tv Declassified CNN November 3, 2019 11:00pm-12:00am PST
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with tiny lights. if those ships came close enough, they would see a new mom swimming with her healthy, happy baby. i remember coming out here many times. you can see how rough it is and how remote it is. there's no one here. and there's no one to see you. never in a million years would i expect to be in the woods digging holes to find classified information. in a sense, we're digging for treasure. it was critical information buried out here that was important to the defense of the united states. and we had to find it.
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>> as a former fbi agent and chairman of the house intelligence committee, i had oversight of all 16 of our nation's intelligence agencies. my name is mike rogers. i had access to classified information gathered by our operatives, people who risked everything for the united states and our families. you don't know their faces or their names. you don't know the real stories from the people who live the fear and the pressure, until now. >> spying is beyond anything i can comprehend. i don't know how you could spy if you thought that you were going to get somebody killed. that's putting our military people in jeopardy. that's putting our operations in jeopardy.
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my job was always to safeguard secrets of the united states, and i took that very seriously. they're secrets for a reason. if one part of this fell into the wrong hands, lives are lost. >> i've been involved in espionage cases since 1983. my squad at the washington field office did espionage cases with unknown subjects, and we got word in december of 2000 that new york had information that they had an espionage case. and the espionage case involved libya and iran. so the new york office received packages that an unknown subject had provided to a foreign intelligence service. >> how did the new york office come into possession of these packages? >> that's information i can't
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talk about because it's still classified. there were three packages. inside the first package was classified documents. some of the pages were photographs that were classified. the second package was the encrypted letter. and the third package was a d decryption code. without that key you could not read the letter. >> the new york field office decoded it with the encryption key. >> it said i am an analyst for the c.i.a. i want to commit espionage. >> so, this someone was likely working out of the washington, d.c. area. >> then that for new york switches the case down to the washington field office. we took the de crypted letter and looked at it for lead purposes. >> what can we know from this decoded letter that we can say about the person who wrote this letter?
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>> i am a middle east north african analyst for the central intelligence agency. i am willing to commit espionage against the united states by providing your country with highly classified information. if i am caught, i will be imprisoned for the rest of my life, if not executed for this deed. my wife and my daughter will be disgraced and harassed by everyone in our community. considering the risk i am about to take, i will require a minimum payment of 13 million u.s. dollars wire transferred in swiss francs. i had never seen anything like that before in all the years that i had been working close to 25 years in the espionage cases. he was actually trying to hide his identity so that the recipient, almost like in a kidnapping case, would not know who it was. that was very unusual. we were lucky to have mark reeser assigned to the case as an analyst.
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not all the squads had that. in a case like this, it is vitally important to have someone who can put all of the information that all of the agents are gathering and make sense of them. >> it's almost like we're putting a big puzzle together. >> once we de crypted a letter, my agents created a matrix. >> it's what we use on sub-cases where we don't know who the person is. we lineup those facts. so in this case, there were some parts of the letter that he wrote which we use as matrix points. so the matrix points we worked off then were military background. he had a knowledge of anthology because the letter was coded. he had access to top secret clearance or intel link. intel link is the classified internet. he probably worked within the intelligence community. he was married and had children, lived in washington, d.c. area, and he was a terrible speller.
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>> and the spelling problems were very unusual. >> espionage, e-s-p-o-s-i-n-a-g-e. >> disgraced, d-i-s-c-r-a-c-e-d. >> satellite, s-a-l-i-g-h-t. >> and the letter was full of misspellings. at this point we did not know what he'd taken. we didn't know that he hadn't already sold it. we just didn't know. and if classified documents fell into the wrong hands, lives are lost. and so the very first thing to do, of course, was to go to the c.i.a. because right away the person claimed to be a c.i.a. analyst. that was a given. and they started an internal investigation. and then there were names that came up in the package through various means that linked the nro to a case. the nro was another group we needed to go talk to right away.
