One morning in early , a year-old manager of an Israeli customer-relations call center named Moran Oz found himself treading water in a hail of bullets. Two of them were armed, and one began firing into the ocean close to Oz. The man was holding a satellite phone. Oz felt disembodied and panicked for time. When I first heard the outlines of this story, from an attorney in Minneapolis last fall, I initially had a hard time believing it.
Later I would learn of incidents even more difficult to comprehend, but at the time it sounded too much like something out of a movie. We put him in the ocean, shot at him. Some never even heard the name Paul Le Roux; others thought of him as a brilliant but eccentric and occasionally obnoxious boss. At that point, they face a moral and practical question of how to proceed.
For some, how they confront that moment will mean the difference between freedom and confinement. For a few, it will be the difference between life and death.
Many had spoken to Oz in detail about his experience and agreed to talk to me on the condition that I not use their names, out of fear that by revealing their identities they could end up in a similar predicament as Oz.
Moran Oz grew up in Jerusalem. He was visiting an uncle in New York, pondering what to do next with his life—go to school? The only requirements were a good command of English and a basic understanding of computers. Oz flew home and took the job. Generally known as call centers—although much of their work happened over email—companies like Beit Oridan served as the customer-service arms of larger organizations based outside Israel, often serving customers in the United States.
