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Lost Son
- An American Family Trapped Inside the FBI's Secret Wars
- Narrated by: Brett Forrest
- Length: 12 hrs and 56 mins
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Publisher's summary
A young American lost in Russia. An FBI-cover up. A mystery leading from Washington to the heart of the Kremlin's war in Ukraine.
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.
PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.
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Critic reviews
"Brett Forest's emotional and globe-trotting investigation into the life and times of a young FBI freelancer immediately reminds me of Jon Krakauer's Into the Wild. Lost Son is as much about the youthful dream to make a difference in the world as it is about the utter failure of the US government to protect one of its own contractors and the heartbreaking search by parents for their son. What I loved most is feeling like I was riding shotgun with Brett as he searches for answers."—Bradley Hope, New York Times bestselling co-author of Billion Dollar Whale and author of The Rebel and the Kingdom
“With the stunning tale of Billy Reilly, Brett Forrest has achieved something remarkable. He has brought together both the post-9/11 war on terror and the war in Ukraine and shown their fateful impact on a young American who wanted something more from life than suburban Detroit could deliver. Reading this amazing story, I kept thinking that Billy was like a character in a 19th Century Russian novel, caught up in the uncontrollable tide of history."—James Risen, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Last Honest Man
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By 1990, the Berlin Wall had fallen and the East German state security service folded. During 40 years, they had amassed more than a billion pages in manila files detailing the lives of their citizens. Overnight, almost 100,000 Stasi employees, many of them experienced officers with access to highly personal information, found themselves unemployed. This is the story of what they did next.
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Very Enlightening
- By Katy on 07-09-22
By: Ralph Hope
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Enemies Within
- Inside the NYPD's Secret Spying Unit and bin Laden's Final Plot Against America
- By: Matt Apuzzo, Adam Goldman
- Narrated by: Keith Szarabajka
- Length: 8 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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In Enemies Within Matt Apuzzo and Adam Goldman lay bare the complex and often contradictory state of counterterrorism and intelligence in America through the pursuit of Najibullah Zazi, a terrorist bomber who trained under one of bin Laden's most trusted deputies. Zazi and his coconspirators represented America's greatest fear: a terrorist cell operating inside America. Apuzzo and Goldman lift the veil of secrecy to reveal the strengths and weaknesses of our counterterrorism measures.
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Very in depth. I highly detailed account.
- By Patrick on 10-08-20
By: Matt Apuzzo, and others
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Spies in the Family
- An American Spymaster, His Russian Crown Jewel, and the Friendship That Helped End the Cold War
- By: Eva Dillon
- Narrated by: Gabra Zackman
- Length: 8 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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In the summer of 1975, 17-year-old Eva Dillon's family was living in New Delhi when her father was exposed as a CIA spy. Eva had long believed that her father was a US State Department employee. She had no idea that he was handling the CIA's highest ranking double agent - Dmitri Fedorovich Polyakov, a Soviet general whose code name was TOPHAT. Dillon's father and Polyakov had a close friendship that went back years, to their first meeting in Burma in the mid-1960s.
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LOVED it!
- By SaraofDI on 11-06-17
By: Eva Dillon
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From Warsaw with Love
- Polish Spies, the CIA, and the Forging of an Unlikely Alliance
- By: John Pomfret
- Narrated by: Donald Corren
- Length: 8 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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From the award-winning and acclaimed author of The Beautiful Country and the Middle Kingdom, From Warsaw with Love tells the epic story of how Polish intelligence officers forged an alliance with the CIA in the twilight of the Cold War. In 1990, soon after the Polish people voted in their first democratic election since the 1930s, the young Polish government sent a veteran spy, who’d battled the West for decades, to rescue six American officers trapped in Baghdad.