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>> the national reconnaissance office is a government agency that specializes in providing satellite imagery of the world. the nro is the eye in the sky for the u.s. intelligence apparatus. so the fbi came to nro in december of 2000 and briefed us on the investigation. >> once the nro was briefed, we discussed what we needed from them and that was for them to look at their personnel to see if anybody fit in that matrix. >> so, we wanted to either rule out the nro or to figure out who it was, and we made a decision to open up our own inquiry looking at nro employees in addition to the active investigation the fbi had. >> while the matrix points were good, they are also vague. somebody with a family, bad speller. so the nro's job was not an easy one. >> at nro, he had access to the
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entire intelligence community's data. that's not just nro data. that's nsa data, counter intelligence data from the counter intelligence community, that's cia data, nga data. if it is a spy, it's an nro working inside this building or similar building. they can do a lot of damage. wit looks like jill heading offe on an adventure. jill has entresto, a heart failure medicine that helps her heart so she can keep on doing what she loves. in the largest heart failure study ever, entresto was proven superior at helping people stay alive and out of the hospital. it helps improve your heart's ability to pump blood to the body. don't take entresto if pregnant; it can cause harm or death to an unborn baby.
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employee in the intelligence community, potentially the person has some training in cryptography and they believed the individual was dyslexic. they based it on some of the misspellings in the letter. the information that he had stolen was highly classified and he could cause significant damage not only to the national reconnaissance office but other intelligence agencies as well. we had no idea who the spy is. my goal was to conduct a review of the nro employees, which would include thousands of files, and reduce the counter intelligence review down to one individual that we felt was the spy. so what we decided to do was look at other factors, the things that are more traditional. we looked at financial difficulties in the security file. we also looked at their training. we looked at their performance history. i was given a small room and a
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cart and i was provided hundreds and hundreds of pages of documents. it was exciting in the beginning. i'm actually on the chase. but after a couple weeks, it became pretty, pretty numbing. so i was just pouring through hundreds and hundreds of pages. people's security files. and then i came across brian reagan's file. and was able to quickly see that he had some cryptography training and suggestions he had some financial difficulty in the file. and finally, i got to take a detailed review of brian's performance evaluation. brian's career he received a number of performance evaluations, all of which were exceptional.
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however, there was one evaluation that he received where he was downgraded minimally, but he was so used to receiving the top levels across the board, he actually wrote a rebuttal. and in that letter, you could see evidence of dyslexia. when i saw the misspellings, i actually couldn't believe that i was reading them properly. i thought i was misreading it and i read it again and i read it again. wow, this can't be coincidental. this person had the same problem with spellings as the person who wrote the letter that the fbi had. once i was confident that it was brian that was the potential unsub, i put together a briefing and requested that we brief that to the fbi. >> now we have to start looking at brian reagan because he's one of a couple of people that fit everything that's in the matrix. >> and so we start to conduct a
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full investigation on brian reagan. >> now we're doing 24-hour surveillance on him, 24-hour surveillance on someone. it's not an easy task. >> i remember the first shift of the surveillance, observed him doing some really odd stuff out in chantilly. they described brian driving to a wooded area, walking into the woods, putting something down, and then getting back in his car and going about his own way. and i remember telling the surveillance, saying, do not go into the woods. leave it alone. let's see what happens. we later found out what he did was he put a voice activated tape recorder into the woods because he wanted to see if anyone was following him. >> he was doing counter surveillance because he was working up to doing something wrong. and so he wanted to see if he was under surveillance. >> but we still have to prove that he's the guy that did it.
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>> we did not know what classified information he'd taken. and if brian reagan committed espionage, he deserved to go to jail, and it was my job to put him in jail. so now we have all of our resources towards the case and we are looking very hard at his entire background. from what we learned about brian reagan, he had a difficult childhood. he had dyslexia, and so he couldn't read, and so you can imagine what that's like for a child that can't read. because of dyslexia, people assumed he wasn't bright, and that's just not the case. >> he made it for himself. he got into the air force. he did very well in the air force. and he was good with codes and numbers. >> brian was an air force master sarge. he had been trained to work in the intelligence community and he worked primarily at the national security agency and the
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national reconnaissance office. >> he, by all accounts, was a very intelligent individual, but he had some flaws. he had a lot of credit card debt. >> when we first started looking at brian reagan, he was $53,000 in debt. not that many months later he was well over $100,000 in debt, over twice what we thought originally. >> how did he get into so much debt in the first place? >> well, he had four children. his wife didn't work. and so he was borrowing from one credit card to pay another credit card, and he saw no way of getting out of it. >> he thought this was the best way to do it. >> once we identified brian reagan as being our primary suspect, the problem was he had already retired. and to the best of our knowledge, he no longer had access to classified information. to be able to take someone to trial and to prosecute them, you really have to prove that they are providing national defense
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information to a foreign power or an agent of a foreign power. and if he doesn't have classified information to pass on to the bad guys, you've got quite a dilemma. >> what we did know is that brian reagan expressed interest in coming back to work as a contractor at the national reconnaissance office. in fact, he had applied for a position and he was awaiting feedback from them on that application. >> so we presented to the director of nro asking that he allow reagan to come back and work for them. and the director sat back and listened to what everybody had to say. he said, i understand where the fbi is coming from and i understand he has to be caught in committing the act of treason, and i will allow him to come back for 90 days. so, fbi, you have 90 days to solve this case. and so the pressure was on. fact is, every insurance company hopes you drive safely. but allstate actually helps you drive safely... with drivewise.
