The Spy Who Couldn't Spell

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The Spy Who Couldn't Spell Page 5

by Yudhijit Bhattacharjee


  Padres was a soft-spoken man with a square face topped by a thick mat of jet-black hair. On a rainy spring morning, he arrived at the NRO headquarters and walked through the security turnstiles to meet up with a network administrator named Bill Green in the agency’s IT department. Green led him to a room crowded with binders containing reams and reams of computer printouts. The printouts, Green explained, were the records of network traffic at the NRO. Green had been going through them manually in an attempt to identify the traffic to Regan’s computer.

  The logs were derived from a device the size of a pizza box, called an Automated Security Incident Measurement (ASIM) system. Developed in the 1990s to improve computer security on Air Force bases and in other Air Force–related institutions, ASIM devices sat at the firewalls of the computer networks within the NRO, recording the traffic going in and out of each network. Padres was familiar with the system. In a previous posting at the Air Force Academy, he had been used to getting phone calls from the Air Force Computer Emergency Response team—a group based in San Antonio, Texas—asking him to analyze ASIM data to look for indicators of a network attack.

  At the NRO, the logs of network traffic were backed up from the ASIMs onto digital tapes every night. The NRO had some four years’ worth of tapes in its archives. Up until this point, they had simply taken up valuable office space. But now the decision to store them suddenly seemed prescient.

  Going through their contents on paper would have taken the better part of a year, Padres told Donahoo. He suggested taking the data with him to a lab where he and others would be able to analyze it more quickly.

  The NRO wasn’t used to letting anybody take information out of the building—officially, anyway. It took Donahoo nearly two weeks to get all the approvals. Padres had the tapes transported to the Defense Computer Forensics Lab in Linthicum, Maryland, where he was given a secure space, equipped to handle classified information, to do the analysis.

  Working with two colleagues from AFOSI, Padres first loaded the tapes onto hard drives. Donahoo had pressed for urgency, and the men worked in shifts around the clock, taking naps in a hotel room across the street. After the data had been transferred, Padres wrote a number of programs to search through it in different ways.

  The analysis showed that Regan had been an avid surfer of Intelink, spending hours on it every day. His surfing pattern was in sharp contrast to those of coworkers in the suite and elsewhere at the NRO. The others accessed Intelink less frequently and for shorter durations, browsing only a handful of topics relating to their assignments. Regan had explored the entire landscape, looking at a diverse set of reports, imagery, and analysis pertaining to multiple countries. His searches were literally all over the map—“Top Secret Iran,” “Top Secret Iraq.” In some instances, he’d misspelled the keywords he was searching for—for example, spelling “Libya” as “Lybia” or “Libia.”

  It was apparent right away that the nineteen documents in the bona fides package, which he had accessed numerous times, were simply the tip of the iceberg. Regan had looked at hundreds, possibly thousands, of documents. Using special software, Padres plotted the Intelink activity on a graph, overlaying it with Regan’s badging records, which indicated when he’d entered and exited the NRO. The surfing coincided with his work attendance, confirming that nobody else had been logging on to Regan’s desktop to browse Intelink.

  Sometime in mid-April, Donahoo and other counterintelligence officials from the NRO visited Linthicum for a presentation that Padres had put together. Carr was in attendance as well, along with other agents from the Washington Field Office. Padres hooked up his laptop to a projector and clicked through the graphs he had plotted. In one of them, each document that Regan had accessed on Intelink was represented as a dot, and documents related to a single topic were clustered together. The picture evoked a patch of sky imaged by a telescope, each swarm of dots resembling a galaxy. This is what espionage in the digital age looked like.

  Using software called NetworkMiner, Padres had extracted from the network traffic the hundreds upon hundreds of satellite images and intelligence reports that Regan had browsed. For the presentation, he had created a slide show that flashed each of the images and the cover pages of the remaining documents in rapid succession. Watching the slides roll one after another on the screen, Donahoo and her colleagues from the NRO were stunned. Though each slide appeared for a second or less, the entire show could have run for hours. The sheer volume of material blew everybody’s mind.

