Did an 8-Year-Old Spy for America? - Gregory D. Johnsen - The Atlantic
▻http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/09/did-an-8-year-old-spy-for-america/309429/?single_page=true
This wouldn’t have been the first time a Middle Eastern ally of the United States had used a child to spy on al-Qaeda. As Lawrence Wright recounts in his book The Looming Tower, in 1995, Egyptian intelligence agents lured two young boys into an apartment, drugged them, and then raped them. The agents photographed everything and used the photos as leverage to force the boys, who were sons of senior militants close to Ayman al-Zawahiri, to spy on al-Qaeda and try to kill the man who would go on to become Osama bin Laden’s deputy and eventually his successor. That plot failed when Zawahiri discovered what the boys were doing. A Sharia court convicted them, and Zawahiri had them both executed.