When she got up, he grabbed the seat. Wickman came over to join him. They noticed that Regan had forgotten to close the Internet browser. He’d merely minimized the window before he left the terminal.
With a click of the mouse, Wickman maximized it. Hitting the “back” button over and over, he was able to retrieve many of the pages that Regan had looked at throughout his surfing session. The surveillance specialists couldn’t believe their luck. After going to incredible lengths to detect surveillance, Regan had failed to do the simplest of things to cover his tracks. If he’d taken the trouble to exit the browser, tracing his surfing activity on the terminal would have been a much harder task. Since it was a public computer, the browser wasn’t set up to store any history once users ended their sessions.
Wickman clicked through the pages, printing them out as he went. Regan had spent time on the Lycos search engine, entering terms like “Embassies of the Arab world,” “Libyan embassy,” “consulate of Libya.” In the pages showing the results, certain Web links were highlighted in purple—these were the sites that Regan had clicked on. From the searches and the highlighted links, it was evident that Regan had looked for the addresses of Libyan embassies and consulates in a number of foreign countries, including France and Switzerland. He had also looked up Iraqi embassies.
What Wickman and his colleagues gleaned that evening wasn’t enough for Carr to figure out Regan’s next move. But it gave the FBI more evidence to press for authority under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) to listen to Regan’s telephone calls and to ask for resources to watch him around the clock instead of sixteen hours a day. Carr had submitted the FISA request eight weeks earlier, supporting it with all the evidence that pointed to Regan as the sender of the letters. But reviewers in the Office of Intelligence Policy and Review at the Department of Justice—the unit responsible for obtaining the required permission from FISA court—still doubted that the FBI had done enough to exclude all other potential suspects.
There were good reasons for the DOJ to be cautious. The FBI had made a grave mistake in a recent high-profile counterespionage investigation. Agents had spent years investigating a CIA officer named Brian Kelly on the suspicion that he was a KGB mole. Their determined pursuit of Kelly as the prime suspect in the case all but broke the man. He was followed 24/7; his phone was tapped; his family members were subjected to interrogation. He was suspended from the CIA for a year without pay. It was only in late 2000 that the FBI found evidence showing that the mole agents had been looking for was in fact not Kelly but one of the bureau’s own: Russian counterintelligence analyst Robert Hanssen. Even though the FBI was subsequently able to redeem itself by arresting Hanssen in February 2001, the episode had made some in the DOJ wary of future mistakes.
The surveillance at the Crofton library gave Carr the ammunition to remove any doubts that the OIPR had. It was too much of a coincidence for Regan to be searching for addresses of Libyan and Iraqi embassies—using the anonymity afforded by a public library—unless he was the sender of the offer the FBI had intercepted.
The FISA authority was granted within forty-eight hours, and agents promptly began eavesdropping on Regan’s phone calls. Most were short conversations between him and Anette about household matters. Regan was clearly the less talkative of the two, rarely responding to Anette in more than monosyllables. It didn’t seem that anything useful could be gleaned from tapping his phones. Then, in one call, agents heard Regan mention upcoming travel, although it wasn’t clear where he would be traveling.
The answer emerged over the next few days. On June 20, as surveillance specialists watched Regan riding the subway, they saw him looking at a foldout map. He tore out a section of it, and at his stop (or similar), he got off the train, leaving the rest of the map tucked in the gap between his seat and the side of the compartment. James Bond would have been appalled.
Despite his abundance of caution, Regan wasn’t immune to this kind of complacence. In fact, his absentmindedness, investigators would come to realize, made him prone to it.
The surveillance team collected the foldout. It was a map of Switzerland. The section Regan had taken with him was the part that covered the city of Bern. Four days later, Regan was once again seen at the Crofton library, this time researching youth hostels in Bern and Zurich in addition to embassy addresses in France, Switzerland, and Germany. Checking with various airlines, investigators learned that Regan was set to fly to Berlin on June 26 and return to the United States on July 3.
For U.S. law enforcement to conduct surveillance in another country is tricky business, for it could mean violating the laws of that country. That’s not to say the FBI never does it. But in Regan’s case, there was simply not enough time for agents to come up with a plan to watch him in Europe. Carr was worried that his quarry was going dark again, but there was nothing he could do about it. All he could hope was that Regan would come back.
• • •
As Lufthansa Flight 415 took off from Washington’s Dulles International Airport for Berlin, Regan gazed out of the window and thought about the mission that lay ahead. He had accomplished what he had always believed to be the hardest part of his plan: accumulating a trove of secrets and stashing them. He had assumed that selling the information would be a cakewalk in comparison. But that expectation hadn’t panned out. For more than two months after having written to Libyan intelligence in November 2000, he had diligently scanned the classified section of the Washington Post, expecting to spot the used-car ad he’d asked them to place to initiate contact. He’d seen nothing of the sort. Frustrated, he’d stopped looking.
However, he wasn’t willing to give up on the plan after having come so far. There was simply too much riding on it. In the months since he’d begun stealing documents, the mountain of debt he faced had only grown bigger. He had even had to forge Anette’s signature to apply for new credit cards. Meanwhile, Anette had purchased for $6,000 a horse that she was having shipped from Sweden later that summer. Anybody with an inkling of the couple’s financial situation would have called her crazy, but Regan hadn’t raised objections. Given the millions of dollars he was expecting from his espionage, $6,000 seemed like pocket change.