  “How was he able to access this stuff?” Donahoo kept asking, shaking her head in disbelief. It was more an expression of shock than a genuine question.

  “There are no restrictions on Intelink,” Padres replied, stating the obvious. “He was able to download anything he wanted.”

  Regan’s nefarious surfing had gone on, completely unnoticed, for more than a year before his retirement. He’d proved to be the perfect insider threat, underestimated and ignored, left to operate stealthily in the shadows. The more Carr learned about him, the more intriguing he found the mismatch between Regan’s unrefined exterior and his hidden cunning. Who was this unusual adversary and what secrets had he stolen?

  CHAPTER 3

  THE ROOTS OF DYSFUNCTION

  Long before Brian Regan decided to commit espionage against the United States, long before he entered the Air Force, and long before his atrocious spelling invited mocking from friends in school, life taught him that he had to fend for himself to survive. It’s a lesson that everybody must learn, and Regan was forced to learn it early, as a young blond-haired boy growing up in Farmingdale, a small town in the center of Long Island, New York.

  Regan’s parents, Michael and Anne, were Irish immigrants who had moved to the United States in the fifties in search of a better life. They struggled to raise their brood of eight children on Michael’s modest income as a worker at a factory that made twist drills. Regan, the third child of the family and the oldest of five brothers, knew from a young age that he’d have to compete with his siblings for food, space, and parental attention in a household where all three were in short supply. He grew out his toenails so that he could use them as little daggers to make more room for himself in the bed he shared for a while with one of his brothers. As an adolescent, he put padlocks on his closet to guard his cookies and Pop-Tarts from his siblings. It was as if he were living in a jungle where nobody else was going to look out for him. Survival depended on outsmarting the world. Regan was on his own.

  The Regans lived in a small house on Lois Lane in the southern part of Farmingdale, in a neighborhood of blue-collar workers untouched by privilege. Michael had added a second floor to the house, doing much of the construction himself, to accommodate his and Anne’s burgeoning brood of children. Still, for a family with ten members—not counting two dogs—the living space afforded by the home was decidedly cramped. There wasn’t enough room around the dinner table for everybody to sit down together, and so it wasn’t unusual for the kids to eat in shifts, except on holidays, when extra chairs were brought in to make everyone fit. During late spring and summer, when the mornings were warm, Regan would sometimes turn on the hose in the backyard and take a shower there. With so many siblings needing to use the two bathrooms in the house at that hour, on certain days it was the only way to get ready for school on time.

  Regan’s father was a powerfully built man with a thick Irish accent that refused to fade even after decades in the United States. He drank more than was good for him, and not just on Saint Patrick’s Day, when he would go out to the pub with friends to celebrate his Irish roots. He loved playing records of old Irish melodies at home. By most accounts, he wasn’t much of a conversationalist. His preference was to drown his frustrations in alcohol rather than to talk about them. Like many fathers of his generation, he was an intimidating presence at home and didn’t hesitate to hand out corporal punishment when he lost his patience with the children. While
commotion often reigned in the house in his absence, the atmosphere was a lot more subdued when he was around.

  Michael and Anne had both had a strict Catholic upbringing, and they strived to make religion an important part of their family’s life. On Sunday mornings, the Regans would get dressed and cram into the family’s station wagon to drive to church, where Anne, wearing a veil over her head, guided her girls and boys into the pews.

  The job of raising the kids fell mostly on her. She sent Regan to a Catholic school in the neighboring town of Massapequa, hoping that the strict environment there would help build his character. Regan didn’t respond well to the school’s stern discipline and often got into trouble. Once, he was admonished for bringing a pack of playing cards to school—a forbidden item. In fourth grade, he began smuggling candy into class to sell to his peers. Candy, too, wasn’t allowed in class, which made it an especially valued commodity, like cigarettes in prison. Regan was able to sell his contraband taffies, called Now & Laters—for a tidy profit.

