Declassified Untold Stories of American Spies_2of8_Buried Secrets Unbreakable Codes
Transcript
00:00I remember coming out here many times.
00:17You can see how rough it is and how remote it is.
00:21There's no one here and there's no one to see you.
00:28Never in a million years would I expect to be in the woods digging holes to find classified
00:33information.
00:34In a sense, we were digging for treasure.
00:37It was critical information buried out here that was important to the defense of the United
00:42States, and we had to find it.
00:49As a former FBI agent and chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, I had oversight
00:53of all 16 of our nation's intelligence agencies.
00:57My name is Mike Rogers.
01:00I had access to classified information gathered by our operatives.
01:05People who risked everything for the United States and our families.
01:09You don't know their faces or their names.
01:12You don't know the real stories from the people who lived the fear and the pressure until
01:16now.
01:28Spying is beyond anything I can comprehend.
01:33I don't know how you could spy if you thought that you were going to get somebody killed.
01:38That's putting our military people in jeopardy.
01:40That's putting our operations in jeopardy.
01:46My job was always to safeguard the secrets of the United States, and I took that very
01:51seriously.
01:52There are secrets for a reason.
01:56If one part of this fell into the wrong hands, lives are lost.
02:07I've been involved in espionage cases since 1983.
02:12My squad at the Washington field office did espionage cases with unknown subjects, and
02:17we got word in December of 2000 that New York had information that they had an espionage
02:23case.
02:24And the espionage case involved Libya, Iraq, and Iran.
02:29And so the New York office received packages that an unknown subject had provided to a
02:35foreign intelligence service.
02:37How did the New York office come into possession of these packages?
02:43That's information that I can't talk about because it's still classified.
02:48There were three packages.
02:49Inside the first package was classified documents.
02:52Some of the pages were photographs that were classified.
02:57The second package was the encrypted letter, and the third package was a decryption code.
03:05Without that key, you could not read the letter.
03:09The New York field office decoded it with the encryption key.
03:13It said, I am an analyst for the CIA.
03:16I want to commit espionage.
03:21So this someone was likely working out of the Washington, D.C. area.
03:26Then that, for New York, switches the case down to the Washington field office.
03:33We took the decrypted letter and we looked at it for lead purposes.
03:39What do we know from this decoded letter that we can say about the person that wrote this
03:43letter?
03:45I am a Middle East, North African analyst for the Central Intelligence Agency.
03:50I am willing to commit espionage against the United States by providing your country with
03:55highly classified information.
03:57If I am caught, I will be in prison for the rest of my life if not executed for this deed.
04:03My wife and my daughter will be disgraced and harassed by everyone in our community.
04:08Considering the risk I am about to take, I will require a minimum payment of $13 million
04:14U.S. dollars wire transferred in Swiss francs.
04:19I had never seen anything like that before in all the years that I had been working close
04:23to 25 years in espionage cases.
04:27He was actually trying to hide his identity so that the recipient, almost like in a kidnapping
04:32case, would not know who it was.
04:34And that was very unusual.
04:40We were lucky to have Mark Reeser assigned to the case as an analyst.
04:43Not all the squads had that, and in a case like this, it is vitally important to have
04:48someone who can put all of the information that all of the agents are gathering and make
04:53sense of them.
04:54It's almost like we're putting a big puzzle together.
05:00Once we decrypted the letter, my agents created a matrix.
05:05Matrix points are things that we used, especially in unsub cases, where we don't know who the
05:09person is, is we just line up those facts.
05:13So in this case, there were some parts of the letter that he wrote which we used as
05:17matrix points.
05:22So the matrix points we worked off then were military background, he had a knowledge of
05:25cryptology because the letter was coded, he had a top-secret security clearance or had
05:30access to top-secret clearance and had access to Intel Link.
05:33Essentially, Intel Link is the classified internet.
05:36He probably worked within the intelligence community.
05:39He was married and had children, lived in the Washington, D.C. area, and he was a terrible
05:44speller.
05:45And the spelling problems were very unusual.
