Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: The Spy Who Couldn’t Spell
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://www.yudhijit.com/
CITY: Washington
STATE: DC
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
http://www.sciencemag.org/author/yudhijit-bhattacharjee * http://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/authors/246954/yudhijit-bhattacharjee
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born in India. Married; children: two.
EDUCATION:Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, undergraduate degree; Ohio State University, master’s degree; attended University of Chicago.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer and journalist. Science, staff writer, 2003-c. 2016.
AWARDS:National Mental Health Association award for for best research writing, 2008, for story on brain trauma caused by battlefield explosions.
WRITINGS
Contributor to anthologies, including Best American Science and Nature Writing 2011. Contributor to periodicals, including the New York Times, Atlantic, New York Times magazine, Time, Wired, GQ, and Discover.
Story for GQ about a spy and his son has been optioned by 21st Century Fox.
SIDELIGHTS
Yudhijit Bhattacharjee grew up in India and graduated from the Indian Institute of Technology with a degree in chemical engineering. He went on to do his graduate work in the United States, earning a master’s degree in journalism at Ohio State University. He started working toward a doctorate in the history and philosophy of science at the University of Chicago but left graduate school to work for Science magazine, where he wrote a wide range of stories related to research and policy, as well as profiles of scientists. He has gone on to become a contributor to various periodicals.
In his first book, The Spy Who Couldn’t Spell: A Dyslexic Traitor, an Unbreakable Code, and the FBI’s Hunt for America’s Stolen Secrets, Bhattacharjee tells the story of a Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) special agent, Steven Carr, and his team as they search for a spy out to sell classified information. The stolen information was wide ranging, including documents concerning U.S. air defense systems and weapons, reconnaissance satellites, Middle East bunkers, and other information that represented a serious threat to the country if revealed. The spy was Brian Regan, who worked at the National Reconnaissance Office and had access to the intelligence community’s Internet called Interlink, a strictly classified network of government servers. “Regan saw an opportunity in accessing hundreds and thousands of classified documents that were on these servers, print out satellite images, top secret documents which he then smuggled out of the building of the National Reconnaissance Office,” Bhattacharjee noted in an interview with All Things Considered radio program host Linda Wertheimer, which was published on the National Public Radio Web site.
Regan gathered the documents between 1999 and 2000, took them home, and then eventually buried them in packages in forests in Virginia and Maryland. Regan hoped to sell them to a foreign government. Regan’s ultimate capture started in 2000 when Carr, who was stationed in the FBI’s offices in Washington, DC, received a packet from the New York office. Inside were letters written in code send to the Libyan consulate offering to sell the secret documents.
Carr and his team went to work quickly, realizing that the secrets being offered could cause a collapse in America’s military security. They eventually gathered enough evidence to determine that the documents were likely made available from a trader who worked in a government facility and had a military background. Other clues indicated that the person had a family and was desperately in need of money. Among the most telling of the clues, however, was the fact that the traitor seemed unable to spell.
As a result of these findings, Carr and his team set out to look for a bad speller via a perusal of e-mail communications and internal reports. With the list of suspects narrowed, the FBI eventually identified Regan as the spy. However, they still faced a difficult task in finding the documents that Regan, who suffered from dyslexia, had hidden. The problem was that Regan could not remember where much of the material was buried because he could not remember the complex codes he had created to locate them. His plan was to sell the codes to the highest bidder after receiving his payoff.
Although Regan turned out to be one of the most dangerous spies in U.S. history due to the sheer mass of information he had gathered, few Americans ever heard the full story about Regan. According to Bhattacharjee, Regan was largely forgotten by the news media because his arrest occurred two weeks before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Reagan ultimately petitioned the U.S. government for a reduced sentence, but the government countered by saying they would seek the death penalty if he did not help them find the documents. Regan was convicted and sentenced to life in prison.
“Readers … will thoroughly enjoy this fast-moving account of a failed spy who, despite his incompetence, easily filched thousands of secrets,” wrote a Publishers Weekly contributor. A Kirkus Reviews contributor called The Spy Who Couldn’t Spell “a well-written, mostly engrossing tale of thwarted amateur treason underscoring the disturbing vulnerability of today’s intelligence systems.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, September 15, 2016, Raymond Pun, review of The Spy Who Couldn’t Spell: A Dyslexic Traitor, an Unbreakable Code, and the FBI’s Hunt for America’s Stolen Secrets, p. 5.
