That was alan greenspan. Yes. Cspan where history unfolds daily. In 1979 cspan was created as a Public Service by americas Cable Television companies and is brought to you today by your cable or satellite provider. Yudhijit talks about agent trying to sell to libya. Thank you all for coming out. I think what we will do. Judhijit can talk for first 20 to 25 minutes and image there would be questions particularly in the book and issues that the books have raised about more contemporary cases and so we can sort of spin off from there and so i guess where should we start, yudhijit, thank you for inviting me to do this. No, absolutely. Thanks to the Wilson Center where i was a fellow january through may 2015 when i was hard at work on this book so its very nice to be able to speak to all of you here at this great institution. Nick, has been a friend of mine, hes obviously a very accomplished journalist, im really glad that youre doing this, nick, with me, im delighted to talk with you about the book, to lets get started. Great, i guess my first question is why dont you talk a little bit about how you found the story and this case and a bit give us the back story of how you ended up working on this project. Great, i would love to talk about this. I actually came across this case of bryan regan who in the book is the spy who couldnt spell. I came across the case back in 2009 on a lark i had gone to the fbi lab to interview a crypt analyst and i wanted to hear about his life story, his name was dan olson and he told me about a variety of cases and most of them involved codes that prison afghanistan tbangs gangs that use today communicate with each other. And said i used on solving the codes that brian regan had used. I thought surely people have written about this but when i dug deeper i saw that it hadnt been covered at all and the reason was that brian regan was arrested two weeks before 9 11 and convicted two months after u. S. Invaded iraq, its almost like his story was bookended by the two major events. To rewind a little bit, you have a background in writing. Cryptology, as you get to the cryptology section, i think everyone except hardcore cryptologist, let me get a cup of coffee. Where was your interest in cryptology or what was your interest in cryptology before, were you working on something . You know, i didnt really have a specific interest in cryptology. Im a science writer. I worked at a Science Magazine for many years and when i actually went to the fbi lab, i was working at science. I was interested in codes, i was interested in this idea that of hiding things from others. Ive always been fascinated by characters who do that and i guess the making and breaking of codes involves hiding and deception. So that was my sort of general interest, but i wasnt mathematically drawn to codes but one side digged deeper into the brian regular and regan story, whats interested about brian regan he went through cryptology courses during his military training, he wasnt really a cryptologist in the formal sense. And so he came up with the codes himself, he kind of invented them. I guess invented is a strong word but used unconventional techniques and thats why they proved to be difficult to break. Lets talk about brian regan himself. The spy that couldnt spell. Give us a sort of thumbnail sketch of who brian regan was and how he found himself in the predicament. Sure. He was an employee of the air force, he joined the air force in 1980. He had grown up with severe dyslexia and as a result of that he didnt do well in good and molled mocked by his peers, friends in neighborhood not because of dyslexia but certain corks which you can read all about in the book. He did well for him, he had to cheat in the military test to get in the air force. He was well enough to be absorbed as a signals analyst. He did pretty well 10 to 12 yes, he served admirably during the first gulf war. He was at the pentagon doing signals analysis to help the armed forces and then in 1995 he came to the national office, the agency that answers all the military Spy Satellite that is the u. S. Government has. These are multibillion dollar satellites, theyve taken years to develop. Decades of r d behind them and these the images that the satellites gather and signals intelligence that these satellites collect are what gives the United States its great military superiority in the world. So starting in 1997 because brian regular regan was facing hardships in life, under severe credit card debt, his wife wasnt happy because of how much he was making. He had a large family, relatively speaking, he had four kids and and he was, you know, he was frustrated. He was also frustrated because of the lack of respect at the workplace even though he was a fairly decent worker, but again, just like it had happened in childhood, he kept getting mocked, he kept getting ridiculed by some of his colleagues and sometimes in 1998 he came up with a plan that he was going to steal american secrets and he was going to try to market them overseas to hostile governments. And so he came up with the espionage plan sometime in 98, 99 and he went through a meticulous process of collecting these secrets which actually collecting them by himself arent that hard, thats something that we can talk about later, vulnerability of the secrets that he had access to much in the way that snowden and managing later had access to them. But to make a long story short, he tried to he actually succeeded in stealing the secrets, he succeeded in hiding them in these two state parks outside of dc, Pocahontas State Park and game up with this method burying them and encrypting the geocoordinates of the locations and what he had at tend of theft sheets of sheets filled with letters and numbers that wouldnt mean anything to anybody else but were essentially the keys to the kingdom. So if you havent already bought the book in the course of that explanation on amazon there are books for sale that he will be signing after this. One of the things that you do very well is you give this sense of what motivated him. Often times people are always looking for motivation and of times comes down to money and money was a factor here but it