4/4: 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
🗓️ 20 February 2024
⏱️ 6 minutes
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Summary
4/4: 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.
1941 Rostov on Don
Transcript
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| 0:26.3 | investment and you should not expect to be protected if something goes wrong This is a CBSI in the world. I'm John Bachelor with the Wall Street Journal Correspondent Brett Forrest. |
| 0:39.0 | His new book is Lost Son, an American family trapped inside the FBI's secret wars. |
| 0:45.0 | It is now the summer of 2018. |
| 0:47.6 | Brett is in Rustof-And-Dahn. |
| 0:50.0 | He's meeting with a woman named Nasia Anastasia, Mikhailovskaia, and they're talking about |
| 0:58.9 | where did Billy go? |
| 1:00.9 | Brett, at this point, you've been told by more than one Russian, well-meaning Russian, he's |
| 1:07.0 | disappeared into Russia or you'll find him someday or he'll come home. |
| 1:10.7 | There's even the possibility that he's gone to the Far East to meet up with |
| 1:14.1 | one of his contacts from those years of surfing for the FBI. But Mikhailovskaia has another fate for, or at least because she's |
| 1:22.2 | a good mystery writer, She has another idea of |
| 1:25.0 | fate. What is it? Nastia and I were sitting on a veranda that sort of jutted out |
| 1:30.8 | into the Don River one summer afternoon that year. |
| 1:35.6 | We were at a hotel that was sort of Cossack style hotel. |
... |
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