Ever since childhood, Brian Regan had been made to feel stupid because of his severe dyslexia. So he thought no one would suspect him of stealing secrets...Yudhijit Bhattacharjee writes.
The classrooms and hallways of Farmingdale High in Long Island were deserted on the morning of Saturday 19 August 2001, when a van pulled into the school’s parking lot.
Turning off the engine, the driver – a tall man in his late 30s – stepped out into the warm summer sun. He cast a sweeping gaze upon the institution he had graduated from two decades earlier.
Whatever nostalgia he might have felt for his old school was tinged with bitterness. It was here that he had suffered some of life’s early humiliations: taunted by classmates for his apparent dimwittedness; 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 with spellings. His bearish frame may have protected him from physical bullying, 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 US intelligence, where he had been given 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 co-workers or managers in the intelligence community could have imagined that he of all people was capable of masterminding a complex espionage plot.
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 nearby highway from the school perimeter.
Walking a few yards, he stopped by a tree and dug a hole in the ground. He took a laminated list of phone numbers out of his pocket and buried it there before walking back to his van, confident that nobody had seen him.
He had already pulled off what was then the biggest heist of classified information in the history 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 the mortgages of his brothers and sisters, settle his personal debts and secure the financial future of his children.
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 off the image that had dogged him since childhood.
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