05:51Espionage, E-S-P-O-S-I-N-A-G-E.
05:55Disgraced, D-I-S-C-R-A-C-E-D.
06:00Satellite, S-A-T-E-L-I-G-H-T.
06:03And the letter was full of similar misspellings.
06:07At this point, we did not know what he'd taken.
06:11We didn't know that he hadn't already sold it.
06:13We just didn't know.
06:15And if classified documents fell into the wrong hands, lives are lost.
06:22And so the very first thing to do, of course, was to go to the CIA because right away the
06:26person claimed to be a CIA analyst, that was a given.
06:29And they started an internal investigation.
06:33And then there were names that came up in the package through various means that linked
06:37the NRO to the case.
06:40And so the NRO was another group that we needed to go talk to right away.
06:47The National Reconnaissance Office is a government agency that specializes in providing satellite
06:53imagery of the world.
06:55The NRO is the eye in the sky for the U.S. intelligence apparatus.
07:01So the FBI came to NRO in December of 2000 and briefed us on the investigation.
07:07Once the NRO was briefed, we discussed what we needed from them, and that was for them
07:12to look at their personnel to see if anybody fit in that matrix.
07:18So we wanted to either rule out the NRO or to figure out who it was, and we made a decision
07:24to open up our own inquiry, looking at NRO employees in addition to the active investigation
07:29the FBI had.
07:31While the matrix points were good, they're also vague.
07:35Somebody with a family, bad speller, so the NRO's job was not an easy one.
07:43At NRO, he had access to the entire intelligence community's data.
07:49That's not just NRO data, that's NSA data, that's counterintelligence data from the counterintelligence
07:54community, that's CIA data, NGA data.
07:56So if it is a spy inside of NRO working inside of this building or a similar building, they
08:02can do a lot of damage.
08:10So the FBI came to NRO in December of 2000 and briefed us on the investigation.
08:17One of the first things the FBI did inform us of is they believed that the individual
08:20was an employee in the intelligence community.
08:23Potentially the person has some training in cryptography, and they believed the individual
08:27was dyslexic.
08:30The FBI explained the dyslexia based off of some of the misspellings that were in the
08:34letters.
08:38The information that he had stolen was highly classified, and it could cause significant
08:42damage to not only the National Reconnaissance Office, but to other intelligence agencies
08:46as well.
08:47And we had no idea who the spy is.
08:53My goal was to conduct a review of the NRO employees, which would include thousands of
08:58files, and reduce that counterintelligence review down to one individual that we felt
09:03was the spy.
09:07So what we decided to do was look at other factors, the things that are more traditional.
09:11We looked at financial difficulties in the security file.
09:15We also looked at their training, we looked at their performance history.
09:20I was given a small room and a cart, and I was provided hundreds and hundreds of pages
09:27of documents.
09:29It was exciting in the beginning.
09:33I'm actually going to chase, but after a couple of weeks, it became pretty, pretty numbing.
09:43So I was just pouring through hundreds and hundreds of pages of people's security files.
09:49And then I came across Brian Regan's file.
09:56I was able to quickly see that it has cryptography training, and something suggested it has some
10:02financial difficulties in the security file.
10:07And then finally, I got to take a detailed review of Brian's performance evaluation.
10:13In Brian's career, he received a number of performance evaluations, all of which were
10:18exceptional.
10:19However, there was one evaluation that he received where he was downgraded minimally,
10:26but he was so used to receiving the top levels across the board, he actually wrote a rebuttal.
10:32And in that letter, you could see evidence of dyslexia.
10:41When I saw the misspellings, I actually couldn't believe that I was reading them properly.
10:44I thought I was just misreading it.
10:47And then I read it again, and I read it again.
10:49I was like, wow, this can't be coincidental.
10:53This person had the same problem with spellings as the person who wrote the letter that the
10:57FBI had.
11:00Once I was confident that it was Brian that was the potential unsub, I put together a
11:05briefing and requested that we brief that to the FBI.
11:11Now we have to start looking at Brian Regan because he's one of a couple of people that
11:15fit everything that's in the matrix.