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brian reagan returned to the nro as a contractor in july of 2001. >> the nro was a government agency that specializes in providing satellite imagery of matters that are of importance to the u.s. government. >> once brian reagan went back to the nro, we had him under constant surveillance, and that included in his work space. >> they had cameras mounted in the equipment as well as audio. so we were able to not only
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listen, but to see pretty much everything that he did. several days after brian returned to the nro for work, he was alone in the room and he was noticeably looking up and gazing at the roof tiles looking for what would appear to be a bug or camera. he wanted to make sure that he was not being monitored. and then once he felt comfortable, he decided that he would just browse for classified information. he browsed on anything from counter intelligence to the iranian threat, anything that was highly classified he decided that it's of interest. >> so now we've gone from being 99.9% sure to we got the right guy. but we still don't have the evidence that we need to make a case. and so you just keep building
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and building and collecting and collecting. hopefully one of these days it will all come together. >> after several weeks, brian requested personal leave to take his family on a vacation to orlando. he wrote this on the whiteboard that he would be going to orlando with his kids. >> but we didn't see any plane tickets being purchased, no indication of travel to orlando. and so i remember we were looking back at his charge records. looking for any kind of indication of going to orlando, and we saw a small charge to one of the airlines that was too small to be airfare. it was too small to be baggage. and it ended up being the administrative fee that you get when you cash in your frequent flyer miles. and so he was cashing in his frequent flyer miles to travel overseas. >> 24 hours prior to his leaving the area, we learned that he was, in fact, going to germany.
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>> and so now we are in a panic because we had no idea whether he had classified on him. >> and we felt that he was probably going to make an attempt to reach out to the intelligence service in a foreign country versus doing it in the u.s. >> but the fbi has no jurisdiction overseas, and so now you have no choice but to stop him from going out of the country, but you may lose your case because of it. >> so after coordination with the intelligence community, secretary of defense and the fbi, a decision was made to actually go ahead and execute the arrest of brian. >> so our biggest problem now is it's happening at the last minute, and department of justice has to approve it to arrest him. so while we're waiting for approval from the department of justice, brian reagan is being followed by our surveillance to the airport. so now i'm trying to brief the department of justice on why we should be able to arrest brian reagan before he gets on an
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airplane. in the meantime, i've got my supervisor at dulles airport calling me going, did we get approval yet? the plane is getting ready to leave. it's almost time. finally, the department of justice official comes back, approves the detention of brian reagan, and we tell the people at the airport you can stop him before he gets on the flight. he is detained. he is interviewed. his luggage was pulled out. and we found some very interesting things in his luggage. he had tape, blass tick baplast had a plastic container, elmer's glue. he had a bag of wet sand. he was worried about leaving fingerprints so he was going to put glue on his fingers, dip them in sand, put the rubber tips on and then handle the
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information. that is a really interesting and complex scenario, one i've never seen before. and later they find documents between the sole of his shoe and the liner of his shoe. they contain addresses of the overseas embassies that we were concerned about. and he has a number of documents that are encrypted. >> brian had three different letters with codes on them, sheets and sheets of these three digits. brian had notes with cryptic, seemingly random words written on it. he had cryptic notations on pieces of paper that were in his wall el wallet. he was basically covered with codes all the way down to his shoes. >> and so by the time they finish interviewing him, because of some of the things he has in his bag, the department of justice agrees that we have enough to arrest him.
