The Spy Who Couldn't Spell

by Yudhijit Bhattacharjee

  It was when the discussion had completely stalled that Olson shifted his attention to something he’d noticed earlier but not paid much attention to. It was the series of trinomes in the last two lines of the message—the ones following the last alphanumeric group to appear in the text:

  . . . 833 698 707 231 069 16A 141 249 453 062 141 462 454 414 205 629 524 834 205 173 524 219 181 602 472 025 181 496 471 955

  What was surprising about these trinomes (italicized above) was that there were several repeats among them. The numbers 141, 205, and 181 each occurred twice, and the repeats occurred at the same intervals. This was in stark contrast with the trinomes that came before 16A, which were all unique.

  In fact, from an analysis of the first two digits of the earlier trinomes, Olson could see that Regan had attempted not to use any picture twice, barring a few exceptions. It was easy to guess why Regan would have taken such care to avoid repetitions: by ensuring that there was no discernible pattern to be discovered in the numbers, he was no doubt striving to make the code harder to break. Why had he abandoned this caution toward the end of the message?

  When he’d noticed that anomaly for the first time at Quantico, Olson had chosen to disregard it. It’s not unusual for coded messages to contain some garbage or useless information that has been included simply to add noise. Olson had assumed that the trinomes after 16A were extraneous to the message. Now, having exhausted all other avenues of breaking the code, he gave the numbers a fresh look.

  “Brian, why are the numbers different down here?” Olson asked. “You were diligent about not repeating pictures higher up, and all of a sudden, you are repeating several numbers.”

  Regan read the trinomes a few times before lifting his head up and staring blankly at Olson. He was no less puzzled than Olson was.

  The brainstorming had lasted more than six hours. Neither Carr nor Olson felt they could go on any longer. Olson gave Regan a copy of the code and asked Regan to continue thinking about the numbers at the bottom when he went back to jail.

  “Can I take the yearbook with me?” Regan asked. By this point, he seemed as keen as Olson and Carr to solve the puzzle he’d created three years earlier.

  “Yes, you can take it back to your cell,” Carr said. It was late in the afternoon when the U.S. marshals escorted Regan out of the courthouse and back to the Alexandria Detention Center.

  • • •

  On the weekend after the marathon meeting, Carr got a phone call from an Alexandria jail superintendent. “Mr. Regan wanted me to relay a message,” the superintendent said. “He has completed the task that you assigned him.”

  Working with pencil and paper in the solitude of his cell, Regan had finally unlocked his memory of the encryption. He had focused on the trinomes at the bottom of the sheet, as Olson had suggested. At some point, the solution had bubbled up from the caverns of his subconscious.

  When Carr met him at the courthouse the next day, Regan told him how it worked. Those anomalous trinomes at the bottom—there were twenty-four in all—weren’t garbage.

  They were coordinates. Hidden in plain sight.

  Masked by the lines that came before them, the trinomes were Regan’s “back door.” Just as he’d done while encrypting the Virginia coordinates, he’d made sure to build a safety hatch for himself, knowing that he could forget how the code worked. What he hadn’t anticipated was that the very existence of the back door could fade from his memory, defeating its purpose. Without Olson’s prompting, he might never have remembered.

  But now it had all come back to him, he explained to Carr.

  The first two trinomes in the series—141 and 249—were the decimal digits for the latitude of the tree he had used as a reference for the first package. The next two trinomes—453 and 062—were the decimal digits for the longitude. As with the code for the Virginia packages, Regan hadn’t bothered to write out the integer part of the coordinates—the numbers left of the decimal point, which were the same for the entire park: 39° north, 76° east. Combining these with the decimal digits provided the latitude and longitude for the first tree:

  39.141249°N, –76.453062°E

  The remaining twenty trinomes in the series, when broken up into sets of four trinomes each, constituted the decimal portion of the coordinates for five other trees. Although there were seven packages, there were only six tree references—Regan had used one of them as a marker for two packages. Regan had chosen three different areas of the park; at each of these areas, he’d buried two or three packages in fairly close proximity. As a result, the coordinates for the two trees he’d used as his markers in each area were identical up to the third or the fourth decimal digit. That explained why several of the trinomes at the bottom appeared twice in the series.