  Regan didn’t last at the school beyond fourth grade, however. One day, he and three of his friends were playing tag at the altar of the school chapel. As they ran around, one of the boys swung himself around a giant candlestick that stood in the middle of the altar, forgetting that it wasn’t some kind of lamppost attached to the floor. The candlestick toppled and was smashed to pieces. In the eyes of the Lord, the damage caused may have been a forgivable sin; in the view of the nuns who ran the school, it wasn’t. Regan, along with two of the other kids, was expelled.

  For a boy who was not yet ten years old, being kicked out of school was a shameful and traumatic experience. Even before adolescence, when most people find the innocence of childhood slipping away, Regan was learning that the world could be an unkind place. The expulsion was proof that society was an adversary from which no sympathy could be expected.

  As Regan grew into his teens, that outlook was hardened by an abusive father at home. The fear of getting a beating from Michael, for the smallest of infractions, was never far from his mind. One afternoon, Regan was playing with a friend in the woods, when he slipped and fell into a stream. It had been raining and the water was high. He was completely soaked. Regan’s friend helped him get out. (I shall refer to this friend, who asked not to be identified by his real name, as Tom.)

  “I’ll get my ass kicked if I go home like this,” Regan said, sounding panicked.

  “Come over to my house,” Tom said.

  Regan was relieved. Tom’s mother had him change and got his clothes washed and dried. It was getting late, so she called Regan’s house to ask if he could stay for dinner. When the permission was granted, she served him a meal of chicken, rice, and green beans.

  “What is that?” Regan asked, pointing at the rice. He’d never encountered rice before: the menu at home rarely strayed from a traditional Irish meat-and-potatoes theme. After dinner was done, he changed back into his clothes and walked home, thankful to not have to face his father’s wrath.

  • • •

  By the time Regan entered middle school, it was evident to his teachers that he was a slow learner. To call him a C student might have been generous. The reason for Regan’s consistently poor academic performance was dyslexia, a learning disorder that makes it difficult for the brain to process and remember a sequence of written characters, be they letters or numbers. Millions of people around the world suffer from the disorder; one out of every twenty people in the United States is dyslexic. Like others with the disability, Regan struggled to read and write, and as is typical for many dyslexics, he also had difficulties learning math, which—just like reading—requires the interpretation of strings of alphabetical and numerical text.

  Dyslexia is a problem of visual and auditory processing; it does not imply low intelligence. Nonetheless, dyslexic children are often perceived by their peers and teachers as being intellectually inferior. In a culture where reading and writing are the primary gateway to academic success, it’s not hard to see why. During reading sessions in class, when the teacher goes around the room calling on individual students to read passages aloud, the dyslexic kid feels a rising sense of dread. While most other students get through the exercise with little effort, he stumbles through his lines, wincing at the chuckles and uncomfortable silences that punctuate his slow, painful reading.

  Attending Mill Lane Junior High, Regan experienced these trials on a routine basis. He was assigned to remedial classes along with other students with various learning and behavioral challenges. Back then, teachers and school administrators were less attuned to dyslexia and other disabilities, and by most accounts, students like Regan did not receive sufficient targeted help to overcome the specific problems they faced. “We were just seen as troubled students that didn’t want to learn or pay attention,” recalls Peter Klopfer, a classmate of Regan’s who, like him, had a reading disability. Regan, like Klopfer, rarely talked to others in class and made every effort to be invisible. As Klopfer explains, “You wouldn’t really want to speak out even if you thought you knew the answer. If the teacher called on you, you’d dummy up or say—I don’t know. You wouldn’t want to be put on the spot.”

  Dyslexia doesn’t affect just academic performance. It can destroy a child’s social standing. Over time, it can induce a permanent sense of being an outsider, of being on the margins. Some dyslexics are able to overcome this constant bruising to their self-esteem by excelling outside the classroom, in sports, for instance. Some are able to cope because they have exceptional support from their parents.

  Regan didn’t find any such refuge. He wasn’t much of an athlete and didn’t play any sport well enough to earn the respect of his peers. The kids he hung out with in his neighborhood would often gang up on him. His affectations, his speech, and the jokes he made always seemed out of step with the others, making him an easy target for mocking. He would come up with one-liners and then break into a cackling, hyena-like laugh that the other kids usually found funnier than the joke. “He was a little bit odd,” recalls Cliff Wagner, who was part of the clique. “We used to laugh at him more than with him.”

