The FBI Lost Our Son
wsj.com
wsj.com
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.
And what about the phone they found? Presumably the journalist verified that it and the messages on it exist?
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.)
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.
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?
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).
The FBI didn't give it their best shot to bring back their son. However, that is also not necessarily in the FBI's primary interests. The parent is mistaking the FBI's primary interests to be in line with their own.
-- Stratfor Glossary of Useful, Baffling and Strange Intelligence Terms
https://wikileaks.org/IMG/pdf/The_Stratfor_Glossary_of_Usefu...
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".
There are no good people working in intelligence, only bad people on your side and bad peoples working on the other side.
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.
Hah, archive.is is something else. I went to 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
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....
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.
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.
0.5 * /s
As to the rest, it will always be speculation. From the article it does seem he himself made decisions to go places.
I found though one can search for the link in google, then click on it and it will let you in.
Edit: Why the downvotes? Actually paying for things is a form of disruption!
3 different people suggested this story to me (originally from Detroit area, and have had family in Russia for a spell). I'm not subscribing to the whole site for this one story. If I could have paid, say, 15-30c to get it, I would have done so.
Assuming the FBI asked him not to go, why and how should they FBI put resources into finding out what he did and what happened to him? Whether the FBI sent him there or not, he decided on his own to stay beyond his plan, and then enter a war zone. Everyone who does some contracting for the FBI deserves world-wide babysitting service?
The take away is that they more or less manipulated this young man into doing things he had no business getting involved in.
There's even some implication that they intervened and shut down his other trip (to meet a woman he wanted to marry in ISIS territory! Bad Idea!). So FBI knew about the Russia trip but didn't shut it down maybe because he wasn't an employee they control? It's a free country, you dont need an exit visa. And asking him for contact info doesn't necessarily imply that they asked him to go. The article danced around that question, implying that FBI asked him to go (because they knew he went), but it's hard to imagine the FBI thinking the guy was a competent field agent (after shutting down the jihadi-bride trip). What would anyone have to gain from him bumbling around Donetsk/Russia? He was adept at penetrating jihadi chat groups, why would they risk that asset?
It seems that (from what little we have to go on) the agent handling him was far more concentrated on the middle east, but asked him to do a one-off on Donetsk, and he got interested in that region on his own.
Also it says that FSB invited him over. That was the big red flag for me: "Hey Mom! guess what?! FSB invited me to Russia!! w00t!" What happened to that paper? What did it say exactly?? Why would you tell your mom that FSB invited you to Russia?
Something's not quite right in this narrative, so many holes.
WSJ is doing FBI FUD pieces now?
The title says clearly that the FBI is responsible for losing him. But it sounds like he actually wandered off into the wilderness on his own.
-- edit --
Oops, I wrote 'hit piece' originally and changed it to FUD. But still, the implication is that the FBI is a menace and that they're lying about their involvement.
I don’t think it’s fair to call it FUD or a hit piece. Obviously since the majority of the information is provided from the prospective of the parents it’s biased, but the story is not making any wild claims like that it was a coverup. At worst it seems they’re accused of not caring much and having poor management.
> The FBI’s Confidential Human Source Policy Guide said a handler must give “an emergency communication plan” to a source traveling abroad.
> As an FBI source, Billy was required to report foreign travel, even vacations. The bureau has the authority to dispatch sources on foreign missions. It is one of the U.S. agencies responsible for disrupting terror cells abroad.
Since we're going over the FBI's rules and powers, the article should ask, does the FBI have the authority to block a source's vacations? That would be relevant.
There is zero concrete evidence presented that the FBI sent him to Russia. If there is any, that would support the premise that the FBI shares some responsibility for the result. But none has been presented.
Also, it's not really the FBI's role to show that they "care". Probably the people involved do care, as individuals and humans. I feel bad for the guy too, he sounds like he was just a bit lost in life. However, in terms of their jobs, they paid an adult to gather information online, which it seems he was pretty good at. Then he got a bee in his bonnet to go to a war zone (at the invitation of the FSB?) How are they supposed to manage that? That's next level. It sounds like they're doing their best to stay professional, considering the circumstances, and not make any public statements about his (apparently very poor) judgement. The statement that the FBI did not direct him to travel abroad says pretty much everything.
If I were the parents that's what I would take issue with. Yes, he was 23, legally an adult. But, plenty of kids are still impressionable and make stupid decisions at that age.
I do not want the FBI wasting my tax dollars trying to parent sources (or anyone for that matter). They're a law enforcement agency, not DHHS.
The parents were paying his internet bill (and everything else), it seems safe to conclude they had considerably more influence over his life direction than the FBI.
Remember the parents gifted him a vacation to SE Asia to meet the jihadi bride. Yeah, you want your kid to have a girlfriend, but there can be limits.
The article also doesn't tell us how much he actually worked for the FBI, other than that they didn't pay him very much (implying not very much). There are a small number of anecdotes, but presumably the article's authors know more and could have told us more.. How many reports did he write? How many did he get paid for? How many times did they meet over the five years, from when he was 23 to when he was 28? Ten? Five hundred?
It does tell us that Agent Tim went to Villanova (amongst other irrelevant personal information), so I guess that means he's supposed to play a parenting role to the sources he manages.
> "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."
Lesson here is don't play war. Would he still be alive had the FBI not recruited him? Maybe, maybe not, but we'll never know.
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.
This is someone's poor attempt at a Hollywood screenplay.