The Evolution of U.S. Hostage Policy

August this year marks 10 years since the shocking execution of American freelance journalist James Foley at the hands of ISIS amid the war in Syria in 2014. His videotaped decapitation was the first of a spree of ISIS beheadings, including several Americans, which ISIS often used as recruitment propaganda. Jim’s killing, almost two years after he had been captured, stunned the world. A month later, ISIS did the same to another American journalist, Time Magazine contributor Steven Joel Sotloff. A month later, an American aid worker, Peter Kassig, was killed in the same way. Another American aid worker, Kayla Mueller, was killed in 2015 while being held captive by ISIS. 

Jim’s mother, Diane Foley, has pushed through the horror of those years by establishing the James W. Foley Legacy Foundation in her son’s memory and pressing the U.S. government persistently over a decade to reform its approach to cases of American hostages held abroad. At the time, its policy, as she explains in a recent article published by Just Security, consisted of little more than a slogan: “The United States does not negotiate with terrorists.” 

Co-hosting this episode is Just Security’s Washington Senior Editor, Viola Gienger. 

On this episode, we’re privileged to have Jim Foley’s mother, Diane Foley, and Luke Hartig, a member of Just Security’s editorial board, who first met Diane when he was a senior director at the National Security Council working on hostage policy and she was advocating for changes in hostage policy. He serves on the Foley Foundation’s advisory board. 

Diane has been a driving force in reforming U.S. policy and practices on the handling of American hostages held abroad. Part of that campaign has been an annual research report that the foundation produces, entitled Bringing Americans Home. It collects and analyzes evidence-based data on hostages currently held in 16 countries to inform the American public, government officials, and lawmakers about how the U.S. government is doing and what else is needed to secure the release of U.S. hostages abroad and reduce the risks of capture in the first place. The latest edition was just released. 

Show Notes:  

• Diane M. Foley (@FoleyDi) 
• Luke Hartig (@LukeHartig) 
• Viola Gienger (@ViolaGienger)
• Paras Shah (@pshah518)
• Diane’s Just Security article “Since James Foley’s Death, a `Moral Awakening’ in America on Hostages Held Abroad”
• James W. Foley Legacy Foundation
• Just Security's Hostages coverage
• Music: “Broken” by David Bullard from Uppbeat: https://uppbeat.io/t/david-bullard/broken (License code: OSC7K3LCPSGXISVI)

Transcript

Paras Shah: August this year marks 10 years since the shocking execution of American freelance journalist James Foley at the hands of ISIS amid the war in Syria in 2014. His videotaped decapitation was the first of a spree of ISIS beheadings, including several Americans, which ISIS often used as recruitment propaganda. Jim’s killing, almost two years after he had been captured, stunned the world. A month later, ISIS did the same to another American journalist, Time magazine contributor Steven Joel Sotloff. A month later, an American aid worker, Peter Kassig, was killed in the same way. Another American aid worker, Kayla Mueller, was killed in 2015 while being held captive by ISIS. 

Jim’s mother, Diane Foley, has pushed through the horror of those years by establishing the James W. Foley Legacy Foundation in her son’s memory and pressing the U.S. government persistently over a decade to reform its approach to cases of American hostages held abroad. At the time, its policy, as she explains in a recent article published by Just Security, consisted of little more than a slogan: “The United States does not negotiate with terrorists.” 

This is the Just Security Podcast. I’m your host, Paras Shah. Co-hosting with me today is Just Security’s Washington Senior Editor, Viola Gienger. 

Viola Gienger: We’re privileged today to have with us Jim Foley’s mother, Diane Foley, and Luke Hartig, a member of Just Security’s editorial board, who first met Diane when he was a senior director at the National Security Council working on hostage policy and she was advocating for changes in hostage policy. He serves on the Foley Foundation’s advisory board. 

Diane has been a driving force in reforming U.S. policy and practices on the handling of American hostages held abroad. Part of that campaign has been an annual research report that the foundation produces, entitled Bringing Americans Home. It collects and analyzes evidence-based data on hostages currently held in 16 countries to inform the American public, government officials, and lawmakers about how the U.S. government is doing and what else is needed to secure the release of U.S. hostages abroad and reduce the risks of capture in the first place. The latest edition was just released.

