The Spy Who Couldn't Spell Read online

  NEW AMERICAN LIBRARY

  Published by Berkley

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014

  Copyright © 2016 by Yudhijit Bhattacharjee

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Bhattacharjee, Yudhijit, author.

  Title: The spy who couldn’t spell: a dyslexic traitor, an unbreakable code, and the FBI’s hunt for America’s stolen secrets/Yudhijit Bhattacharjee.

  Description: New York, NY: New American Library, 2016.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016012584 (print) | LCCN 2016024121 (ebook) | ISBN 9781592409006 (hardback) | ISBN 9780698404090 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Regan, Brian, 1962– | Spies—United States—Biography. | Espionage, American—History—21st century. | Dyslexics—United States—Biography. | Intelligence service—United States—History—21st century. | United States. National Reconnaissance Office | United States. Federal Bureau of Investigation. | BISAC: TRUE CRIME/Espionage. | HISTORY/Modern/21st Century. | POLITICAL SCIENCE/ Political Freedom & Security/Intelligence.

  Classification: LCC JK468.I6 B48 2016 (print) | LCC JK468.I6 (ebook) | DDC 364.1/31 [B]—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016012584

  First Edition: November 2016

  Jacket design by Colleen Reinhart

  While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers, Internet addresses and other contact information at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.

  Version_1

  To Jen, my companion for life, and to Victor and Zoe, who bring joy to our hearts

  CONTENTS

  TITLE PAGE

  COPYRIGHT

  DEDICATION

  PRELUDE

  CHAPTER 1: THE TIP

  CHAPTER 2: TRAITOR UNMASKED

  CHAPTER 3: THE ROOTS OF DYSFUNCTION

  CHAPTER 4: A DESPERATE PLAN

  CHAPTER 5: SPY HUNT

  CHAPTER 6: NABBED

  CHAPTER 7: DECIPHER THIS

  CHAPTER 8: A CONVOLUTED COVER-UP

  CHAPTER 9: THE SEARCH FOR BURIED SECRETS

  CHAPTER 10: MR. EIGHTY PERCENT

  PHOTOGRAPHS

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  A NOTE ON SOURCES

  INDEX

  PRELUDE

  The classrooms and hallways of Farmingdale High in Long Island were deserted on the morning of Saturday, August 19, 2001, when a van pulled into the school’s parking lot. After turning off the engine, the driver of the vehicle—a tall man in his late thirties—stepped out into the warm summer sun. He cast a sweeping gaze upon the buildings and grounds of the institution he’d graduated from two decades earlier.

  Whatever nostalgia he might have felt for his old school was tinged with bitterness. For it was here that he had suffered some of life’s early humiliations: taunted by classmates for his apparent dim-wittedness; held in low esteem by his teachers. If they remembered him at all, they would remember him as the boy who had difficulty reading, the boy who was so bad at spelling. His bearish frame might have sheltered him from physical bullying in his last years of school, but combined with his severe dyslexia and his social awkwardness, it had also cemented his image as a dolt.

  That image had stuck with him, despite a successful career in U.S. intelligence and a top secret security clearance that gave him access to some of the country’s most valued secrets. Being underestimated—by family, classmates, and colleagues—had been the theme of his life, a curse he had borne silently since childhood. But for the mission he had now embarked upon, it was a blessing. None of his colleagues or managers in the intelligence community could have imagined that he of all people—so lacking in flamboyance as to be the antithesis of James Bond—was capable of masterminding such a cunning espionage conspiracy.

  From the parking lot, he walked to the edge of the school grounds. Squeezing through a hole in the barbed-wire fence next to the handball courts, he stepped into a wooded area that separated the Southern State Parkway from the school perimeter. After walking a few yards, he stopped by a tree and dug a hole in the ground. He took a laminated phone list out of his pocket and buried it there before walking back through the fence to his van, confident that nobody had seen him.

  He’d already pulled off the biggest heist of classified information in the annals of American espionage. In just a few days, he hoped to execute the final step of a meticulous plan to exchange those secrets for millions of dollars. If he succeeded, he would have enough money to pay off his brothers’ and sisters’ mortgages, settle his personal debts, and secure his children’s financial future.

  With fortune, he imagined, respect would follow. Those who had known him would no longer doubt his intelligence. Once and for all, he would shake the mantle of stupid.

  CHAPTER 1

  THE TIP

  On the morning of the first Monday in December 2000, FBI special agent Steven Carr hurried out of his cubicle at the bureau’s Washington, D.C., field office and bounded down two flights of stairs to pick up a package that had just arrived by FedEx from FBI New York. Carr was thirty-eight years old, of medium build, with blue eyes and a handsome face. He was thoughtful and intense, meticulous in his work, driven by a sense of patriotic duty inherited from his father, who served in World War II, and his maternal and paternal grandfathers, who both fought in World War I. Because of his aptitude for deduction and his intellectual doggedness, he’d been assigned to counterintelligence within a year after coming to the FBI in 1995. In his time at the bureau—all of it spent in the nation’s capital—he had played a supporting role in a series of high-profile espionage cases, helping to investigate spies such as Jim Nicholson, the flamboyant CIA agent who sold U.S. secrets to the Russians.