11:18And so we start to conduct a full investigation on Brian Regan.
11:26Now we're doing 24-hour surveillance on him, 24-hour surveillance on someone.
11:31It's not an easy task.
11:33I remember the first shift of the surveillance observed him doing some really odd stuff out
11:39in Chantilly.
11:44They described Brian driving to a wooded area, walking into the woods, putting something
11:48down, and then getting back in his car and going about his own way.
11:53And I remember telling the surveillance, saying, do not go into the woods, leave alone, let's
11:59see what happens.
12:01We later found out what he did was he put a voice-activated tape recorder into the woods
12:07because he wanted to see if anyone was following him.
12:10He was doing counter-surveillance because he was working up to doing something wrong,
12:15and so he wanted to see if he was under surveillance.
12:18But we still have to prove that he's the guy that did it.
12:23We did not know what classified information he'd taken.
12:27And if Brian Regan committed espionage, he deserved to go to jail, and it was my job
12:32to put him in jail.
12:36So now we have all of our resources towards the case, and we are looking very hard at
12:43his entire background.
12:46From what we learned about Brian Regan, he had a difficult childhood.
12:50He had dyslexia, and so he couldn't read.
12:53And so you can imagine what that's like for a child that can't read.
12:57Because of dyslexia, people assume that he wasn't bright, and that's just not the case.
13:02He made it for himself.
13:03He got into the Air Force.
13:04He did very well in the Air Force, and he was good with codes and numbers.
13:11Brian was an Air Force Master Sergeant.
13:13He had been trained by the Air Force to work in the intelligence community, and he had
13:18worked primarily at the National Security Agency and the National Reconnaissance Office.
13:22He by all accounts was a very intelligent individual, but he had some flaws.
13:29He had a lot of credit card debt.
13:32When we first started looking at Brian Regan, he was $53,000 in debt.
13:39Not that many months later, he was well over $100,000 in debt.
13:42It was over twice what we thought originally.
13:44How did he get into so much debt in the first place?
13:48Well he had four children.
13:49His wife didn't work, and so he was borrowing from one credit card to pay another credit
13:53card, and he saw no way of getting out of it.
13:57He thought this was the best way to do it.
14:02Once we identified Brian Regan as being our primary suspect, the problem was he had already
14:08retired, and to the best of our knowledge, he no longer had access to classified information.
14:15To be able to take someone to trial and to prosecute them, you really have to prove that
14:20they are providing national defense information to a foreign power or an agent of a foreign
14:25power.
14:26And if he doesn't have classified information to pass on to the bad guys, you've got quite
14:31a dilemma.
14:33What we did know is that Brian Regan expressed interest in coming back to work as a contractor
14:38in the National Reconnaissance Office.
14:39In fact, he had applied for a position, and he was awaiting feedback from them on that
14:44application.
14:46So we presented to the director of NRO, asking that he allow Regan to come back and work
14:52for them.
14:55And the director sat back and listened to what everybody had to say, and he said, I
14:58understand where the FBI is coming from, and I understand he has to be caught in committing
15:02the act of treason, and I will allow him to come back for 90 days.
15:07So FBI, you have 90 days to solve this case.
15:10And so, the pressure was on.
15:21Brian Regan returned to the NRO as a contractor in July of 2001.
15:27The NRO is a government agency that specializes in providing satellite imagery of matters
15:31that are of importance to the U.S. government.
15:34Once Brian Regan went back to the NRO, we had him under constant surveillance, and that
15:39included in his workspace.
15:42We had cameras mounted in the equipment, as well as audio.
15:45So we were able to not only listen, but to see pretty much everything that he did.
15:53A couple days after Brian returned to the NRO for work, he was alone in the room, and
15:58he was noticeably looking up and gazing at the roof tiles, looking for what would appear
16:03to be a bug or a camera.
16:06He wanted to make sure that he was not being monitored.
16:10And then, once he felt comfortable, he decided that he would just go browsing for classified
16:15information.
16:20He browsed on anything from counterintelligence to the Iranian threat.
