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APPROACHING ZERO

routinely make international calls. Even in America, where the phone culture was at its most developed, no one would casually pick up a telephone and call a friend half-way across the world. An international call, particularly a trans-Atlantic call, was an event, and if families had relatives abroad they would probably phone only once a year, often at Christmas. The call could easily take half a day to get through (longer at Christmas) and the whole family would take turns speaking to granny or auntie. And they would shout - in those days, perhaps in awe of the great distance their voices were being carried, international callers always shouted. It would take another two decades before trans-Atlantic calls became as commonplace as ringing across the country.

Not surprisingly, the British GPO (General Post Office), which then ran the UK telephone system, became somewhat suspicious of a vacationer who routinely received five or six calls a day from the States. They began monitoring his line; then investigators were sent to interview him. They wanted to know why he had been receiving quite so many calls from across the Atlantic. He replied that he was on holiday and that he supposed he was popular. The investigators were unimpressed. Draper contacted his friends in America and said 'No more.'

It was about this time that Draper became the king of phreakers. He had rigged up a VW van with a switchboard and a high-tech MF-er and roamed the highways in California, looking for isolated telephone booths. He would often spend hours at these phone booths, sending calls around the world, bouncing them off communications satellites, leapfrogging them from the West Coast to London to Moscow to Sydney and then back again.

The Captain also liked to stack up tandems. Tandems are the instruments that send the whistling tone from one switching office to another. What the Captain would do is shoot from one tandem right across the country to another, then back again to a third tandem, stacking them up as he went back and forth, once reportedly shooting across America twenty times. Then he would bounce over to a phone box in London's Victoria Station or to the American Embassy in Moscow. He didn't have anything to say to whichever startled commuter at Victoria answered the ringing, or to the receptionist at the

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