He was here because one of the crews working on FLAG had, while enlarging a manhole excavation, plunged the blade of their backhoe right through the main communications cable connecting Egypt to Libya — a 960-circuit coaxial line buried, sans conduit, in the same median. Libya had dropped off the net for a while until Mu’ammar Gadhafi’s eastbound traffic could be shunted to a microwave relay chain and an ARENTO repair crew had been mobilized. The quality of such an operation is not measured by how frequently cables get broken (usually they are broken by other people) but by how quickly they
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