16:25Anything that was highly classified, he decided that it's of interest.
16:31So now, we've gone from being 99.9% sure to we got the right guy.
16:40But we still don't have the evidence that we need to make a case.
16:45And so, you just keep building and building and collecting and collecting, and hopefully
16:49one of these days, it will all come together.
16:53After several weeks, Brian requested personal leave to take his family on a vacation to
16:58Orlando.
16:59He wrote this on a whiteboard that he would be going to Orlando with his kids.
17:05But we didn't see any plane tickets being purchased, no indication of travel to Orlando.
17:10And so, I remember we were looking back at his charge records, looking for any kind of
17:16indication of going to Orlando.
17:17And we saw a small charge to one of the airlines that was too small to be airfare, it was too
17:24small to be baggage, and it ended up being the administrative fee that you get when you
17:29cash in your frequent flyer miles.
17:32And so, he was cashing in his frequent flyer miles to travel overseas.
17:3724 hours prior to his leaving the area, we learned that he was, in fact, going to Germany.
17:46And so now, we are in a panic because we had no idea whether he had classified on him.
17:52And we felt that he was probably going to make an attempt to reach out to an intelligence
17:56service in a foreign country versus doing it in the U.S.
18:00But the FBI has no jurisdiction overseas.
18:02And so now, you have no choice but to stop him from going out of the country.
18:08But you may lose your case because of it.
18:11So after coordination with the intelligence community, Secretary of Defense, and the FBI,
18:16a decision was made to actually go ahead and execute the arrest of Brian.
18:23So our biggest problem now is it's happening at the last minute and Department of Justice
18:28has to approve to arrest him.
18:30So while we're waiting for approval from the Department of Justice, Brian Regan is being
18:34followed by our surveillance to the airport.
18:38So now I'm trying to brief the Department of Justice on why we should be able to arrest
18:43Brian Regan before he gets on an airplane.
18:47In the meantime, I've got my supervisor at Dulles Airport calling me, going, did we get
18:52approval yet?
18:53The plane's getting ready to leave.
18:55It's almost time.
18:57Finally, the Department of Justice official comes back, approves the detention of Brian
19:05Regan, and we tell the people at the airport, you can stop him before he gets on the plane.
19:11He is detained.
19:12He is interviewed.
19:13His luggage was pulled out, and we found some very interesting things in his luggage.
19:22He had tape, plastic bags, he had a plastic container, he had Elmer's glue, the rubber
19:29fingers that you put when you're doing pages, and he had a bag of wet sand.
19:34And then we later learned that he was worried about leaving fingerprints, so he was going
19:39to put glue on his fingers, dip them in sand, put the rubber tips on, and then handle the
19:45information.
19:46That is a really interesting and complex scenario, one I'd never seen before.
19:55And later, they find documents between the sole of his shoe and the liner of his shoe.
20:02They contained addresses of the overseas embassies that we were concerned about.
20:09And he has a number of documents that are encrypted.
20:16Brian had three different letters with codes on them.
20:20Sheets and sheets of these three digits.
20:23Brian had notes with cryptic, seemingly random words written on it.
20:28He had cryptic notations on pieces of paper that were in his wallet.
20:33He was basically covered with codes all the way down to his shoes.
20:38And so by the time they finished interviewing him, because of some of the things that he
20:42has in his bag, the Department of Justice agrees that we have enough to arrest him.
20:50So now the number one priority is to break the codes, find whatever he's taken or whatever
20:55he's given away.
20:56We needed to know what he had stolen, where is it?
20:59Has he made contact with a foreign power?
21:03Brian had secrets, and we needed to learn what he knew.
21:06And we knew we needed to unlock these codes.
21:16On August 23, 2001, the FBI arrested Brian Regan at Dulles Airport in Virginia just as
21:23he was getting ready to board an international flight.
21:28There are so many different items on him when he was arrested.
21:31Brian had three different letters with codes on them.
21:34Sheets and sheets of these three digits.
21:37He had cryptic notations.
