While delivering newspapers, Regan became friends with Michael Gould, a smiling, cherubic teenager who lived a few blocks away. A year younger than Regan, Gould didn’t have any of the meanness that Regan was used to encountering, and the two started spending a lot of time together. On the weekends, they would bike over to the movie-plex at Sunrise Mall, lock up their bikes, and binge-watch as many movies as they could, one after another. “We’d pay for a matinee show, and when it was over, go into another theater, and then another till the night,” Gould recalled. “Then we would ride home.” For Regan, being away from his house, where he had little privacy, was itself rewarding; watching stars lead fantasy lives on the screen in what constituted hours and hours of entertainment for a couple of bucks was a bonus. He especially enjoyed James Bond movies. Every time they watched one—The Spy Who Loved Me was a favorite—he’d remark to Gould how cool the cars and the women in the film were.
The movies were only a temporary escape from the humiliations Regan faced in real life. At school, he continued to struggle to get a passing grade. “I can’t believe you graduated,” a classmate wrote in his junior high school yearbook in 1977, the year he exited Mill Lane and entered Farmingdale High School. Anyone who borrowed a book from him in class couldn’t help chuckling at the misspellings in the notes he had made in the margins. “What the hell are you writing here, Brian?” a friend recalled saying to him. “You’ve spelled everything wrong!” In the social circle of teenagers in the neighborhood, the likes of Cliff Wagner called him a “retard.”
Yet even they felt that Regan possessed an odd ingenuity. He always seemed to have a plan, even though it was usually a bad one, like the time when he traded the perfectly good throttle on his minibike for a lawn mower shifter. The throttle—mounted on the handlebar—allowed for speeding up and slowing down, but Regan wanted to get to full throttle in one step, which he was able to do with the shifter. But he now had less control than before, and moreover, since the shifter was next to the gas tank, close to the ground, he had to bend down while riding at full speed to turn the engine off. Nobody at the mud tracks where the boys raced their minibikes thought Regan had made a good trade.
There were times when his ideas worked out. He once got a pair of rabbits and kept them in a cage in his backyard. Nobody had advised him to keep the male and female rabbit away from each other, and soon enough, the rabbits multiplied. Within weeks, he had more than twenty of them. Regan found a way to use the bounty to mow the lawn. He put them out on the grass, confining four or five of them each under a milk crate. When the animals were done nibbling all the grass under their feet, he slid the crates to another spot, denuding the lawn section by section.
What few of Regan’s friends were aware of was his knack for stealth and his willingness to deploy it. One winter evening, when he was still in junior high, Regan broke into a house in the neighborhood. The owners, who were moving to another state, had been gone for a few months. The neighboring house belonged to the family of Regan’s friend Tom, whose mother had made him dinner the day he got wet in the stream. She was walking her dog when she noticed, in the darkness, the silhouette of somebody climbing out of the neighbor’s window and running away. She rushed into her own house, and Tom’s father ran out with a baseball bat to see who it was, but there was nobody to be found. The window of the neighbor’s house had been broken.
The police came and discovered that the house had been robbed. All that had been taken were ceramic paints and brushes and carving tools, worth less than a couple of hundred dollars. The police didn’t ever track down the thief. But years later, Regan would confess to Tom that the shadowy figure his mother had seen on that cold, dark evening was none other than him.
• • •
Sometime around his fifteenth birthday, Regan hit a growth spurt, shooting up to over six feet in height. He’d always been of average size and build compared to kids his age; now he was one of the biggest boys in his cohort, towering over most of his classmates at Farmingdale High. He began working out at the gym. As he grew in physique, so did his confidence. After years of being ridiculed, he was realizing that he had the strength to fight back, and he wasn’t afraid to flaunt it.
One winter afternoon, a friend of Regan’s named Brian Wagner— who called Regan “Big Irish Mick”—went with him to watch a movie. On the way back, the two decided it would be fun to throw snowballs at a store near the movie theater. The owner of the store, who happened to see them in the act, was not amused. He came out and, along with his son, knocked Brian Wagner off his feet and pinned him to the ground.
Regan pounced on the two attackers and pulled them off Wagner. He threw the store owner down and wrapped his arm around the man’s neck, putting him in a tight choke hold. All those years of wrestling with his brother on the front lawn of his house, combined with his newfound strength, were enough to make the fight a no contest.
“Grow up, man, grow up,” Regan said, breathing heavily. “I don’t want to hurt you.” He released the choke hold, and the father and son walked away.
Although he didn’t go around picking fights, Regan made it known at school and in the neighborhood that he wasn’t going to take things lying down. When one of Regan’s brothers got picked on at his school, Regan came to his defense, delivering a stern warning to the boy who had been bullying his brother. He stepped in to defend a frail classmate and friend named Glen Brausch, whose image as a weakling made him a frequent target of harassment.
“If you were his friend, he was protective of you,” Gould recalled. “If you weren’t his friend, you were his enemy.”
While in high school, Regan got a job unloading and stacking tires at a store near where his father worked. The work was physically demanding but paid a lot more than what he had been making as a newspaper delivery boy. With the money he saved, he bought a used sports car—a Ford Mustang Boss 302—from Cliff Wagner’s next-door neighbor. It was golden in color, with black stripes, and although it was more than ten years old, the owner had kept it in great condition.
