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The Spy Who Couldn't Spell
- A Dyslexic Traitor, an Unbreakable Code, and the FBI's Hunt for America's Stolen Secrets
- Narrated by: Robert Fass
- Length: 8 hrs and 11 mins
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Publisher's summary
The thrilling, true-life account of the FBI's hunt for ingenious traitor Brian Regan - known as the Spy Who Couldn't Spell.
Before Edward Snowden's infamous data breach, the largest theft of government secrets was committed by an ingenious traitor whose intricate espionage scheme and complex system of coded messages were made even more baffling by his dyslexia. His name is Brian Regan, but he came to be known as the Spy Who Couldn't Spell.
In December of 2000, FBI special agent Steven Carr of the bureau's Washington, DC, office received a package from FBI New York: a series of coded letters from an anonymous sender to the Libyan consulate, offering to sell classified US intelligence. The offer, and the threat, were all too real. A self-proclaimed CIA analyst with top secret clearance had information about US reconnaissance satellites, air defense systems, weapons depots, munitions factories, and underground bunkers throughout the Middle East.
Rooting out the traitor would not be easy, but certain clues suggested a government agent with a military background, a family, and a dire need for money. Leading a diligent team of investigators and code breakers, Carr spent years hunting down a dangerous spy and his cache of stolen secrets.
In this fast-paced true-life spy thriller, Yudhijit Bhattacharjee reveals how the FBI unraveled Regan's strange web of codes to build a case against a man who nearly collapsed America's military security.
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Critic reviews
"An excellent, highly engrossing account of the search for a man who was cunning, avaricious - and a dreadful speller....It is a pleasure to be in the hands of a writer who so skillfully weaves his assiduous research into polished prose....The Spy Who Couldn’t Spell presents an estimable, thoroughly enjoyable overview of espionage in the digital age.” (The Wall Street Journal)
“Yudhijit Bhattacharjee has brought to light an intriguing tale of espionage and betrayal - a tale filled with twists and turns and powerful revelations.” (David Grann, New York Times best-selling author of The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon)
“Brian Regan was an all too human spy, a trailblazer in the digital age - a mole who managed to squirrel away thousands of classified documents - and a brilliant, dyslexic cryptologist who was caught in part because he couldn’t spell. Yudhijit Bhattacharjee has penetrated the FBI and other parts of the intelligence community to write this fantastic true story - a captivating, gracefully-written narrative that is destined to become a classic in the history of code-breaking.” (Kai Bird, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames)
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A landmark collaboration between a thirty-year veteran of the CIA and a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, The Main Enemy is the inside story of the CIA-KGB spy wars, told through the actions of the men who fought them. Based on hundreds of interviews with operatives from both sides, The Main Enemy puts us inside the heads of CIA officers as they dodge surveillance and walk into violent ambushes in Moscow. This is the story of the generation of spies who came of age in the shadow of the Cuban missile crisis and rose to run the CIA and KGB in the last days of the Cold War.
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A masterpiece of espionage history
- By kucherv on 08-21-18
By: Milton Bearden, and others
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Spies in the Family
- An American Spymaster, His Russian Crown Jewel, and the Friendship That Helped End the Cold War
- By: Eva Dillon
- Narrated by: Gabra Zackman
- Length: 8 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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In the summer of 1975, 17-year-old Eva Dillon's family was living in New Delhi when her father was exposed as a CIA spy. Eva had long believed that her father was a US State Department employee. She had no idea that he was handling the CIA's highest ranking double agent - Dmitri Fedorovich Polyakov, a Soviet general whose code name was TOPHAT. Dillon's father and Polyakov had a close friendship that went back years, to their first meeting in Burma in the mid-1960s.
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LOVED it!
- By SaraofDI on 11-06-17
By: Eva Dillon
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Class 11
- Inside the CIA's First Post-9/11 Spy Class
- By: T.J. Waters
- Narrated by: Patrick Lawlor
- Length: 10 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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Written by one of its own graduates, Class 11: Inside the CIA's First Post-9/11 Spy Class is an insider's view of the first CIA training class after September 11, 2001 - a look at the most elite and secretive espionage training program in the country.
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Save Your Money
- By Daniel on 11-27-06
By: T.J. Waters
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Oklahoma City
- What the Investigation Missed - and Why It Still Matters
- By: Andrew Gumbel, Roger G. Charles
- Narrated by: Todd Waring
- Length: 14 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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In Oklahoma City, veteran investigative journalists Andrew Gumbel and Roger G. Charles puncture the myth about what happened on that day - one that has persisted in the minds of the American public for nearly two decades. Working with unprecedented access to government documents, a voluminous correspondence with Terry Nichols, and more than 150 interviews with those immediately involved, Gumbel and Charles demonstrate how much was missed in the official investigation.