21:39He was basically covered with codes all the way down to his shoes.
21:44And we knew we needed to unlock these codes and find whatever he's taken or whatever he's
21:49given away.
21:51Anything that we can figure out of these codes, it's going to be key at trial.
21:54And so our biggest problem now is we have to prove at least that he's attempted to commit
22:00espionage.
22:01But we don't have the evidence that we're going to need to make a good case to go to
22:08trial.
22:09And so, of course, we get search warrants for his cars and his house because the original
22:14encrypted letter, it was typed, so it had to be on a computer somewhere.
22:19So we were looking for any computer that Brian Regan had access to.
22:24We traveled over to Brian's home in Bowie, Maryland.
22:31So during the search of the basement, I found a computer.
22:36Then the computer was given to our computer department to search diligently.
22:42So while the computer department is looking for any evidence, we're starting to prepare
22:48for the potential to go to trial.
22:54Most of our cases don't go to trial because you don't want classified national defense
22:59information to get out to the public.
23:03And so Brian Regan was offered a plea agreement.
23:08During the proffer between the government and his attorneys, they hinted that there
23:13was a lot of national security information that he had buried.
23:21We found out that he would steal classified paper documents and he took those and he buried
23:26them.
23:27He would print anything that had a classification on it that he felt was important enough for
23:30an adversary and leave the building with them.
23:33And to his credit, he was never detected.
23:37Once he buried them, his plan was to try to sell them to a hostile intelligence service.
23:44Not only is it buried treasure, it's our national treasures, our sources, our methods.
23:48And that's what Brian had and we had to find him.
23:53The last thing you want to do is have that unsecured somewhere that nobody knows where
23:58it is.
23:59And so then the negotiation started.
24:03And I think it was finally decided that they would offer him 12 years in prison, as long
24:08as he fully cooperated, that we would agree to that.
24:13And Brian Regan said, no, I don't want 12 years.
24:17I want eight years.
24:18And if you don't give me eight years, I'm going to go to trial.
24:22My argument was, if we allowed Brian Regan to graymail the government, who says the next
24:28spy is not going to try to do the same thing?
24:30It was just a bad idea.
24:32And so we prepared to go to trial.
24:34For the first time now in half a century, an espionage trial in the United States could
24:39lead to a death sentence.
24:40The trial of Brian Patrick Regan is underway in Virginia.
24:46The case came to me when Brian Regan decided to go to trial.
24:50And these codes we found on him when he was arrested reveal a lot of secrets.
24:56What is being coded here?
24:57What is he trying to tell the foreign power?
25:00It would be logical that these codes reveal locations of classified documents.
25:05So there was immense pressure to break these codes.
25:12I'm a unit chief of the cryptanalysis unit of the FBI laboratory.
25:15Now, a cryptanalyst is someone who breaks codes.
25:19We're not breaking codes that are made by computers.
25:21We're breaking codes that are made by people.
25:23What is this person doing?
25:24What are the quirks of this individual that produce this type of code?
25:28So now our sole purpose is breaking these codes as the trial date is getting closer
25:33and closer and closer.
25:37And so I walked into a room where all of Brian's codes were laid out, and it was just like
25:42a smorgasbord of different codes.
25:45It was really kind of overwhelming.
25:48So let's go after the biggest one first.
25:50And that was these three-number trinomes that couldn't be broken.
25:53Trinome is a three-number combination.
25:56Every code breaker, I think, goes through the same roller coaster.
25:58When you first look at a code, your first thought is, oh, my goodness, I'll never be
26:01able to do anything with this.
26:02It's an overwhelming challenge.
26:05But then as you sit down and start to look at it, typically what will happen is you start
26:09to notice patterns.
26:10You start to see things.
26:11And then that little ray of hope comes, wow, I think maybe I can actually break this.
26:15But sometimes, try as you might, you just hit a wall and you can't do anything.
26:18Then that roller coaster goes back down, and now you feel like, oh, I'll never break this.
26:22And so you have to recognize when you're beat.
26:25You have to be able to move on.
26:26Otherwise, you'll never sleep again.
