
The FBI Lost Our Son - alphabettsy
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-fbi-lost-our-son-11570806358?mod=rsswn
======
fortran77
I believe the FBI on this one. He seemed more like a naive terrorist
sympathizer than a source the FBI could rely on, especially after pursing a
woman romantically who wanted to go to Syria (and after the FBI told him to
leave her alone.)

It's likely true they never told him to go to Russia, content on having him
simply report what he sees in online chatrooms from the comfort of his parents
homes. He was moderately useful but not someone they could really trust for
anything more than basic "internet chatroom" work.

~~~
netsharc
The FBI isn't that holy, they goaded idiots into becoming "terrorists" so they
can say "Good job us! We need more budget!", just look up "FBI entrapment".

And what about the phone they found? Presumably the journalist verified that
it and the messages on it exist?

~~~
fortran77
I'm not saying they're holy. They took advantage of a misfit kid, to have him
do some entry-level intelligence monitoring chatrooms. I don't think they held
him in high esteem either, likely knowing his allegiances to anyone in
particular weren't very strong, other than some misguided sense to help the
"underdog."

But there's no reason to think the FBI had anything to do with his Russia
adventures. And I'm not sure how much responsibility the US has with bailing
out Americans who want to pursue women who want to fight in Syria, etc.

The "FBI" didn't lose their son. Their son got lost on his own.

> Moments later, Agent Waters phoned. He asked what happened. “You murdered
> our son,” Mrs. Reilly yelled. “Don’t ever talk to us again.”

It is unfortunately very easy to get yourself in serious trouble, if not
murdered in Russia. Their anger is _very_ misplaced, though I'm certainly
sorry for their loss.

I only go with a skilled guide and personal driver, and I'm only going for
boring business reasons! I've had a business associate who was kidnapped just
for taking the wrong cab. (Basically, they get driven somewhere while the cab
driver negotiated a fee for their return with their company.)

~~~
Assadi
When was the last time you were in Russia? I've lived here for a few years
now, almost intentionally trying to get into trouble, and I've yet to ever
have any real problems. The biggest issue I've run into is food poisoning.

~~~
romwell
I'm from Ukraine, and I traveled there last year.

It's very safe in most places, and my hometown of Odessa is especially
friendly for tourists these days (to the extent that I think that it's
becoming _too much_ tourist-oriented). I've helped a Korean tourist find a way
to the sea (she asked me in English) in the middle of November, long time
before the tourist season begins.

Most cities in Ukraine are great tourist destinations.

Except for anywhere in Donbas, which in 2015 was a literal effin' warzone, and
where people still die during the "ceasefire".

All reasonable people that could stay the fuck away from Donbas did so. That's
about _two million people_ , just to give you the scale of things. Still, the
area _attracted_ some people. The kind of people that downed that Malaysian
airliner.

I doubt that guy made it anywhere close to combat. There's still law in
Russia, but the moment he crossed into Donbas, he was a goner.

A remarkable investigative job by the parents and the journal, though.

~~~
mindentropy
> All reasonable people that could stay the fuck away from Donbas did so.
> That's about two million people, just to give you the scale of things.

Did all the people in different villages just leave leaving their farms etc? I
was seeing travel vlogs of "Bald and Bankrupt" and I see elderly people in
former Soviet Union countries living alone in extremely remote places. Most of
the places are sparsely populated with supplies coming once in a week or so.

In these conflicts do they harm the village population or is the fight limited
between the armies in the region? What would they gain by harming elderly
people?

~~~
romwell
The battles happened where they happened; nobody was specifically targeting
small towns, but nobody took much care to avoid them either. There aren't any
really remote places in Donbass, it's not that big of a territory - and most
people live in the cities or large towns.

A lot of elderly people did stay. Ukraine does pay the pensions (which they
absolutely rely on), but one needs to travel outside of DNR-controlled areas
to get them. DNR also pays pensions, and some people, apparently, get two
pensions; both DNR and the Ukrainian government are not happy with that, and
so that won't last long. Russia is being more active now with giving the
people there Russian citizenship, but one would need to go to Russia to get
the pension.

All in all, it's a complicated mess, and the weakest get the worst of it;
those people who live alone in villages are screwed.

