In December 2000 Steven Carr, a special agent in the FBI’s counterintelligence unit in Washington, D.C., received a parcel from the bureau’s New York City office. It contained stolen American military secrets that had been passed on to the New York FBI by an informant in the Libyan consulate. The secrets had been mailed to the consulate along with encrypted cover letters from an individual who, the bureau would conclude, clearly worked in an American intelligence organization. The letter-writer offered to supply Libya with more secrets in exchange for money. Carr was assigned the job of finding the anonymous renegade. Yudhijit Bhattacharjee’s “The Spy Who Couldn’t Spell: A Dyslexic Traitor, an Unbreakable Code, and the FBI’s Hunt for America’s Stolen Secrets” is an excellent, highly engrossing account of the search for a man who was cunning, avaricious—and a dreadful speller.
The FBI’s target turned out to be Brian Patrick Regan, a most improbable traitor: He was a former Air Force master sergeant whose last assignment before retiring from the military was at the National Reconnaissance Office, a secretive agency “responsible for managing the nation’s spy satellites.” Regan was born in 1962 and raised on Long Island by strict Irish Catholic parents. His life was troubled from an early age because he was dyslexic. His behavior and speech were peculiar, and even his “friends” mocked and harassed him. But he had a gift for “spatial intelligence” and a “knack for stealth” (as a teenager he burglarized a neighbor’s house). He also cultivated a desire to overcome his problems and make something of himself. When he was a high-school senior, he cheated on a military aptitude test and scored high enough to allow him to enlist in the Air Force. After basic training he was assigned to study signals intelligence and analysis, and notwithstanding his past shoddy schoolwork, he succeeded, working harder than he ever had to master his lessons. As an intelligence analyst, Mr. Bhattacharjee writes, he discovered that his disability was actually an advantage: Dyslexics’ “global view helps them make connections between disparate pieces of information and recognize patterns in data that might elude more linear thinkers.”
The Spy Who Couldn’t Spell
By Yudhijit Bhattacharjee
New American Library, 292 pages, $27
Over the next two decades, Regan married, had children and earned modest promotions in the Air Force while being educated in modern spycraft. He participated—from the Pentagon—in Operation Desert Storm in 1991. In 1993 he received his last promotion, to master sergeant, and won a medal for “outstanding leadership.” The following year, he started work at the National Reconnaissance Office. It seemed, to his family and childhood acquaintances, as if Regan had made a success of his life.
But all was not well. His posting to the NRO was like a return to his dismal past: Regan’s new colleagues, smarter and better educated than he was, quickly noticed his intellectual idiosyncrasies and treated him with disdain. Moreover, “with a take-home income of less than $40,000 a year, he was . . . in dire financial straits.” His marriage was also eroding. And so early in 1999, a year from retirement, seething with resentments and bitterness, he decided to prove, at least to himself, that he was smarter and more proficient than the world ever imagined: He would sell military secrets to enemy states, earn millions of dollars—and get away with it.
As it turned out, stealing classified material was shockingly simple. Since Regan had the proper clearances at the NRO, he had access to Intelink, a supposedly highly secure network restricted to intelligence agencies. With “ridiculous ease . . . [Regan] was able to print and copy a vast number of classified documents,” Mr. Bhattacharjee writes—over 20,000 pages (including duplicates), as well as CD-ROMs and videotapes—though he repeatedly misspelled search terms (“Libia,” “Lybia”). He “walked out of the NRO building, day after day, with classified materials hidden in his gym bag.” Ironically, Regan’s reputation as something of an oaf meant that his fellow workers paid no attention to what he was doing. After he retired from the Air Force in August 2000, he was hired by the defense contractor TRW—which sent him back to work at the NRO in what was essentially his old job. And so he continued to steal documents from Intelink.
Regan’s goal was to acquire classified material that would be of great interest to certain enemy states—Libya initially and eventually Iraq and China. (He thought that Russia leaked too much information about American traitors.) He stored some of his cache in a credenza at work and in public lockers. But the most sensitive secrets were buried in 19 packages in two parks in Virginia and Maryland. If the authorities discovered what he was up to, these hidden stockpiles would, he believed, serve as bargaining chips for leniency.
In mid-November 2000 Regan mailed the Libyan consulate three packages containing examples of the kind of material he was willing to provide for the price of $13 million. His cover letters and instructions were in code, but he provided decoding advice in the same package. This is puzzling. Regan didn’t seem to consider that if the authorities obtained the parcels they would have clues to trace the traitor. Which is exactly what happened. A few weeks after Regan sent his packages, a mole in the consulate conveyed them to the FBI, and they ended up on the desk of Special Agent Carr. CONTINUE AT SITE