26:30The one thing is, there were so many codes to try.
26:32When you got stalled at one, you could start working on another.
26:37And so I had this little note, and I thought, hmm, I wonder if it's just something as simple
26:41as shifting every character over.
26:43So I started shifting everything, one position, one position.
26:46For example, every A becomes a B, and every B becomes a C.
26:51I shifted all 25 characters over, and it was the last one.
26:56It was German.
26:57The first line was Bundesplatz.
27:00The next one was Bundeshof Bahnhofstrasse.
27:03So those aren't exactly words that jump out at you if you're not looking for them.
27:08It ended up being a list of banks in Europe and the locations of those particular banks.
27:13But that was the first success.
27:15It was a small success, but it was a confidence builder in some ways, because when you have
27:20nothing, anything is something.
27:22The next pivotal moment came when more codes and documents were found on his laptop computer.
27:31Brian thought that he had deleted those from the computer, but the FBI was able to find them.
27:38One document was a letter written to Saddam Hussein.
27:41The next letter was a coded message to Saddam Hussein.
27:45And the third message was a coded letter to the leader of Libya.
27:51And everything for trial.
27:55Here was Brian, in his own words, telling Iraqi President Saddam Hussein that he's willing
28:00to commit espionage against the United States and willing to sell our secrets.
28:04To hear the callousness in his own words and to hear the complete lack of remorse really
28:09motivates you to want to see this through to the end.
28:15And so we went into court.
28:16We told our story.
28:18I showed the jury where we succeeded, and I showed them where we couldn't figure out
28:22the codes, and we left it in the hands of the jury.
28:27And it was just a short time later that we found that he was convicted.
28:33Brian Regan was found guilty by jury in February of 2003.
28:38This is a man who went from having the potential of 12 years to now waiting sentencing, which
28:43ended up being life.
28:48Strangely enough, while that's an exciting moment, we still have a lot of work to do.
28:54The case wasn't closed as long as there's thousands of documents out there somewhere.
29:00There are national secrets and they're buried all over the mid-Atlantic.
29:04Now the game's switched from convicting to finding these classified documents and getting
29:09them back.
29:18Brian Regan was found guilty by jury in February of 2003.
29:24But the case wasn't closed as long as there's thousands of documents out there somewhere.
29:33So after the trial, he agrees to cooperate with the government.
29:41Part of the reason why he was fully cooperating was because his wife continued to be a beneficiary
29:46to his retirement.
29:48She would have lost his pension.
29:49Now here's a woman with no job and four children.
29:53And so then we go into debriefing him for an extended period of time.
29:57Most of it at the beginning dealt with where is all the classified information.
30:0120,000 documents that reveal sources, methods.
30:06As long as these packages are out there, there's always a possibility that the wrong person's
30:10going to find them.
30:13And so Brian Regan told the debriefers that he had buried documents in multiple locations
30:20in Maryland and Virginia.
30:22There were 19 packages total, seven packages in Maryland, and there was an additional 12
30:29packages in Virginia.
30:30He gave us the name of the parks that he had buried them in.
30:34But the coordinates to where they were buried were in a toothbrush holder that was buried
30:39under a sign alongside I-95 South on an exit to Fredericksburg in Virginia.
30:47In a sense, he was creating an espionage treasure hunt.
30:50And this was his way to stay anonymous.
30:53If he buried them, gave somebody the coordinates, and they went and picked them up, they would
30:57never know who he was.
30:59And so we start searching the fence line on I-95, looking for a toothbrush holder.
31:07Much to my astonishment, we found that toothbrush holder, and it had the coordinates inside
31:12of it.
31:14So in the toothbrush case, he had the plaintext coordinates for the packages buried in Virginia,
31:20and he had the coded coordinates for the packages buried in Maryland.
31:25What we also needed to know was, once you found that location, what did you do?
31:31From the ones in Pocahontas Park, down in Virginia, Brian had put roofing nails on the
31:38side of the tree, and then marked out the number of paces from that side of the tree
31:43that's where you were to dig.
