The Spy Who Couldn't Spell

by Yudhijit Bhattacharjee

  On April 19, 2002, the prosecution filed the death-penalty notice in court. When Gillis told his wife about it, she reacted with shock and anger. Over the next several weeks, she told him more than once that she did not want to be sleeping next to a killer. Gillis, for his part, did his best to explain why the government believed Regan deserved to die. The man had hidden secrets that he could, in theory, still pass on to enemies of the United States. If he wasn’t going to reveal where those secrets were, the government had no choice but to put him to death. It was a perfectly logical argument, but Gillis knew, even as he made it, that his wife was never going to be persuaded.

  CHAPTER 8

  A CONVOLUTED COVER-UP

  Regan had thought a lot about death, long before he set out to commit espionage. He was convinced he was going to die young. Starting in his mid-thirties, he had been suffering frequent bouts of abdominal pain that made him worry that he had cancer. Somehow it had never occurred to him that his binge drinking and constant imbibing of Mountain Dew could be the cause of the problem. Even though doctors he’d consulted with never suspected cancer, he wasn’t entirely convinced.

  Natural death wasn’t the only kind of death Regan had thought about. He had also wondered whether he was predisposed to mental illness that could drive him to suicide. The thought had established itself firmly in his mind after two of his maternal uncles—one in Ireland and one in the United States—killed themselves. Another of his mom’s siblings—her sister—had died mysteriously at an elder-care facility, leading Regan to suspect that she, too, may have committed suicide. And so, he had come to ask himself: could some of the genes he shared with these troubled individuals lead him to one day engineer his own demise?

  As he sat in his prison cell, those thoughts had come close to becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. One day in the fall of 2001, a few weeks after his arrest, Regan had repeatedly banged his head against the wall, expecting to give himself a brain injury that he hoped would lead to death. The guards had stopped him well before he could hurt himself seriously.

  As far as suicide attempts go, it was a pretty halfhearted one. As Regan would explain later, the head banging was intended to make the hoped-for death look like an accident. If it were declared a suicide, he had reasoned, his wife and children would be deprived of his life insurance. Like some of Regan’s other plans, this one, too, seemed to have been doomed by overthinking.

  Barring this incident, after which doctors put him on Prozac, Regan kept up his stoic exterior in prison. When Anette visited him every week at the Alexandria Detention Center, the two sat on opposite sides of a glass divider, talking through a phone line. The conversations were monitored by an FBI agent seated next to Anette. A device hooked up to the phone line recorded the talks. There was very little warmth exchanged during these calls, and though the two sat only a few feet across from each other, the monitoring agents could sense the emotional gulf that lay between them. Anette frequently expressed her bitterness and anger, which seemed to be directed at the government and her husband in equal measure. She ranted about how her life and the lives of their children had been upended by the investigation, how the numerous searches of their home had turned their lives into a nightmare. “I can’t believe the government is doing this,” she would say with disgust.

  By contrast, Regan never raised his voice or showed any signs of agitation. At times, he seemed close to being catatonic. He had told her—as well as his parents and his sisters—that the government was making a mountain out of a molehill, that it was all a big conspiracy. At one point, he told them that the FBI was making him a scapegoat for the September 11 attacks. Anette didn’t ask any questions to probe his vague and evolving defense. Whether it was out of a desire for self-protection or out of sheer naïveté, she showed no signs of venturing out of denial.

  What she was most worried about was money. She had begun working and taking nursing classes, but raising four kids without Regan’s income was a frightening prospect. Yet, as in the years before, the magnitude of the crisis seemed to elude her. In many of the conversations with Regan, monitoring agents heard her go on and on about Aztero, the stallion she had purchased from Sweden in the summer of 2001. She would complain about how she’d had no time lately to go visit the horse. She was paying $250 a month to a stable near Bowie for Aztero’s upkeep, and though months had passed since Regan’s arrest, she was still debating whether it was a good idea to sell the horse or to keep paying for its maintenance.