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>> so now, number one priority is to break the codes, find whatever he's taken or whatever he's giving away. we need to know what he had sto stolen, where is it, has he made contact with a foreign power. brian had secrets and we needed to learn what he knew and we knew we needed to unlock these codes. [ classical music playing ]
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on august 23rd, 2001, the fbi arrested brian reagan at dulles airport in virginia just as he was getting ready to board an international flight. >> there are so many different items on him when he was arrested. brian had three different letters with codes on them, sheets and sheets of these three digits. he had cryptic notations. he was basically covered with codes all the way down to his shoes. and we knew we needed to unlock these codes and find whatever he's taking or whatever he's giving away. anything we can figure out of these codes is going to be key at trial. >> so our biggest problem now is we have to prove he's at least attempted to commit espionage, but we don't have the evidence that we're going to need to make a good case to go to trial. and so, of course, we get search
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warrants for his cars and his house because the original encrypted letter was typed, so it had to be on a computer somewhere. so we were looking for any computer that brian reagan had access to. >> we traveled over to brian's home in bowie, maryland. so during the search of the basement, i found a computer. >> then the computer was given to our computer department to search diligently. so while the computer department is looking for any evidence, we're starting to prepare for the potential to go to trial. most of our cases don't go to trial because you don't want classified national defense information to get out into the public. and so brian reagan was offered a plea agreement. during the proffer between the
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government and his attorneys, they hinted that there was a lot of national security information that he had buried. >> we found out that he would steal classified paper documents and he took those and he buried them. >> he would print anything that had a classification on it that he felt was important enough for an adversary, then leave the building with them. then, to his credit, he was never detected. >> once he buried them, his plan was to try to sell them to a hostile intelligence service. not only is it buried treasure, it's our national treasures, our sources, our methods. that's what brian had, and we had to find them. >> the last thing you want to do is have that unsecured somewhere that nobody knows where it is, and so then the negotiation started. and i think it was finally decided that they would offer him 12 years in prison. as long as he fully cooperated,
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that we would agree to that. and brian reagan said, no. i don't want 12 years. i want eight years. if you don't give me eight years, i'm going to go to trial. my argument was if we allowed brian reagan to gray mill the government, who says the next spy is not going to try to do the same thing? it was just a bad idea. and so we prepared to go to trial. >> for the first time now in half a century, an espionage trial in the united states could lead to a death sentence. the trial of brian patrick reagan is underway in virginia. >> the case came to me when brian reagan decided to go to trial, and these codes we found on him when he was arrested revealed a lot of secrets. what is being coded here? what is he trying to tell the foreign power? it would be logical that these codes reveal locations of classified documents. so there was immense pressure to break these codes.
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analysis of the laboratory. a crypt analyst is someone who breaks codes. we're not breaking codes that are made by computers. we're breaking codes made by people. what is this person doing? what are the quirks that produced this type of code? now our sole purpose is breaking these codes as the trial date is getting closer and closer and closer. and so i walked into a room where all of brian's codes were laid out, and it was just like a smorgasbord of different codes. it was really kind of overwhelming. so let's go after the biggest one first, and that was these three number trinome that couldn't be broken. your first thought is, oh, my goodness, i'll never be able to do anything with this. it's an overwhelming challenge. as you sit down to look at it, you start to notice patterns,
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you see things. that ray of hope comes. wow, i can actually maybe break this. sometimes, try as you might, you just hit a wall and you can't do anything. then that roller coaster goes back down and you feel like, i'll never break this. you have to recognize when you're beat. you have to be able to move on. otherwise you'll never sleep again. the one thing is there were so many codes to try, when you got stalled at one, you could start working on another. and so i had this little note and i thought, i wonder if this is something as simple as shifting every character over. i started shifting everything, one position, one position. for example, every a becomes a b and every b becomes a c. i shifted all 25 characters over and it was the last one. it was german. first line was bundesplaz. the next one was munhoz. those words won't jump out at you if you're not looking for them. it ended up being a list of
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banks in europe and the locations of those particular banks. but that was the first success. it was a small success, but it was a real confidence builder in some ways because when you have nothing, anything is something. the next pivotal moment came when more codes and the documents were found on his laptop computer. brian thought that he had deleted those from the computer, but the fbi was able to find them. one document was a letter written to saddam hussein. the next letter was coded message to saddam hussein. and a third message was a coded letter to the leader of libya. everything for trial. here was brian in his own words telling iraqi president saddam hussein that he's willing to commit espionage against the united states and willing to sell our secrets. to hear the callousness in his own words and to hear the complete lack of remorse really motivates you to want to see
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this through to the end. and so we went into court. we told our story. i showed the jury where we succeeded and i showed them where we couldn't figure out the codes. and we left it in the hands of the jury. it was a short time later we found that he was convicted. >> brian reagan was found guilty by a jury in february of 2003. this is a man who went from having the potential of 12 years to now waiting sentencing, which ended up being life. strangely enough, while that's an exciting moment, we still have a lot of work to do. >> the case wasn't closed as long as there's thousands of documents out there somewhere. there are national secrets and they're buried all over the mid-atlantic. now the game switched from convicting to finding these classified documents and getting