31:44That was a very interesting approach that we hadn't seen before.
31:48It was very complicated.
31:50So we went out with metal detectors, trying to find trees in the forest that had nails
31:56in them.
31:58Finally, we found, of the 12 caches of documents that he had buried in that park, 11 of them
32:04that night.
32:05And we're not talking about a little package this big.
32:10We're talking about a tremendous amount of documents.
32:16So we have 11 of the packages, and we just could not find the 12th one.
32:23And so, I got a call on a Sunday afternoon that said, hey, we found 11 of the 12 packages,
32:28but we're having trouble with the 12th, can you help us?
32:32For that, I would have to go to the original trinomes and break it from scratch.
32:37Those trinomes were the coordinates for the packages in Virginia.
32:41That was the code that we had the most failure with.
32:49Every code has a key.
32:50And we knew we needed to find that key in order to unlock these secrets.
32:54Brian provided the key to the code.
32:56The key was his phone list that was in his wallet at the time that he was arrested.
33:00Our next question is, what do we do next?
33:03In which case, Brian didn't remember.
33:06The problem was, two years has gone by, and he didn't know how to use the key anymore.
33:10He forgot how to use it.
33:12You really didn't remember?
33:14Well, at this point, Brian was being forthcoming.
33:16We believed he was telling us the truth.
33:18But he wasn't telling us the truth when he said he couldn't remember how to break the codes.
33:22And so, we followed everything Brian told us,
33:25tried to reconstruct what he couldn't remember,
33:27and eventually were able to make it work.
33:29But it was tough.
33:32And as I came up with a solution,
33:34the case agent was on the phone with the team that was in the state park,
33:38and they dug it up 30 minutes later.
33:42After they recovered all of the 12 packages from Virginia,
33:44the next battle was the coded locations for seven more packages buried in Maryland.
33:52This was a code I had never seen before,
33:54because this code was from the toothbrush case.
33:57So now we have a whole new problem and a whole new set of packages to recover.
34:03The next step is figuring out, what is the key to unlock this code?
34:08So Brian said, the key is my yearbook.
34:10We went to the house, we got the yearbook.
34:13This is the 1977 Mill Lane Junior High School yearbook
34:18that Brian used to encipher the coordinates
34:22for the packages buried in Patapsco State Park in Maryland.
34:25So Brian provides the key, but unfortunately two years has gone by,
34:29and he can't remember how he enciphered the messages.
34:33He made it so complicated, he couldn't remember how to use the keys to break the codes.
34:38And so, we needed to sit down with Brian Regan to talk about how to use that yearbook
34:43to unlock the code.
34:47And so, we spent hours and hours together going over different parts of the code.
34:52We needed to figure out the relationship between the numbers in the code and the yearbook itself.
34:58And so, when you look at the code,
35:01the first line of the Maryland code was the words, number one.
35:05We learned that number one represented Brian Regan.
35:09The entire code system revolved around his picture in his middle school yearbook.
35:14And of all things, the number that kept on appearing in the code was the number 13,
35:21referencing the 13th picture from Brian's picture.
35:25Here's a picture of Brian down in the bottom corner.
35:29Now, the 13th picture over is not a person.
35:35The 13th picture is a student with a mask, and it says, mystery man.
35:41It was a practical joke in the yearbook.
35:44Above the word mystery man, Brian Regan had written Frank.
35:50He picked the one middle school in all of the state of Maryland,
35:53there is not a single child whose first name starts with F.
35:56And so, Brian had to create a Frank so his code would work.
36:00And that's why we have the word Frank written in front of the picture of the mystery man.
36:07Brian needed a Frank in that yearbook because he needed a student whose first name started with F.
36:13Because he needed the letter F seven times to represent feet seven different times.
36:21And so, we made a breakthrough, but we still needed to break the rest of the message.
36:28Right towards the end of the interview, we pointed out some anomalies that we had observed on the bottom of the code.
36:35And we said, Brian, what is this? Why did this happen?
36:37The bottom two lines mathematically were not similar to the entire rest of the message.