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A Catalog
- By Lynn on 07-31-12
By: Andrew Gumbel, and others
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Kingpin
- How One Hacker Took Over the Billion-Dollar Cybercrime Underground
- By: Kevin Poulsen
- Narrated by: Eric Michael Summerer
- Length: 8 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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The word spread through the hacking underground like some unstoppable new virus: Someone - some brilliant, audacious crook - had just staged a hostile takeover of an online criminal network that siphoned billions of dollars from the U.S. economy. The FBI rushed to launch an ambitious undercover operation aimed at tracking down this new kingpin. Other agencies around the world deployed dozens of moles and double agents.
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This should be a movie
- By Hijenks on 05-19-15
By: Kevin Poulsen
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The Watchers
- The Rise of America's Surveillance State
- By: Shane Harris
- Narrated by: Kirby Heyborne
- Length: 15 hrs
- Unabridged
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Our surveillance state was born in the brain of Admiral John Poindexter in 1983. Poindexter, President Ronald Reagan's national security adviser, realized that the United States might have prevented the terrorist massacre of 241 Marines in Beirut if only intelligence agencies had been able to analyze in real time data they had on the attackers. Poindexter poured government know-how and funds into his dream---a system that would sift reams of data for signs of terrorist activity.
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Important context for privacy debate
- By Keefer on 09-17-11
By: Shane Harris
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Curveball
- Spies, Lies, and the Con Man Who Caused a War
- By: Bob Drogin
- Narrated by: Erik Singer
- Length: 6 hrs and 15 mins
- Abridged
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Curveball answers the crucial question of the Iraq war: How and why was America’s intelligence so catastrophically wrong? In this dramatic and explosive book, award-winning Los Angeles Times reporter Bob Drogin delivers a narrative that takes us to Europe, the Middle East, and deep inside the CIA to find the truth—the truth about the lies and self-deception that led us into a military and political nightmare.
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George W. Bush lied...
- By Jonathan Love on 11-21-14
By: Bob Drogin
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Best of Enemies
- The Last Great Spy Story of the Cold War
- By: Gus Russo, Eric Dezenhall
- Narrated by: Robert Petkoff
- Length: 11 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1978, CIA maverick Jack Platt and KGB agent Gennady Vasilenko were new arrivals on the Washington, D.C., intelligence scene, with Jack working out of the CIA's counterintelligence office and Gennady out of the Soviet Embassy. Both men were assigned to seduce the other into betraying his country in the final days of the Cold War, but instead the men ended up becoming the best of friends. Theirs is a friendship that never should have happened, and their story is chock full of treachery, darkly comic misunderstandings, bureaucratic inanity, and landmark intelligence breakthroughs.
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Really?
- By M.E. on 01-13-19
By: Gus Russo, and others
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The Spy and the Traitor
- The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War
- By: Ben Macintyre
- Narrated by: John Lee
- Length: 13 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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If anyone could be considered a Russian counterpart to the infamous British double-agent Kim Philby, it was Oleg Gordievsky. The son of two KGB agents and the product of the best Soviet institutions, the savvy, sophisticated Gordievsky grew to see his nation's communism as both criminal and philistine. He took his first posting for Russian intelligence in 1968 and eventually became the Soviet Union's top man in London, but from 1973 on he was secretly working for MI6.
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John Lee is GREAT!
- By David on 09-21-18
By: Ben Macintyre
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Spycraft
- The Secret History of the CIA's Spytechs from Communism to Al-Qaeda
- By: Robert Wallace, Henry Robert Schelsinger
- Narrated by: David Drummond
- Length: 19 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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Now, in the first book ever written about this ultrasecretive department, the former director of OTS teams up with an internationally renowned intelligence historian to give listeners an unprecedented look at the devices and operations deemed "inappropriate for public disclosure" by the CIA just two years ago.
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Unique, informative history of the CIA
- By Richard on 07-29-08
By: Robert Wallace, and others
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The Cell
- Inside the 9/11 Plot, and Why the FBI and CIA Failed to Stop It
- By: John Miller, Michael Stone, Chris Mitchell
- Narrated by: John Miller
- Length: 4 hrs and 43 mins
- Abridged
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The Cell provides the first complete treatment to piece together what led to the events of 9/11, ultimately delivering the disturbing answer to the question: why, with all the information the intelligence community had, was no one able to stop the September 11 attacks? It also includes a first-person account of John Miller's face-to-face meeting with Osama bin Laden.
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What led up to 9/11?