  In the middle of one such conversation in September 2002, Anette said something completely out of context with the rest of their discussion.

  “I’m knitting a sweater for Jamie,”* she said.

  Regan responded with a nod.

  The exchange was odd, but innocuous enough not to draw the attention of the agent monitoring the conversation. Its significance would elude the FBI until later that fall.

  • • •

  At around nine a.m. on Saturday, October 12, shortly after inmates at the Alexandria Detention Center had finished breakfast, a deputy sheriff named Gregory Kimble walked down a corridor on the fourth floor of the jail building to conduct a routine search. Kimble was an old hand at performing these searches, which were part of a system of fortnightly “shakedowns” aimed at confiscating any drugs and weapons hidden by prisoners at the facility. He made it a point to check the utility closets between cells, knowing that inmates liked to stash contraband there.

  That morning, when Kimble peeked into the utility closet adjoining Regan’s cell, 4B-3, he noticed a couple of toilet paper holders sticking out of a hole cut in the wall for the cell’s plumbing. Rolled up inside the holders were five or six handwritten pages. Some of the content seemed to have been written in code. It was obvious that Regan had hidden the pages there, sticking them in from the other side of the hole, which lay just below his sink.

  Kimble confronted Regan, who told him that the papers were intended for his lawyers. When Kimble walked him over to a table outside the cell and asked him to mark the pages as “attorney-client material,” Regan suddenly snatched the documents, ran back into his cell, and flushed them down the toilet.

  Kimble and the other guards present rushed over to him, but it was too late. When they’d recovered their wits, one of them asked Regan, “What will you do about the copies we made?” The color drained from Regan’s face when he heard the question, and he sat down on his bunk, saying nothing.

  The truth was that the jail staff hadn’t copied the documents. They were hoping the scare would get Regan to tell them what he had been hiding and why. The ploy didn’t work, though, and Regan eventually caught on to the guards’ bluff. Since the materials were meant for his defense, he argued, the government had no business knowing what they were.

  When the FBI received word of the incident, Carr and his fellow investigators were alarmed. From Kimble, who was able to recall fragments of text from his brief perusal of the pages, the agents learned that the message included instructions for ripping up the documents and flushing them down the toilet after their contents had been read. They didn’t find it at all believable that Regan had written them for his lawyers. It was far more likely that he was planning to communicate with another party, perhaps even a foreign agent. Had he succeeded?

  The suspicion led the FBI to investigate whether Regan had made an attempt to transmit anything out of prison unbeknownst to jail authorities. Agents reviewed his purchases at the prison canteen, where Regan spent most of his money buying Cheetos and other junk food. He had also bought a few stamped envelopes over the prior months. When the agents compared the tally of envelopes he’d purchased with the number of letters they knew he had mailed—all of which had been copied and reviewed by the FBI—it became clear that he had succeeded in sending out mail that circumvented the FBI’s monitoring.

  Interviewing others at the prison, agents found out that Regan had attempted to use other inmates on
his floor to mail letters on his behalf, offering to have money deposited into their canteen funds. Two of the inmates had turned him down, but one had agreed to help in exchange for a payment of $5 every week, along with a promise of $500 to be paid when Regan got out of prison. Regan had slipped the letter to him inside a newspaper, which inmates were allowed to exchange freely. The person the letter was addressed to was Anette Regan.

  • • •

  To have FBI agents show up at her doorstep had become routine for Anette by the fall of 2002. In the year that had passed since Regan’s arrest, her reaction to these intrusions had gone from shock to anger to sneering contempt. In her exchanges with agents during searches of the house, she never missed a chance to convey how stupid the FBI was for wasting its time on this wild-goose chase. She simply didn’t believe her husband was capable of plotting the conspiracy he was being accused of.

