The Spy Who Couldn't Spell

by Yudhijit Bhattacharjee

  • • •

  At twelve fifteen p.m., in another parking lot ten miles away—right next to Dulles Airport—Special Agent Bill Lace stepped out of his car to brief a team of FBI personnel. He had rounded up more than two dozen agents and staff from the Washington Field Office to put together a plan for searching Regan’s luggage at the airport that afternoon. Although the duffel bag had already been searched, investigators didn’t know what else Regan was planning to take along on the trip, and they wanted to be prepared to look through all of his belongings—including checked baggage and other carry-ons—before he got to the departure gate.

  For the briefing, Lace had asked everybody to meet in the parking lot of the Courtyard Marriott near Dulles. As they were gathering, one of the FBI’s surveillance specialists drove up to Lace to deliver an urgent message.

  “Cast Led is here!” he yelled from inside the car, using the bureau’s code name for Regan.

  “What are you talking about?” Lace asked, surprised.

  “He’s right on the other side of the parking lot!”

  The surveillance team had seen Regan leave his office building an hour and a half earlier, soon after he and McNulty returned from the NRO. He’d first driven to a Staples, and then to the Courtyard Marriott, arriving there exactly at the same time that Lace and his colleagues were assembling there.

  “OK, everybody back to their car!” Lace told the others, hurriedly reentering his own parked vehicle. If Regan were to notice the huddle in the middle of the lot, he would definitely have reason to be suspicious, and that could seriously jeopardize the investigation.

  The group scattered. Sitting in his car, Lace scanned the other end of the parking lot. He finally spotted Regan’s van, from which he saw Regan emerge and walk into the hotel through a side entrance. Minutes later, much to Lace’s relief, he returned to the van and drove away.

  • • •

  From the hotel, Regan drove to the airport. His flight wasn’t until a few hours later, but he wanted to check in early. The Lufthansa counter hadn’t opened yet, however, and he had to wait for an hour before he was able to drop off his suitcase and pick up his boarding pass. Puzzlingly enough for the surveillance team, he then drove back to his office instead of staying at the airport until his scheduled time of departure.

  The reason became clear a couple of hours later when Regan drove back to the Courtyard Marriott and parked. By leaving his vehicle there, he wouldn’t have to pay for parking at Dulles. He had made the earlier trip to the hotel to find out the pickup times of the Marriott’s free shuttle service to the airport.

  Before getting on the shuttle, Regan opened up the hood of the van. He took off his wedding ring and put it in the carburetor along with his car keys. Experience had taught him that the ring was a liability when it came to picking up women. The trip he was about to make wasn’t just for espionage. He had another kind of betrayal in mind.

  At Dulles, Lace and his fellow agents were waiting at the gate closest to the Lufthansa counter. They were all wearing uniforms bearing the logo of Argenbright—a company contracted to provide security at the airport. The plan was to whisk away Regan’s carry-ons for a search when he came through. But Regan didn’t show up, even though surveillance had seen him board the shuttle bus at the Marriott.

  Carr met up with the team. He still hadn’t received word on whether Regan was to be arrested or not. Carr’s supervisor—Lydia Jechorek—had gone over to the Department of Justice to brief officials about the status of the investigation. Regardless of what the DOJ ended up deciding on the question of arresting Regan, the top brass within the FBI and the NRO had made up their minds not to allow Regan to leave the country.

  To guarantee that, the government had taken an unusually rare step. In the hours prior, the State Department had issued a letter signed by Secretary of State Colin Powell revoking Regan’s passport. Carr was carrying the letter in his pocket. He’d been instructed that it was to be used only as a last resort.

  While Carr and the others waited anxiously at the gate expecting Regan to arrive at any minute, Jechorek was pressing her case at the Department of Justice. In the room was John Dion, a tall, wiry attorney in charge of counterespionage matters at the DOJ. The arrest had to be authorized by him.

