I remember being in a state of semishock after reading the article, trying to take in one statement after another that simply wasn’t true. With this one piece, Markoff single-handedly created "the Myth of Kevin Mitnick"—a myth that would embarrass the FBI into making the search for me a top priority and provide a fictional image that would influence prosecutors and judges into treating me as a danger to national security. I couldn’t help recalling that five years earlier I had refused to participate in a book Markoff and his-then wife, Katie Hafner, wanted to write about me and some other hackers, because they wanted to make money from my story while I myself would make no money from it. It also brought back memories of John Markoff telling me in a phone call that if I didn’t agree to an interview, anything anyone else said about me would be considered truthful since I wasn’t there to dispute it.