Nobody gains anything by harming the elderly, but they are a liability that
nobody really wants to take on. For Ukraine, it's dumping money into territory
occupied by the enemy. It's a burden for Russia, which their citizens aren't
too happy about either. DNR has little need for the elderly, but has to pay up
if they are playing the "we are an independent state" game.

There is a mounting pressure to resolve this situation, but the whole point of
this mess was to make it complicated (Russia didn't play a Crimea scenario in
Donbass so that it remains a long-term unresolved slow conflict, like
Transnistria in Moldova and Abkhazia in Geogia).

------
catalogia
This is a very sad story, made no less sad by the fact that Billy is far from
the only foreigner to die in that region. Hopefully this story will help
discourage other naive young men from involving themselves in foreign wars.

------
roywiggins
> Billy, an American of European heritage, who had knowledge of Arabic and
> could approach potential terror targets online, had great potential value to
> the FBI.

I get that the FBI was to struggling to recruit and train Arabic speakers for
its programs post-9/11, but recruiting random Americans with self-taught
Arabic to cosplay as cyber FBI agents does not speak well of them.

This is of a piece with stuff the FBI and DEA has done routinely in the "war
on drugs," so I don't doubt it at all, but it's still a nasty way to work.
It's not like they were turning an Al Queda recruit into a mole, this guy was
running a whole constellation of fake accounts etc, basically doing stuff the
FBI could and should be doing itself and not outsourcing to "informants".

~~~
barry-cotter
You wouldn’t be surprised at all if Russian intelligence sent an asset to
their deaths or killed them themselves. Why would you expect anything better
from the CIA or the organization that was responsible for burning 76 US
civilians to death at Waco, or killing a mother holding her child at Ruby
Ridge?

There are no good people working in intelligence, only bad people on your side
and bad peoples working on the other side.

~~~
roywiggins
Who said I was surprised?

The CIA by my reading actually often does better by its collaborators than the
FBI and has a certain sense of honor-among-spies that the FBI doesn't when it
comes to this sort of stuff. FBI and CIA have both done awful things but they
are different organizations with different MOs.

------
neonate
[http://archive.is/YWTLl](http://archive.is/YWTLl)

~~~
wffurr
Broken link. WSJ doesn't work in outline.com anymore. This article is
impossible to read.

~~~
zulln
Are you using 1.1.1.1 as DNS? That could explain it.

~~~
indigodaddy
Why doesn't Cloudflare work for archive.is?

~~~
dnet
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19828317](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19828317)

~~~
indigodaddy
ah thanks!

Hah, archive.is is something else. I went to
[http://88.208.54.247/YWTLl](http://88.208.54.247/YWTLl) and got the default
nginx page so needs host headers...

Then I do curl --header "Host: archive.is"
[http://88.208.54.247/YWTLl](http://88.208.54.247/YWTLl)

and it hangs... eh?? well guess what archive.is blocked my IP after that first
connection to the default nginx website...! can't even telnet 88.208.54.247 80
after that lol...

what a piece of work archive.is is....

------
colmvp
A podcast episode with the journalist of this story:
[https://gimletmedia.com/shows/the-
journal/gmh37n](https://gimletmedia.com/shows/the-journal/gmh37n)

------
newnewpdro
Decent journalism of a sad story.

What the FBI is doing exploiting these citizens having limited employment
opportunities without giving them any sort of actual long-term career path to
look forward to, while simultaneously exposing them to real risks and a taste
of legitimacy, strikes me as unethical, immoral, and unpatriotic. They're
arguably setting up conditions for this kind of outcome, whether they intend
to or not. I personally suspect it's an unintended consequence of their
exclusive focus on the mission.

I want to feel bad for the parents but they're substantially responsible for
raising such a naive fool of a son.

~~~
Nextgrid
I would think part of the FBI's involvement here could also be to keep an eye
on him. He came across as a very naive & influenceable person to me
(converting to a religion, putting himself at risk by trying to meet a woman
from a different country - which could've very well been a trap - woman who
later tried to go into a conflict zone, going to Ukraine for <reasons>,
etc)... I wouldn't be surprised if he one day ended up becoming one of the
terrorists he was supposedly tracking (was he truly tracking them, or was he -
maybe subconsciously - "into it" and the whole FBI thing happened to be a
convenient way for him to get closer to the terrorist groups?).

~~~
newnewpdro
Agreed.

I'd expect them to formally hire these people and have them working as teams
with proper opsec and infrastructure provided for them entirely separate from
their personal lives.

Instead they're left to work in isolation from home, more vulnerable to
recruitment, if anything just to be treated as part of something more.

There's so much wrong with the situation the FBI is cultivating here. They
basically treated this kid as a criminal turned informant as terms of his
freedom. That's the level of concern for his and his family's safety they
seemed to exercise from my read of the article.

VPNs were his only cyber protection? For all we know he was phished in a
targeted attack that uncovered his true identity and affiliations.

