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Moscow Embassy. That wasn’t the point. Sometimes he asked about the weather.

The unit he carried in the back of the van was computer-operated, and Draper was proud of the fact that it was more powerful and faster than the phone company’s own equipment. It could, he claimed, ‘do extraordinary things’. The vagueness of the statement added to the mystique rather than detracted from the plausibility.

Once, making a call around the world, Draper first MF-ed to Tokyo, which connected him to India, India connected him to Greece, Greece connected him to South Africa, South Africa to South America, then to London, which put him through to New York, which connected him to an LA operator – who dialled the number of the phone booth next to the one he was using. He had to shout to hear himself but he thought the echo was ‘far out’. Another time, using two call boxes located side by side, Draper sent his voice one way around the world from one of the call boxes to the other and, simultaneously, from the second phone booth around via satellite in the other direction back to the first phone. The trick had absolutely no practical value, but the Captain was much more interested in the mechanics of telecommunications than he was in actually phoning anyone. ‘I’m learning about a system,’ he once said. ‘The phone company is system. A computer is a system . . . Computers. Systems. That’s my bag. The phone company is nothing but a computer.’

The Captain was not alone in his enthusiasm. To advanced phreakers the system linking the millions of phones around the world – that spider’s web of lines and loops and tandems – was infinitely interesting. Most of the phreakers were technology junkies anyway. They had been the sort of kids who took apart radios to see how they worked, who played with electronics when they were older and who naturally progressed to exploring the phone system, if only because it was the biggest and best piece of technology out there. But it was the growing recognition that it was a computer – and that they had liberated computer technology from Ma Bell – that made it all more exciting.

By 1969, even Mark Bernay, who had helped spread phone phreaking across America, found his interests were changing. He had settled

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