Diane, Luke, thank you so much for being with us.

Diane Foley: It's our pleasure.

Viola: Diane, let's start with you. Tell us a little about your own experience with the US government when Jim was being held by ISIS, which you described so vividly in your book, American Mother. Describe your interaction with US government during his detention, how you found out about his killing.

Diane: It's hard to find the words. It was disappointing, frustrating, and by the end of my experience appalling to be honest. As that because initially, I didn't know much of anything about government. My background is as a nurse and a family nurse practitioner, mother of five kids, so busy life but not as engaged in the government. So, when our government initially found out Jim was kidnapped through some journalist colleagues who had been awaiting him in Turkey, on the border — because they live just across the border during that time when they were covering the conflict in Syria. But shortly thereafter, we heard from consular, who confirmed that Jim had been kidnapped. And about a week later, an FBI agent was sent to us, to our home to talk to us, and we were very grateful for that. However, this FBI agent knew nothing about the Middle East, none of the history. They told us we probably should reach out to President Assad to help us, just really didn't speak Arabic, really had no understanding of the current situation there at the border. And we were depending on him; he told us he would be going to the border to help resolve figure out what happened to Jim. So, it wasn't until three weeks later that he went, and by then Jim had totally vanished. You know, we had so many rumors of where he was. 

All of his journalist colleagues were trying to follow the rumors and figure out where he might have gone, who took him. The fixer who had been helping Jim had no idea really who the group was because a lot of various jihadists and various groups had come into Syria at that time, welcomed really by Assad and many ways, at this time of civil unrest when a lot of the population was trying to seek their own freedom. So, it was a very confusing time. And he disappeared, nobody knew where he was. And I never got any information at all from the government, no one was allowed to tell me anything for the next 10 months. There was one FBI agent who shared with me a sighting in Aleppo, so that gave me hope that Jim might be alive. But we really didn't hear where he was, or if he was alive until September of 2013. And that's when a Belgian father, whose son had been in the jihad, and he had gone to get him out, and that that son had seen Jim and others — but definitely knew what Jim was and was able to tell us exactly where he was in northern Syria at that time. 

And that's when we knew he was not held by Assad. We knew he was held by one of the jihadist groups at that point. And we knew he was alive. And we had a better FBI agent at that point who went to Belgium to interview him, etc. So, our government knew where Jim and the other Americans were starting in September of 2013. And then they moved from to Raqqa later, as things developed. The jihadist finally reached out to us about a year from his date of kidnapping in November of 2013. But our FBI was not allowed to engage with them at all, their hands were tied. And so, it was on us as families to try to reply to the captors when they wrote to us, and the FBI was kind, they tried to advise us. Just be yourselves, tell them you can't give money, you can't get political prisoners just be ourselves. So that's what we did. So, the captors communicated with us for about one month. And then our FBI told us not to tell anybody that Jim had been held, so we did not except for close family. And then, however, the end of December, ISIS essentially left and moved to Raqqa. And we never heard from them again until just before Jim's murder. That ended that communication. So as far as at that point, we were just desperate. So, in the new year in January of 2014, we decided we had to go public, that we needed help from somebody. Our government wasn't telling us anything. And when I went to Washington — I quit my job — to begin going to Washington to find somebody to tell them that Jim was missing. And people were kind to me, but they always told me that Jim was our country's highest priority but gave me no information. 

So, I trusted that for a good year. But starting at 2014, I was getting more and more frantic. And that's when our good friend David Bradley, who had helped when Jim was briefly detained in Libya, reached out and had, through his research, realized that Jim was not alone, that he was he was held with Steven Sotloff, a fellow journalist, and two aid workers, Peter Kassig and Kayla Mueller. So that was good news to us. And David helped us get together and go to Washington to advocate and get some help. And it was actually then in April of 2014, that we not only found out Jim was with others, but it was then that the tone of government changed from he's our highest priority to threats. That's when we started getting threatened that we would be prosecuted if we want tried to raise a ransom, that our government would never do a rescue mission, that or reach out to any other country on our behalf. We were threatened three times with that was really appalling, but it was the truth. The truth was our government had made that decision that they were not going to negotiate, but no one ever told us that, except when Mark Mitchell threatened us with the fact that we would not be helped, essentially, and said, we would be prosecuted if we start to raise ransom. But that's when we started to get really nervous. And that's when, as a family, we started getting pledges for ransom, because I could tell that other hostages were starting to come home — all the Europeans started to come home in February 1, the Spanish, then the French, then our friend Frederico Machda, who really tried, came to the States several times trying to advocate for the British and the Americans. But it became clearer that or I was feeling that somehow that wasn't going to work. I was just worried. 

