American spy caught with secrets

ALEXANDRIA, Va. -- Brian Patrick Regan buried 20,000 classified documents, five CD-ROMs and five videotapes, the government said Wednesday, evidence of the convicted spy's intention to sell national security secrets to Iraq and other countries for millions of dollars.\nRegan, convicted in February of two counts of attempted espionage and one count of gathering national defense information, wrote down the coordinates of the hidden documents. He buried those directions in a blue toothbrush holder and purple plastic salt shaker along Interstate 95 in Virginia between Fredericksburg and Richmond, U.S. Attorney Paul McNulty said.\nHe called the Regan case "one of the largest espionage schemes of all times."\nMcNulty said all of the material stolen by the retired Air Force master sergeant has been recovered and none of it was delivered to foreign governments.\nDuring the trial, prosecutors said the information Regan wanted to sell to Iraq, Libya, China and Iran could help those countries learn what the U.S. government knew about their weapons programs and how well U.S. satellites could spy on their missile sites and other military operations.\n"Imagine what would have happened if he was able to get started to transfer this information into the hands of our adversaries," McNulty said. "Information like that in the hands of Saddam Hussein that he could use or give to others would have been an extraordinary threat to us."\nEven during the February trial, the government didn't know exactly how many classified documents Regan purloined, McNulty said.\nExperts are still cataloguing all of the recovered documents and how much damage they could have done, said Air Force Col. Debra Donahoo, chief intelligence officer for counterintelligence for the National Reconnaissance Office, the spy agency where Regan worked.\nA phone call to Regan's lawyer, Nina Ginsberg, was not immediately returned.\nA U.S. District court spared Regan the death penalty. Regan agreed not to appeal a sentence of life imprisonment without parole in exchange for the government promising not to prosecute his wife and allowing her to keep a portion of his military pension.\nSurrounded by FBI agents, NRO officials and the two assistant U.S. attorneys who successfully prosecuted the case, McNulty said the newly uncovered documents disproved defense characterizations of his actions as "childish," "unprofessional," "nonsense" and "harebrained."\nMcNulty said Regan regularly removed documents from the spy agency and squirreled them away in 19 different locations in two state parks, Patapsco Valley State Park west of Baltimore, and Pocahontas State Park south of Richmond.\nSo well hidden were the materials that Regan, who agreed to cooperate with the government as part of his plea bargain, had to accompany FBI agents to the Maryland park on three separate occasions to show them where the documents were buried.\nRegan was arrested Aug. 23, 2001, at Dulles International Airport outside Washington while boarding a flight for Zurich, Switzerland. He was carrying information with the coded coordinates of Iraqi and Chinese missile sites, the missiles that were stored there, and the date the information was obtained, prosecutors said.