Kirkus Reviews, September 15, 2016, review of The Spy Who Couldn’t Spell.
Library Journal, October 15, 2016, William Grabowski, review of The Spy Who Couldn’t Spell, p. 100.
Publishers Weekly, September 19, 2016, review of The Spy Who Couldn’t Spell, p. 60.
ONLINE
Fort Worth Star-Telegram Online, http://www.star-telegram.com/ (October 26, 2016 ), John Henry, “Author Yudhijit Bhattacharjee Writes about a Dyslexic Spy,” review of The Spy Who Couldn’t Spell.
National Public Radio Web site, http://www.npr.org/ (November 19, 2016), Linda Wertheimer, “How Misspellings Caught A Spy,” author interview.
Science Online, http://www.sciencemag.org/ (July 1, 2016), author profile.
Yudhijit Bhattacharjee Website, http://www.yudhijit.com (July 1, 2017).*
Yudhijit Bhattacharjee
Yudhijit has been a staff writer at Science since 2003. He has written stories on different topics related to research and policy, such as the fight over teaching evolution in U.S. classrooms and the neuroscience of time perception, and has profiled scientists with different interests and backgrounds, such as an astrophysicist who discovered dark energy and a fisherman-scientist who is working to protect fisheries in the Gulf of Maine. Yudhijit now spends most of his time covering astronomy, along with science and security and a few other areas of science policy.
Yudhijit spent the first 26 years of his life in India, receiving an undergraduate degree in chemical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay. He has a master's degree in journalism from Ohio State University in Columbus, and nothing to show for a semester's worth of classes as a Ph.D. student in the history and philosophy of science at the University of Chicago, which he left to join Science.
Yudhijit's 2008 story on brain trauma caused by explosions on the battlefield won an award for best research writing from the National Mental Health Association. His work has appeared in The New York Times,The Atlantic, The New York Times Magazine, Time, Wired, and Discover.
Yudhijit Bhattacharjee is an award-winning writer whose features and essays on espionage, cybercrime, science and medicine have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, National Geographic, Wired and other U.S. magazines. Yudhijit spent 11 years as a staff writer at the weekly journal Science, writing about neuroscience, astronomy and a variety of other topics in research and science policy. His work has been anthologized in the Best American Science and Nature Writing series. Yudhijit has an undergraduate degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, and a master’s in journalism from The Ohio State University. He lives in a suburb of Washington, D.C., with his wife, his two children and a big red dog.
I am a contributor to The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, National Geographic and other publications. I enjoy working on longform narratives and features, such as this piece I wrote for The New Yorker about a Boeing engineer who became a spy for China, a story about baby brains that I did for National Geographic and this investigation into the mind of a fraudulent scientist that I wrote for the NYT Magazine. I also write newspaper essays like this New York Times Sunday Review article on the benefits of bilingualism and this NYT Magazine piece about a pastor's attempts to de-conflict evolution and Christianity. A story I wrote about an organ dealer in India has been anthologized in the 2011 Best American Science and Nature Writing, and a piece I wrote for GQ about a spy and his son has been optioned by 20th Century Fox. I'll let you know if the movie ever gets made.
While at Science, I wrote about a variety of topics relating to scientific research and policy, like this story about brain trauma caused by explosions and this story about the rivalry between two teams that shared the Nobel Prize for their discovery of the accelerating universe.
