This would-be, misfit spy wasn’t exactly James Bond
We like to think of spies and other traffickers in secret as suave and exciting, like Bond or Bourne, but the reality is often more like Brian Patrick Regan.
Regan, as we learn in Yudhijit Bhattacharjee’s The Spy Who Couldn’t Spell (NAL, 304 pp., out of four), was a misfit who coordinated military exercises and data in the ultra-secret National Reconnaissance Office (NRO). Dyslexic, sloppy and overweight, Regan was often mocked by his colleagues.
He reacted as people like him often do: He lashed out at his tormentors, and the method he chose turned him into a traitor.
Regan was not content with the typical and petty strikes against authority — expense account chiseling or exaggerating on time sheets. Instead, in 2000, he created a personal code to send mes- sages to foreign governments, hoping to sell U.S. secrets. He also picked a curious way to contact potential clients. “This letter is confidential and directed to your President or Intelligence Chief,” Regan’s letter to the Libyan government said. He included a “four-page letter with 149 lines of typed text consisting of alphabetical characters and numbers. The second envelope included instructions on how to decode the letter. The third envelope included two sets of code sheets. One set contained a list of ciphers. The other, running to six pages, listed dozens of words along with their encoded abbreviations: a system commonly known as brevity codes.” Regan never got the chance to sell anything to anyone. He never even got a meeting with an official from any government he considered a likely buyer for the reconnaissance photos and manuals he stole from the NRO, which manages the nation’s network of spy satellites. That, in equal measures, is the appeal and drawback of The Spy Who Couldn’t Spell. Bhattacharjee, a staff writer for
Science magazine, has done an excellent job explaining codes and ciphers. He makes that arcane world come alive, particularly as he shows the chief investigators, led by the late Steve Carr of the FBI, as they piece together the various clues that led them to Regan.
He also shows the dangers posed by a misfit working inside an intelligence agency, a potential problem that security analysts call an insider threat.
These employees can tote their accumulated grievances for years and then strike out, often with ruinous consequences. Too often, their managers fail to recognize the problem in their midst, and then it’s too late. For proof of that, see Edward Snowden and the NSA.
The downside here, however, is that despite the lengthy sentence meted out to Regan after he was convicted of espionage, his actions don’t rise to the level of a Snowden, Aldrich Ames or Kim Philby. The documents and photos never reached a foreign government, nor were they ever linked to damage to U.S. interests or troops. They eventually were recovered after extensive sleuthing. For all his trying, Regan failed at being a spy.
U.S. intelligence officers got lucky when a confidential informant tipped them off, which turned the spy who couldn’t spell into the spy who couldn’t deliver.