  After figuring out the back door, Regan had also been able to recall all the steps for decrypting the trinomes in the first ten lines of the code. He explained them to Carr. The first step involved doing exactly what Olson had deduced in the brainstorming session: counting forward from Regan’s picture to the portrait occupying the position given by the first two digits of the trinome. The next step was to add up the number of letters in that student’s first name, or, if the student had a middle name, both first and middle names. This number and the third digit of the trinome had to be looked up on a simple 10-by-10 chart to resolve the trinome into the digit that it encrypted. The chart, which Regan had added as a second layer of encryption, looked like this:

  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0

  2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1

  3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2

  4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3

  5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4

  6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5

  7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6

  8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

  9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

  0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

  Regan walked Carr through the steps with examples from the encrypted text. For instance, to decrypt the first trinome of the message, 146, one first looks up the fourteenth picture from Regan. Counting up the letters in the first name of that student, Sharon, gives the number 6. The trinome is now reduced to a two-digit number: 66. Next, one has to find the first digit of this number, 6, in the first column of the chart, and then locate in that row the second digit, which also happens to be 6. Then one has to go up to the top of the column in which the second digit has been found. The digit sitting at the top of that column—that is, in the first row—is the trinome’s decrypt. In this example, that digit happens to be 1.

  Similarly, the second trinome—051—leads to a picture of Patricia, with eight letters in the name. Going down to the eighth row of the chart, looking up the last digit of the trinome—1—in that row, and going up to the top of that column, one gets the decrypt: 4.

  Not surprisingly, the first six trinomes resolve to 141249, and the next six translate to 453062: exactly the same as the first four trinomes at the bottom of the message: 141 249 453 062.

  Regan gave Carr the results of his decryption. The encoded lines contained more than just the coordinates of the trees and the package descriptions, which Olson and Regan had worked out earlier. Along with the shortened latitude and longitude for each tree were two other pieces of information that would lead to the package. The first was the distance, in feet, one was supposed to walk from the tree. The second was a set of coordinates—once again abbreviated—that Regan had recorded at the location of the package.

  Leaving the courthouse, Carr called Olson to relay how the code worked so that Olson could break out the message independently and validate the decryption Regan had provided. With the coordinates in hand, however, Carr didn’t want to wait another moment to begin the search. “We’re going out to look for the packages right now,” he told Olson.

  • • •

  It should have been a snap to find the packages. Carr had anticipated that the mission would be accomplished within a few hours, maybe in a
couple of days at the most. The last thing he had thought he would need to do was rent a backhoe.

  Yet here he was, watching a rented backhoe being unloaded from a trailer at a parking lot inside the Patapsco Valley State Park. It was seven in the morning on April 22, several days after Regan had given Carr the decrypt of the coded message. Over the course of those days, Carr and his fellow agents had succeeded in finding all but one of the six trees that Regan had marked with roofing nails. The coordinates for each tree were precise enough to get to the tree’s vicinity; scanning the area with metal detectors, the agents had been able to locate the exact tree. Some of the nails were barely visible on the trunk, having been obscured by new layers of bark that had grown in the years since Regan had been there.

  Puzzlingly, though, none of the packages had been found. Carr and his colleagues had gone about the search exactly as they had in Virginia. From each tree, they had gone the specified number of feet on the side of the trunk opposite to the nail and dug. But despite digging large holes at those spots—deeper than the ones they had had to dig in Virginia—they had found nothing. The abbreviated coordinates that Regan had recorded for the package locations had not helped either. The limited precision of GPS in a forest, where signals from overhead geopositioning satellites tend to bounce off tree limbs and leaves while traveling through the canopy, meant an uncertainty of twenty meters or more in determining a particular site on the ground. At some of the locations, the reception was so poor that the agents struggled to get a GPS reading at all. The heavy foliage of spring didn’t help the signals either. There was a reason Regan had needed to use the roofing nails as markers.