~~~
9nGQluzmnq3M
Such an un-Silicon Valley view. Clearly FBI is disrupting the entrenched spy
industry by using innovative gig economy tactics to source diverse spy-
partners from non-traditional backgrounds.

0.5 * /s

------
droithomme
Fascinating story. I'm really impressed with the dedication of the parents who
retraced all his steps, contacted people he had met, found long forgotten
photos, and eventually were able to find him in an unmarked grave in a foreign
country of which there were no official records whatsoever he ever entered,
and bring his remains home. The parents were incredible investigators.

As to the rest, it will always be speculation. From the article it does seem
he himself made decisions to go places.

------
IAmGraydon
Play stupid games, get stupid prizes. I feel for his parents. This guy lived
about 10 different secret lives, lied to everyone who cared about him, was an
extremist sympathizer, and repeatedly inserted himself into extremely
dangerous situations. I don’t think there was any other possible fate for him.

~~~
fortran77
I, too, feel for his parents but not for him.

------
droithomme
The usual advice of opening in Private Mode doesn't work anymore as a
workaround.

I found though one can search for the link in google, then click on it and it
will let you in.

~~~
JudasGoat
[https://github.com/iamadamdev](https://github.com/iamadamdev) works good in
Chrome. I haven't tried Firefox.

~~~
RandomBacon
Works on Firefox Mobile on Android with uBlock Origin and several other
privacy add-ons also installed.

------
Invictus0
I skimmed a bit, but is this article trying to imply that the FBI killed Billy
in Ukraine because they thought he was trying to defect?

~~~
catalogia
The implication I got is the men Billy found himself among men who didn't
respect him (saw him as a walking wallet) and murdered him after he was no
longer useful to them (they plausibly considered him a liability in combat
since he didn't fit the mold of a soldier.) However I don't know if there was
combat reported in the vicinity of Dibrivka during that particular time
period. It's possible he was killed in combat.

> _" Billy was nearly the opposite—5-foot-7, 160 pounds, his features rounded
> by a diet of snacks and fast food. His scruffy brown beard offset a receding
> hairline; rectangular metal-frame glasses gave him a bookish look."_

> _" Mr. Polynkov sized up his new recruit as a traveler, not a fighter. In
> his experience, soldiers of fortune didn’t travel with wheeled oversize
> suitcases. He tried to dissuade Billy from going to Rostov [...]"_

> _" Men at the camp forced Billy to pay their liquor tabs. “He was naive,”
> Mr. Victorov said. Billy’s credit cards registered more than $2,700 in
> fraudulent purchases and cash advances in Russia before he disappeared."_

~~~
nkrisc
I don't think he ever stood a chance with soldier of fortune types. The kind
of guys who go to fight for Russia backed separatists probably eat guys like
him for breakfast. From the description of his death it sounds like he might
have been murdered by one of them. Maybe he ran out of money or he ticked off
the wrong guy.

------
no_opinions
Imagine if _any_ sort of change is possible in terms of regulation
transparency, etc. You are tasked with writing a tailored / scoping a way to
manage human sources:

Could you describe in words how to make a friend, or courtship that applies to
every situation, or every person, and every situation?

Try to quantify how disruptive it is (or isn't) to send in a source, verse tap
lines, etc. How does it effect their life?

Does it involve a foreign target or a US one? Should they be dealt with
differently?

Can you write a regulation something flexible enough a wide array of
circumstances / need to acquire information can be satisfied, but minimize
intrusion upon people?

If someone had a better idea, what's wrong with that? But most people,
including informant handlers themselves - which are human beings also - can't
even figure out own personal relationships. I could only imagine how traumatic
their family, love and social life has been for them to get in that position.

------
linuxftw
This article reads like complete an utter BS. The FBI found him because his IP
was found on a hard drive in an al Qaeda hideout? Then later says he used
VPNs, etc to conceal his location.

This is someone's poor attempt at a Hollywood screenplay.