  Dion was an intense man in his sixties who had been involved in the prosecution of nearly every important spy case since the beginning of the Cold War. Jechorek had known him since 1985, when she investigated Jonathan Pollard, the naval intelligence analyst who was convicted of passing U.S. secrets to Israel. The first time Jechorek made Dion’s acquaintance was when he took her to task for having arrested Pollard without authorization from the DOJ. Back then, she hadn’t known the rules. This time, she had no such excuse.

  It seemed simple enough: all she had to do was brief Dion on Regan and ask that the FBI be allowed to arrest him. There was a frustrating bureaucratic hurdle, though, that stood in the way. According to newly instituted rules at the DOJ, FBI agents weren’t allowed to speak directly to officials in charge of making prosecutorial decisions. In matters related to national security, the bureau was required to go through the Office of Intelligence Policy and Review—the same office the investigators had approached when they wanted authorization to conduct surveillance on Regan.

  The problem was that the head of OIPR, James Baker, was out for a few hours attending to some other official business. He was expected back by the middle of the afternoon, and Jechorek and the other FBI officials who had accompanied her had no choice but to wait. Meanwhile, Jechorek’s cell phone kept ringing every few minutes. The person calling her was Anthony Buckmeier, a colleague of hers from the Washington Field Office who was supervising the operation at the airport.

  “Did you get the authorization?” he asked.

  “Not yet,” Jechorek answered. “We’re waiting for Jim Baker.”

  “What do you mean, you’re waiting for Jim Baker?” The uncertainty was driving Carr and the other agents crazy, Buckmeier explained, dropping a few F-bombs along the way.

  “I’ll call you as soon as a decision is made,” Jechorek replied, glancing at her watch for what seemed like the hundredth time.

  • • •

  To give itself some breathing room, the FBI had asked Lufthansa earlier that day to bump Regan to a later flight. The airline had obliged willingly, offering him a first-class seat on Flight 419, scheduled to leave at six fifteen. But now, even this extra time was dangerously close to running out. Not only were the agents vexed by the delay in decision making at the DOJ; they were also concerned that there was no sign of Regan with just over an hour to go before departure.

  Then it dawned on Carr that Regan didn’t necessarily have to come to the gate where the agents had positioned themselves. Since he’d collected his boarding pass earlier, he could go through security at the west end of the airport, which the Marriott’s shuttle would have gotten to first. It was a simple detail that had been overlooked despite all the meticulous planning.

  “Crap,” Carr said. He scrambled toward the other gate, accompanied by an agent named Dave Lambert and two SWAT team members. By now, surveillance specialists were scanning the west end, and one of them spotted Regan going through security. By the time Carr and the others got to the concourse, Regan had stepped into a coach that was taking passengers to Terminal C, where his flight was to depart from.

  “He’s on People Mover Number Five,” a surveillance specialist said on the radio, using the name the bus-sized vehicles were known by.

  Carr could see Regan all the way at the back of the coach, his tall figure standing out in the crowd.

  “Do not let this people mover move,” Carr told the driver, who was standing out in the front.

  “Who the hell are you?” the driver asked. He was about to close the doors.

  Carr flashed his badge. “It’s not going anywhere until you see m
e get off,” he said.

  “OK,” the driver said, backing off.

  Carr and Lambert stepped into the coach, which was jam-packed and as hot as a furnace. Outside, the runways shimmered under the hot August sun. Carr wished he hadn’t worn a suit.

  Carr didn’t have the authorization to arrest, but he had the letter to revoke Regan’s passport. It was now or never.

  The two agents started making their way through the crowd. “Excuse me. Pardon me. Coming through,” Carr said as they inched toward the back. Finally, the two men stood face-to-face with Regan.

  “Mr. Regan,” Carr said, holding up his badge. “I’m with the FBI. We have a couple of questions for you. Do you mind coming with us?”

