3/4: Lost Son: An American Family Trapped Inside the FBI's Secret Wars by Brett Forrest (Author)
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
4.5 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 24 November 2023
⏱️ 16 minutes
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Summary
3/4: Lost Son: An American Family Trapped Inside the FBI's Secret Wars by Brett Forrest (Author)
https://www.amazon.com/Lost-Son-American-Family-Trapped/dp/0316591610/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=
When Billy Reilly vanished, his parents embarked on a desperate search for answers. Was their son’s disappearance connected to his mysterious work for the FBI, or was it a personal quest gone wrong? Only when Wall Street Journal reporter Brett Forrest embarks on his own investigation does a picture emerge: of the FBI's exploitation of US citizens through a secretive intelligence program, a young man's lust for adventure within the world's conflicts, and the costs of a rising clash between Moscow and Washington.
Sept. 11th roused Billy Reilly's curiosity for religions, war, and the world and its people beyond his small town near Detroit. Online, Billy taught himself Arabic and Russian. His passions led him into jihadi Internet forums, attracting the interest of the FBI.
An amateur drawn into professional intelligence, Billy became a Confidential Human Source, one of thousands of civilians who assist FBI agents with investigative work, often at great hazard and with little recourse. When Russia stirred rebellion in Ukraine, Billy set out to make his mark.
In Russia, Billy's communications dropped. His parents, frantic, asked the FBI for help but struggled to find answers. Grasping for clues, the Reilly family turned to Brett Forrest. Commencing a quest of his own, Forrest applied years' worth of research, along with decades of extensive experience in Russia, illuminating the inner workings of the national-security machine that enmeshed Billy and his family, picking up the lost son's trail.
A masterwork of reporting, composed like a thriller, blending political maneuvering and international espionage, Lost Son illustrates one man's coming of age amid new global dangers.
1917 Rostov
Transcript
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| 0:45.2 | inside the FBI secret wars. Terry and Bill Riley last year from their son, Billy Riley June 24th, 2015. |
| 0:57.9 | Brett Forrest travels there in December of 17 |
| 1:00.8 | to Oxford, Michigan, and has a conversation with the family that engages him. |
| 1:06.0 | Why? |
| 1:07.0 | And that is one of the compelling subplots of this book, Brett, because your own travels as a young man were equally adventurous and risky. |
| 1:18.2 | You travel to Africa and you travel to Russia. |
| 1:20.9 | You spent a lot of time in Russia. So what were you thinking about after you left |
| 1:25.8 | mom and dad and over the next year about Billy Riley and his adventure? |
| 1:38.0 | Well for me personally, John, it was always a sort of dual calculation here. One was, as a reporter at the Wall Street Journal with professional responsibilities of trying to unearth interesting stories and important stories to tell, but also filing regular stories and publishing regularly and meeting demands of my editors. |
| 1:57.0 | I'm always looking at, I was always looking at this story at least in the early stages as I was trying to figure out if this was something worth doing if it's something that the journal should do. |
| 2:08.0 | But on the other hand, well in addition, I had a great personal attachment or interest in it because Billy had gone missing in Russia. |
| 2:20.0 | I had first gone to Russia in 2002 looking for a sort of new adventure, a new chapter in my life. |
| 2:28.1 | And my travels there diverted my own path. |
| 2:32.4 | I ended up living in Moscow for five years and I ended up |
| 2:35.7 | living later in Kyib and I've been working at that time in those two countries |
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