The Chinese military had been preparing the site for a test in prior weeks, and the United States had been monitoring the development through satellite reconnaissance. The image that Regan had looked at on the fifteenth had been photographed on August 9; the image he’d viewed on the twenty-third had been snapped two days earlier, on the twenty-first. The fact that spy satellites had taken at least two different pictures of the site within a two-week period showed how keen the United States was to follow what the Chinese were doing there.
“Thirteen words,” Carr wondered, looking at the image. “What’s on this page that is thirteen words?”
It struck him that the coordinates of the site—the digits of the latitude and longitude—added up to thirteen. Had Regan converted them into a code?
Just as Carr was mulling that over, an agent walked over to him with items that had been found in Regan’s wallet. Among them was an AT&T calling card with a Post-it note stuck on the back. Written on it was Regan’s Ameritrade account number, followed by the words “Hand Tree Hand Car.”
By Carr’s reasoning, each of the words on the Post-it represented a digit. Following a simple visual scheme, his guess was that “hand” stood for 5, corresponding to the number of fingers, “tree” represented 1, and “car” stood for 4.
Could 5154 possibly be the passcode Regan had set for his Ameritrade account? There was only one way to find out.
From the speakerphone on the conference table, Carr dialed Ameritrade’s 800 number. He went through the prompts and entered Regan’s account number. The system asked for Regan’s passcode.
Carr punched in “5154.”
There was silence around the table as Carr waited for the system to respond. The next couple of seconds seemed to go on forever. Then a recorded voice spoke up indicating that the passcode had been accepted.
In Regan’s wallet, agents had found a second Post-it note with his IRA account number. Below it was another series of words that Carr took to be the passcode to access the IRA account. Carr decided to test his theory again. One of the words was “skate.” Another was “stool.”
“What could ‘skate’ mean?” he asked, looking around the room.
Somebody suggested 8—the number that skaters learn to carve on the ice as part of a popular figure-skating exercise. Carr thought it was a logical guess.
He debated whether “stool” represented 4 or 3. After all, some stools have four legs; others have three. Carr wanted to get it right on the first try. He was worried that the wrong passcode could get them locked out of the account, foreclosing the option of trying out any further guesses.
Given Regan’s Irish background, Carr thought 3 was more likely. The classic Irish milking stool—used for sitting down by a cow’s udder to milk it—has three legs, not four.
He called the number for Regan’s IRA account and punched in the code he and the others had inferred. Once again, they got immediate access.
His hypothesis confirmed, Carr translated the thirteen words into digits, using the same pictorial logic he’d applied to crack the passcode. The first word in the string was “tricycle.” Sure enough, it corresponded to 3, the first digit in the latitude of the missile site. “Lockpost” signified 1; “motorcycle” and “switch” represented 2; “weapon”—evocative of a revolver with six chambers—translated to 6. Although less obvious, the words “Las Vegas” and “casino” represented the number 7, by virtue of their association with gambling, evoking the reference to “lucky 7.”
As the words fell into place one by one, fitting the coordinates perfectly, it became obvious to Carr and the others that Regan had adopted a strategy frequently employed by dyslexics: using images to remember text. The notation “21month” also became intelligible—it was a reference to the date, August 21, when the image of the missile site had been photographed.
When agents applied the same principle to the twenty-six words on the index card found in Regan’s wallet, they got two sets of coordinates. One of them was of the same Chinese launch site, except that Regan had marked it with a different date—August 9—indicating when the United States had photographed the site previously. The other coordinates specified the location of a mobile Iraqi surface-to-air missile launch system in the northern no-fly zone, again photographed on a specific date that Regan had encoded separately. Investigators realized that the index card was the same one Regan had been seen writing on a week before his arrest.
Now that they knew some of the information that Regan was planning to take with him to Europe, Carr and his fellow agents were in a position to make some definitive claims about Regan’s intent that they felt could be backed up by evidence. The addresses hidden in his shoe suggested that he was planning to visit Iraqi and Chinese embassies to offer U.S. defense secrets. By sharing the coordinates of the two sites he’d encoded, the agents believed, Regan intended to prove his legitimacy and his access to top secret information.
Regardless of what secrets Regan may have followed up with, using those coordinates as a business card would have been enough to hurt the United States. Telling the Iraqis that the United States knew where one of their missile systems was located would encourage the Iraqis to move the system to a new and possibly undetectable site, making American planes patrolling the zone more vulnerable to attack.
• • •
On September 11, 2001, three weeks after Regan’s arrest, Michael Gould turned on the TV at his home in Farmingdale and saw the horrifying images of airplanes crashing into the World Trade Center in Manhattan. Like millions of Americans, he was stunned by the unfolding tragedy of the attack. Then, as news arrived of a third plane having crashed into the Pentagon, Gould thought about Regan. The two hadn’t talked in a while, but he recalled that Regan used to work at the Pentagon. “Oh my God, he could have been killed in this attack,” Gould thought.
He picked up the phone and called Regan’s house in Bowie. After hearing Anette’s voice on the other end, he asked if Regan was OK.