  Carr’s voice was calm and friendly, but his mind was racing with anticipation. What would be the best move if Regan got physical? Carr visualized grabbing his baton and swinging it at the spy, but he wondered if there would be enough room in this crowd to do that without hitting anybody else.

  Regan stared at Carr with a dazed expression, looking not the least bit menacing. Carr thought he looked like a teddy bear.

  “Sure,” he replied, picking up his duffel bag. The agents led him out of the coach and onto the concourse. Holding him by the elbow, they marched him into a room the FBI had arranged for the questioning.

  The three men sat down at a table, Regan facing the two agents. All day, Carr had been agitated about not getting authorization to arrest Regan, but right now, he saw that indecision as a blessing. It meant that Regan didn’t have to be read his Miranda rights, improving the chances that he would submit to the interview. Carr’s plan was to keep Regan talking for as long as possible, which was why he had asked the other agents not to knock on the door even if they got word from the DOJ. For no matter what the DOJ’s decision was, Carr knew, it was likely to halt the interview.

  “Why are you going to Germany?” Carr asked.

  “Because I can,” Regan replied. He looked relaxed.

  “On business or pleasure?”

  “Pleasure.”

  “What does your wife think?”

  “Business.” The answer was matter-of-fact.

  “Do you know anything about code?” Carr asked.

  “No,” Regan said, unhesitatingly.

  “Really?” Carr said. He slid a sheet over to Regan. It was the cover letter that was in each of the three packages mailed to the Libyan embassy. “Do you recognize this?”

  Regan scanned the document. “I have no idea what this is,” he said, looking up.

  “What about this?” Carr asked, this time sliding over a copy of the alphabetic key found in the codebook sent to the Libyans.

  Once again, Regan didn’t flinch. He claimed not to have seen the document before.

  “Am I going to be able to make my flight?” he asked. It was five fifteen p.m.

  The agents didn’t answer. There was a knock on the door. Duncan Wainwright, the chief attorney of the FBI’s Washington Field Office, poked his head in.

  “Can I talk to you, Dave?” Wainwright asked Lambert.

  Wainwright hadn’t been there earlier when Carr had instructed everybody not to interrupt the interview. In any case, Wainwright’s job was to ensure that all the rules were followed, even if that conflicted with Carr’s desire for an extended interview with the subject.

  Minutes earlier, Jechorek had called from the DOJ and spoken to Tony Buckmeier, the supervisor in charge at the airport.

  “We have authorization to arrest Regan,” she had said. “About time,” Buckmeier had replied. Wainwright conveyed the decision to Lambert outside the interview room.

  A little later, Lambert came back in with a document in hand. “Brian, you know how government works,” he said, casually. “We’re going to have to get you to sign this advice-of-rights form.” It was the equivalent of reading Regan his Miranda rights, except that it sounded like routine paperwork. Carr and Lambert made him initial every line, including one that read: “You may refuse to answer any question if a truthful answer to the question would tend to incriminate you.” The formality over, the interview resumed.

  Carr took out eight-by-ten glossy photographs of the sheets with trinomial numbers that agents had found in Regan’s duffel bag that morning. He pushed them toward Regan.

  “Can you tell me what this is?” Carr asked.

  Regan looked down at it. His face fell.

  “This is my stuff,” he said, his voice wavering. Suddenly, he looked deflated, as if the air had been sucked out of him. “I think I need a lawyer.”

  The agents stood up and opened the door. “The interview is over,” Carr told the agents outside. Wainwright walked into the room.

  “Brian, you understand what’s happening here,” he said. “You are under arrest.”

  CHAPTER 7

  DECIPHER THIS

  Carr stared at the words in front of him.

  Tricycle Lockpost Glove Motorcycle.

  He read on.

  Switch Weapon Pen Las Vegas.

  Thirteen words in all, along with the curious notation “21month” scribbled sideways across the page of a spiral notebook that agents had found on Regan when they searched him after his arrest. Now, two days later, Carr sat in a large conference room at the Washington Field Office puzzling over what the innocuous string of words could possibly mean.