36:42And of course, I don't remember. Don't remember.
36:47Brian, his own method of using such complex methods was a detriment in a lot of the codes that he made.
36:53He made them overly complex so he couldn't remember how to break them.
36:57And we need to know where everything is.
37:00Brian had access beyond just where he was working.
37:03So he can provide information on terrorism matters.
37:06He can provide information on a host of other things not even related to the National Reconnaissance Office.
37:12As long as these packages are out there, there's always a possibility the wrong person is going to find them.
37:17And we need to get them before someone else does.
37:27Right towards the end of the interview, we pointed out some anomalies that we had observed on the bottom of the code.
37:34And we said, Brian, what is this? Why did this happen?
37:37The bottom two lines mathematically were not similar to the entire rest of the message.
37:42And of course, I don't remember. Don't remember.
37:45We asked if we could send the yearbook and the code with him so he could sleep on it overnight.
37:53Once Brian got alone, had time to think about the areas that we had focused on,
37:57he then remembered that the bottom of the code literally contained the coordinates for the last seven packages of top-secret material in Maryland.
38:10The coordinates were right there in plain text.
38:14It's like writing the password of a message into the message itself.
38:19And so a team of FBI agents went to Patapsco State Park and began digging up packages.
38:26If you can picture men and women from the FBI walking down a trail in the woods like the seven dwarfs with shovels and picks over their shoulders,
38:34you get an idea of what this looked like in Patapsco.
38:39And so we'd spend literally all day digging holes.
38:43And then nothing would come up.
38:45We were out for weeks, and we dug holes that you cannot believe.
38:49I think we were digging swimming pools at a certain point, and we could not find the documents.
38:53So there was obviously a problem.
38:55It was so important for us to recover all the material,
38:58because we needed to make sure this classified material was all accounted for at the end.
39:05And so my case agent and Mark Rieser came to me and said,
39:09We think we need to take Brian Regan out of jail and take him out there.
39:14Brian was visual.
39:15So our last-ditch effort was a, let's try taking him out and seeing if things start clicking with him.
39:23In my mind, it didn't make any sense that Brian Regan would be able to find the documents three years later in the middle of the woods.
39:33But we got the approval with a lot of conditions.
39:36And myself, the case agent, Brian Regan, and a SWAT team drove up to Patapsco Park.
39:45So we're going down these trails with a guy handcuffed with his hands in front of him.
39:50It's not like he's picking flowers and stuff.
39:52He's shackled, and he knows it.
39:57Brian walked over, and he starts pointing with both his hands.
40:01Brian walked over, and he starts pointing with both his hands.
40:05I think it's here.
40:08And so we grabbed the shovel, started digging, and within maybe four or five shovel digs, we found the first package.
40:19And so we continued searching, much to my amazement, Brian Regan remembered his trees.
40:27He found the documents.
40:29And we would not have found them without his cooperation.
40:33As far as we know, he got no money.
40:35And the information that was buried, we recovered everything.
40:43This is one of those cases that we can sit back and say, we prevented it from happening.
40:47And that's something that I am proud of, and I'm sure all the guys that worked there are proud.
40:52If you betray the trust of a country like Brian Regan did, that's putting our military people in jeopardy.
40:58That's putting our operations in jeopardy.
41:01To be able to stop that is a satisfaction that I don't think you can even describe.
41:10Spying is inevitable.
41:12There will always be spies.
41:13There will always be people that understand the systems well enough to exploit them.
41:19By all accounts, Brian Regan was a patriot.
41:22He served in the military, and everyone felt that he loved his country that much.
41:26But what we found was that, for some reason, he was willing to sell out his country for money.
41:33I think every spy goes into it thinking, I'm going to be the one that doesn't get caught.
41:37I'm going to study other spies and see what they did wrong, and I'm not going to make those mistakes.
41:41I'm going to outsmart them all.
41:43I think Brian fell victim to what so many other spies do, and that is that sense of superiority.
41:48He took government secrets, and he buried them in an attempt to sell them for his own gain.
41:54He brought all this on himself.