< How Misspellings Caught A Spy November 19, 20165:21 PM ET 7:41 Download Facebook Twitter Google+ Email LINDA WERTHEIMER, HOST: And now we're going to hear a story that sounds just too bizarre to be true. More than a decade before Edward Snowden famously leaked thousands of classified records to the world, another U.S. government contractor tried a similar move the old-fashioned way. His name is Brian Regan. And in 1999 and 2000, he smuggled classified documents out of his office and buried them in the woods hoping to sell them to a foreign government. But he was foiled in part by his own terrible spelling. This thrilling story is out this month in a new book called "The Spy Who Couldn't Spell: A Dyslexic Traitor, An Unbreakable Code And The FBI's Hunt For America's Stolen Secrets." Michel Martin talked with author Yudhijit Bhattacharjee about the strange story of Brian Regan. MICHEL MARTIN, BYLINE: Why do you think most people have never heard of this story? YUDHIJIT BHATTACHARJEE: The main reason is that Brian Regan was arrested just two weeks before 9/11. And so his story got completely overshadowed by the coverage of what was arguably the biggest story of the last 20 years. MARTIN: So how did this all - how did he do it? BHATTACHARJEE: So Brian Regan had access to Intelink which is the intelligence community's version of the Internet. It's a purely classified and closed-off network of government servers. And Brian Regan saw an opportunity in accessing hundreds and thousands of classified documents that were on these servers, print out satellite images, top secret documents which he then smuggled out of the building of the National Reconnaissance Office, hid in his basement and then ultimately went out to the forest and buried in several packages out in Virginia and in Maryland. MARTIN: And so the plan was that once he got paid, he would tell people how to get the information. BHATTACHARJEE: Exactly. His plan was a very meticulous and detailed plan and a rather complicated one. Once he buried these secrets, he read out the GPS coordinates, the geo coordinates of these hiding locations, and he encrypted them. And so what he was left with were these sheets of paper with numbers and letters that nobody would have understood had he gotten caught. And, in fact, that's what happened later on. His plan was to offer a sample of these secrets to foreign governments in order to induce them, and then once he got paid $13 million, he was going to provide these sites so that these intelligence services could dig up the information and use it. MARTIN: So take us back to the beginning. Who is Brian Regan and why did he do this? BHATTACHARJEE: In 1995, Brian Regan joined the NRO which is the National Reconnaissance Office which is the agency that manages all of the spy satellites. Brian Regan - sometime in 1998 because of his severe debts and because of his feeling of being disrespected at the workplace and just in general in society - decided that he was going to betray the country in order to try and make some money. MARTIN: But he did have - you know, he had a family. He was married. He had kids. He did seem to be respected within his field, even though he did have a significant learning disability, and yet he didn't see himself that way. Do you know why? BHATTACHARJEE: Brian Regan had a very difficult childhood. And I think it left a deep impact on him. Because of his dyslexia and his odd personality, he got ridiculed at school. He got made fun of by his neighborhood friends. And despite his success, he still felt that more respect was due to him, and one way to put it is that Brian Regan was underestimated by everybody else and overestimated by himself, and that mismatch kind of sums up his psychology. MARTIN: So the first break in the case, at least for the U.S. government, was the fact that somebody informed on him. BHATTACHARJEE: That's exactly right. MARTIN: But they didn't know who they were informing on, correct? They just knew that somebody was passing information and an informant told - somebody who was an informant on the receiving side let the government know - the U.S. government know - that somebody was trying to pass these secrets, so they were kind of on their trail. What was the relevance of the fact that he couldn't spell? How did that become important? BHATTACHARJEE: His misspellings were, in fact, one of the clues that allowed the FBI to narrow down the list of suspects because, you know, Brian Regan used to misspell words in his email communications, in his internal reports. And because the government had found so many misspellings in this intercepted package, investigators went looking for somebody who was a bad speller. MARTIN: Ultimately, Regan was - I mean, this is not a spoiler. This is a matter of public record. He was convicted and sentenced to life. Why was the punishment so severe? BHATTACHARJEE: The punishment was very severe because Brian Regan attempted to blackmail the government. He tried to ask the government to give him a reduced sentence in exchange for his willingness to tell them where he had hidden the secrets that he had stolen. What the government had at that point was simply these sheets of encrypted sites which the government didn't know what they meant, and he wasn't going to tell them. If he had come clean right after he was arrested, if he had cooperated, I believe he might have gotten away with a shorter sentence. MARTIN: So what can we learn from this? I mean, the fact that the government had an example of a person who engaged in this conduct - and he thankfully from the governor's perspective was stopped in time before he was able to actually transfer any secrets. But is there something we should learn from this? BHATTACHARJEE: After the Brian Regan case, there was considerable reform undertaken at the National Reconnaissance Office, but many in the intelligence community and the broader intelligence community still to this day don't know anything about the Brian Regan case, although, it was the perfect sort of example of an insider threat, and anybody studying that case could have foreseen the possibility of Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden. So it was sort of unfortunate that this important case got lost in history, and I'm glad that I was able to bring that story out. MARTIN: Yudhijit Bhattacharjee's latest book is "The Spy Who Couldn't Spell: A Dyslexic Traitor, An Unbreakable Code And The FBI's Hunt For America's Stolen Secrets." Yudhijit Bhattacharjee was in our studios in Washington, D.C., to talk with us about this. Thank you so much for joining us. BHATTACHARJEE: Thank you, Michel.