“Oh, haven’t you heard?” she said.
“What?”
“Brian’s in jail.”
“For what?” Gould asked, shocked a second time that morning.
“Treason,” Anette said darkly.
“Get out of here,” Gould said, incredulous.
“I can’t believe it either,” she replied.
Like the Twin Towers in Manhattan, Anette’s world had come crashing down on the evening of August 23, when the FBI came knocking on her door. Agents spent hours searching the house, with police vans parked on the street, while Anette fought back tears and took care of the kids. When the agents left, they took with them boxes upon boxes of documents—everything from old financial records to letters—as well as Regan’s two laptops. To Anette, the night had felt like a terrible dream.
In the days since, she had struggled to make sense of what the government was claiming about her husband. This wasn’t the man she had known for the past nineteen years. When the two had first met, in the sunny Mediterranean, she was drawn to Regan because he seemed strong and stable, like her father. Over time, she had been forced to reconcile with his emotionally distant personality—perhaps the flip side of his apparent strength. At times, it seemed as if his feelings were locked up in an impregnable fortress. The trait made him reluctant to socialize and made it difficult for the couple to cultivate friendships. His aloofness had certainly not helped their marriage, especially after the first few years, and Anette had grown accustomed to the resulting bouts of loneliness that visited her with increasing frequency as the years went on.
Yet she also knew her husband to be kind and caring. He was the kind of person who would help old ladies cross the street. When he worked at the Pentagon, he had donated bone marrow to a leukemia patient who was a stranger to him. He sent money to charities to help feed starving children. How could a man like that commit espionage?
What she found mos
t difficult to believe was the accusation that Regan had acted out of greed. The husband she knew—disappointingly enough for her—had never demonstrated a desire to be wealthy. When the kids demanded things they wanted—candy, toys, video games—he would often get irritated and lecture them on how there was more to life than the pursuit of material pleasures. Despite his impatience with the kids, she felt he had been a good father, joking around with them at home, taking them to the playground, and playing basketball with them. She liked that he took the kids to the library whenever he could and told them how important it was to read.
She was aware that he had financial worries—even though she herself was strangely detached from them—but she had never sensed any bitterness or resentment in him about not having enough money. Every now and then, he would remind her that they had a pretty good life. “Think of some of the other people out there,” he would say. “Homeless people. People in other countries.”
That’s why the idea of his conspiring to betray the United States was confounding to Anette. True, Regan had never been one to wear his patriotism on his sleeve. But Anette knew him to be thankful for having been born in the United States. He’d mentioned to her how he hadn’t always felt safe during visits to countries like Sudan and Egypt, trips that made him appreciate all the more the freedoms enjoyed by those living in the United States. Anette had always thought that Regan felt indebted to the military. He wanted his kids to join the services. Anette recalled that she had opposed the idea, but Regan had insisted that it was a great option for those who couldn’t afford to pay for college. It was unfathomable to her that a man who recommended military service to his children could think of selling the secrets of that same military to a hostile government.
This had to be a mistake.
• • •
On October 23, 2001, a grand jury indicted Regan in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia on one count of attempted espionage. It was an unfortunate coincidence for him that the date happened to be his thirty-ninth birthday.
Unlike the criminal complaint, the indictment made no mention of the intercepted packages that had sparked the FBI’s spy hunt. Instead, it cited Regan’s prolific surfing of Intelink sites that didn’t relate to his job, his search of Libyan embassy addresses at the Crofton library right before his trip to Europe in June, and the words in the spiral notebook and on the index card, which prosecutors charged were a “personal system of code” used by Regan to represent the coordinates of systems portrayed in classified images.
A week after the indictment, government prosecutors met with Regan’s defense attorneys at the federal courthouse in Alexandria, Virginia. The meeting was initiated by the government under a proffer agreement, a standard practice in criminal law that allows defendants to provide information to the prosecution with the assurance that it won’t be used at trial.
Most espionage investigations don’t result in criminal charges, even when the government is convinced of wrongdoing. The reason is that the prosecution of spies—be they U.S. citizens or foreign agents operating in the United States—can involve the disclosure of intelligence-gathering methods and other sensitive information that the government would rather keep under wraps. When an investigation confirms that an individual is a spy, the government can choose to simply remove the person from a position of access—by taking away his or her secret clearance or, in the case of a foreign citizen, deporting the individual back to his or her home country. Even when an investigation does lead to a criminal complaint, more often than not, the person being charged ends up pleading guilty rather than going to trial.
That was the outcome prosecutors were hoping for when they met with Regan’s attorneys. Leading the defense team was Nina Ginsberg, a tough, bespectacled woman who counted national security law among her specialties. This wasn’t the first spy case for Ginsberg. Five years earlier, she had represented the FBI turncoat Earl Pitts, who was convicted of spying for Russia.
After all the paperwork had been signed, the discussion began. The lawyers on either side were no strangers to one another; their paths had crossed before. Ginsberg was especially familiar with Randy Bellows, the assistant U.S. attorney who had led the prosecution of Earl Pitts.
