If you’re a person of a certain age — which increasingly seems to mean “older than dirt” — you may remember a Broadway show and movie called “Bye Bye Birdie,” a thoroughly fictionalized account of the fuss around Elvis Presley being drafted into the Army. (He went, by the way. Served his whole hitch. My ROTC sergeant in high school was his platoon sergeant. Spoke very highly of him.)
In the show, Elvis’s fictional counterpart is a rock-and-roll star named Conrad Birdie. The story centers around the search for a perfect teenage girl to appear on the Ed Sullivan Show to receive “one last kiss” from Birdie when he premieres his song “One Last Kiss.” It’s a fun movie, full of catchy and singable songs. Dick Van Dyke played Birdie’s manager, Ann-Margret is the 16-year-old girl (even though she was 21 during filming), Paul Lynde played her father (unlikely though that may have been) and Ed Sullivan played Ed Sullivan.
Paul Lynde’s big song was “What’s the Matter with Kids Today,” and this whole extended digression was to set up this clip:
When I heard this story, that’s the first thing that came to mind.
Nathan Laatsch, a 28-year-old IT specialist employed by the Defense Intelligence Agency since 2019, was arrested after the FBI received a tip in March 2025 that someone was willing to provide classified information to a friendly foreign government.
Laatsch was just arrested because he was stealing — the technical term is "exfiltrated,” which means "stole" — classified information that he was then trying to give to a friendly (unnamed) foreign government. He was apparently trying to buy his way into citizenship in the friendly foreign country.
This material was apparently highly classified, because that’s what the DIA does. They said he held a Top Secret clearance, and while there’s no such thing as a higher classification than Top Secret, there are “compartments” that are more closely controlled than what is merely Top Secret. (For an extended look at the details of that, you can look at my old articles on Edward Snowden and Hillary Clinton.)
It’s pretty obvious that Laatsch was trying to market material in one of those special “compartments.” And that gets us to the question of what’s the matter with kids these days.
He was trying to flog this stuff to a friendly foreign government, because
[he] didn’t “agree or align with the values” of the Trump administration, and would be willing to share classified information that he could access, including “completed intelligence products, some unprocessed intelligence, and other assorted classified documentation.”
Laatsch was arrested after the FBI was tipped off. Now, first and foremost, if you’re going to turn spy, you don’t go to a friendly foreign government. Snowden was smarter than that, at least. He turned to China, possibly on his way to a pre-arranged apartment in Moscow, or possibly the Chinese sold him to Moscow. Snowden didn’t try to go to, say, Australia. A friendly foreign power would very likely see it as more in their interest to get a marker for a future time and call the FBI.
Which is, apparently, what they did. So an FBI agent, no doubt with a convincing foreign accent, got in touch and arranged for him to leave his information at a northern Virginia park — a classic “dead drop” that I’m sure impressed Laatsch with what a super-spy he was being. And next thing he knows, he’s in cuffs.
The thing that is the most depressing about the whole affair is just how utterly, implausibly, ignorantly, and naively stupid Laatsch was. He picks out a “friendly” foreign government, call it F–, because the government of F–, while friendly, is not above pushing the nose of the USA, and because the capital of F—, P—, is reputed to be a nice place if you have the money. He could have chosen Russia or China or even Ukraine and gotten hooked up with some Bond-girl honeypot. Although I suspect Ukraine might feel like it needed to be more circumspect.
Has this kid never watched any James Bond movies?
Seriously, though, what was wrong with this kid? At least Kim Philby and the Cambridge Five had been recruited as campus Communists and thought they were serving the interests of the inevitable Revolution of International Communism. This kid’s motivation apparently was that Trump is icky.
And how many more, possibly smarter, kids also think Trump is icky, and intend to do something about it?
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