  But like most agents starting out in their careers, Carr was keen to lead a high-stakes investigation himself. A devout Catholic, Carr would sometimes bow his head in church and say a silent prayer requesting the divine’s help in landing a good case. That’s why he had responded with such alacrity when his squad supervisor, Lydia Jechorek, had asked him to pick up the package that morning. “Whatever it is, it’s yours,” she had said.

  Carr raced back to his desk and laid out the contents of the package in front of him: a sheaf of papers running into a few dozen pages. They were from three envelopes that had been handed to FBI New York by a confidential informant at the Libyan consulate in New York. The envelopes had been individually mailed to the consulate by an unknown sender.

  Breathlessly, Carr thumbed through the sheets. Based on directions sent from New York, he was able to sort the papers into three sets corresponding to the three envelopes. All three had an identical cover sheet, at the top of which was a warning in all caps. “THIS LETTER CONTAINS SENSITIVE INFORMATION.” Below, it read, in part:

 
; “This letter is confidential and directed to your President or Intelligence Chief. Please pass this letter via diplomatic pouch and do not discuss the existence of this letter in your offices or homes or via any electronic means. If you do not follow these instructions the existence of this letter and its contents may be detected and collected by U.S. intelligence agencies.”

  In the first envelope was a four-page letter with 149 lines of typed text consisting of alphabetical characters and numbers. The second envelope included instructions on how to decode the letter. The third envelope included two sets of code sheets. One set contained a list of ciphers. The other, running to six pages, listed dozens of words along with their encoded abbreviations: a system commonly known as brevity codes. Together, the two sets were meant to serve as the key for the decryption.

  Carr flipped through the letter, skimming the alphanumeric sequence. It looked like gibberish, like text you might get if you left a curious monkey in front of a keyboard. There was no way to make sense of it without the code sheets and the decoding instructions. By mailing the three separately, the sender had sought to secure the communication against the possibility that one envelope might get intercepted by a U.S. intelligence agency. Carr saw that the sender had included a message in typed plaintext in each envelope, informing the consulate of the other two envelopes in the mail and instructing the receiver of the message to place a car ad in the Washington Post if any of the other envelopes failed to arrive. The sender had not anticipated that all three envelopes could fall into the FBI’s hands.

  FBI New York had already decoded a few lines of the letter. Carr’s pulse quickened further as he read the deciphered text.

  “I am a Middle East North African analyst for the Central Intelligence Agency. I am willing to commit espionage against the U.S. by providing your country with highly classified information. I have a top secret clearance and have access to documents of all of the U.S. intelligence agencies, National Security Agency (NSA), Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), Central Command (CENTCOM) as well as smaller agencies.”

  To prove that this wasn’t a bluff, the sender had included in all three envelopes an identical set of government documents, twenty-three pages in all, some marked “CLASSIFIED SECRET,” some “CLASSIFIED TOP SECRET.” Most of them were aerial images taken by U.S. spy satellites showing military sites in the Middle East and other parts of the world: air defense systems, weapons depots, munitions factories, underground bunkers. Some of the documents were intelligence reports about regimes and militaries in the Middle East. It was evident from the markings on these images and reports that they had been printed after being downloaded from Intelink, a classified network of servers that constituted the intelligence community’s Internet.

  There were some additional documents. One was a monthly newsletter of the CIA, circulated internally among agency employees. Another was the table of contents of the Joint Tactical Exploitation of National Systems, a classified manual to help the U.S. war fighter take advantage of the country’s reconnaissance satellites and other intelligence-gathering technologies. The manual had been compromised before by another spy—an NSA cryptologist named David Sheldon Boone, who had sold it to the Soviet Union a decade earlier. In the years since, as the United States’ reconnaissance capabilities had evolved, the manual had been updated a number of times. The table of contents the sender had included in the package was from the manual’s most recent version. It would be valuable even to an adversary already in possession of the JTENS that Boone had given away.

  Also among the documents were aerial photographs of Gaddhafi’s yacht in the Mediterranean Sea. They had been taken from a low-flying aircraft deployed not by the United States but by a foreign intelligence service. How the sender of the package could have acquired them was unclear.

  Carr studied the pages in stunned silence, oblivious to the comings and goings of colleagues around him. He had never seen anything like this before. Since joining the squad, he had followed up on dozens of letters tipping the FBI off to potential espionage. Most came from anonymous sources at U.S. intelligence agencies accusing a coworker or colleague of being a spy. Rarely did such “point and pin” letters lead to the discovery of a real threat: more often than not, they turned out to be a case of erroneous judgment by the tipster or a case of bitter workplace jealousy.