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documents out there somewhere. >> so after the trial he agrees to cooperate with the government. part of the reason why he was fully cooperating was because his wife continued to be a beneficiary to his retirement. she would have lost his pension. here's a woman with no job and four children. >> and so, then, we go into debriefing him for a extended period of time. most of it at the beginning dealt with where is all the classified information? >> 20,000 documents that reveal sources, methods. as long as these packages are out there, there is always the possibility the wrong person is going to find them. >> and so brian reagan told the debriefers he had buried documents in multiple locations in maryland and virginia. >> there were 19 packages total,
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seven packages in maryland and there was an additional 12 packages in virginia. >> he gave us the name of the parks that he had buried them in, but the coordinates to where they were buried were in a toothbrush holder that was buried under a sign alongside i-95 south on an exit to fredericksburg in virginia. >> in a sense, he was creating espionage treasure hunt. >> this was his way to stay anonymous. if he buried them, gave somebody the coordinates, picked them up, they would never know who he was. so we start searching the fence line on i-95 looking for a toothbrush holder. much to my astonishment, we found that toothbrush holder, and it had the coordinates inside of it. >> so in the toothbrush case he had the plane text coordinates for the packages buried in virginia and the coded coordinates for the packages buried in maryland. >> what we also needed to know
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was, once you found that location, what did you do? on the ones in pocahontas park down in virginia, brian had put roofing nails on the side of the tree, and then marked out the number of paces from that side of the tree. that's where you were to dig. >> that was a very interesting approach we hadn't seen before. it was very complicated. so we went out with metal detectors trying to find trees in a forest that had nails in them. finally, we found of the 12 caches of documents he buried in that park, 11 of them that night. >> and we're not talking about a little package this big. >> we're talking about tremendous amount of documents. so we have 11 of the packages and we just could not find the 12th one. >> and so i got a call on a sunday afternoon that said, hey,
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we found 11 of the 12 packages, but we're having trouble with the 12th. can you help us? for that i would have to go to the original trinomes and break it from scratch. those were the coordinates for the packages in virginia. that was the code that we had the most failure with. every code has a key, and we knew we needed to find that key in order to unlock these secrets. brian provided the key to the code. the key was his phone list that was in his wallet at the time that he was arrested. our next question is, what do we do next? in which case brian didn't remember. the problem was two years has gone by and he didn't know how to use the key any more. he forgot how to use it. >> he really didn't remember? >> well, at this point brian was being forthcoming. we believe he was telling us the truth, even the truth when he said he couldn't remember how to break the codes. and so we followed everything brian told us, tried to reconstruct what he couldn't
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remember, and eventually we were able to make it work. but it was tough. and as i came up with a solution, the case agent was on the phone with the team that was in the state park, and they dug it up 30 minutes later. after they recovered all of the 12 packages from virginia, the next battle was the coded locations for seven more packages buried in maryland. this is a code i had never seen before because this code was from the toothbrush case. so now we have a whole new problem, and a whole new set of packages to recover. the next step is figuring out what is the key to unlock this code. so brian said the key is my year book. we went to the house. we got the year book. this is the 1977 mill lane junior high school year book that brian used to encypher the coordinates for the packages buried in patapsco state park in
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maryland. he couldn't remember how he encyphered the numbers. he couldn't remember the key to break the codes. we needed to sit down with brian reagan to figure out how to use the year book to unlock the code. and so we spent hours and hours together going over different parts of the code. we needed to figure out the relationship between the numbers in the code and the year book itself. and so when you look at the code, the first line of the maryland code was the words number one. we learned that number one represented brian reagan, the entire code system revolved around his picture in his middle school year book. of all things that kept appearing in the code was the number 13. referencing the 13th picture. from brian's picture. it was a picture of brian down
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on the bottom corner. now, the 13th picture over was not a person. the 13th picture is a student with a mask, and it was a practical joke in the yearbook. above the word mystery man, prin regan had written frank. he picked the one middle school in all of the state of maryland where there's not a single child whose first name starts with f. that's why we have the word frank written in front of the picture of the mystery man. ♪ brian needed a frank in that year book because he needed a student whose first name started with f because he needed the letter f seven times to represent feet seven different times. and so we made a breakthrough. but we still needed to break the
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rest of the message. right towards the end of the interview we pointed smout anomalies that we had observed on the bottom of the code. we said, brian, what is this, why did this happen? the bottom two lines mathematically were not similar to the entire rest of the message. and of course i don't remember, don't remember. brian, his own method of using such complex methods was a detriment in a lot of the codes. he made them overly complex so he couldn't remember how to break them. we needed to know where everything is. brian had access beyond where he was working so he could provide information on terrorism matters, he could provide information on a host of other things not even related to the national reconnaissance office. as long as these passages are out there, there's always the possibility someone else could find them. we need to get them before someone else does.
