The spy who loved her

Dennis Murphy Correspondent • Profile

MINNEAPOLIS, MINNESOTA - Spies and secret agents thrive in the shadows, playing a sometimes lethal game of intrigue. So what’s a young woman from Iowa to do when you’ve tumbled hard for a spy and not even one of your own?

Dennis Murphy, Dateline Correspondent: You’d fallen in love with him?

Kim Adams: I had.

The man schoolteacher Kim Adams fell for was a British agent — like 007, made famous by movies like “Goldfinger.”

And like the Bond girls on screen, she became embroiled in an international spy story involving Russian submarines, Irish terrorism, and an al Qaeda plot to blow up a passenger jet.

But after Kim herself was abducted, it would take a gutsy secret mission by her own mother to save the day.

Ann Hodgins, Kim Adams' mother: Nobody messes with my kids. In order get my daughter back, I had to do it.

The story begins in 2001. Kim was a single mom, a school counselor, living in Minneapolis. After her teenage son moved in with his father to attend a better school, Kim, now empty-nested, could finally scratch her itch for wanderlust.

Kim Adams: I’d always wanted to live abroad. It was just great.

London was her destination. With her Ph.D. credentials, Kim arranged for a job there as a trained psychologist—counseling special ed kids in a school district out in the far-flung burbs.

Murphy: So if you worked at six or eight schools, you needed to get around?

Adams: I needed a car to get back and forth to work. So I went to my local car dealership.

Who’d guess that your life could change in a used car lot and that the debonnaire 30-year-old salesman there named Robert Freegard would turn out to be "the one"?

Adams: Robert sort of swooped in and shook my hand and introduced himself.  When I first met him, I remember thinking, “He’s got the most honest eyes.”

Robert sold Kim a car and his after-sales service calls soon became personal heart-to-hearts.

After a few months, he asked Kim out on a date— dinner in London’s exclusive Park Lane.

Adams: He was very attentive. He enjoyed the finer things in life.

And more dates followed, and the couple shared drives through the English countryside.

But as suave as he was, Kim says there was still something nagging about Robert—something secretive. Like his cellphones. Though he had four or five of them, she often found it hard to reach him. It was frustrating.

And there was funny business about cameras: he didn’t like having his picture taken. And jobs? This new man in her life changed them as often as the fast cars he drove. He had top-of-the-line BMWs and Audis with Duran Duran thumping through the speakers.

Kim began probing Robert’s quirks.

Murphy: When did he start confiding in you, Kim, that he wasn’t just a used car salesman—but that he was a secret agent?

Adams: He started telling me, in little bits and pieces, about undercover- investigative police work for the government.

Murphy: James Bond-type stuff?

Adams: Some of it was terrorism.  Some of it was crime rings. It’s not like he sat me down and said, “Oh, by the way.  I’m a spy.” It seemed like very difficult, gritty, unpleasant work.

Kim grew closer to Robert despite her promise to herself that she wasn’t going to get involved in a heavy relationship - not right then.

Murphy: So when did all of this change?

Adams: I really started to realize that I was falling in love with him.

Murphy: Against all of your rational wishes?

Adams: Absolutely.

Robert moved in with Kim.

Hodgins: He was charming.  Absolutely charming.  Very complimentary to my daughter. 

Kim’s mom, Ann, a teacher back in Phoenix, wanted to meet her daughter’s interesting new boyfriend, so she flew over to London.

Murphy:You could see the attraction?

Hodgins: I could, yes. He seemed to know how to talk to each person so that they felt very, very special.

Six months after their first date, a year after Kim bought that car from Robert - the couple cruised to sun-kissed Marbella, Spain, where Robert proposed.

Murphy: You, who were not looking for a husband. You said, in response to, “Will you marry me?”

Adams: Yes.

Murphy: So, “Will you marry me” and “Yes” is a huge step.

Adams: It was a huge step.

But there was an even bigger one ahead. Robert told Kim he’d been offered an important and lucrative position in the global spy game.

Adams: He talked about a job at a lighthouse, which was some sort of communications station really.

In a remote part of Scotland there was a lighthouse. And Robert told Kim that’s where they would be gathering intelligence together, monitoring Russian submarines as they skulked by. They’d send their dispatches to spymasters in London.

Murphy: So you were gonna be Mr. and Mrs. James Bond living in a lighthouse someplace?

Adams: We were gonna be living in a lighthouse.

Kim’s parents had divorced and now both were remarried. She called her dad in Sioux City, Iowa, to tell him about her serious live-in boyfriend.

John Adams, Kim's father: I told everybody my daughter was marrying James Bond.

Kim was shaken, but not stirred by the prospect of keeping vigil in a desolate lighthouse. Still, she told her dad, the money was good -- $170,000 a year. He was skeptical.

John Adams: I said, “I may be a farm boy from Iowa that’s got ‘stupid’ tattooed on his forehead, but they don’t pay anybody thousands of dollars to turn a light on a lighthouse.” I said, “Do I have Stupid tattooed up here?”

But after he happened to see a documentary about Russian submarines, and talked with his daughter on the phone, he came around.  

John Adams (recorded on the phone): Hey I’m kind proud of you. I’ve never had a spy in the family.

Kim Adams: Oh shush.

Kim thought it quite natural when Robert told her she would have to go through some strenuous training. First, forget about being called Kim Adams. She’d be issued a new identity at spy school, assuming, that is, British authorities didn’t uncover any skeletons in rigorous background checks. Kim was about to be married to both a spy and the British secret services that employed him.

So the couple set a date and found an idyllic spot for the wedding. Kim’s mom and dad would be coming over. But about a week before the ceremony, just a year after 9/11,  Kim’s father, john, got an urgent call from his prospective son-in-law.

Robert Freegard (on the phone): Hi John, how you doing?

John Adams: Hello, Robert!

John Adams: He called and said, “We’re gonna postpone the wedding.”

Robert said intelligence analysts had picked up some disturbing terrorist “chatter.”

John Adams: He says, “I know that there’s gonna be another 9/11 take place, gonna be another airplane go down or attempt to be shot down and I don’t want that to happen to Kim’s family.

Days later the chatter seemed to be confirmed in a story on the news: Terrorists armed with shoulder-fired missiles had narrowly missed bringing down an Israeli passenger jet on take-off in Africa—and just two days before Kim’s wedding date.

Robert had been right after all...maybe it was too risky for Kim’s family to fly to London.

Then, before the couple could set a new wedding date, those detailed background checks on Kim turned up a road block to happily-ever-after, living as spies in a top-secret lighthouse.

Adams: I had some student loans that needed to be paid off, but Robert had told me that because of the security clearance that he had, he couldn’t carry unsecured debt.  Nor could anyone in his immediate household, because it would put him at risk for bribery. 

Robert was strapped for the kind of cash they needed to retire the loan, so Kim called her parents in the States.

Murphy: And you starting hitting on them for $35,000?

Adams: That seemed like an unbelievable amount of money to me. I have never borrowed money from my parents.

Her parents wired $35,000 to London. Robert told Kim the money would be deposited in a secret agents’ account and the student loan paid off.

But not long after the cash transfer, something totally unexpected happened: Kim Adams mysteriously vanished— gone without a trace from her home, and her school counseling job. 

Hodgins: I was almost panic stricken.  I didn’t know what to do.  We didn’t know where Kim was. We didn’t know if she was okay. We couldn’t get an answer.

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