And then I went back to France to try to find out how they got their citizens out. It became kind of a desperate time for us, for all of us. And then, actually, I was just in Paris, when my husband called to tell me the jihadists had reached out again, saying that if the bombing didn't stop in northern Syria, that Jim would be the first to be killed. So, but I was hopeful that they were in touch. So, we got in touch with them and told them we'd raise pledges for ransom, obviously, it was much too late. So anyway, when Jim was killed — so horrifically beheaded — and after my horrible shock, I was angry, to be honest, because I felt that I felt my fellow Americans had lied to me, had told me that they were on it for Jim when, in fact, they weren't. And I, in all fairness to them, I think they didn't know what to do with me. At that point in time, our country had no one who was really accountable for helping a family whose loved one had been targeted because he was American, not because he had committed any crime. 

So, they really didn't know how to help me, I think is part of the problem. But I felt betrayed, I really did. And I felt strongly that Jim would have wanted us to use his death somehow for good. So that's when we started the Foley Foundation because I really felt our country could do much better, could be more honest with citizens. could have the back of brave citizens who are going out to the world but are targeted because they have US passports. So, it was a very disappointing, horrible time for us, but my hope is that out of that has been born all the good people stepped up after that. So, and that's when it really took several deaths before everyone woke up to be honest: Jim was the first, followed by Steven Sotloff, and Peter Kassig, Kayla, Luke Summers, Warren Weinstein, Robert Levinson. So, it's really their legacy that I think helped to awaken our nation. And I'm so grateful that for all the good people like Luke Hartig, who joins me today, who recognize that as a country, we could do better, that we could, in fact, help when our citizens are targeted abroad. 

Viola: It’s really amazing work that you've done through the Foley Foundation as well all these years to bring so much of this to light.

Paras: Yeah, Diane, thank you so much for sharing that story and your experience with us. Luke, I want to turn to what that period was like for you. You are a senior director in the National Security Council, and you've seen many of the negotiations and the response to hostage taking from the inside from the White House and from what other agencies of the government are doing. What does the process typically look like in your experience?

Luke Hartig: Well, first of all, thank you for having me on. I really appreciate this conversation and really appreciate Diane sharing her personal experience. I've heard Diane tell various versions of her story many times, and it just never ceases to be a really powerful discussion of why this issue is so important and why her work is so important. So ,thank you, Diana, appreciate having the opportunity to collaborate with you again. You asked about what the experience was like from inside of government during this time. And I think what really came out for us in the immediate aftermath of the deaths of Jim, of Steven Sotlof, of Peter Kassig, all kind of in rapid succession, was just how would it lead an ad hoc, not integrated, centralized approach that we had to these horrible kidnappings and hostage takings. And, you know, I'd worked in counterterrorism for several years before this happened, and there were always cases of hostages. You'd sort of track them and stay on top of them. And we had several successful hostage rescue missions in Iraq and Afghanistan. Some other hostages were freed through other means. But it was never a central issue for us. 

And I think both just the horror of those three murders in rapid succession, and then the murders of others, right, the Jordanian pilot, and others, right. All done for the spectacle, the political spectacle and the attention to what ISIS was doing, was certainly a wakeup call. But it wasn't just those deaths, right. It was the tireless advocacy from Diane, and also from the other families, right. So, Ed and Paula Kassig, Arthur and Shirley Sotloff, Carl and Marsha Mueller, Deborah and Marc Tice — different case, but still the Tice’s had been tireless in their advocacy for Austin, he's still held in Syria. And I think the advocacy from Diane and a really unlikely and unfortunate club of parents raised our attention to the fact that at the end of the day, it was ultimately that they were not able to save their loved ones, but there were so many steps and failures that led up to that ultimate failure. And those were failures around integrating the strategies to recover them, right. So, it felt like the FBI wasn't talking to the military. And military rescue seemed to be the primary option. And it was clear that things were not actually bubbling up to the senior most leadership within the White House and ultimately to the President. So, they weren't getting the kind of senior attention that they deserve. 