He had thought long and hard about why the Libyans hadn’t responded. Perhaps his offer hadn’t reached the right person within Libyan intelligence. Perhaps they had been wary of dealing with somebody who was hell-bent on remaining anonymous. The thing to do, he had concluded, was to relax his condition of anonymity. He would make contact with potential buyers face-to-face. He’d have to go knocking on doors like a salesman.
It would have been convenient for Regan to walk into the Libyan embassy in Washington, D.C. But he had learned enough about American counterintelligence to know how closely the FBI monitored foreign embassies and consulates in the United States. There was no way he would be able to get in undetected. That’s why he’d decided to fly to Europe, where he was certain of being able to try his luck without risk.
Having landed in Berlin, Regan traveled to Munich and then on to Bern. He’d brought along a map of the city, which serves as Switzerland’s de facto capital. (The country has no officially declared capital city.) The address he was looking for was Tavelweg 2, CH 3006. It was just east of downtown, a mile from the scenic Aare River, which winds through Bern.
He had no trouble getting to it. An elegant two-story mansion stood there, in the middle of a lush green lawn fenced in from the sidewalk by a row of hedges. The flags of Libya and Switzerland fluttered inside the compound. On the wall next to an iron gate leading into the property was a plate that read: EMBASSY OF THE GREAT SOCIALIST PEOPLE’S LIBYAN ARAB JAMAHIRIYA. It was the official name that President Muammar Gaddhafi had given to the country in 1977, a few years after coming to power through a military coup.
Regan walked in. Going up to the front desk, he asked to speak to the security officer. He didn’t offer an introduction, alth
ough it was obvious from his accent that he was American.
A while later, a member of the staff led him into a back room. Regan explained that he had access to secret information that could be of value to the Libyan government. He could only discuss his offer with a senior official, he said, somebody who had the authority to handle intelligence matters.
The staffer, who wasn’t fluent in English, indicated that he was having trouble understanding Regan. He had Regan sit at a computer and asked him to type up his request so that it could be passed on to the right officials.
Regan had thought he would be welcomed with open arms. And here he was having to struggle with a language barrier just to get to the negotiating table. Was this really how a spy with reams of secrets in his possession deserved to be treated? It was maddening.
Regan sat at the computer and began typing a message, expecting it to be a last formality before he got his desired meeting. But while he was in the middle of it, an official walked in demanding to know how the embassy staff had allowed an unknown American to come in.
Regan didn’t get a chance to explain. He was marched out of the building. “Don’t ever come back,” the official told him.
Regan couldn’t understand why he had been kicked out. He had no idea that walk-ins, or volunteer spies, were treated suspiciously by intelligence services around the world. To the embassy authorities, Regan had in all likelihood come across as a dangle—an agent sent to gain their trust and gather intelligence on behalf of an enemy. He might have had a better chance of establishing his credibility if he’d first identified the right security official—perhaps by watching the embassy gates for employees who arrived at work in expensive cars—and then approaching that official at a different venue, like a parking lot.
Troubled as he was by the failure, Regan didn’t see it as the end of the road. He made the most of the rest of his stay in Europe, binge-drinking and sightseeing in Nice and Zurich. He made a phone call to Anette to tell her that he’d been out in the field working. Then he flew back to Washington, no less determined to succeed.
• • •
With Regan back in the United States, the FBI pondered its next move. The bureau still didn’t have enough evidence to arrest Regan. To question him at this stage could ruin the prospects of ever finding out precisely what he had done. At the same time, Carr realized that simply waiting and watching wasn’t enough. The FBI had to make every effort to catch Regan red-handed in the act of espionage.
Regan’s new employer—TRW—knew nothing about the investigation. The company was waiting for him to get back his security clearance so that he could do the work he’d been hired for. Since Regan had a foreign-born spouse, the process was expected to take longer than usual, because of some additional security reviews. Still, more than ten months had passed since TRW had submitted the application for his clearance to the Department of Defense, and company managers were beginning to get impatient. In February, Regan’s supervisor at TRW had written a letter to the Pentagon urging authorities to accelerate the approval process. But in May, the company had been told that Regan’s paperwork needed to be resubmitted, which meant the clearance could take another few months.
On July 24, Carr went to the NRO. He brought along his laptop, on which he’d prepared a PowerPoint presentation about the case. The audience for his briefing was the senior leadership of the NRO. They had gathered in the conference room of the NRO director, Keith Hall.
With his round, mustachioed countenance and smiling demeanor, Hall could have been easily cast as a jolly uncle in a Christmas movie. His genial air belied an independent mindedness that had served him well over the years. Hall had begun his intelligence career in the Army, commanding two field intelligence units during the 1970s. He had gone on to serve for eight years as a staff member on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence before moving to the Pentagon in 1991 as the deputy assistant secretary of defense for intelligence and security. Hall had been appointed director of the NRO in 1997, at a time when the agency was facing heat from Congress for financial mismanagement that had led to the disappearance of $4 billion in funds. Even by the standards of fraud and wastage in defense spending, it was not an inconsiderable amount of money to have gone missing, and so, since taking over, Hall had focused most of his attention on improving the accountability of how the NRO spent its vast budget.