  That’s why Carr had requisitioned the backhoe. He and the other members of the search team stood by as it was taken off the trailer. One of the agents climbed into the driver’s seat and drove it cautiously into the woods, to within a few yards of a nailed tree. Lowering the backhoe’s giant yellow arm, he began scooping out large chunks of dirt. By noon, the excavation had turned the ground around the tree into a shallow crater.

  There was still no sign of a package. The agents got out and dug further, turning the loose soil over with shovels to inspect every square inch with care. Still nothing.

  The scene was to play out over and over through the next several weeks as the search continued fruitlessly. Carr remarked wryly to his fellow agents that some of the holes they were digging were big enough to swallow a Lincoln Continental. Speculating that Regan may have transposed the digits for some of the coordinates as he’d done for the twelfth Virginia package, the agents dug not only around the trees but also dozens of yards afield. At the end of each day’s digging, the searched areas were pockmarked terrain, looking, in Marc Reeser’s words, “like a Civil War zone where bombs had gone off.” On the rare occasion that a jogger or horseback rider stopped by to ask what was going on, Carr had a cover story ready: the purpose of the excavation was to find the footprint of an old estate. A passerby called the state park office and inquired, in earnest, if a Walmart was being built in the park.

  Unproductive as they were, the searches weren’t entirely uneventful. In one instance, the backhoe toppled on its side while being driven across an especially uneven incline, and the agents had to use chains and all their strength to haul it back up. When a few attorneys from the Justice Department decided to join the search for a day, hoping to enjoy some time out of their offices, one of them lost his balance while stepping over rocks to get across a creek. The water was less than a foot deep, but enough for him to get soaking wet. The others struggled not to laugh.

  Carr went back to Regan for pointers to focus the search but didn’t learn anything useful. Somebody suggested hypnotizing Regan to get him to recall precisely where the packages were buried. Although the scientific support for using hypnosis to recover memories was weak, the FBI decided it was worth a shot.

  A forensic psychologist named Michael Gelles was brought in for the job. He put Regan in a reclining chair in a corner of the debriefing room at the courthouse and dimmed the lights. Carr and another agent sat in another corner, watching the session in silence.

  “I want you to focus on your toes, Brian,” Gelles began soothingly. “Relax your toes.” He went on. “Now focus on your calves. Relax your calves.” Step by step, he directed Regan’s attention upward, until he’d covered the whole body. If Gelles’s suggestions had the hypnotic power they were supposed to have, Regan was by this point awash in calmness from head to toe.

  “How are you feeling, Brian?” he asked.

  “Relaxed,” Regan replied.

  “Let’s take you back to when you were burying these packages,” Gelles said. “Tell us, Brian . . .”

  “Can I get up?” Regan asked, interrupting. He felt he could think better on his feet.

  “Sure,” Gelles said.

  He proceeded to ask Regan questions about the three areas in Patapsco that he’d buried the packages in. From the corner of the room, Carr listened intently to Regan’s responses and took notes. It wasn’t clear from the answers if Regan was truly tapping into hitherto inaccessible memories of his activities from three years earlier or if he was merely playing along.

  Much of what Regan recounted was too vague to be of value, although he did have a few specific descriptions. At one of the sites, he said, he’d come across a fallen log shaped like a Y: he recalled having buried a package just to the left of where the log bifurcated into the two prongs. At another site, near one of the marked trees, Carr’s team had found an old tire. Regan remembered the tire: he told Gelles that he’d buried a package to the right of it.

  Vivid as these recollections were, they didn’t help the search. While Carr and his fellow agents didn’t mind that they were spending their workdays tramping through the woods rather than being at their desks, there was a mounting sense of frustration. The digging was getting tiresome. Carr could see no end point in sight. There was just one thing left to do, he told Jechorek: get Brian Regan out of jail to the state park to see if he could just show them the sites.