  And so when investigators rang her doorbell on the evening of November 1, Anette let them in with her characteristic sullenness, bracing herself for yet another search. Under different circumstances, she might have felt embarrassed about how disheveled the house looked, with the carpeting torn up, nail strips poking dangerously out from the exposed floor, piles of laundry everywhere and dishes stacked up in the sink, dust and dog hair all over. But her days of fretting over home maintenance were now well past. She had four children to support and take care of in her husband’s absence; keeping the household running was enough of a struggle.

  When the visitors told her they’d come to talk to her, she was taken aback. She led them in through the living room, her annoyance giving way to anxiety. “What do you want to know?” she asked.

  A young agent named Kathy Springstead inquired if Regan had sent her a letter recently.

  “Yes,” she replied hesitatingly.

  Springstead asked if she could hand it over. Anette walked over to a china cabinet in the dining room and returned with the letter. “I want to get this straightened out,” she said.

  Springstead and another agent sat down with Anette at the dinner table. In the eight-page letter, written by hand, Regan had explained to Anette how the FBI was trying to frame him. The letters that investigators claimed to have found on his computer had been planted, he wrote, because the FBI, after having spent so many resources on the case, was desperate to prove that he was a spy. Besides loading the letters onto the laptop’s hard drive, he went on, the agents had taken another sinister step. They had removed the evidence that could prove his innocence.

  Before he was arrested, Regan wrote in the letter, he had been burying toys and magazines at various locations as part of a treasure hunt he’d been creating for the kids. Those buried items were key to his defense, he explained, because they could prove that the materials he had with him at the time of his arrest—the GPS, the shovel, the handwritten sheets—had nothing to do with espionage. But he was convinced that the agents had dug up these innocent “treasures,” he wrote in the letter, which was why he needed Anette’s help to “re-create” his defense ahead of the trial.

  He wanted her to go out to four locations in Maryland and Virginia and bury some innocuous objects from the basement—collectible drinking glasses bearing cartoons and magazines and comic books that he’d collected since the seventies. He asked that she wear gloves before handling the items, so as to leave no fingerprints, and wrap them up into packages. To make the packages look like they’d been in the ground for a while, he suggested leaving them in a mud bucket for a few hours.

  The letter included maps for where he wanted them buried: in a wooded area by a horse barn in Crownsville—where Anette sometimes went to ride—and at a spot near the Rosecroft Raceway in Fort Washington. The maps were surprisingly detailed, despite having been drawn from memory. At the Crownsville location, for instance, Regan had sketched where Anette was to bury the toy relative to a fence near the riding trail. In Virginia, he directed her to a location near the NRO and another in Manassas Battlefield Park. Throughout the letter, Regan emphasized how important it was for Anette to be discreet and throw off FBI agents who were likely to be surveilling her. One suggestion he had for her was that she take the dog along for a walk: when she bent down to dig, he wrote, it would look like she was picking up poop. His other idea was that she take his sneakers along to pack down the dirt after burying each item: that would leave behind his footprints.

  Springstead—allergic to pet dander—sneezed and sniffled as she took in the contents of the letter. All the dog hair around the house was playing havoc with her sinuses. “Are you OK?” Anette asked, more than once. It was the first time that the agents had seen her show any softness toward them.

  They asked her if she had done what Regan had asked.

  She told them she had, in fact, in two trips over the span of a month, buried some items at the two sites in Maryland. She hadn’t had time to visit the other locations yet. In the letter, Regan had instructed her on how she could communicate to him—through code—that she’d carried out the given task. As Springstead would find out later from listening to recordings of the couple’s conversations, Anette had done that by making that puzzling remark about knitting “a sweater for Jamie.”