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right towards the end of the interview, we pointed out some anomalies that we had observed on the bottom of the code. we said, brian, what is this, why did this happen? the bottom two lines mathematically were not similar to the entire rest of the message. and of course "i don't remember, don't remember." we asked if we could send the year book and the code with him
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so he could sleep on it overnight. once brian got alone, time to think about the areas that we had focused on, he then remembered at the bottom of the code literally contained the coordinates for the last seven packages of top secret material in maryland. the coordinates were right there in plain text. it's like writing the password of a message into the message itself. and so a team of fbi agents went to the state park and began digging up packages. if you can picture men and women from the fbi walking down a trail in the woods like the seven dwarves with shovels and picks over their shoulders, you'll get an idea what this looked like. so we spent literally all day digging holes. and then nothing would come up. >> we were out for weeks and we
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dug holes that you cannot believe. i think we were digging swimming pools at a certain point and we could not find the documents so there was obviously a problem. >> we had needed to make sure this classified material was all accounted for at the end. >> and so my case agent and mark reaser came to me and said i think we need to take brian regan out of jail and take him out there. >> brian was visual. so our last-ditch effort was a let's try taking him out and seeing if things start clicking with him. >> in 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. >> but we got the approval with a lot of conditions. and myself, the case agent, brian regan and a s.w.a.t. team drove up to paptasco park.
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so we are going down these trails with a guy handcuffed with his hands in front of him. it's not like he's picking flowers and stuff. he's shackled and he knows it. brian walked over and he starts pointing with both his hands i think it's here. and so we grabbed the shovel, started digging and within maybe four or five shovel digs we found the first package. >> and so we continued searching much to my amazement brian regan remembered his trees. he found the documents and we would not have found them without his cooperation. >> as far as we know, he got no money. and the information that was buried, we recovered everything. this is one of those cases that we can sit back and say we prevented it from happening. and that's something that i am proud of and i'm sure all the
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guys that worked it are proud. >> if you retain the trust of the country like brian regan -- that's putting our military people in jeopardy, that's putting our operations in jeopardy to be able to stop that is a satisfaction that i don't think you can even describe. >> spying is inevitable. there will always be spichltz there will always be people that understand the systems well enough to exploit them. by all accounts brian regan was a patriot. he served in the military and everyone felt that he loved his country that much. but what we found was that for some reason he was willing to sell out his country for money. >> i think every spy goes into it thinking i'm going to be the one that doesn't get caught. i am going to study other spies and see what they did wrong and outsmart them all. i think brian fell victim and
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that is that sense of superiority. he took government secrets and he buried them in an attempt to sell them for his own gain. he brought all this on himself. hello, and welcome to our viewers here in the united states and all around the world. you are watching "cnn newsroom." and i'm rosemary church. today begins a crucial week in the impeachment inquiry into u.s. president donald trump. and a short time ago we learned what the white house plans to do. also ahead. >> the war here is not over yet, and ukraine is still very much dependent on the support of the u.s. >> cnn's clarissa ward on the front lines in ukraine's ongoing battle with russian separatists. plus, we are live in hong
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