into the basement of his town house in Bowie. None of the things he’d collected over the years—comic books, baseball cards, action figures—had made him rich; now, finally, he was hoarding materials with real value that he expected to convert into a fortune.
His stash wasn’t limited to documents anymore. He was copying information from the NRO’s computers onto CD-ROMs, which were even more convenient to smuggle out of the office. His supervisors had put him in charge of maintaining a small library of training videos on VHS tape containing instructions for accessing NRO systems. He took them home, knowing that they wouldn’t be missed since he was the custodian. Late at night, while Anette and the kids slept, he would go down to the basement and copy the tapes.
It was around the same time, in April of 2000, that Regan started working on a plan to market what he had stolen. From the spy cases he had researched, he knew he would have to contact the intelligence services of the countries he was targeting. The simplest way to do so would be to walk into the embassies of these countries in the United States. But that would b
e dumb, Regan quickly realized, for the FBI kept a close watch on foreign embassies in the country. To minimize the risk of being found out through surveillance, he would make contact anonymously and remain incognito throughout the transaction, exchanging information for money without ever meeting with a foreign agent.
Regan began writing a letter addressed to the head of the Libyan intelligence service, whose name he had dug up on Intelink. Introducing himself as a CIA analyst, he highlighted some of the secrets he was willing to offer in exchange for $13 million. By the time he was done typing up his detailed instructions for how the transaction was to occur—the Libyans would have to set up an 800 number for him to call, and communicate that through a used-car ad in the Washington Post—the letter had run to thirteen pages. Drafting it was only the first step, however. To be secure, Regan decided he had to communicate the letter in code.
He had first become acquainted with codes during his training at Goodfellow shortly after he enlisted. What he’d learned about cryptology back then, going back nearly two decades, didn’t go beyond the basics. But he’d been fascinated with encryption ever since. He’d even used it in his personal life. Once, after having met up with a woman behind Anette’s back, he’d encrypted her name and number on a piece of paper, converting the plaintext using a simple encryption scheme he’d learned at Goodfellow. When he found the paper on his desk some months later, however, he failed to decipher the number because he couldn’t recall the encryption key.
The Spy Who Couldn't Spell Page 9