The Cairo Affair

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Thanks to Mark Milstein, who was there, for revisiting his memories of the road from Novi Sad to Vukovar for me.

COLLECTION STRATEGIES

On February 19, 2011, two days after the Day of Revolt, the first kidnapping occurred in London, and over the following seventy-two hours similar scenes occurred in Brussels, Paris, and New York. In only three days, five politically active Libyan exiles vanished from the face of the earth: Yousef al-Juwali, Abdurrahim Zargoun, Waled Belhadj, Abdel Jalil, and Mohammed el-Keib.

Word of these abductions reached Langley along the usual paths—updates from the cousins, intercepted e-mails, news feeds, and worried reports from friends and colleagues—yet the computer algorithms somehow missed the possibility that they were part of a single event. It took a researcher in the Office of Collection Strategies and Analysis, Jibril Aziz, to see the connection. As a native Libyan who had been reared on the anxieties of his family’s political exile, he was primed to find connections where others wouldn’t be looking, and his enthusiasm sometimes meant that he found connections where they didn’t actually exist.

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