was sort of proving himself and not to be adult, that was the sort of impression that he was trying to wrestle himself out of, he visits high school and you sort of see the two worlds colliding. I thought that was phenomenal in getting into the psychology of this guy as well. You referenced snowden and managing, both of them played a adminnish role where they were not necessarily privy, they had they only had a right to know those secrets and a right to access those secrets as a result of Technical Expertise not as a result of espionage specialty; is that correct . Thats right. And i would say if you were to compare brian regan to these two individuals, brian regan had experience. He knew the value of signals intelligence very specifically because he had helped to collect it, he had helped to analyze it. At the nro, his job, part of his job involved maintaining the web page for his particular group and so he had certain privileges, i dont know exactly what they were but he was quite familiar with how all of this information that was stored on the servers had to be used by the military in war and in peace. And i think that that made him dangerous. Well, given his intent it made him dangerous because he had both access, he had knowledge and he knew the value of these things and he knew which governments might value which kind of information. So if you read the book, you will find that he went through a process of sorting all of the classified material that he had stolen in order to create separate packages, some of them containing the same information, create separate packages for the governments of libya and iraq and, in fact, iran too. And he the nro, one of the things which i think is interesting, we associate, even in sort of a presnowden era, the nsa secrets were we always associate the cia the spookies of the spookies and the nro and nsa, that intelligence is far more valuable because of what you said incredible expense platforms, right, so if you talk about sort of the nro being the spy agency that no one heard of thats actually has thats a great question and i spent some time in the book sort of describing what the nro is, why it was important. So the nro until 1992 the American Public didnt even know that the nro existed because it was just this Little Office within the air force completely classified even its existence not known and there were people who worked on intelligence agencies like the fbi who had no idea what the nro was. In 1992 it was declassified so the existence became known and and so thats when the public started to get a slight glimpse of what this multibillion Dollar Agency did. Since the 19 since the late 50s, this is the agency that sort of first came up with all of the technology to to photograph and collect signals intelligence from space and this is through the 60s there were several improvements made. The American Public didnt know anything about it, 70s, 80s and thats when people started to get so in short, nro collects two types of intelligence mainly, one is photographic intelligence, just images, High Resolution images of of military installations, of weapons depos. Theres a picture of gadhafis yacht . Yes, thats actually right. That particular image was not taken by the nro, it was taken by another middle eastern spy agency, but in the book youll find why that is relevant. You bring up a nice point, but but, yes, the incredible amount of detail that these photographs were able to show as the nro improved its capabilities have been instrumental in winning wars. And, in fact, the work that brian regan did during the first gulf war, he wasnt the only one, of course, you know, those were sort of critical to so easily overpowering the iraqi forces when iraq had invaded kuwait. The imagery that the u. S. Special operators and seals had in the raid of bin laden compound was through nro sources. Yes, in fact, one of the individuals who was involved in collecting the intelligence that led to the bin laden raid which, by the way, has written a terrific piece for the new yorker a few years ago, that one of the individuals connected to that intelligence was called to testify in the brian regan trial and i tried very hard to interview him but the agency didnt make that person available just because they knew that i might also start nosing around and asking about bypass bin laden. Right. We sort of talked about in a macro level what the nro was doing and lets go sort of more micro. Brian regan is collecting all of the information in the house and stashing into the woods. His family does, doesnt has suspicions, talk about how he managed keeping that secret from colleagues and family and then eventually how he was outed. So brian regan was closed off. He didnt really have friends at the nro. He didnt have many friends in his neighborhood and as his wife told me, you know, many years later when i was working on the book that, you know, hes not somebody that i even knew and so the layers of deception that he was able to deploy are as fascinating as the codes that he created. I mean, in the book i describe him as being a code that i sought to sort of unravel through my reporting. He you know, he stashed the materials first at the nro itself in one of the cabinets and theres a scene in the book where he goes off on travel duty and the nro the nro Office Managers come in and theyre moving excess furniture and take away this cabinet and then they unlock it and they discover all these papers in it and they say, oh, probably belong to this guy and when he returns they call him and say, hey, theres theres all the stuff that you had, do you need it . And he says, oh, yeah, sure, please. And they send it back to him. So, you know, some of the security lapses are simply laughable and certainly should should concern us. But but aside from that, he did a good job himself of keeping it a secret. When he brought it home and sorting it his wife and kids were away and so he was able to sort it in his basement and then soon after that he took it out, he first actually stored it in a Public Storage facility while he was kind of putting his plan together. So there were multiple steps to how he stored this information. Of course, snowden