  They made no sense, just like the four sheets of handwritten trinomes Regan had been carrying in his accordion folder. There were other seemingly nonsensical notes that agents had recovered from him. In his wallet, he had been carrying a three-by-five index card with twenty-six words that could have been randomly plucked out of a dictionary. Also found in the wallet was a piece of paper penned with a sequence of letters and numbers that looked like gobbledygook. The four lines on it began “56NVOAIP . . .” and ended with “. . . 18837795.”

  In Regan’s checked-in brown suitcase, agents had found an assortment of things that to them seemed odd: a bag of sand, a Tupperware container, six plastic garbage bags, and a bottle of Elmer’s glue. In the duffel bag, Regan was carrying a GPS. The list of puzzling possessions didn’t end there. On the night of the arrest, after Regan was taken to the Central Virginia Regional Jail in Orange, Virginia—ninety miles from D.C.—a correctional officer had discovered, tucked between the inner and outer sole of Regan’s shoe, a folded piece of paper bearing handwritten addresses in Europe. They turned out to be the addresses of the Iraqi and Chinese embassies in France, Switzerland, and the Netherlands.

  Strange and inexplicable as these things were, they weren’t incriminating. On their own, they didn’t prove that Regan had committed espionage or that he’d even conspired to do so. There was nothing unlawful about writing down gibberish on sheets of paper, or hiding embassy addresses in one’s shoe. Regan had also done nothing illegal by lying to his boss about where he was going, even though he might have technically violated a rule at his job requiring advance notification of foreign travel. The only sensitive information agents had found in his luggage consisted of a handful of NRO course descriptions—the same document he’d been seen creating at his office on August 15 by cutting out portions of an NRO course catalog. Regan had kept two copies of it inside a pornographic magazine he was carrying in his duffel bag; he had assumed, erroneously, that security officials would find it awkward to thumb through an X-rated glossy if they decided to search his luggage. While the courses were classified, the course descriptions were not, and so their value as evidence of an espionage plot was fairly limited.

  Because of these reasons, the FBI had been compelled to mention the origins of the investigation in its criminal complaint against Regan, which Carr had helped to draft the day after the arrest. Without disclosing the source of the predicating information, the complaint laid out how the FBI—after learning that a number of classified documents had been provided to “the governm
ent of Country A”—had traced those documents to Regan’s computer at the NRO. It went on to describe Regan’s activities in the days and hours leading up to the afternoon of August 23, and listed the various materials seized from him, including the pages of trinomes—which were characterized as possible “handwritten encrypted messages”—and the GPS unit, which according to investigators could have been meant for locating a drop site. Based on these facts, the FBI’s charge was that Regan had conspired to commit espionage against the United States.

  But even though the complaint had relied on the intercepted packages to make the case against Regan, the agents and attorneys assembled in the conference room that morning knew that whatever had been handed to the FBI by the confidential informant was off-limits for the purpose of prosecution. As the group discussed its options, an uncomfortable question hung in the air. In the absence of alternate evidence, how could the government hope to prove the conspiracy charge?

  Reviewing the items in front of him, Carr looked again at the spiral notebook. It looked familiar. In a video recording of Regan’s work space from the morning of August 23, which Carr had had a chance to look at the day after the arrest, Regan was seen scribbling in a notebook that looked identical. It wasn’t hard to tell that it was, in fact, the same notebook, because the video showed Regan writing sideways on the page. That’s how the thirteen words had been penned in the notebook that Carr now had in front of him.

  “What was he looking at when he wrote these?” Carr quizzed his fellow agents.

  The answer wasn’t hard to find—it was in the records of Regan’s computer activity. Like most other days, Regan had logged in to Intelink within minutes of arriving at the office that morning. He was seen writing in the notebook while viewing an aerial image of the same Chinese missile launch facility that he’d looked at on August 15.