Word: phoning
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Last February the family relocated to Baghdad, moving into an unoccupied house owned by a cousin in one of the city's most upscale neighborhoods. A week after they had moved, Waddah's brothers gave him $200 to buy a cell phone and some phone cards. The family had never owned a cell phone, and he was excited about buying one. Waddah got into his cousin's brand-new midnight blue Chevrolet Lumina. It was a short drive to the neighborhood's main drag, and he parked in front of a large cell-phone store. When he couldn't find...
...taken indoors, then down a flight of stairs and through a doorway and pushed roughly to the floor. He felt several kicks to his chest and thighs, followed by rapid- fire questions: What was his name? Where did he live? Where did he work? What was his family's phone number? "They said, 'The sooner you give us a phone number to call, the sooner we contact your family, negotiate a ransom and let you go,'" Waddah says. A common persuasion technique employed by kidnappers is to call the family of the victim and let them hear him screaming during...
...turn in the interrogation room came every other day. The questions never varied. "They kept coming back to the phone number--why I didn't have any," he says. "They just wouldn't believe me." Every session would end with threats of more beatings and torture. He was told of other captives who had died grisly deaths and was shown stains on the floor where they had bled. The strong smell of chemicals began to make sense. They had been used to cover up the smell of vomit and dried blood. But, says the U.S. official, the threat of death...
...them names of family members in Fallujah and Ramadi, along with directions to their homes. One of the addresses in Ramadi had checked out, and the person who lived there--an old friend who Waddah believed had been a fighter in an insurgent group--had agreed to find a phone number for his family. The interrogator said "our people in Baghdad" were also looking for Waddah's home. A few days later, the kidnappers said they had made contact with Waddah's family. But Haseeba and her other sons, believing him to be dead, had already held a wake...
...former German telephone�monopoly Deutsche Telekom took a leap of faith across the Atlantic and bought an upstart U.S. mobile-phone company called VoiceStream Wireless for $46.5 billion. Telekom's management was excoriated for paying an exorbitant price for the smallest operator in a crowded market, dwarfed by giants Cingular, Verizon and Sprint. But the bet paid off. Today, the U.S. arm of T-Mobile, the German mother ship's wireless unit, is still ranked fourth, but it is the fastest-growing part of the $75 billion company and well on its way to becoming Telekom's largest revenue source...