didnt have to do anything of this. Its debatable, you know, whether what he did was entirely good or bad, but at least he did take information that he wasnt supposed to take and and in so far as that goes, snowden didnt have to go through the trouble of printing stuff out and putting it in credenza and putting it in topperware containers. He sorted the piles and sends a letter to the Libyan Embassy. Thats right. He goes through great pains to first create a letter thats entirely coded and then he creates a code sheet and so he sends out a letter thats really in sort of three parts, it has the code sheet, it has the code book, or rather the instructions for how to resolve the code and then theres this letter which is entirely coded. And so all of this is his way of trying to remain anonymous because hes really, really paranoid about being found out as anybody would be. So he sends these to the Libyan Embassy. He addresses the letter to Saddam Hussein, sorry, to gadhafi, he actually has a separate letter that goes out to Saddam Hussein and one of these actually actually all of these letters get intercepted by the fbi and a source they had. By a source they had in the Libyan Embassy. I never actually figured out, i never got much clarity on that and, you know, justifiably so because the fbi needs to protect its sources and methods and thats how the spy hunt began and it took several months for the fbi to figure out who had sent those letters. So lets get into this in a second. Talk a little bit about the craft of sorry. Talk a little bit about the craft of your own investigation and reporting and writing. How much did you sort of struggle with wanting to uncover all of the sources and methods to be able to see exactly how they did it and also respecting the fact that the fbi had sources and methods, your own personal journalistic ambitions, how did they contradict the professional ambitions of the fbi and their own sort of protection of sources and methods . Well, i knew that that was an important part of the story but i knew that was just sort of the beginning of the story. I was happy enough to let that lie, really, and if i had gotten hung out on how they got the tip and ip cysted on finding that out, well, this book wouldnt be here. I didnt think it was germane to the story. The lengths the government had to go to build the case without bringing the informant, i knew how important it was to keep the informant behind the scenes and later on when i discuss this with counterintelligent agents, i learned that there could be tremendous risk to this individual. He could have been killed by the gadhafi regime for having done, you know what brian regan was seeking to do to this country. Yeah, theres the concept of gray mail in u. S. Public prosecutions you in cases in counterintelligence cases as theyre bringing the evidence often times the prosecution will say, this guy is a criminal but we cant tell you how we got where we got and they have the private secure conversations. Was there gray mailing, an attempt to giving up the informant or try to jeopardize him . Well, thats exactly what brian regan. Brian regan knew that the government would not be able to bring in this informant to testify. He didnt know exactly who had tipped off the fbi, but he knew that even if the fbi presented these letters, these anonymous letters in court they would have a hard time that the letters were actually sent to an embassy. Right. And so he attempted to blackmail the government by saying, look, im not giving anything up and i think that i deserve less than nine years in prison for what ive done and only if you give me that short sentence relatively speaking, will i help you to give up the secrets that i have buried and so this was highly unusual and this was, i think, this was probably the worst this was the worst judgment call that brian regan could have made and thats what fascinating me and i wanted to get deeper into his life to understand what kind of child and youth he had to lead him to think this way to outsmart and outmaneuver the government after being caught with his pants down. You talk about legal phase, the chase itself, the letter comes in and you have fantastic fbi agent as protagonist, how do they build the case against regan and how do they go after him and get him in. So the first phase of the investigation was just identifying who this person was and so they looked nsa and count intelligence people within the cia and this cant be our guy, you know, because of all the bad spelling and in these letters because we have much more people who serve in our agency. Riddle would be thats right. This was what fascinating me about regan. He would be so smart and he would do one thing that would be so dumb that would completely be the end of his plot. This happens repeatedly through the story. But back to the chase, the fbi started to do audits. What regan had done had classified internet of the Intelligence Community and had included 24 pages, about 11 documents in his package that he had mailed and so that was the clue that that the fbi was trying to connect to whoever the mailer of the package was. So to make a long story short, eventually the fbi found one particular document that had been printed out on july the ninth of 1999 and they were able to narrow down the number of people who had accessed that document on that particular day and thats when brian regans name sort of came to the forefront. They also had other clues, you know, they were looking for a bad speller and when they looked into brian regans files, they could tell that he was probably their guy. But, you know, intelligence investigations are incredibly complex if they are to hold up in court. Theres a whole lot of evidence and so they went through a long process of first confirming that he, indeed, had done it and there were moments in the story, for example, when hes seen going into a library in croftman, maryland and hes doing searches for libyan embassies and iraqi embassies in europe and as a side note he goes through incredible, you know, effort to cover his tracks and then he leaves the browser open when he walks off from the terminal. You know if he had just refreshed it, t