Bhattacharjee, Yudhijit. The Spy Who Couldn't Spell: A Dyslexic Traitor, an Unbreakable Code, and the FBI's Hunt for America's Stolen Secrets
William Grabowski
141.17 (Oct. 15, 2016): p100.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
* Bhattacharjee, Yudhijit. The Spy Who Couldn't Spell: A Dyslexic Traitor, an Unbreakable Code, and the FBI's Hunt for America's Stolen Secrets. NAL. Nov. 2016. 304p. index. ISBN 9781592409006. $27; ebk. ISBN 9780698404090. POL SCI
When FBI agent Steven Carr received a FedEx package from the New York field office, he didn't suspect its contents would consume his every thought and action. Via a confidential source at the Libyan consulate, Carr held a number of oddly coded letters written by someone claiming top-secret clearance with the CIA and offering gravely sensitive data about U.S. spy satellites, air defense, locations of Middle East underground bunkers, and more--for a hefty price. Journalist Bhattacharjee (staff writer, Science) writes of how, from December 2000 until shortly before 9/11 (and years after catching the perpetrator), Agent Carr's team, various intelligence analysts, and code-breakers spent hours unpuzzling seeming nonsense scripting the whereabouts of downloaded, printed caches hidden by one Brian Patrick Regan--a doltish, ill-socialized worker with the highly secretive National Reconnaissance Office. Regan's dyslexia, hence muddled spelling, might have forever obscured his identity. What distinguishes this real-world chronicle from similar others (James Bamford's The Shadow Factory; Glenn Greenwald's No Place To Hide) is the author's humane perspective. VERDICT Recommended for spycraft buffs and general enthusiasts of U.S. intelligence operations and psychosocial factors behind espionage.--William Grabowski, McMechen, WV
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Grabowski, William. "Bhattacharjee, Yudhijit. The Spy Who Couldn't Spell: A Dyslexic Traitor, an Unbreakable Code, and the FBI's Hunt for America's Stolen Secrets." Library Journal, 15 Oct. 2016, p. 100. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA466413036&it=r&asid=ca7821fb5c33234157f581961913cc5a. Accessed 30 May 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A466413036
The Spy Who Couldn't Spell: A Dyslexic Traitor, an Unbreakable Code, and the FBI's Hunt for America's Stolen Secrets
263.38 (Sept. 19, 2016): p60.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
The Spy Who Couldn't Spell: A Dyslexic Traitor, an Unbreakable Code, and the FBI's Hunt for America's Stolen Secrets
Yudhijit Bhattacharjee. NAL, $27 (304p) ISBN 978-1-59240-900-6
Journalist Bhattacharjee skillfully touches all the bases in recounting the story of Brian Regan, who pilfered reams of top secret information from his job at the National Reconnaissance Office and offered to sell them to foreign governments. Regan stole more secrets than Edward Snowden would over a decade later, but few have heard of him because he was quickly caught and imprisoned. Bhattacharjee covers Regan's unsatisfactory life. He was mired in debt and unpopular at the NRO. In 1999, after studying the techniques of other spies, Regan concocted a bizarre scheme. The result: in 2000 the Libyan consulate received three separate letters containing a sample of secret documents and pages of codes that, when deciphered, described his offer. Sadly for Regan, an informant forwarded them to the FBI, who soon identified him through bad spelling and several clumsy errors. Regan's arrest was straightforward. Far more difficult was recovering his immense buried cache of documents and other materials, because he had forgotten many of the complex codes needed to locate them. Readers may skim the explanations of Regan's codes, but they will thoroughly enjoy this fast-moving account of a failed spy who, despite his incompetence, easily filched thousands of secrets. Agent: Lydia Wills, Lydia Wills. (Nov.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"The Spy Who Couldn't Spell: A Dyslexic Traitor, an Unbreakable Code, and the FBI's Hunt for America's Stolen Secrets." Publishers Weekly, 19 Sept. 2016, p. 60. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA464352758&it=r&asid=9b9830e9f6330d6800cc1b45abc14942. Accessed 30 May 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A464352758
The Spy Who Couldn't Spell: A Dyslexic Traitor, an Unbreakable Code, and the FBI's Hunt for America's Stolen Secrets
Raymond Pun
113.2 (Sept. 15, 2016): p5.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
The Spy Who Couldn't Spell: A Dyslexic Traitor, an Unbreakable Code, and the FBI's Hunt for America's Stolen Secrets. By Yudhijit Bhattacharjee. Nov. 2016.304p. NAL, $27 (9781592409006). 364.1.
