Lost Son: An American Family Trapped Inside the FBI’s Secret Wars

Wall Street Journal reporter Forrest (The Big Fix) delivers an uneven account of FBI informant Billy Reilly, who disappeared in Ukraine in 2015. Born in 1986 to working-class Catholic parents in Oxford, Mich., Reilly felt like an outsider as a teen, but found purpose after the 2001 al-Qaeda terror attacks, when he converted to Islam and began connecting with terrorist sympathizers in online forums. This activity brought him to the attention of the FBI in 2010; he was enlisted as a source and instructed to monitor Islamic fundamentalists online. In 2015, after Russian separatists in the Donbas region of Ukraine declared independence, Reilly traveled to Russia, where he fell out of touch with his parents. Eventually, Forrest was able to match Reilly’s fingerprints with those of an unidentified corpse found in Donbas in 2015. Forrest, drawing on evasive conversations with FBI agents and Russian separatists, suggests the FBI exploited Reilly, following a known pattern of manipulating informants into taking intelligence-gathering risks; according to Forrest, Reilly was strung along by his handlers with the promise that he would be given a real job at the agency. However, Forrest uncovers no solid evidence that proves Reilly intended to spy for the U.S. in Donbas or that he was killed for being a spy. This highly speculative account raises more questions than it answers. (May)