Overnight, the car earned Regan more admiration and respect from peers than he had ever gotten. Wagner had coveted the car himself, having seen it for years in his neighbor’s driveway, and so when Regan came around driving it one day, he was stunned. “I didn’t even know it was for sale,” Wagner remarked to Regan. His envy was obvious.
It was the first car to be owned by anybody in Regan’s circle. Cliff Wagner and other boys in the group would pile into it, and Regan would take them for a drive around the block. On streets with a downward slope, he would idle the engine and take his foot off the brake, letting it roll without hitting the gas pedal. “Step on the gas!” Wagner would yell. “No, it costs too much money,” Regan would respond, and they’d keep cruising. No matter how much the others jeered, he knew he was firmly in the driver’s seat and didn’t have to give up control.
• • •
With his poor academic performance, Regan didn’t see college in his future. But he didn’t want to stay in Farmingdale and work at a factory like his father. He wished to see the world, to travel to some of the exotic locations he’d seen in the James Bond movies. The only way he could think of realizing that ambition was to join the U.S. military.
As a senior in high school, Regan took the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery—a three-hour-long multiple-choice test that the U.S. military has offered to students in the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth grades since 1968. The exam consists of questions for probing an array of basic intellectual skills and knowledge: some questions test for cognitive abilities like pattern recognition and spatial perception; others measure verbal ability; yet others test the exam taker’s knowledge of science, social studies, history, and other topics. Depending on the score, applicants have the option of enlisting in the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, or Coast Guard. The minimum score required to enter the Air Force, Marines, and Coast Guard is higher than that
required to join the Army or the Navy.
Regan appeared for the ASVAB with a number of students at Farmingdale High, including Gould. They took the test in the high school auditorium, scribbling away under the inattentive watch of a bored serviceman proctoring the exam. Regan was seated behind Gould. When the proctor wasn’t looking in his direction, he peeked over Gould’s shoulder and copied several of the answers. Whatever he lacked in academic ability, he did his best to make up for by taking advantage of his height.
When the results were posted a few months later, he—along with Gould—was among the high scorers. On his own, he may not have qualified for any of the services. Yet, thanks to the sly peeking he’d been able to get away with, his score was high enough for him to enlist in the Air Force. Regan had done so well, in fact, that he qualified for a job in intelligence, one of the service’s more coveted career tracks.
Regan was ecstatic. He’d finally found an escape from Farmingdale. This was his chance to build a new life far away from Lois Lane, leaving behind the painful memories of humiliations and insults he’d suffered there. Since he was still a few months shy of his eighteenth birthday, Anne had to sign a waiver allowing him to enlist. In the summer of 1980, shortly after graduating from Farmingdale High, he packed up his bags and left for Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas. Anne wept for days after he said good-bye.
• • •
After eight weeks of basic military training at Lackland, Regan went to the Goodfellow Air Force Base in San Angelo, Texas, for technical school. Over the next few months, he learned about signals intelligence and analysis, a cornerstone of modern warfare. It was the most challenging and rigorous academic work he had ever encountered in his life. But Regan was determined to succeed, and he made every effort to overcome whatever impediments his dyslexia posed. As part of his training, he became familiar with Morse code and learned how to detect and intercept radio signals using suitable antennae for specific frequencies and emitting stations. He mastered the basics of interpreting and analyzing these signals to extract intelligence about an enemy.
Graduating from the course, Airman First Class Regan was assigned to a U.S. air station near Iráklion on the Greek island of Crete. The Air Force had built the facility in 1954 to monitor the Mediterranean, where both the U.S. and the Soviet navies operated their fleets. Spread over a few thousand acres in a rural, idyllic setting, the Iráklion station was equipped with an array of antennas for eavesdropping on military communications throughout the region. Communications between Soviet aircraft and ships were a target of collection, of course. The station was also engaged in intercepting and analyzing signals stemming from the North African and Middle Eastern countries bordering the Mediterranean Sea.
Regan worked with some four hundred signals intelligence analysts who together constituted the 6931st Electronic Security Squad. As he learned the ropes, he came to discover that his dyslexia gave him a unique advantage when it came to doing analysis. Dyslexics tend to think in pictures, not in words, and instead of processing ideas sequentially from the simple to the complex, they are more inclined to look at the big picture. Having a global view helps them make connections between disparate pieces of information and recognize patterns in data that might elude more linear thinkers. As Regan would find out in the course of his assignments, this knack for pattern recognition is a particularly useful thing for a signals analyst to have.
He couldn’t have asked for a better first posting. Life on the station was relaxed and enjoyable. The sunny weather was a dreamy contrast to the harsh winters of Farmingdale. The beach was minutes away. For the first time in his life, Regan had a place to call his own, and the privacy that came with it. There were no pesky brothers or sisters to intrude on his space. Within walking distance was a marina where enlisted men and women spent hours swimming and lazing about in paddleboats. Wandering out of the station, one could go picking grapes or visiting ancient Greek ruins. Though the town of Iráklion didn’t have much to offer, the big historic metropolis Athens was a ferry ride away.
