Yudhijit Bhattacharjee

Most people probably remember the capture and revelations surrounding Robert Hanssen, a CIA officer who sold sensitive information to Russia. I had never heard, however, of Brian Regan, also an intelligence insider who tried to do something similar. Regan tried to offer a variety of sensitive documents to a number of enemy governments. He managed to steal the documents with disturbing ease. He didn't manage to sell them on, but it wasn't for want of trying. Regan's downfall came, in part, through dyslexia. His pattern of misspellings provided important clues to investigators. When Regan's messages were intercepted, CIA counter-intelligence agents had to figure out who the traitor was. Much of the book discusses the process of breaking the code and trapping the spy. In general it reads quickly and with excitement, as one might expect of an inside spy chase. There are fascinating bits of information- like polaroid photos taken by the CIA teams that break in and sweep offices and other locations. Anything moved is put exactly back in place, to the millimeter. It was amazing to me how cocky Regan became during his espionage. He really seemed to think he was above catching. According to Bhattacharjee's analysis, this cockiness, combined with a constant anger from having been belittled because of his learning disability, is what led Regan to his acts. This is a book well-worth reading for the interest and page-turning factor.… (meer)

In the late 90s, a disgruntled U.S. intelligence analyst named Brian Regan decided to solve his financial problems by stealing reams of top secret information and selling it to Libya for millions. He was caught before any information could fall into non-American hands, and sentenced to life in prison. Regan's story has long been a footnote in stories about his more effective successors, Snowden and Manning, simply by virtue of the far larger quantity of materials that he stole. Yudhijit Bhattacharjee thought him worthy of a story in his own right, and Regan's life and choices do have the makings of a good yarn.

The son of a large, poor Irish immigrant family, Regan was mocked as a kid for his social awkwardness and his dyslexia, and physically abused by an alcoholic father. The army was Regan's way out of the working-class Long Island neighbourhood where he grew. He enlisted, found that his dyslexia gave him an advantage in pattern recognition work, and met and married a woman whom he met while stationed in Europe. Yet true success and promotion eluded him. His colleagues didn't respect him; he was a binge drinker and serial adulterer; he racked up tens of thousands of dollars in credit card debt but refused to stop spending. And so he began to download information from the intranet of America's intelligence agencies, and came up with an incredibly complex cipher in which to encode information that he offered up first to Gadaffi's regime.

It's jaw-dropping how much information such a bumbler was able to make off with, and how close he came to success. It's also jaw-dropping to see just how poor the security is at the various U.S. national intelligence agencies, and the mistakes that they committed over and over again. Bhattacharjee tells his tale at a brisk pace with an eye for good detail, and The Spy Who Couldn't Spell is the kind of book you can easily down while travelling. Yet it could have been a better book if you didn't get the sense that Bhattacharjee felt he had to pull his punches when it came to criticising the FBI, whether because he didn't want to lose access to sources or out of political convictions. I couldn't quite work out if this passage, when the agents were trying to guess Regan's banking pass code:

Given Regan's Irish background, Carr thought 3 was more likely [to be the numerical significance of the word 'stool']. The classic Irish milking stool—used for sitting down by a cow's udder to milk it—has three legs, not four.

was testimony to poor and reductive phrasing on Bhattacharjee's part, or if it was actually representative of the kind of "logic" regularly employed on such investigations. If the latter, then let me say wow, and also, as an Irishwoman, the fuck? Regan was born in Queens. This stuff isn't genetic.

Bhattacharjee also spends a lot of time on how Regan's admittedly awful upbringing primed him to commit this kind of act, but completely ignores any of the roles which gender expectations had to play—and if ever a man could be discussed under the rubric of "toxic masculinity", it's Brian Regan.… (meer)