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Fascinating and well researched
- By wacek szymkowiak on 07-23-24
By: John Pomfret
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The Targeter
- My Life in the CIA, Hunting Terrorists and Challenging the White House
- By: Nada Bakos, Davin Coburn
- Narrated by: Christine Lakin
- Length: 10 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1999, 30-year-old Nada Bakos moved from her lifelong home in Montana to Washington, DC, to join the CIA. Quickly realizing her affinity for intelligence work, Nada was determined to rise through the ranks of the agency first as an analyst and then as a Targeting Officer, eventually finding herself on the frontline of America's War against Islamic extremists. In this role, Nada was charged with determining if Iraq had a relationship with 9/11 and Al-Qaida, and finding the mastermind behind this terrorist activity: Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
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Terrible book. Feminazi Propaganda
- By Dan Wells on 08-24-19
By: Nada Bakos, and others
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The Cell
- Inside the 9/11 Plot, and Why the FBI and CIA Failed to Stop It
- By: John Miller, Michael Stone, Chris Mitchell
- Narrated by: John Miller
- Length: 4 hrs and 43 mins
- Abridged
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The Cell provides the first complete treatment to piece together what led to the events of 9/11, ultimately delivering the disturbing answer to the question: why, with all the information the intelligence community had, was no one able to stop the September 11 attacks? It also includes a first-person account of John Miller's face-to-face meeting with Osama bin Laden.
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What led up to 9/11?
- By Richard on 12-31-03
By: John Miller, and others
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Shadow State
- Murder, Mayhem, and Russia's Remaking of the West
- By: Luke Harding
- Narrated by: Nicholas Guy Smith
- Length: 12 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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Moscow’s support for Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election has grown into the biggest political scandal of modern times. Its American players are well-known. In Shadow State, award-winning journalist and best-selling author Luke Harding reveals the Russians behind the story: the spies, hackers, and internet trolls. Harding charts how the Kremlin has updated Communist-era methods of influence and propaganda for the age of Facebook and Twitter, and considers the compelling question of our age: what exactly does Vladimir Putin have on President Trump?
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The reader is mispronouncing words!
- By Jonathan on 07-20-20
By: Luke Harding
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Betrayal in Berlin
- The True Story of the Cold War's Most Audacious Espionage Operation
- By: Steve Vogel
- Narrated by: Joel Richards
- Length: 17 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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Its code name was “Operation Gold”, a wildly audacious CIA plan to construct a clandestine tunnel into East Berlin to tap into critical KGB and Soviet military telecommunication lines. The tunnel, crossing the border between the American and Soviet sectors, would have to be 1,500 feet (the length of the Empire State Building) with state-of-the-art equipment, built and operated literally under the feet of their Cold War adversaries.
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Fascinating Book
- By Toni Bowes on 01-11-20
By: Steve Vogel
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The Compatriots
- The Brutal and Chaotic History of Russia's Exiles, Émigrés, and Agents Abroad
- By: Andrei Soldatov, Irina Borogan
- Narrated by: Nick Sullivan
- Length: 10 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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The history of Russian espionage is soaked in blood, from a spontaneous pistol shot that killed a secret policeman in Romania in 1924 to the attempt to poison an exiled KGB colonel in Salisbury, England, in 2017. Russian émigrés have found themselves continually at the center of the mayhem. Russians began leaving the country in big numbers in the late 19th century, fleeing pogroms, tsarist secret police persecution, and the Revolution, then Stalin and the KGB - and creating the third-largest diaspora in the world.
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Great book. Extremely detailed history of the USSR
- By M. Gordon on 03-03-20
By: Andrei Soldatov, and others
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The Moscow Rules
- The Secret CIA Tactics That Helped America Win the Cold War
- By: Jonna Mendez, Antonio J. J. Mendez
- Narrated by: Wilson Bethel
- Length: 7 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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Antonio Mendez and his future wife, Jonna, were CIA operatives working to spy on Moscow in the late 1970s, at one of the most dangerous moments in the Cold War. Soviets kept files on all foreigners, studied their patterns, tapped their phones, and even planted listening devices within the US embassy. In short, intelligence work was effectively impossible. The Soviet threat loomed larger than ever. The Moscow Rules tells the story of the intelligence breakthroughs that turned the odds in America's favor.