  • • •

  On a cold and rainy morning in late May, Brian Regan stepped out of the back of an SUV near McKeldin Rapids at the north end of Patapsco Valley State Park. His wrists were handcuffed in front of him, hidden under a green rain poncho that covered him down to the waist. Worried that Regan’s prison uniform might invite needless attention from hikers, Carr had made him change into a T-shirt and a pair of maroon sweatpants before they left the jail. Days earlier, a fellow inmate had given him an unflattering haircut, using a razor to shave a band around his head. As Regan entered the woods with Carr and his fellow agents, half a dozen SWAT team members fanned out in the vicinity, watching his every move.

  Carr had not had an easy time selling Jechorek on the idea of bringing Regan out of prison. When she finally agreed, she had insisted on a comprehensive written plan to guarantee that Regan wouldn’t escape or hurt himself. That meant having a paramedic on hand and mapping the shortest route to the nearest hospital from different parts of the park. The jail authorities had driven home the responsibility Carr was taking on when he checked Regan out. “If you lose him, don’t come back,” he had been told, not quite in jest. As the group made its way to the first site, walking along a stretch of forest that lay between a cliff and the Patapsco River, Carr had a momentary bout of anxiety thinking about the prospect of Regan breaking into a run and flinging himself over the cliff. He was reassured to see a SWAT team member walking along Regan’s left, perfectly positioned to stop Regan from attempting a jump.

  There was nothing in Regan’s behavior to suggest that he might do something dangerous or unexpected, and everybody was more relaxed by the time they got to the first location. Regan surveyed the trees around him. Many of them had an orange ring painted on the trunk to indicate that they had been scanned for nails. Carr pointed out one on which nails had been found.

  Walking a few pa
ces from the tree, Regan came to the Y-shaped log that he’d mentioned in the hypnosis session. He straddled the top of the log, with one foot inside the Y and the other foot outside, and fixed his gaze at the reference tree. Then he bent forward, lowering his head, and looked at the tree again, squinting.

  “I buried it there,” he said matter-of-factly, moving his cuffed hands under the poncho to point at a spot a couple of feet away.

  Carr had expected that Regan would need a measuring tape to determine how far away from the tree the package might be. Instead, Regan was relying on his visual memory. Carr was skeptical.

  “Brian, I can’t remember which tree I peed on two months ago,” he said. “And you’re telling me you buried a package here three years ago.”

  Reeser grabbed a shovel and began to dig. The earth, softened by the rain from earlier that morning, offered little resistance. He scooped up the dirt and tossed it to the side, an action that he and the other agents had mastered over the past few weeks. Regan looked on, his face betraying no emotion.

  Minutes later, after Reeser had dug about a foot and a half, his shovel made a hard sound announcing contact with something solid. Breathing heavily, Reeser reached over and pulled the object out of the dirt. It was a package the size of a school lunch box, wrapped tightly in plastic.

  Reeser took a knife and cut through the wrapping. Inside the package were a number of disks marked “Top Secret.” They contained the Joint Tactical Exploitation of National Systems manual—the guidebook to the U.S. military’s satellite and signals intelligence capabilities.

  Reeser showed the disks to Carr, who looked at them, momentarily stunned. What they had just dug up was one of the country’s most prized secrets, describing in detail America’s vast and hidden network of reconnaissance systems and providing the U.S. war fighter with guidance on how to take advantage of those systems. To have even a few pages of this manual end up in the hands of an adversary would seriously compromise U.S. intelligence gathering. To have a foreign spy service acquire the entire JTENS manual—that, too, in digital form—would have been an intelligence disaster on an unparalleled scale, potentially undermining the U.S. military for decades. If the agents needed a concrete symbol of what the stakes had been in the two-year pursuit of Regan, those disks would have served the purpose.