The Spy Who Couldn't Spell

by Yudhijit Bhattacharjee

  Regan encrypted the letter using a far more complex encryption scheme. He first assigned brevity codes to the different words in his text—for example, using the code “JK” to represent the word “signals.” This encoded version of the letter he then converted, through further encryption, into another string of letters and numbers. In a separate document, Regan typed up the steps for decrypting the letter. After weeks of painstaking effort, he had what he thought was a foolproof way of reaching out to the Libyans without risking his anonymity.

  • • •

  In July, when Anette and the kids were away in Sweden, Regan went through the trove of classified materials in his basement. By now, he had more than twenty thousand pages, in addition to CD-ROMs and videotapes. He’d made multiple copies of some of the documents over the course of many visits to the high-speed copy room at his office. These were images and reports that he believed would be valued by more than one country and hence could be sold separately to each.

  Sitting at home, he sorted the information by target country, bundling the printouts and CDs and tapes into packages intended for Libya and Iraq—the two that he felt most optimistic about selling to. He separated about five thousand pages of documents into another pile. They contained what Regan believed to be the most sensitive of all the secrets he had pilfered—secrets that would severely compromise the national security of the United States.

  He packed these documents in Tupperware containers, along with CD-ROMs and videotapes containing information of similarly high sensitivity. He put the containers—and whatever he couldn’t fit into them—into garbage bags and wrapped them up into packages, securing them with duct tape.

  In the middle of a rainy day in July, Regan drove out to Patapsco Valley State Park, near Baltimore, about thirty miles from his house. The woods in the park were lush green, the hiking trails damp from rain. Regan got out of the car with a backpack and walked into the forest, his six-foot-four figure dwarfed by the surrounding trees.

  After he’d trekked deep into the forest, Regan stopped and looked around. There wasn’t anybody in sight. He took out a shovel from his backpack and began digging a hole in an open patch between the trees. The air was hot and humid, and by the time he’d dug a foot and a half into the ground, Regan’s brow was beaded with sweat. He dropped one of the packages into the hole and covered it up with dirt.

  Then he walked over to a tree several feet away and hammered some roofing nails into it. Next, he reached into his backpack and pulled out a GPS logger that he’d brought home from work. He’d used the device hundreds of times before to record the positions of air defense systems deployed in training exercises. He peered at the logger’s screen to read out the coordinates of where he stood, next to the tree he’d just marked with the nails, and wrote them down on a piece of paper.

  Over two more visits to the park, Regan finished burying all of the seven packages that he’d determined to be highly sensitive. On the last visit, he walked all the way to the edge of the park, without realizing that he had set foot on private property. As he was digging a hole, he heard a dog bark less than fifty yards away. He nervously finished burying the last package, hammered the nails into the nearest tree, and jotted down the location’s latitude and longitude, hoping that the dog hadn’t drawn anybody’s attention to him. Relieved to see nobody around, he walked back to his car with his backpack and the coordinates of all seven burial sites.

  He wasn’t going to trade these secrets for money. Their value was much greater. They were part of his insurance plan.

  CHAPTER 5

  SPY HUNT

  Regan pressed his foot hard on the gas pedal as he pulled out of the parking lot of TRW in the middle of the day on May 23, 2001. He’d been working at the defense contracting company’s offices in Chantilly since the fall, after having retired from the Air Force in August 2000. The company planned to assign him back to the NRO as a contract employee to do the same kind of work he’d been doing before. But for now, while he waited to regain his security clearance—it had been effectively suspended upon his retirement—he didn’t have a lot to keep himself busy.

  Except his paranoia. Since November, when he had mailed his secret offer to the Libyans, crossing a point of no return, his mind had been gripped by an ever-present fear of being found out. It was true that he’d taken every precaution to stay anonymous. He couldn’t help but think about the enormous risks he had taken by first stealing and stashing classified information, and then making contact with a hostile intelligence service, neither of which could be undone. From all the counterintelligence investigations he had read about on Intelink, he knew he was playing a dangerous game in which one wrong move could give him away. He found himself worrying constantly about being watched. He had to make sure that wasn’t the case.

  That’s why he’d recently taken to getting on the subway and then hopping off at the last minute, right before the doors closed, to see if anybody stepped out of the train to shadow him. On this morning, just a short while after he’d come into work, he drove away from TRW and sped through the streets of Chantilly, darting glances at the rearview mirror. As he approached an exit for Interstate 66, he swerved from the left lane all the way over to the right, just in time to get on the ramp for I-66 West. If a car was following him, he assumed, it would have to switch lanes as suddenly as he had, revealing itself to him. He raced on at breakneck speed for ten miles and got off at an exit for Manassas National Battlefield Park.

  Entering the park, he drove up a one-way dirt road. When he got halfway to the end, he stopped the van and turned off the engine.

  He scanned his surroundings. There were no cars driving up from behind, which he took to be a reassuring sign. He sat there for twenty minutes, watching for any activity that might indicate surveillance. He saw none.