The atmosphere was cordial, but it was clear to the prosecutors from the beginning that Ginsberg intended to play hardball. She told them she didn’t believe the government’s case against Regan was very strong. Based on everything she’d learned about the investigation, she didn’t think the FBI was prepared to furnish any evidence that Regan had contacted a foreign power.
Then Ginsberg dropped a bombshell. She disclosed that Regan had hidden multiple packages of classified information in two separate geographical locations close to each other. “He’s got stuff buried out there that could start a war,” she said.
The words were a startling admission of guilt, but it was made in a proffer and hence useless for the purposes of prosecution. Randy Bellows and his fellow government attorneys knew that Ginsberg had made that statement to begin negotiations for a plea bargain. But they weren’t prepared for what she was about to propose.
If the prosecution agreed to a prison term of less than nine years, Ginsberg said, Regan would help the government recover the documents. Otherwise, the government was welcome to try to find the packages on its own.
The prosecutors were stunned. It wasn’t until after the meeting that they fully grasped the audacity of the offer. Regan was attempting to blackmail the United States government by holding hostage the secrets he had hoped to sell for cash. His release was the ransom he was demanding.
When Carr and his fellow investigators learned about Ginsberg’s remark, they finally had confirmation of what they’d guessed all along. In Regan’s letter to the Libyan embassy, he’d written about having removed and stashed eight hundred pages of classified documents. Now, after analyzing Regan’s Intelink history as well as his badging records at the NRO, which showed the great frequency of his visits to the high-speed copier rooms where printers were located, agents speculated that the number of pages he’d taken was probably in the thousands.
Carr and his colleagues had also had prior reason to believe that Regan might have buried documents somewhere. Searching Regan’s van, they had found several little pieces of paper and other pocket litter he’d emptied out in the vehicle, including a number of task lists he’d written for himself. Among them, the agents had discovered a curious note that began with the words: “Loc List.” Below it was a host of cryptic words and numbers, such as:
Bear trail 369299—(4-5-6)
Tennis Ball 365652-55
A-Horror 32N-S beer bottle
This was followed by a hyphenated string that the agents found repeated in various other notes as well:
Turkey-block-rugs 884 A—35steps-dirt-log-Mexican
Puzzling over this and other notes, investigators had made some reasonable guesses. The “32N-S” most definitely seemed to be a reference to an exit sign near which Regan had pulled over while driving around in Farmingdale the weekend before his arrest. That’s where surveillance specialists had seen Regan exit his vehicle and go off into the wooded area on the side of the road. It was consistent with “A-Horror”—a likely shorthand for the 1979 movie The Amityville Horror and therefore a reference to Amityville, which was one of the two towns named on the exit sign. Combined with the phrase “Loc List,” which presumably meant “location list,” the note suggested that Regan may have buried something in the woods next to the sign.
Agents had already searched that wooded patch. They had also looked around in the woods behind Farmingdale High School, where Regan had spent about fifteen minutes on that weekend trip. They’d found a few items there—five cigars in separate Ziploc bags, a red Magic Marker—but none of them seemed relevant to Regan’s conspiracy.
Although proffer statements cannot be used at trial, law enforcement agencies ar
e free to rely on them to further their investigations. With the defense validating the theory that Regan had buried packages somewhere, what was until now a search for evidence turned into a hunt for stolen secrets. Carr and his team looked for clues in parks in Bowie that surveillance teams had seen Regan visiting with his dogs and kids. As winter approached, agents went back to his town house on Minetta Lane to conduct another extensive search. They checked every nook and cranny, knocking on air ducts and shining a flashlight inside the furnace while Anette looked on in sullen despair.
They found nothing.
While these searches were being conducted, top officials in the Justice and Defense Departments were deliberating on Regan’s offer to help recover the secrets in exchange for a light sentence. One day in the late fall of 2001, they met at the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Alexandria to discuss the matter. The chief counsels of the NRO and several other intelligence agencies were present in the room. Among the representatives from the FBI was Lydia Jechorek.
The counsels from the intelligence community were practically unanimous in wanting a deal. By now, the NRO’s leadership had had a few weeks to estimate the potential damage that could be caused if the secrets Regan had stolen ended up in the hands of an adversary. The consequences would be nothing short of catastrophic, the agency had concluded, and so its top priority was to get the secrets back, no matter what it took. If that meant giving in to the demands of the very man who had caused the threat, then so be it. From the NRO’s perspective, it was immaterial whether Regan got nine years or fifteen.
Jechorek’s was one of the voices in the room to express strong disagreement with that view. She pointed out that Regan had researched past espionage cases in crafting his plan; future traitors would likely do the same. If the next insider to contemplate betraying the United States were to realize that Regan got a good deal because he was successful in hiding classified information, what would prevent that person from employing the same tactic? Jechorek asked. Accepting Regan’s offer would solve the current crisis, but it would create a new hazard in the years to come: spies scheming to protect themselves through blackmail.
The Spy Who Couldn't Spell Page 14