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. By Yudhijit Bhattacharjee.

These days the “honeypot” is a popular trope in espionage thrillers, with seemingly every high-level informant recruited via seduction by a ravishing female spy. But long before James Bond ever jumped across the roof of a moving train in books or film, the globe-trotting spy Betty Pack was wooing suitors for classified information on both sides of the Atlantic. Few people have elevated the habit of pillow talk to an art form quite like the crafty American-born intelligence officer, who “used the bedroom like Bond used a beretta,” Time magazine noted in 1963.

An Iranian scientist who provided the US with information about the country's nuclear programme has been hanged for treason, the government has confirmed. Shahram Amiri was executed for giving "vital information to the enemy", a judiciary spokesman said. Amiri disappeared in Saudi Arabia in 2009 and resurfaced a year later in the US, where he claimed to have been abducted and interrogated by the CIA. He subsequently returned to Iran and was given a long prison sentence.

When you start packing for a reporting trip to Russia, you get a lot of advice. Take a clean phone, advised my journalist friends in Moscow. Take a clean laptop. That means one that has been wiped and re-imaged and from which I've never logged on with my usual user accounts and passwords. The reason? Russian intelligence will be monitoring you from the moment you land, they said. "Really?" I replied. "You think they'll be that interested in a random American reporter flying in?"

Recently, we’ve been overwhelmed with news of horrors, attacks, monsters who murder the innocent in the name of a faith they don’t truly know. I’m publishing this article today to talk about other monsters, and I can guarantee these can be much worse than the ones we are now familiar with. They are the ones you don’t see coming, those you cannot conceive to be real.

A Chinese man who ran an aerospace firm with offices in British Columbia has been sentenced to nearly four years in jail for stealing confidential information on a U.S. military transport aircraft and the F-35 stealth fighter. Su Bin had pled guilty in federal court in Los Angeles to helping two Chinese military hackers. Among the targets of the hacking efforts was information on the U.S. F-22 and F-35 stealth fighters as well as Boeing’s C-17 transport aircraft, which is also used by the Canadian air force.

A Chinese national was sentenced Wednesday to nearly four years in prison for plotting with Chinese military officers to hack computers belonging to U.S. defense contractors such as Boeing Co. and obtain trade secrets involving designs of American military aircraft. In addition to the prison term, U.S. District Judge Christina A. Snyder ordered Su Bin, a 51-year-old man who is also known as Stephen Subin and Stephen Su, to pay a $10,000 fine.

On a cold February night in 1986, Berlin’s Glienicke Bridge became the scene of the cold war’s last ever prisoner exchange – a dramatic hand-over involving a Soviet dissident and Karel Koecher, the only foreign agent ever known to have infiltrated the CIA. Koecher was a Czech citizen who had been living undercover in the US for 21 years. Alternately codenamed Rino, Turian or Pedro, he had moved to America in 1965 to establish himself as a mole within the CIA. Koecher’s KGB case officer, Colonel Alexander Sokolov, would later call him a super-spy.

For months, a small team of U.S. Navy investigators and federal prosecutors secretly devised options for a high-stakes international manhunt. Could the target be snatched from his home base in Asia and rendered to the United States? Or held captive aboard an American warship?Making the challenge even tougher was the fact that the man was a master of espionage. His moles had burrowed deep into the Navy hierarchy to leak him a stream of military secrets, thwarting previous efforts to bring him to justice.

Edward Snowden has responded to reports the CIA inspector general’s office “mistakenly” destroyed its only copy of a comprehensive Senate 'torture report' with a stinging rebuttal: “When the CIA destroys something, it's never a mistake.” An intelligence agency was quoted by Yahoo News as saying CIA inspector general officials deleted an uploaded computer file containing the report, before "inadvertently" destroying a disk with the document on it.

im Foley turned 20 on 27 June 2010. To celebrate, his parents took him and his younger brother Alex out for lunch at an Indian restaurant not far from their home in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Both brothers were born in Canada, but for the past decade the family had lived in the US. The boys’ father, Donald Heathfield, had studied in Paris and at Harvard, and now had a senior role at a consultancy firm...

Two months after Osama bin Laden was killed, the CIA’s top operative in Pakistan was pulled out of the country in an abrupt move vaguely attributed to health concerns and his strained relationship with Islamabad. In reality, the CIA station chief was so violently ill that he was often doubled over in pain, current and former U.S. officials said. Trips out of the country for treatment proved futile. And the cause of his ailment was so mysterious, the officials said, that both...

The director of national intelligence on Monday blamed NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden for advancing the development of user-friendly, widely available strong encryption. “As a result of the Snowden revelations, the onset of commercial encryption has accelerated by seven years,” James Clapper said during a breakfast for journalists hosted by the Christian Science Monitor. The shortened timeline has had “a profound effect on our...

Bradley Birkenfeld is the most significant financial whistleblower of all time, so you might think he'd be cheering on the disclosures in the new Panama Papers leaks. But today, Birkenfeld is raising questions about the source of the information that is shaking political regimes around the world. Birkenfeld, an American citizen, was a banker working at UBS in Switzerland when he approached the U.S. government with information on massive...

A Taiwan-born Navy officer who became a naturalized U.S. citizen faces charges of espionage, attempted espionage and prostitution in a highly secretive case in which he is accused of providing classified information to China, U.S. officials said. The Navy examined the charges against Lt. Cmdr. Edward C. Lin in a preliminary military justice hearing on Friday. The service did not release his identity, but a U.S. official disclosed it Sunday under the condition of anonymity...

A former German intelligence employee has said he started spying for the US and Russia because he felt under-appreciated and not sufficiently challenged in his job. Triple agent Markus Reichel, 32, was on Thursday sentenced to eight years in prison for passing on more than 200 secret documents to the CIA, as well as trying to hand over three documents to Russian intelligence. Reichel had been employed in the administration department of Germany’s federal...

Klaus Fuchs, a German-born British scientist who helped developed the atomic bomb, is arrested in Great Britain for passing top-secret information about the bomb to the Soviet Union. The arrest of Fuchs led authorities to several other individuals involved in a spy ring, culminating with the arrest of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and their subsequent execution.

Two members of the Cambridge spy ring were so drunken and unstable that US officials were stunned they had been employed by the Foreign Office, newly-released papers show.

As the Cold War drew to a close with the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, those at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, finally hoped to resolve many long-standing puzzles. The most important of which was how officers in the field under diplomatic and deep cover stationed across the globe were readily identified by the KGB. As a consequence, covert operations had to be aborted as local agents were pinpointed...

When Ashraf Marwan fell to his death from the balcony of a London flat, he took his secrets with him. Was he working for Egypt or Israel? And did the revelation of his identity lead to his murder?