There are a lot of things that just struck us as like challenging and problematic and things we should look into. So that's why President Obama directed us to conduct a review of major hostage takings in the previous couple of years and the failings of the US government and to recommend some ways to improve the way that we address hostage taking and ultimately develop strategies for bringing hostages home. And that review, which was which included interviews with dozens and dozens of families of hostages, former hostages themselves who'd come home, revealed a number of key trends that Diane has really spoken to here. It was largely a pickup team of officials across the government who worked on these, oftentimes that people were working hostage taking didn't have the proper context or training to be able to support families. Families were not given information, and in fact were often treated as almost kind of like a burden to the government doing its job. Certainly, there was a strong deference for getting to a rescue mission, which sometimes rescue mission is the right answer, but they're very risky. Right? Every rescue mission is very risky. And that that seems to be a challenge. 

Just the different parts like government were not talking to each other, we were not developing integrated strategies for recovering hostages. And when there were challenges, we were not bubbling those challenges up to the highest levels of the government to figure out how we could get them resolved. So those things all came out pretty clearly and those things all drove the reforms that President Obama ultimately ordered and that we implemented. And I think we're still implementing to be honest, right. I think a lot of those solutions, which we can talk about further, I think those solutions are still being implemented. But the issues I worked on in government, this is one of the most important if not the most important. And, and I think what was so powerful about it, like I've worked on counterterrorism operations that have saved 1000s of lives, right? I mean, really important, operations in that context. In this case, we're not talking about a ton of Americans, but the conversations we have with Diane and with others, just made us realize that we were failing at one of the just most basic things that government needs to do as a government — which is serve its citizens during their time of greatest need. And we were not doing that we were not doing that by any means. And so, it was a wakeup call for us and we all felt very strongly that this was one of the most important things we could do because it spoke to something just fundamental about what government does for its citizens. 

Paras: So Luke, as we've seen, the US government's policy really has evolved quite a bit there now new structures, new coordinating mechanisms. What does it look like now? And how have you seen it evolve?

Luke: When we started this review back in 2014, as we've talked about, it came on the heels of these horrific murders of US citizens. Also, the failed rescue attempt of Luke summers in Yemen in which his captors killed him, and also the accidental killing of Warren Weinstein in a US counterterrorism operation. So, some horrible stuff, those were the high profile cases. When we dug into hostage taking, we actually found that the largest number of cases were criminal kidnappings that were usually very quick kidnapping for ransom type operations, often related to drug cartels in in the Western Hemisphere. Most of those cases did not go on for very long, and there was a ransom paid pretty quickly and the loved one was returned home. The hardest cases were definitely the hostage takings. There were definitely concerns at that time about unjust detention. So, I believe at that time, Jason Rezaian was being held in Iran — a number of other American citizens were held in in other places by governments that we did not have friendly relations with him. And I think that the urgency was getting the hostage cases right. And so, we moved quickly to address that. 

The wrongful detention cases just seemed like maybe a little bit more than we could actually bite off at that point and, just frankly, was not the acute challenge then that it is today. So, so we didn't tackle that one. They are more complicated, and I'll talk about that in a second. They're just different, similar in that they're complicated, but in different ways. The main things that we did to try to fix US response to hostage taking was, and Diane's alluded to these, we've created three structures, we created this operational level hostage recovery fusion cell, where the best of each agency across the government — the FBI, the State Department. the Intelligence Community, the Department of Defense — could come together in one place with access to the resources of their home agencies and build combined operational plans for bringing home hostages, right. And those plans would be different depending on the nature of the taking and the resources available to us. Sometimes it might be a military operation. Oftentimes, it might be a negotiation, or work through a third country, various other means.

