The spy who loved her

American school psychologist Kim Adams had dropped off the map after handing a $35,000 gift from her parents for spy school to her fiance, British Agent Robert Freegard.

News of the American’s disappearance reached London-based FBI special agent Jackie Zappacosta. A British police colleague was on the line.

Jackie Zappacosta: “What I’m going to tell you will be impossible to believe,” he said, “but you have to believe it.”

Even for a 20 year veteran of the FBI, the spy story the British policeman told her about Kim Adams and her fiance stretched her imagination. 

Jackie Zappacosta: The two were training to man a lighthouse in Scotland and be on the lookout for enemy submarines.

Murphy: James Bond work?

Zappacosta: James Bond work.  Absolutely.

But the agency that employs the real James Bond—the British secret service—had never heard of a Robert Freegard.

The story didn’t check out. And British cops soon suspected the missing American had been kidnapped by Freegard.

That’s when they turned to the F.B.I. for help. And once agent Zappacosta began to discover creepy details of Freegard’s past, the case became a matter of life and death.

Her investigative trail began almost 10 years before in 1993. Robert Freegard was a barman pulling pints at a pub near an agricultural college in rural England. He’d befriended three regulars there— college students— and confided to them that he was in fact an undercover investigator rooting out a cell of Irish terrorists on campus.

Murphy: So he was working as a barman and he’s telling them on the side, “You know I’m pulling a pint here, but I’m looking for IRA guys.”

Zappacosta: “I’m looking for IRA guys at the agricultural college.”

Murphy: This job as barman is simply cover. 

Zappacosta: Exactly.

Murphy: And they didn’t laugh him out of the pub?

Zappacosta: Not these three students.

The agent discovered Freegard even enlisted one of the students to work on the undercover mission, and devised brutal training for him. He blindfolded his apprentice, took him into a basement and beat him up repeatedly.

Murphy: Saying, “Are you tough enough to be MI5?  To be a spy, huh?”

Zappacosta: Precisely.

Then, quite suddenly, Freegard told the students his undercover unit had been made by the IRA—that they were all in grave danger. And they should immediately flee with him.

Zappacosta: They left college.  They never graduated. They went on the road with him to various, as he put them, safe houses where he could protect them.

Protect them... and control them.

Zappacosta: [He was] controlling where they slept, what they ate, what they did during the day, who they spoke with.

Robert told what were by now his captives that he needed cash to set up fake businesses and new identities for them.

Zappacosta: And these particular students came from wealthy farming families. Their parents had to pay to protect their children, because of their exposure to the IRA.

And pay they did. Weeks turned into months and then years as the students dutifully paid Robert Freegard more than a million dollars to hide them from the IRA. And while they were stashed away in small rooms, living on greasy fish and chips, Freegard was moving on up. He drove snazzy new cars, dressed in designer suits and jetted off to exotic destinations on vacation.

It was clear to the FBI agent hunting Kim Adams and Robert Freegard that the students who eventually escaped their captor had been bamboozled in most cruel fashion. Fleeing Irish terrorists, the miserable safe houses, the beatings, the vast sums of money— were all part of a big hoax. Robert Freegard was not an undercover cop, a spy or a secret agent.

He was a con man: A brilliant one.

Zappacosta: Freegard was someone that did not complete his secondary education.  Tried his hand at becoming a carpenter, a barman. Very little personal success in his life. 

And, the FBI agent discovered, the con man had used his velvety-charm on a string of other victims—all women—including a company executive, a lawyer, even a woman who’d been married just a few months. They were all accomplished women, and all ensnared. And now Kim Adams was caught in his web too.

Zappacosta: As he was with one woman, the other five women or so that he had secreted around the UK would still be funding his adventures by working menial jobs.

Murphy: This guy had to have more than special cologne.  What did he wield over his female victims?

Zappacosta: It was a combination of charm woven with threats of violence, threats of death.

Murphy:They could have walked away?

Zappacosta: By the time they got to that point, I don’t think they had the power to walk away.

But what did all those years of scams and sadistic cruelty at the hands of a phony secret agent spell for the missing American Kim Adams, a psychologist with a Ph.D.?

Murphy: You have to be thinking, “How could this woman have bought this package?”

Zappacosta: He was a master.

So as Jackie Zappacosta tried to pick up Kim’s trail, where to even begin to look?

Zappacosta: All of the traditional means that the FBI would use or New Scotland Yard would use to track someone—all that proved fruitless.

Murphy: No credit cards?

Zappacosta: No credit cards. No hard line telephone.  No permanent address.  No mail drop.  Nothing.

Murphy: So he’s a pretty clever guy?

Zappacosta: He’s a very clever guy.  He was invisible to law enforcement.

So to catch Robert— and save Kim Adams— the FBI agent would have to outsmart him. She decided on a bold, ingenious scheme... a plan perhaps only a mother could carry out. The FBI would turn Kim’s own mom into a secret agent.

Ann Hodgins, Kim Adams' mother: I knew that if this didn’t work, it was all over.  We’d never get her back.

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