The people who raided my information during the past two or three years were in some respects expert -- very slick. But in one fundamental respect, they botched it. The first searches after the close of my urban ministry were a puzzlement to me. Everything was turned upside down, yet silver cutlery and signed Tretchikoffs, among other things, were left alone. It was too much chaos for me to make sense of it. Then, in the following searches, thousands of office papers were taken -- however, these searches missed my critical files. After that, any raider should have known that they had lost their chance. However, I didn't reckon with what could still be seized. My late wife's interviews, my personal notebooks, and so on -- all of them precious in their own way. But imagine the effort, if I had tried to back up and secure absolutely everything I had. The personal notebooks were a special loss to me -- these represented decades of research -- however I started backing those up some twenty years before, and nothing of the contents was lost. Finally this year, one raid came oh so close to seizing a copy of my critical files. So close that the raider moved them in their hiding place. In the event, I would still have had the files, but someone would have had copies. OBSERVATION: I considered offering a substantial reward for my personal notebooks in particular, but was concerned about how this might skew the dynamics.
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