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FBI digs up secret documents in spy case
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- FBI agents have recovered more than 10,000 pages of highly sensitive secret documents buried by convicted spy Brian Regan before his August 2001 arrest, government sources said Monday. The agents this month finished digging up the documents and some related items, including CD-ROMs, from about a dozen locations in Maryland and Virginia, according to officials familiar with the case. The FBI and Justice Department refused comment, but two federal law enforcement sources requesting anonymity confirmed the government is now confident that all of the classified material that Regan buried is recovered. Officials would not discuss the nature of the material or how it might have been taken out of a high-security federal agency. Regan worked at the National Reconnaissance Office, a U.S. government agency which analyzes data from spy satellites. "Right now I am not in a position to comment on this matter at all," said Regan defense attorney Nina Ginsberg. After Regan's arrest, the National Reconnaissance Office conducted an internal review of possible security problems. "We have done the review and made some adjustments," said an NRO spokesman. A retired Air Force master sergeant, Regan was convicted in February of offering to sell military secrets to Iraq and China, and of gathering national defense information. He was acquitted of attempting to provide U.S. secrets to Libya. A federal jury spared Regan the death penalty. His case marked the first time the U.S. government had sought to execute a convicted spy since the early 1950s. Unlike other convicted spies, such as the FBI's Robert Hanssen, Regan faced the death penalty without being accused of actually revealing secrets. Prosecutors said 40-year-old Regan, a father of four, offered to sell secrets from the National Reconnaissance Office to Iraq, China and Libya for $13 million. He had run up $116,000 in credit card debt, according to prosecutors. He is now serving a life sentence in a federal prison without the possibility of parole. Investigators found letters from Regan to former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi on Regan's home computer, and Regan was arrested with a notebook containing encrypted codes describing the location of a missile launcher in the northern no-fly zone of Iraq and another location in China, prosecutors said. But Ginsberg said he was acting out a fantasy and never intended to hurt the United States. She said a real spy would not have sought so much money for so little information and pointed out that investigators never found 800 pages of CIA documents that his letters claimed he had. Government sources say the recovered documents are evidence of the potential seriousness of the Regan case.
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