  Like many teenage boys of the day, Regan took up delivering newspapers to earn pocket money. On weekdays, after school ended in the afternoon, he would ride his bicycle over to the County Line Shopping Center with a friend and wait for the newspaper truck to arrive. After stacks of the Long Island Press, an evening paper, had been hauled off the truck and onto the sidewalk, Regan—like the other carriers—would load up his bicycle with two large bundles of newspapers—one in the front basket, one in the back—and set out on his delivery route. It wasn’t an easy ride, especially on Thursdays, when the paper was nearly twice the regular size because of an additional section, and on Sunday mornings, when it was fattened further by pullouts and supplements. He’d park his bicycle at every house he had to deliver to, walk up to the front step, and leave the paper on the porch or in the mailbox. The work paid about $40 per week.

  It was good money, but Regan had to work for every cent of it—more so than the others because of all the bullying he had to put up with on the route. The neighborhood kids, Wagner leading the pack, would throw roof shingles at him. They would knock his bike down, spilling the newspapers on the ground, and run, laughing. Regan would chase after them, yelling his pet curse: “Son of a bitch.” Everybody knew it was a hopeless pursuit—not only was Regan slow on his feet; he wasn’t very well coordinated in his movements. In the winter months, the chase would end with him slipping and falling on the ice while the bullies enjoyed the spectacle from a distance.

  Regan felt increasingly frustrated and powerless, and one day, he decided he couldn’t take it anymore. After what had been an especially humiliating afternoon, he got hold of a BB gun and went after one of his tormentors, a boy named Bob Florio, who was watching TV at a friend’s house. Hearing the commotion, the father of the friend, a beefy man named Joe, came out. Regan was
in the driveway, brandishing the gun.

  “What are you going to do with that gun, boy?” Joe asked.

  “That guy, that son of a bitch, he terrorizes me on my paper route,” Regan yelled in fury, referring to Bob Florio. “He tries to make me run every time, and I fall.”

  “Go home, boy,” Joe advised.

  Regan finally left, unable to exact his revenge. Instead of giving him a tough-guy reputation, the story of the incident—told and retold by kids on the block—served to reinforce Regan’s image as an oddball and a clown, somebody not worth taking seriously.

  • • •

  According to the theory of multiple intelligences, put forth by the Harvard psychologist Howard Gardner in 1983, the human race is endowed with nine kinds of intelligence. Our education system has traditionally rewarded only two of them: verbal or linguistic intelligence and the intelligence for mathematical thinking and logical reasoning. Gardner goes beyond these to list seven others. There are musical intelligence and bodily-kinesthetic intelligence, which dancers and athletes possess in spades. There are intrapersonal or social intelligence, which successful politicians ride on, and interpersonal intelligence, the ability for self-awareness that is the hallmark of spiritual figures. There’s naturalistic intelligence—the aptitude for observing and understanding nature. And then there’s spatial intelligence—the talent for visual thinking, memory, and imagination that architects, artists, and sculptors rely on.

  Regan would have scored poorly in many of these categories: he was obviously not verbally gifted or musically inclined, nor was he a graceful athlete or socially outgoing. But if there was one talent that he seemed to possess in abundance, it was spatial intelligence. Starting in junior high, he made dozens of intricate ceramic figurines, spending hours carving their features to perfection. Some of the statues were of little bears; others were of Disney characters like Mickey Mouse and Tinker Bell. To guard them from being smashed by the brother closest to him in age, he would store the figurines carefully in the same padlocked closet in which he stashed all kinds of confections to satisfy his sweet tooth. In junior high, he excelled in carpentry class, once helping a classmate make an eagle. Though he wasn’t a fan of the written word, he loved comics. He built up a large collection of two of the day’s popular comic magazines—Crazy and Cracked—whose off-the-wall characters delighted him no end and became a source of some of his one-liners.

 

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