The charms of Crete had long made it a popular tourist destination for Europeans. During the spring and summer months, thousands of visitors from the west and north of the continent would descend upon the island to enjoy its sandy white beaches and the warm ocean waves that crashed upon them. One day, Regan met a young tourist who was visiting from Sweden. She was blond and blue-eyed and had a shy smile. Her name was Anette Stenqvist.
The two fell in love and kept up a steady correspondence after Anette returned to Sweden. Regan proposed to her in short order. Anette, who had completed only a high school diploma, was happy to shelve her plans of furthering her education in favor of getting married. Regan’s prospects seemed bright, and Anette was optimistic about the life she could have in the United States. After Regan completed his Iráklion assignment and took up his next posting at Kelly Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas, Anette came to the United States to work as an au pair. In March 1983, the two got married.
After two years at Kelly, Regan spent nine months in Korea serving on the Osan Air Base, which the United States had maintained since its intervention in the peninsula during the Korean War. The Air Force routinely conducted reconnaissance flights from the base, flying U-2 spy planes at an altitude of sixty thousand feet above North Korea’s territory to photograph military installations and intercept signals of interest. Regan worked with the 6903rd Electronic Security Group, whose primary role was to interpret and analyze the data collected during these missions to produce intelligence reports.
Regan did well in his job, moving up the ranks steadily. His struggles with reading and writing didn’t keep him from completing advanced levels of training or clearing the written tests he needed to take to earn promotions. Whether it was by hard work or his talent for visual thinking, he had clearly found a way to compensate.
• • •
In the summer of 1985, Regan and Anette moved to Wheeler Air Force Base in Honolulu, Hawaii, where Regan was assigned to work with the 6934th Electronic Security Group. It was a dream posting that would last for the next three years. Regan invited his friend Michael Gould to visit. Gould was impressed by how well Regan was doing, so impressed as to wonder, enviously, if he shouldn’t have gone into the military himself.
Regan’s apartment on the base was spacious and well furnished. He and Anette seemed to be thriving financially, and they looked happy together. Regan had recently bought a brand-new pickup truck; he and Anette drove Gould around to Honolulu’s spectacular beaches. Regan showed off the truck’s powerful four-wheel drive, driving the vehicle over the white sands all the way to the shore of Waimea Bay, where the three sunbathed and watched surfers ride the waves under a brilliant blue sky. At night, Regan and his wife took Gould to downtown Honolulu to explore the bars and clubs. Gould returned from the trip thinking that his friend was “stationed on paradise.”
Every so often, Regan would visit Farmingdale. Michael and Anne were proud that he had made something of his life, and his brothers and sisters viewed him with a respect and admiration that he hadn’t known before. Sometimes, the family would stay up late at night waiting for him to arrive. Anne would make sure to cook him a turkey and a ham, two of Regan’s favorite foods. For all the squabbling and fighting of the growing-up years, Regan loved playing big brother to his siblings during these visits, freely dispensing advice. He affectionately chided his younger sister for smoking. “That’s no good for you,” he told her. “It’s going to give you cancer. You should quit.” When she asked him what he did in the Air Force, he responded with a cliché of a joke that contained less humor than pride. “I can’t tell you,” he said. “If I told you, I’d have to kill you.”
Once in a while, he’d run into the old gang of tormentors from the neighborhood, including Bob Florio and Cliff Wagner. None of them had left Farmingdale or launched a career, and it must have given Regan some glee to face them in his
new avatar as a successful military man doing more for the country than they had ever imagined. One day, when he was hanging out with Florio and Brian Wagner on the lawn of a neighborhood house, he showed off some of the combat maneuvers he had learned in basic training. Florio watched as Regan wrestled Brian Wagner down to the ground with ridiculous ease. Every time the tall and hefty Wagner ended up on his back, Regan let out a laugh. It was all in good fun, but there was one difference from the past. The fun was no longer at his expense.
From Hawaii, Regan was transferred to Washington, D.C., where he attended the NSA’s National Cryptologic School for two months of training in signals analysis pertaining specifically to the Middle East and North Africa. Then he began working at the Air Intelligence Agency. He was now a tech sergeant with some management experience under his belt, having supervised a team of analysts in his last two years at Wheeler Air Force Base. For his job at the Air Intelligence Agency (AIA), Regan went beyond analyzing signals to learning how to disrupt an enemy’s communication networks.
In August 1990, after Iraqi tanks rolled into Kuwait, the U.S. armed forces began preparing an offensive to drive Iraqi forces from Kuwait’s territory. Regan, who had spent part of his career analyzing signal transmissions in the Middle East, was drafted to support the war plans. When, after a buildup of forces, the United States launched Operation Desert Storm on January 16, 1991, Regan worked twelve-hour shifts at the Pentagon to plot—through signals analysis—Iraqi missile sites. He was part of a team that prepared order-of-battle reports on how the Iraqi military planned to deploy their missiles; these reports were used by U.S. commanders to brief the Joint Chiefs of Staff and President George H. W. Bush.
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