In his first book, Bhattacharjee, who writes for Science, the New York Times, and the Atlantic, will leave readers wondering whether classified information from the U.S. government is always vulnerable to being sold, for the right price. Before Edward Snowden's data breaching or Julian Assange's WikiLeaks, Brian Regan, a former American intelligence specialist, committed one of the most massive acts of espionage in American history, by selling U.S. classified and secret information to foreign governments. But, because Regan was arrested shortly before September 11, 2001, Bhattacharjee argues, his extraordinary story has never fully been told. Bhattacharjee now writes the true tale of the dyslexic man who became known as "the spy who couldn't spell" and the FBI special agent who, along with a team of experts, identified Regan's illegal activities, tracked his steps, and broke into his coded messages and letters (which were often riddled with misspellings). Readers interested in spy thrillers, cybercryptology, and the history of U.S. espionage will find this book to be both entertaining and helpful in understanding today's complex landscape of leaked classified information.--Raymond Pun
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Pun, Raymond. "The Spy Who Couldn't Spell: A Dyslexic Traitor, an Unbreakable Code, and the FBI's Hunt for America's Stolen Secrets." Booklist, 15 Sept. 2016, p. 5+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA464980734&it=r&asid=367d871a4500c4a8159f9a7d8815d20c. Accessed 30 May 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A464980734
Yudhijit Bhattacharjee: THE SPY WHO COULDN'T SPELL
(Sept. 15, 2016):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Yudhijit Bhattacharjee THE SPY WHO COULDN'T SPELL New American Library (Adult Nonfiction) 27.00 11, 1 ISBN: 978-1-59240-900-6
The account of an eccentric would-be traitor who executed a large-scale heist of American military secrets.In his debut book, Science staff writer Bhattacharjee focuses on cryptographic science and the doggedness of investigators involved in the improbable story of Brian Regan, an embittered Air Force security specialist who decided to pad his retirement by offering classified intelligence to Libya. Although an informant contacted the FBI, Regan had constructed a complex scheme using encrypted ciphers to hide his identity. As the author notes, “Lifting that veil of anonymity was going to be a daunting task.” Bhattacharjee reconstructs Regan’s suburban childhood to discern the roots for his moral lapse; he notes Regan, suffering from dyslexia, was mocked by peers for appearing simultaneously dense and clever, a lifelong pattern persisting through his one-man conspiracy. The author offers a compellingly seedy portrait of Regan, motivated to contemplate treason due to debt, career stagnation, and marital malaise. “As long as he could get away with it, espionage was a legitimate answer to his troubles,” the author concludes. Relying on extensive research and interviews, Bhattacharjee re-creates Regan’s brazen acquisition of bulk intelligence and cinematically documents his pursuit by Steven Carr, a driven FBI agent, with exciting tradecraft set pieces of surveillance and covert entries. But the narrative’s pace slackens halfway through, when Carr apprehends Regan in 2001 prior to an overseas trip to solicit Iraqi or Chinese spy agencies. The author focuses on the details of the government’s aggressive prosecution as well as Regan’s use of cryptography in his audacious fail-safe: he’d buried classified documents in various state parks. However, this negotiating tactic only hardened the government’s resolve, in keeping with the post–9/11 national mood; ultimately, Regan was convicted of attempted espionage and received a life sentence. In exchange for consideration for his family, Regan helped retrieve his caches, resulting in dark comedy when he was initially unable to decipher his own cryptographic clues. A well-written, mostly engrossing tale of thwarted amateur treason underscoring the disturbing vulnerability of today’s intelligence systems.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Yudhijit Bhattacharjee: THE SPY WHO COULDN'T SPELL." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Sept. 2016. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA463215979&it=r&asid=7894f9519c921c1db9dd200848b7cd2c. Accessed 30 May 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A463215979
October 26, 2016 10:31 AM
Author Yudhijit Bhattacharjee writes about a dyslexic spy
By John Henry
Special to the Star-Telegram
LinkedIn
Google+
Pinterest
Reddit
Print
Order Reprint of this Story
The moral of the story of Brian Regan: No matter the circumstance or depth of financial trouble there is always a better answer to your problems than a sophisticated, get-rich-quick scheme punishable by the death penalty.
But that was ultimately the motive of Regan, a signals intelligence specialist employed by the National Reconnaissance Office who, in 2000, offered to sell state secrets to Saddam Hussein, Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi, the mullahs of Iran and China to get out of a financial bind of hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt and more piles on the way with young children to support.
