The Spy Who Couldn't Spell by Yudhijit Bhattacharjee

Author:Yudhijit Bhattacharjee
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2016-12-09T09:57:12+00:00

CHAPTER 7

DECIPHER THIS

Carr stared at the words in front of him.

Tricycle Lockpost Glove Motorcycle.

He read on.

Switch Weapon Pen Las Vegas.

Thirteen words in all, along with the curious notation “21month” scribbled sideways across the page of a spiral notebook that agents had found on Regan when they searched him after his arrest. Now, two days later, Carr sat in a large conference room at the Washington Field Office puzzling over what the innocuous string of words could possibly mean.

They made no sense, just like the four sheets of handwritten trinomes Regan had been carrying in his accordion folder. There were other seemingly nonsensical notes that agents had recovered from him. In his wallet, he had been carrying a three-by-five index card with twenty-six words that could have been randomly plucked out of a dictionary. Also found in the wallet was a piece of paper penned with a sequence of letters and numbers that looked like gobbledygook. The four lines on it began “56NVOAIP . . .” and ended with “. . . 18837795.”

In Regan’s checked-in brown suitcase, agents had found an assortment of things that to them seemed odd: a bag of sand, a Tupperware container, six plastic garbage bags, and a bottle of Elmer’s glue. In the duffel bag, Regan was carrying a GPS. The list of puzzling possessions didn’t end there. On the night of the arrest, after Regan was taken to the Central Virginia Regional Jail in Orange, Virginia—ninety miles from D.C.—a correctional officer had discovered, tucked between the inner and outer sole of Regan’s shoe, a folded piece of paper bearing handwritten addresses in Europe. They turned out to be the addresses of the Iraqi and Chinese embassies in France, Switzerland, and the Netherlands.

Strange and inexplicable as these things were, they weren’t incriminating. On their own, they didn’t prove that Regan had committed espionage or that he’d even conspired to do so. There was nothing unlawful about writing down gibberish on sheets of paper, or hiding embassy addresses in one’s shoe. Regan had also done nothing illegal by lying to his boss about where he was going, even though he might have technically violated a rule at his job requiring advance notification of foreign travel. The only sensitive information agents had found in his luggage consisted of a handful of NRO course descriptions—the same document he’d been seen creating at his office on August 15 by cutting out portions of an NRO course catalog. Regan had kept two copies of it inside a pornographic magazine he was carrying in his duffel bag; he had assumed, erroneously, that security officials would find it awkward to thumb through an X-rated glossy if they decided to search his luggage. While the courses were classified, the course descriptions were not, and so their value as evidence of an espionage plot was fairly limited.

Because of these reasons, the FBI had been compelled to mention the origins of the investigation in its criminal complaint against Regan, which Carr had helped to draft the day after the arrest.

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