  What Carr had in front of him seemed anything but a false alarm. The sender of the envelopes was no doubt a bona fide member of the U.S. intelligence community, with access to top secret documents, intent on establishing a clandestine relationship with a foreign intelligence service. The person had, in fact, already committed espionage by giving classified information to an enemy country. Carr might as well have been looking at a warning sign for a national security threat flashing in neon red.

  • • •

  Despite his excitement, Carr filed the sheets neatly into a binder before stepping into his supervisor’s office. “Lydia,” he said, sliding the binder across her desk. “You have to look at this.”

  Jechorek leafed through the pages. A short-haired, bespectacled woman in her early fifties, she had a quiet manner that belied a tough-as-nails personality. She had gotten hooked to law enforcement early in life, joining her father—a police officer—on surveillance runs and drawing sketches of murder suspects while still a sophomore in high school. Now a veteran of counterintelligence, Jechorek was best known for having led the FBI’s investigation of Jonathan Pollard, the spy who was caught selling U.S. secrets to Israel in the eighties.

  Carr explained to her why FBI New York had couriered the pages to Washington. In the portion of the coded letter that agents in New York had deciphered, they had found an e-mail address the sender wanted to use for further communication. With special permission from the U.S. attorney general, the nation’s top law enforcement official, the agents asked the e-mail service provider to let them pry into the account: [email protected].

  They discovered that the account had been created four months earlier, on August 3, using Internet access from a public library in Prince George’s County, Maryland. In the account registration, the user had identified himself as “Steven Jacobs,” having a residential address in Alexandria, Virginia. The account had been accessed half a dozen times from public libraries around Washington, D.C. There were no e-mails in the account except for test messages the person had sent to himself, and a reply from the Fraud Bureau in response to an inquiry he had made about an online company that sold fake IDs. From the accesses, the New York agents were certain that the individual lived somewhere in the greater Washington, D.C., metropolitan area.

  “What are we going to do?” Jechorek asked, the urgency in her tone mirroring Carr’s. It was imperative that the FBI find this person as quickly as possible. Perhaps it was already too late.

  Carr showed her a matrix of clues he’d built from his gleaning of the pages. The system of brevity codes the sender had used—along with the concern for operational security—pointed to somebody with a military background. That surmise was founded on Carr’s own experience in the military: before coming to the FBI, he had spent eleven years in the U.S. Army and the National Guard, where he had used brevity codes in training exercises to communicate with fellow troops. In Carr’s estimation, the sender of the envelopes likely had a more sophisticated knowledge of cryptology than just brevity codes. He had a top secret security clearance, which was marginally helpful, since it reduced the potential suspect pool from the few hundred thousand workers in the U.S. intelligence community who have a secret security clearance to a more limited population, on the order of tens of thousands, with the higher level of clearance. He also had access to Intelink. And he was likely married, with children, as evidenced by a line in the letter stating, “If I commit espionage, I will be putting myself and family at great risk.”

  There was one other thing: the man was a terrible speller.

  Scanning the six pages of br
evity codes, Carr spotted one misspelled word after another. The sender had evidently put this codebook together by first printing out the typed letter in plaintext, then cutting out individual words and pasting them alongside abbreviations that he’d printed out separately on other sheets. Carr could deduce that because the words didn’t line up perfectly with the individual abbreviations. But the disorderliness in alignment was hardly as glaring as the misspellings.

  AP: Anonmus

  NH: Alligations

  GR: Reveil

  16: Precausion

  CN: Negotianalable

  DZ: Airbourn

  KJ: Assocation

  MY: Netralize

  YF: Confrimed

  The list went on and on. Here was a person who had gone to great lengths to accomplish operational security but failed to run a basic spell-check.

  For the moment, though, Carr was focused on another set of clues: the locations of the public libraries the sender had accessed the jacobscall e-mail account from. He’d marked them with pins on a large map of the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area. The pins were clustered in and around the towns of Bowie and Crofton in Maryland. The intelligence agency in closest proximity was the National Security Agency.

  Located in Fort Meade, Maryland, the NSA has thousands of military employees, many with a background in cryptology, many with homes in the towns of Bowie and Crofton. Carr’s hunch was that the traitor was likely from within the NSA’s ranks, even though he’d introduced himself as a CIA analyst. That line—and the CIA newsletter in the materials he had sent—was possibly a red herring.

  “We need to call Mac,” Carr said.

  Jechorek picked up the phone and dialed Robert McCaslin, the head of counterintelligence at the NSA.

  “Hello,” McCaslin answered. An old-timer in counterintelligence circles, he spoke with the deep, authoritative voice of someone who was not used to being challenged.