  An old pickup truck drove past; it looked like nothing out of the ordinary. Regan stepped out of the van. He walked a few yards into the forested area by the road and placed a couple of Mad magazines on the ground. Then he hopped back into the van and returned to work, stopping for lunch along the way.

  Later that day, he drove back to the park to retrieve the magazines. They were exactly where he had left them. He felt certain he wasn’t being watched.

  He was wrong.

  • • •

  The FBI began surveilling Brian Regan in late April 2001, shortly after Steven Carr and his fellow investigators had linked the Intelink documents in the intercepted package to Regan’s computer at the NRO. In the bureau, this initial monitoring of a suspect goes by the euphemism “get to know you.” Teams of surveillance specialists followed him on his commute from home to TRW’s offices in Chantilly and back. Regan took a bus from home to the subway, switched trains to get to a metro stop near Chantilly, and then boarded another bus to get to the parking lot of an apartment building where he kept his van. The vehicle was in such precarious condition that Regan didn’t trust it enough to drive it all the way from Bowie to Chantilly, using it only for the last leg of the commute.

  Surveillance is one of the most resource-intensive tasks in law enforcement. Investigative agencies like the FBI and the Drug Enforcement Administration often have to deploy dozens of people to monitor a single target. Case agents are under constant pressure to justify committing so many resources to shadowing a suspect, since there’s never any guarantee that the surveillance will yield something useful. How to know if the target is the right one to focus on? How to be certain that the investigation is on the right track?

  If there were any doubts in Carr’s mind about Regan being the spy, they were laid to rest on May 23 when surveillance teams observed Regan driving like a lunatic from TRW to Manassas Battlefield National Park. Just because Regan had failed to notice any cars following him didn’t mean there weren’t any. When Regan was parked on the dirt road, Carr was on the phone with a surveillance specialist nicknamed Smitty, who was watching Regan’s v
an from a distance.

  “We’ve got a live one,” Smitty told Carr.

  “What do you mean?” Carr asked.

  Smitty described how Regan had been driving and how he’d come to a stop in the middle of nowhere.

  “What are you doing?” Carr wanted to know.

  Smitty said surveillance couldn’t possibly drive up the dirt road in the car they were using. It would look suspicious.

  “Do you have any pickup trucks or anything?”

  “Yes, we do,” Smitty answered. Soon after, the team had a pickup truck drive by Regan’s van. Smitty called Carr back.

  “He’s just sitting in the van.”

  None of these observations constituted evidence that would help Carr build his case. They wouldn’t have any value in court. Regan hadn’t broken any laws by leaving a couple of magazines in the park and collecting them later. But his unusual behavior showed that he was watching to see if he was being watched. In Carr’s eyes, it was undeniable proof of guilt.

  • • •

  After the five-hour flight from Washington, D.C., to San Diego, Regan could have used a shower and a nap to get over his jet lag. Instead, he picked up a rental car at the airport and headed south, toward Mexico.

  After driving for two hours, he parked the car next to a highway on the U.S. side of the border with Mexico. He’d brought along a voice-activated recorder that he placed on top of one of the rear tires. From where he’d parked, he rode a shuttle bus that took him across the border into Mexico, where he wandered about in a shopping mall.

  Returning to the car a couple of hours later, he retrieved the recorder and played it back. If anybody had approached the vehicle in his absence, he expected the recorder to turn on.

  There was just one complication, however—one key detail that Regan hadn’t thought of. The noise of traffic from the highway, it turned out, was enough to activate the recorder. When Regan listened to it, all he could hear was the sound of vehicles roaring past.

  He played the audio again and again, trying to listen for evidence that his security had been compromised. He was finally convinced that it hadn’t.

  Satisfied, he boarded a flight back to Washington, D.C. The trip’s only purpose had been to check for surveillance. He was exhausted from traveling from the East Coast to the West Coast and back in the span of a day, but no effort was too much for him in his quest for operational security.

  And in that, he had succeeded. For when he got off the plane at Reagan National Airport in D.C. to execute the next step in his plan, the FBI’s surveillance teams still had no idea where he was.

  • • •

  It was evening when Regan left the airport, driving a rental SUV. He had another trip to make, but first he needed to make a stop at home in Bowie. He had to pack a few things.

  He had written them down on a checklist. One was a GPS navigator—a Garmin III—that he’d recently bought for $320. He wouldn’t have had to purchase it if he’d been able to keep the GPS device given to him at the NRO, but he’d had to turn that in when he retired. He’d also ordered a pair of night-vision goggles ten days before flying to San Diego; when he got to the house, he was glad to find that they had arrived. At $245, the goggles were a pricey purchase, but he was sure he was going to need them.

  He put them in his backpack, along with the GPS. There were sundry other items on his list, and he crossed them out one by one.

  Shovel, tape measure, gloves. Check.

  Toothbrush, paste, razor. Check.

  Snacks, drinks, vodka bottle. Check.

  When he had finished packing, Regan drove 150 miles south, past Richmond, to Chester, Virginia. His first stop was a public storage facility where he’d been renting space since the end of 2000. In there, under lock and key, were fifteen thousand pages of secret documents and other classified materials—everything he’d stolen, save what he’d buried in Patapsco Valley State Park. He’d kept the stash hidden in the basement of his house for several months before deciding that it was too risky.