His story of espionage is told by author Yudhijit Bhattacharjee in the nonfiction spy thriller The Spy Who Couldn’t Spell.
Aptly titled indeed as the FBI was led to Regan through a trail of spelling errors included in a letter passed to authorities from a foreign source. In it an unidentified U.S. intelligence official offered a trove of intelligence for an upfront payment of $13 million plus millions more for additional drops of military secrets.
In the letter, he attempted to build trust in his sales pitch by reminding that he could be “enprisioned” for his “esponage.”
Those types of spelling errors are common for sufferers of dyslexia, like Regan, who battled the disorder that impairs one’s ability to recognize and process words and letters. The bad speller in the intelligence community led to the retired master sergeant of the U.S. Air Force who was put under months of surveillance.
Yudhijit Bhattacharjee was a staff writer for the weekly journal, ‘Science,’ for 11 years. Among his topics were astronomy and neuroscience.
What Regan was trying to peddle were tens of thousands of pages downloaded from the Intelink — the intelligence community’s secured intranet — and CD-ROMs and videotapes of the National Reconnaissance Office, all of which he stuffed in his gym bag over the course of a year and buried at various locations, including state parks in Maryland and Virginia.
The FBI arrested Regan in August 2001, a month before 9-11, at Washington’s Dulles International Airport. He had lied to his supervisors about taking a week off to visit Orlando. Instead, he was headed to Europe hoping to finally make a transaction. He had previously visited a Libyan embassy overseas, but he was ordered to leave because officials didn’t trust him.
At the time of his arrest, Regan was in possession of mysteries.
A paper tucked under the insole of his right shoe included the addresses of Iraqi and Chinese embassies in Europe. But in his pants pocket was a pad on which he had written 13 words, among them “tricycle,” “rocket” and “glove,” and none of them connected to the other.
In his wallet was a paper with a string of several dozen letters and numbers, and also on his person was a folder of four pages filled with three-digit numbers or trinomes.
In the Air Force, Regan had been trained in cryptanalysis, the art of deciphering coded messages.
He had crafted this complicated messaging language sequence to encode the coordinates of the sites where he had buried the stolen intelligence.
Much of the book is devoted to the FBI trying to solve Regan’s puzzles, and they had little success except for deciphering that his use of words such as “tricycle” was a reference to the number three and “glove” five. Using images to remember text is a strategy often employed by dyslexics.
The codes identifying where the treasure troves were hidden remained elusive. The FBI needed Regan’s help, but he gave it only after conviction. Indeed, he tried to use his advantage in a reverse plea bargain, his attorney trying to negotiate a lighter sentence for his cooperation.
Prosecutors, however, countered with their intention to seek the death penalty — only the Rosenbergs have been put to death for spying, in 1953 — and prosecute his wife for helping him bury seemingly innocuous items for a fictitious treasure hunt for his children as a ruse to throw off investigators.
Bhattacharjee has written features and essays on science, medicine, cybercrime and espionage for a variety of U.S. magazines.
Prosecutors won that game of chicken. A jury found Regan guilty on three counts of attempted espionage and sentenced him to life in prison.
His fear of a life in solitary confinement unnerved him, as did the potential prosecution of his wife. Regan agreed to help authorities find the buried caches.
Finding the secrets buried in Virginia didn’t even require breaking a code, Regan told investigators. He directed them to a fence line along Interstate 95 and Exit 12A where he had buried a plastic toothbrush container with 12 coordinates written in plain text. In the same container, he included the encoded coordinates for the sites in Maryland.
That’s where the search stalled. Regan couldn’t remember the codes he had written three years earlier.
Authorities sat with Regan trying to crack the code, which was based on the convicted spy’s yearbook. They focused on the alpha-numeric “13A,” which appeared seven times, suggesting that it represented each of the seven spots in the state park.
Law enforcement then surmised (guessed, really) that the No. 13 represented 13 yearbook pictures. They counted 13 and found the name “Frank.” Perhaps 13A translated to “feet.” That indeed uncovered the keys to the code.
Today, Regan sits in the U.S. Penitentiary in Lee County, Va., paying his price while reminding all of us that there is a better way.
The Spy Who Couldn’t Spell: A Dyslexic Traitor, an Unbreakable Code and the FBI’s Hunt for America’s Stolen Secrets
By Yudhijit Bhattacharjee
NAL, $27
☆☆☆ (out of five)
Read more here: http://www.star-telegram.com/living/books/article110547432.html#storylink=cpy