On My Radar:

The Spy's Son: The True Story of the Highest-Ranking CIA Officer Ever Convicted of Espionage and the Son He Trained to Spy for Russia
by Bryan Denson
Atlantic Monthly Press
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

Investigative reporter and Pulitzer Prize finalist Bryan Denson tells the riveting and extraordinary true story of the Nicholsons—father and son co-conspirators who deceived their country by selling national secrets to Russia.

Jim Nicholson was one of the CIA’s top veteran case officers. By day, he taught spycraft at the CIA’s clandestine training center, The Farm. By night, he was a minivan-driving single father racing home to have dinner with his three kids. But Nicholson led a double life. For more than two years, he had met covertly with agents of Russia’s foreign intelligence service in locations around the world and turned over troves of classified documents, including the identities of hundreds of trainees. In 1997, Nicholson became the highest ranking CIA officer ever convicted of espionage. But his duplicity didn’t stop there.

While behind the bars of a federal prison, the former mole systematically groomed the one person he trusted most to serve as his stand-in: his youngest son, Nathan. In his early twenties, deeply depressed after suffering a serious injury during military training, Nathan was easy prey for his father. When Nicholson asked him to courier messages out of prison to his Russian contacts, Nathan saw an opportunity to not only make something of himself but to make his father proud by following him into the spy world.

The Spy’s Son is a fast-paced, thrilling account that takes readers inside the private meeting rooms of the FBI and CIA, into the intrigues of international cat-and-mouse espionage games, and behind the closed doors of a family struggling to stay together through the deepest of betrayals.

On My Radar:

Exploding the Phone: The Untold Story of the Teenagers and Outlaws Who Hacked Ma Bell
by Philip Lapsley
Grove/Atlantic
Hardcover

From the publisher website:

 “If we hadn’t built blue boxes, there would have been no Apple.” —Steve Jobs 

Before smartphones and iPads, before the Internet or the personal computer, a misfit group of technophiles, blind teenagers, hippies, and outlaws figured out how to hack the world’s largest machine: the telephone system. By the middle of the twentieth century the telephone system had grown into something extraordinary, a web of cutting-edge switching machines and human operators that linked together millions of people like never before. But the network had a billion-dollar flaw, and once people discovered it, things would never be the same. 

Phil Lapsley’s Exploding the Phone traces the birth of long-distance communication and the telephone, the rise of AT&T’s monopoly, the creation of the sophisticated machines that made it all work, and the discovery of Ma Bell’s Achilles’ heel. Lapsley expertly weaves together the clandestine underground of phone phreaks who turned the network into their electronic playground, the mobsters who exploited its flaws to avoid the feds, and the counterculture movement that argued you should rip off the phone company to fight against the war in Vietnam.  

AT&T responded with “Greenstar,” an unprecedented project that would ultimately tap some thirty-three million telephone calls and record 1.5 million of them. The FBI fought back, too, especially when a phone phreak showed a confidential informant how he could remotely eavesdrop on FBI calls. Phone phreaking exploded into the popular culture, with famous actors, musicians, and investors caught with “blue boxes,” many of them built by two young phone phreaks named Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. Soon, the phone phreaks, the feds, and the phone company were at war.  

Based on original interviews and declassified documents, Exploding the Phone is a captivating, ground-breaking work about an important part of our cultural and technological history.