  He hauled the documents out of the storage unit and loaded them into the SUV. From there he drove to a nearby motel and checked into a room. With its grimy carpeting and a bed that seemed flea-ridden, the accommodations were anything but inviting. But Regan didn’t care. If his plan worked, he’d never need to stay in a room like this again in his life.

  • • •

  He had sorted the documents before. Sitting in the room, he sorted them again, with the intention of bundling different stacks of papers into individual packages. As he thumbed through the documents, he came across a number of reports and images whose importance he hadn’t quite grasped earlier.

  These materials, he realized, were even more sensitive than what he’d buried in Patapsco. The secrets they contained were simply too damaging to be sold.

  He set them aside.

  It was the oddest of all the choices he had made since the summer of 1999 when he began contemplating espionage. He had rationalized the idea of betraying the country for money because he’d convinced himself that the U.S. government hadn’t treated him fairly. He’d spelled out that self-justification in his offer to the Libyans. If basketball players and Hollywood stars in the United States could make millions, he had written, surely he deserved more than just a pension for the years of service to his country.

  That rationale had driven him onward in his conspiracy, and he had marched forward, steadily, unhesitatingly, until this moment, when he found himself staring at a line he didn’t want to cross. For somebody who had spent months masterminding a traitorous scheme, it was strange to be acting out of any sense of loyalty toward the country. But even treason has its limits, and Regan had reached as far as he was willing to go. He couldn’t let this subset of documents fall into anybody’s hands.

  He didn’t want to risk holding on to them, either. There was no question of bringing them back to the NRO. The only option he had was to destroy them.

  He went into the bathroom and turned on the bathtub faucet. When the tub filled up with a couple of inches of water, he put the sheaf of documents in it, letting the pages soak. He watched as the water turned cloudy from the ink dissolving off the documents. Mangling the wet papers with his hands, he turned them into a soggy, mulchlike mess.

  He picked up the dripping mass from the tub and tried flushing it down the toilet, realizing immediately what a terrible idea that was. The toilet got clogged and overflowed. Before things could get worse, he fished the pulp out of the water and put it into a garbage bag. Stepping out of the motel into a nearby alley, he tossed the bag into a dumpster and walked away.

  • • •

  Returning to his room, Regan stuffed the remaining pages into Tupperware containers and cardboard boxes and wrapped them up in garbage bags. When he was done, he had before him twelve packages in all. They sat on the mattress and the floor, looking like nondescript goods at a warehouse. To Regan, they might as well have been gold bricks.

  Taking six of the packages with him, he drove to Pocahontas State Park, twenty miles away. As he entered the park, the noise of traffic faded away. He left the vehicle at a parking lot and followed a hiking trail into the woods, the sound of his footsteps accentuated by the stillness of the night. He had put on the night-vision goggles to begin with, but they were bulky and soon proved to be a bother. There was enough light for him to be able to see clearly without them. He took them off and trekked on through the trees. He was far away from the park’s camping grounds and picnic tables. The handle of a shovel, which he’d shortened with a saw, poked out of the top of his backpack like an antenna.

  After walking for several minutes, he veered off the trail and stopped at a clearing. He lowered the backpack, pulled out the shovel, and began digging, carefully piling the dirt on a plastic sheet to avoid leaving any sign of the dig. When the hole was big enough, he dropped a package in and cover
ed it up, packing up the leftover dirt in the plastic sheet. Then, as he’d done in Patapsco, he hammered nails into a nearby tree and measured the distance from it to the burial site with his tape measure. From the Garmin, he jotted down the latitude and longitude of the location.

  Regan buried the remaining five packages in similar fashion that night. Then he drove back to the motel, completely exhausted. He would return to the park the following night to bury the other set of six packages.

  • • •

  On the evening of June 13, investigative specialist Ronald Good sat at a desk inside the Crofton Community Library in Maryland, flipping through a magazine. His colleague William Wickman stood a few feet away, scanning the titles on the shelves. To a casual observer, it would have seemed like the two men were absorbed in their own worlds. But in fact, their attention was focused on Brian Regan.

  Regan had resurfaced only days before, in early June, following a vanishing act that had lasted for the better part of a week. Ever since, the bureau’s surveillance personnel had intensified their watch on him, hoping not to lose him again. On this evening, Good and Wickman and other members of their team had followed Regan from TRW’s offices to the Crofton library. A little past seven p.m., after Regan entered the library and sat down at one of the computers, Good walked over and seated himself behind him. Wickman, who was watching from farther away, took out a camera and snapped a photo of Regan from behind a bookcase.

  They could tell that Regan had an Internet browser open on the screen, but it was hard to see what he was looking at. After half an hour of surfing, Regan got up, collected some printouts, and left.

  Good rose from his chair, eager to get to the computer Regan had been using. Before he could reach it, however, a woman took the spot. He bided his time while the woman searched the library’s catalog for the next several minutes.