  It was late in the evening when the agents wrapped up the interview. The next day, Springstead drove out with Anette to the sites that Regan had indicated in his letter, which the FBI wanted to search in order to verify Anette’s story. In the car, Springstead attempted to strike up a conversation with Anette, whose indignation hadn’t lessened one bit despite her admission. She didn’t really comprehend why Regan had asked her to bury the toys; she told Springstead the story of the treasure hunt was confusing to her. She had just done it because he had asked. She expressed to Springstead, more than once, how ridiculous the FBI was to be wasting its resources looking for toys. She knew her husband quite well, she said, and he was no spy.

  Anette’s tiresome defiance prompted Springstead to share with her a couple of details from the investigation. Having monitored many of Anette’s prison visits, Springstead knew that Anette thought Regan was about to travel on business when he was arrested. “Did you know that he told his boss that he was going to Orlando on vacation with the family?” Springstead asked.

  Anette stared back in silence. This was news to her.

  Springstead also told her that Regan had left his wedding ring in the carburetor of his car before catching the shuttle to the airport that afternoon. “If he was just going on a trip for work,” she asked, “why would he have taken his ring off?”

  The usual annoyance on Anette’s face was gone now. She looked stunned.

  They drove to the sites in the letter, where teams of agents were already doing searches. The collectible glasses that Anette had buried at the location next to the barn in Crownsville were discovered when the squad supervisor, Lydia Jechorek, accidentally stepped on them, cracking one of them under her heel. Carr and the others would tease her for weeks afterward. “Way to destroy the evidence, Lydia,” they would say to her jokingly. At the other location, agents recovered four Mad magazines and a couple more glasses.

  Over the course of those few hours, Anette went from defiant to shaken. The sight of FBI agents looking for things that she had buried, the knowledge that Regan had lied to his boss and to her, the fact that he’d taken his ring off: all of it appeared to have left her questioning her previous judgment. By the time Springstead drove her back home, Anette could no longer deny the bizarreness of Regan’s request that she bury toys. Perhaps she shouldn’t have complied.

  In another shakedown of Regan’s cell around the same time, jail staff found more documents, some hidden under his mattress. One was a note to a fellow inmate, offering him coffee and cookies and popcorn—along with money—in return for having him mail a handwritten letter to one of his sisters. That letter—which the sister was supposed to send on to Anette—included a map of a park in Farmingdale where he wanted
Anette to bury a few sheets of code to be solved for the treasure hunt, together with a letter to his kids introducing them to the hunt. He hadn’t succeeded in getting this letter out.

  Investigators also learned that Regan had made a trip to the forests of the Pinelands National Reserve in New Jersey in early 2001 to bury a stack of magazines as part of a future treasure hunt he was creating for his children. Standing at that location, he’d filmed a short video of himself giving directions to the kids on how they could find the treasure. Agents had found the videotape at his house and subsequently dug up the buried magazines as well.

  Putting all of these pieces together, Carr and his fellow investigators could see what Regan’s game plan was. He was literally attempting to plant evidence to support his “treasure hunt” defense, which he’d begun contriving by generating the fake codes and word puzzles in prison shortly after his arrest. From the video he’d shot in the pine forests, it was evident that he’d begun thinking of this alibi well before he was arrested. Now, having learned that the FBI had surveilled him for months and had seen him walk into wooded areas on multiple occasions, he needed more buried objects—besides the magazines—to account for that behavior. Despite having his back to the wall, or perhaps because of it, he believed he could still outsmart the government and cover up his crime.

  • • •

  In a speech at West Point Military Academy in June 2002, President George W. Bush declared that the United States had to be prepared, in certain circumstances, to strike a potential threat before it became a real one. This new defense doctrine of preemption, the administration explained, was necessary to shield the United States and its allies against the possibility of large-scale attacks by terrorist groups and terror-supporting regimes. In Bush’s words, “If we wait for threats to fully materialize, we will have waited too long. . . . Our security will require transforming the military you will lead—a military that must be ready to strike at a moment’s notice in any dark corner of the world. And our security will require all Americans to be forward-looking and resolute, to be ready for preemptive action when necessary to defend our liberty and to defend our lives.”