- By Richard on 12-31-03
By: John Miller, and others
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Exploding the Phone
- The Untold Story of the Teenagers and Outlaws Who Hacked Ma Bell
- By: Phil Lapsley
- Narrated by: Johann North
- Length: 12 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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Before smartphones, back even before the Internet and personal computer, a misfit group of technophiles, blind teenagers, hippies, and outlaws figured out how to hack the world’s largest machine: the telephone system. Starting with Alexander Graham Bell’s revolutionary "harmonic telegraph", by the middle of the 20th century the phone system had grown into something extraordinary, a web of cutting-edge switching machines and human operators that linked together millions of people like never before. But the network had a billion-dollar flaw, and once people discovered it, things would never be the same.
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Great Story along with Great Technical Research
- By Elsa Braun on 04-25-16
By: Phil Lapsley
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Freezing Order
- A True Story of Russian Money Laundering, State-Sponsored Murder, and Surviving Vladimir Putin's Wrath
- By: Bill Browder
- Narrated by: Adam Grupper
- Length: 10 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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When Browder’s young Russian lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, was beaten to death in a Moscow jail in 2009, Browder cast aside his business career and made it his life’s mission to pursue justice for Sergei. One of the first steps of that mission was to uncover who had killed Sergei and profited from the $230 million corruption scheme that he had exposed. As Browder and his team tracked the money that flowed out of Russia—through the Baltics and Cyprus and on to Western Europe and the Americas—they discovered that Vladimir Putin himself was one of the beneficiaries of the crime.
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Red Notice Part II —- The Empire Struck Out
- By R. Alembik on 04-16-22
By: Bill Browder
What listeners say about The Spy Who Couldn't Spell
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- R. Koehler
- 01-24-17
Terrific Book
What made the experience of listening to The Spy Who Couldn't Spell the most enjoyable?
Extremely well developed and suspenseful (even knowing the ending!).
What’s the most interesting tidbit you’ve picked up from this book?
This story, along with the traitorous actions of Bradley Manning and Julian Assange, demonstrates the serious damage that can be done to U.S. intelligence by one determined individual with a flash drive. On the flip side, it also shows the intelligence community's inability to safeguard it.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Michelle
- 12-05-16
Thrilling & True
Would you listen to The Spy Who Couldn't Spell again? Why?
yes - to soak in any details that I missed the 1st time.
What was the most compelling aspect of this narrative?
Steve Carr's out of the box thinking. Why the spy did not plead guilty & why he was sentenced with the death penalty. The exhaustive search for threats to national security.
Which character – as performed by Robert Fass – was your favorite?
F.B.I. Special Agent Steve Carr
Was this a book you wanted to listen to all in one sitting?
yes
Any additional comments?
It has thrilling & tense parts & lots of facts to help the reader understand the true threat to National Security.
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2 people found this helpful
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- thaichicken
- 04-22-24
fascinating story of a lesser-known espionage episode
this story is a fascinating weave of the spy with the hunter, the codemaker with the codebreaker. i enjoyed learning about the NRO and other lesser-known aspects of US intelligence. the writing is excellent, and the narration is peerless. visual codes were well-described, and it struck me that while the spy himself was described as telling his story in a monotone, this retelling was anything but. still, it was calm and easy to listen to. A++
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- SinCityCigarMan
- 07-11-17
A Great Spy Caper
The Spy Who Couldn't Spell is an often lighthearted telling of a true story that is full of unexpected twists. It also serves as a good primer on cryptography, without delving in too deep and getting lost in the details of what is actually a rather intricate crime.
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- Steven V. Turner
- 09-20-22
A good spy story well told
I enjoyed this book. It’s well written and tells a good spy story. It made me wonder… for every “in house spy” they catch, how many get away scot-free?
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- Eugene
- 11-09-16
Great Great Great Story Telling, What a Great Book!
Soon as I read an excerpt online about this book I marked my calendar with the book's release data. On the date it came out, November 1st, I ordered it on Audible and finished listening to it in 8 days. It's an amazing book. The story telling is suspenseful and I could not get enough of it. Get this book, you won't regret it! A+++++++
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8 people found this helpful
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- Chris
- 11-08-16
Not a riveting thriller, but a fascinating story
Definitely an interesting story I was surprised to have never heard about. The tale of an awkward American spy who became the first ever to face the death penalty for espionage
Well worth the listen
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6 people found this helpful
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- Allison
- 12-13-16
Well written and engaging
This book is based on an interesting topic in our history and is presented in such a way that I had a hard time turning it off. It is well-written. Robert Fass was an excellent narrator for this story.
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2 people found this helpful
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- William D.
- 06-21-22
Disappointed
The last 1 hour and 30 minutes wouldn’t play. Did not get to hear full book.
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- Jonathan Webber
- 12-26-16
Excellent Story and Narration
I listened to this in my car for two weeks, the story was great and I never lost interest. Narration was good and kept it appealing.
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2 people found this helpful