I finished this book last night. In short: Yes, it's worth a read if you're into stories about real-life espionage.
However, this is nowhere near the page-turner that The Traitor and the Spy is. The first 35% of the book or so is compelling. American intelligence knows they have a security leak and they are rushing to find it. This investigation is the best part of the book.
They soon (and fairly easily) set their sights on Brian Regan of NRO (National Reconnaissance Office, not the bastard RINOs at that other place) as the prime suspect, although because the FBI (or NSA, or CIA) had been burned recently by concentrating on the wrong man regarding another case, they are a bit slow to officially settle on this guy. Not a bad thing, really, but that's the history of it.
The middle third (about) is about trying to get hard evidence on Regan – enough to convict him in a court of law. In this part of the book as well we get a violin-playing biography on Regan. He was dyslexic. He didn't fit in as a kid. He got picked on. His family life was difficult. Etc. And no doubt this is all true. The amazing thing, despite all this, he readily made a success of his life after joining the military (and then later joining the intelligence service).
He was really an accomplished fellow and was able to literally return home and turn the heads (and rub it in a little) of all those who had ever picked on him or thought him stupid. Most of the guys who picked on him and called him a loser were still stuck in small-town life, having accomplished basically nothing of import in their own lives.
This really should have been a feel-good story. But there was something "off" about Regan. And I think the book fails in large part to give necessary insight into a lot of this stuff. The author is a little namby-pamby about it all, if you ask me. The bottom line is that he seemed to get bored in his job. Most of his previous professional life was spent moving from one place to another...often including such exotic places as Hawaii. But here we was doing a nine-year span at NRO (I couldn't work that long with Goldberg either) dong an 80 mile commute (each way) each day in a job that apparently no longer was offering him much of a challenge.
And, of course, he got into debt. So, of course, he simply asked his bosses for a raise or started hunting around for a better-paying job. Well, no. What he did was decide to turn traitor and try to make money selling secrets.
Again, I think the story itself is interesting although I don't think this author wrung out of it all he could. But clearly what we have in Regan is not Aldrich Ames or any other traitor who came from the ranks of active spies. Regan was a functionary, a bureaucrat, for all intents and purposes. Oh, yes, the things he did were usually highly important. But he was in no way involved on the front lines of dead-drops, dangling, and managing double-agents.
So what he did was what any ambitious traitor would do: He got on the intelligence services' version of the internet (Intelink) and read case file after case file of previous traitors, trying to learn what to do and how not to get caught. That the Intelink was relatively open and could just vomit out all of the nation's top secrets to some guy at a computer terminal was eye-opening enough. (I sure hope the hell they fixed this.)
However, the new impetus (particularly after 9/11) was for the intel services to share information. But it seems they went a little overboard. Oh...and hopefully intel services now keep better watch on who is making copies and how many. Jesus H. Christ, this was another leak that could have easily been plugged. Every night he walked out of his job at NRO with copied documents in the bottom of his duffel bag without being searched. As the author noted, he would probably have had a harder time stealing books out of the public library. The perils of Intelink could have been a book unto itself.
Regan was an odd bird. He was careful and meticulous in some things but then would do really stupid things. One of the agents on his case called him "the 80% man" because he'd be really clever and careful about some aspect of his espionage and then find a way to fuck it up in the end. For instance, he had been storing photocopies of all his stolen intelligence in his house for a while. As investigators conjectured (correctly, it turns out), the volume of material was such that his could only be a temporary hiding place. So Brian Regan rents a nearby storage facility. He, of course, does so under an assumed named. But the clever switch of name he chose was "Patrick Regan," Not good.
The third half of the book is basically about the agents trying to find all the caches of documents that Regan buried here and there (in public parks). He had initially failed in his bid to sell anything to Libya or anyone else. He was just literally too much of an intelligence hick and novice not to turn off any prospective buyer. So his Plan B, of sorts, was to bury this stuff and then (after giving credible samples to a prospective buyer) give them the coordinates of the buried treasure. Something like that.
In this last third of the book, Regan was in prison (for life) and part of the deal he made with the Feds (in order to protect his wife from persecution, and to allow her to receive at least a portion of a pension), was to cooperate in returning the stolen documents. The problem was, Regan forgot enough aspects of his old code that he couldn't read the encrypted code that gave the GPS coordinates of where he buried some of the stuff. So they brought in a crack code-cracker and he helped Regan remember how he did it. That section of the book was very interesting. Regan's coding methods were explained. And although the implementation was fairly simple, by the time you encrypted the info behind two coding algorithms, the code was fairly secure.
Unlike The Traitor and the Spy wherein I came to despise the main character more and more, in this one, one is left with more of a sympathetic view of this idiot. The Feds were basically begging this guy to take a nine-year (or less) sentence as a plea bargain. But Regan held out. It seemed he thought he was smarter than the entire intelligence community of the United States and could win. So what does he win? The prosecutors go after the death penalty for him (which was later denied to them by a judge). But he does get life with no possibility of parole.
Regan himself, a few years later, finally admits that he was out of touch with reality for a time. Yeah, that might explain some of it. But you have to read the book to get a feel for this guy. And I'm still not sure what to make of him. I don't think he was the kind of evil man such as Aldrich Ames. But on the other hand, despite many good traits, he regularly cheated on his wife. Obviously he cheated on his country as well. It's just this mix of people. You wonder even if he could have split personalities or something.
