Spy Inquiry of Ex-Airman Seeks Cache of Secret Data

The investigation of Brian Regan, the retired Air Force master sergeant arrested last week on espionage charges, has been widened to learn whether he gathered a large trove of secret documents with hopes of selling them to other countries, government officials said Tuesday.

Regan, 38, spent the last four years of his 20-year military career at the National Reconnaissance Office, the agency responsible for the nation’s intelligence satellites. He had daily access to Intelink, a computer system used by U.S. intelligence agencies to store and share highly classified information. If he was spying during most or all of that time, the damage to national security could be far greater than first thought, the officials said.

Regan was arrested at Dulles International Airport on Thursday as he was about to board a flight for Switzerland via Germany. He had been under intense FBI surveillance since June, and officials believe he was caught before he could sell significant secrets to a nation identified in a 19-page FBI affidavit as Country A, which sources said was Libya.

But officials said they fear that Regan may have begun stealing and setting aside secrets some time ago. “He may have been preparing for retirement, planning to sell the material off over the years,” a senior government official said.

Less than a month before his Aug. 30, 2000, retirement from the Air Force, Regan established an e-mail address under a pseudonym--Steven Jacobs of Alexandria, Va.--that he planned to use for surreptitious contacts with foreign governments, according to the FBI affidavit.

Also, a search this year of the computer that Regan used during the four years when he was an Air Force cryptanalyst, or code breaker, at the NRO shows that he accessed and may have downloaded much more secret information than the few samples he allegedly passed to Libya to establish himself, government officials said.

As a result, investigators are concerned that he may have created a cache of classified documents somewhere, perhaps in computer files or on disks. The investigation is now focused on determining when he began collecting documents, what he did with them and whether he started peddling them before leaving the service, the officials said.

Nina Ginsberg, Regan’s court-appointed attorney, declined to comment.

Regan was arraigned Friday and was ordered held without bond pending a preliminary hearing in U.S. District Court in Alexandria. That hearing, originally scheduled for today, has been postponed until Sept. 28.

In addition, Judge Claude Hilton on Tuesday gave the government until Oct. 19, a month longer than usual, to indict Regan because of the “complex nature of the investigation and the classified nature of much of the material involved.”

After retirement, Regan was hired in October by TRW Inc., which does work for the NRO. Because he lost access to top-secret data when he retired, his initial job at TRW was as a military liaison and did not involve highly classified data.

By April, when Regan’s old office and computer were searched, the FBI had begun to focus on him as the possible source of secret documents that had been passed to Libya and turned over to U.S. government officials, presumably by an American agent.

In June, the FBI began full-scale surveillance of Regan. According to the current issue of Newsweek, the FBI sent an e-mail to the Jacobs address purporting to come from a Libyan spy and induced Regan to fly to Munich. There, a U.S. operative posing as a Libyan met Regan and encouraged him to provide information, Newsweek said.

Although senior U.S. officials declined Tuesday to confirm that account, the FBI affidavit says Regan flew to Munich on June 26, using the Internet in Switzerland before the trip to get the diplomatic address of an unnamed country, said by sources to be either Iraq or a former Soviet republic.

In July, with the approval of the FBI, Regan’s top-secret clearance was restored and he was moved to a TRW office at NRO headquarters. That office had been wired by the FBI with a hidden video camera.