A different kind of accountability was on his mind as he sat down for the briefing. Hall had learned about Regan from his staff in the spring and had lost a lot of sleep in the months since, worrying about the extent of the damage that might have been caused. As with finances, the buck on security, too, stopped with the director’s office.
He sat at one end of a long conference table. Carr sat at the other end, in front of a briefing board. There were more than a dozen other people in the room, including Debra Donahoo, the head of counterintelligence at the NRO. The mood was somber as Carr went through his slides over the next forty-five minutes, providing a detailed timeline of the investigation and where things stood. Then, looking straight at Hall, he laid out a couple of options.
One was to grant Regan his security clearance and have him come back to the NRO. “You can put him back into a position of access,” Carr said. “We will surveil him. We will apply every FISA technique we can possibly apply. We will watch his every move and we’ll guard your equities to the best of our abilities.”
The other option was to deny Regan the clearance. “You say no, he goes back out on the street. He tries to find a security job someplace else,” Carr told the group. In that event, the FBI would just have to pursue Regan wherever he went next. The NRO would no longer be involved in the investigation.
However, there was a downside to shutting Regan out of the NRO, Carr pointed out. It would make it hard for the FBI to find out what classified information Regan had taken and what he’d done with it. “We may never find out where that information is,” Carr said.
It couldn’t have been clearer which of the two options Carr was recommending.
Hall looked around the table at his deputies. None of them was keen to endorse Carr’s proposal. Some were strongly opposed. It was bad enough for the NRO that a spy had been able to operate within the organization for months without raising any red flags. To knowingly let him come back and possibly steal more information seemed like lunacy. Moreover, it was the FBI’s job to hunt Regan down and uncover his whole plot. The smart thing for the NRO to do, most of Hall’s deputies felt, was to limit any further liability.
Hall could see their point. The NRO would definitely be putting itself at risk by allowing Regan to have access again. If things went wrong, the NRO leadership would be held accountable for having handed an espionage suspect the keys to the kingdom. Hall would personally never be able to live down the ignominy.
Yet, he also understood—perhaps better than many in the room—the risks of failing to bring Regan to justice. Hall had become intimately familiar with the impact of espionage on national security beginning in 1985, when the FBI and its partner agencies made a string of high-profile spy arrests, including John Walker Jr. and Jonathan Pollard. The year would later come to be known as the Year of the Spy. Hall’s position at the time as a staffer on the Senate Intelligence Committee had given him an appreciation of how important it was to hunt down moles and prosecute them. Years later, at the Pentagon, he had helped coordinate the government’s response to the fallout from the betrayal of the CIA’s Aldrich Ames, serving as the first chair of the National Counterintelligence Policy Board.
He asked Carr how the FBI planned to monitor Regan at the NRO if he was allowed to come back.
A surveillance camera would watch his work space, and every keystroke on his computer would be logged, Carr replied.
Hall looked around the table once again. Then he leaned back in his chair and clasped his hands behind his head. “We’re going to do it,” he said. “We�
��re going to put him back into access.” Then he brought his hands to the table and leaned forward, looking at Carr. “You have one hundred twenty days to figure this out.”
CHAPTER 6
NABBED
On Monday, July 30, after a relaxing weekend trip to Virginia Beach with Anette and the kids, Regan showed up for work at his new office in an NRO building two miles from the agency’s headquarters. He had received a phone call from a security officer at TRW the week before, delivering the good news he’d been waiting for since late 2000. At long last, his clearance had come through. He could finally stop worrying about his future with TRW. Not that he’d have to bother about employment for too long.
He badged in and spent the morning getting a customary security briefing. In the afternoon, an office manager led Regan to a suite he was to share with another worker. It had two workstations facing each other. Regan looked around, studying the space.
“I don’t want to sit here,” he said.
His eyes were on a one-person suite across the hall. It was vacant. He walked over to it and put his bag down, saying he’d prefer to sit at that desk instead of the one he’d been given. There, he would be by himself, without a coworker directly across from him.
The manager didn’t see any reason to object.
But Regan’s seemingly innocuous seating preference caused a stir at the NRO headquarters, where an FBI agent—along with counterintelligence officials from the NRO and the Air Force Office of Special Investigations—sat inside a conference room watching a video monitor. The agent made a phone call to Steve Carr.
“Hello,” Carr answered. He’d been eagerly waiting since morning for an update.
“He’s not sitting at his desk,” the agent informed Carr, referring to Regan.
In the days prior—right after the NRO director gave permission to bring Regan back—investigators had worked speedily to bug the office space Regan was going to be stationed at. Carr didn’t want to waste any time in putting Regan into a position of access, especially after Regan’s worrying weeklong trip to Europe, which had heightened the FBI’s sense of urgency. Working together, specialists from AFOSI and the FBI had installed a pinhole video camera in the ceiling right above what was to be Regan’s desk.
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