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Interesting, clean, pro-CIA history
- By Alexander M Leasenby on 02-27-20
By: Jonna Mendez, and others
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Missing Man
- The American Spy Who Vanished in Iran
- By: Barry Meier
- Narrated by: Ray Porter
- Length: 8 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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In late 2013, Americans were shocked to learn that a former FBI agent turned private investigator who disappeared in Iran in 2007 was there on a mission for the CIA. The missing man, Robert Levinson, appeared in pictures dressed like a Guantánamo prisoner and pleaded in a video for help from the United States.
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Important story
- By Richard F. Callahan on 08-03-16
By: Barry Meier
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The Fall of the FBI
- How a Once Great Agency Became a Threat to Democracy
- By: Thomas J. Baker
- Narrated by: David Marantz
- Length: 11 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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Americans have lost faith in the Federal Bureau of Investigation, an institution they once regarded as the world’s greatest law-enforcement agency. Thomas Baker spent many years with the FBI and is deeply troubled by this loss of faith. Specific lapses have come to light and each is thoroughly discussed in this book: Why did they happen? What changed? The answer begins days after the 9/11 attacks when the FBI underwent a significant change in culture.
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We have to stop them
- By E B. on 07-01-23
By: Thomas J. Baker
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From Russia with Blood
- The Kremlin's Ruthless Assassination Program and Vladimir Putin's Secret War on the West
- By: Heidi Blake
- Narrated by: Marisa Calin
- Length: 10 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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The untold story of how Russia refined the art and science of targeted assassination abroad—while Western spies watched in horror as their governments failed to guard against the threat. Unflinchingly documenting the growing web of death on British and American soil, Heidi Blake bravely exposes the Kremlin's assassination campaign as part of Putin's ruthless pursuit of global dominance—and reveals why Western governments have failed to stop the bloodshed.
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Putin & Polonium; Oligarchs & FSB Assassins; Oh My
- By Michael J Canning on 01-09-20
By: Heidi Blake
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Do Not Disturb
- The Story of a Political Murder and an African Regime Gone Bad
- By: Michela Wrong
- Narrated by: Michela Wrong
- Length: 18 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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We think we know the story of Africa’s Great Lakes region. Following the Rwandan genocide, an idealistic group of young rebels overthrew the brutal regime in Kigali, ushering in an era of peace and stability that made Rwanda the donor darling of the West, winning comparisons with Switzerland and Singapore. But the truth was considerably more sinister.
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What is true and what isn't?
- By Buretto on 11-30-21
By: Michela Wrong
What listeners say about Lost Son
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Marian S
- 12-28-23
FBI secrets shielded family from knowing their son had been killed.
Good details and description of historical background of Billy’s home town that explained his interest and how a person could become radicalized leading to actively visiting Russia. His parents did not understand his being drawn to the FBI or how the FBI could fail their son. Billy was naive to think he would not stand out in Russia or that he would be able to obtain information from operatives there.
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- Nancy N.
- 06-01-23
Moving story of
Part spy thriller, mystery, and coming of age, the core of this story is a deeply human and personal examination of what happens when the elephants tussle. Few instances of journalism manage to change the lives of their subjects … this accomplished that.
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- Jin Wang
- 05-27-23
An exhilarating tale
Brett Forrest’s narration keeps you on the edge of your seat during this thrilling recounting of Billy’s life.
It’s difficult to categorize this book—it’s equal parts espionage, thriller, geopolitics, and at times a meaningful critique of the FBI’s intelligence gathering methods. Most importantly, this book is a story of a man’s search for meaning in life.
Be ready for some twists and turns and to have your expectations subverted!
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- AnnieMac
- 06-22-23
Cancel all your plans, read this book.
This book restored my faith in journalism. This is why a free and fair press is so important in our world.
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