And the second big component was the creation of the Special Presidential Envoy for Hostage Affairs, which was important to create a senior level diplomat who had the ability to reach directly to the Secretary of State and indirectly to the President of the United States and advocate on behalf of hostages overseas. In fact, we've seen a number of cases of hostages coming home, based on us just reaching out to our allies, our allies who might have better connections, who might have connections to some dubious people, but the types of connections that can bring people home. And I think that's an immensely powerful position. 

And we've had a number of really great Special President Envoys. Roger Carstens, the current envoy, is very excellent and this administration’s credit that they kept him over from the Trump administration. And he's served faithfully and patriotically in both administrations. And the final thing was the creation of this Hostage Recovery Group at the White House level. And this is a policy strategy level group focused on hostage taking. So, it's not going to develop all the operational plans for bringing people home. But when there's a challenge, right, there's a hey, what should we do at this moment? Or this agency has been difficult and not providing the information we need? Or the President is meeting with the hostage families next week? And what should the President know about these situations? And where should he be ready to make new commitments? That group was supposed to develop all those things and make sure that there was a pathway to the highest levels of government. As Diane said, I think this is a space where there's been a little bit of falling short. Now, that was the architecture that we built explicitly for hostile takings by terrorist groups and other non-state actors, but I think it's actually a very durable structure that works pretty well for wrongful detainees as well. There are certainly adjustments that have to be made, and we can talk about some of some of the challenges there. But I think it actually works pretty well as a structure, and a lot of the modifications that have been made through the Levinson Act and through different implementation of this framework by the current administration and by the Trump administration was meant to just adapt to the current challenge. There's just different set of complications when it comes to wrongful detentions by state actors. 

A couple of things jump out. So, first of all, there's always this question of what constitutes a wrongful detention, and indeed the Levinson Act tries to put some criteria around that, right. But we've seen cases where somebody is detained for a relatively petty crime and receives just a disproportionate level of punishment from that country, and what's clearly an act of hostage diplomacy, but they can sort of hide behind the fig leaf of oh, this person broke our country's laws, right. And so we have to be able to spot that and call that out when we know that this is a disproportionate reaction. You know, again, states are often looking for more than money. In fact, they often don't want money, right? They're looking for major changes to US policy and that can be a really hard thing for the US government to do, especially when it comes to fundamental conflicts with other priorities within US foreign policy. And then when it comes to working with families, one of the challenges is that a lot of times the information that we are able to gather on wrongful detentions held by foreign nations is obtained through some of the most sensitive means of intelligence collection. Tt's not always stuff that we can share with somebody who's not cleared for security clearance. So that can sometimes seem like a cop out, sometimes that's an excuse. And the government needs to work harder to share critical information with families. But it does make it a little bit harder to do that. 

And I think one of the things that we've learned is that the most successful hostage and wrongful detention recovery strategies include the family as a co-equal partner in bringing the person home. So, we have to continue to work through that, and I think that the structure is sound. But I think one of the things that jumps out for me and really comes clear from Diane's report is there's not a lot where it's like, “we need to blow this thing up, right, we need to create an entirely new process”. I look at it as like, we need to return to the original promise of what we were trying to do here, right? That when we have the fusion cell, the fusion cell is truly bringing the best across government into this work, that it's career enhancing for the people there, that the agencies are freely sharing and supporting the people that they have on the fusion cell. that the special presidential envoy is really well integrated as just one arm of recovery strategies — a very important arm but not the only arm of recovery strategies — that that pathway to the White House sits there. 

Both because there's often thorny issues that we need to resolve but also having been a White House policymaker myself, it's so important that that people in those roles and ultimately the President hears from the families of those who were being held abroad. It's just absolutely essential. It's important that government feels that urgency, right. And when you hit when you have Diane coming to see you every week, you feel a sense of urgency. That's important. I felt that. I hope that the current officials feel that I know a lot of them do. But we need to go back to just fulfilling the promise of what we were trying to do in the first place.

Viola: That's really helpful. Thank you very much for that. Diane, I want to turn to the current situation right now. The Foley foundation just issued this report, the annual research report that you put out, about bringing Americans home. What did that this time reveal about the number of Americans who are being held abroad, which countries or groups are holding them and so forth? Give us a sense of the current situation.

Diane: If I may, Viola, I’d just like to offer, though, that what made what Luke was just saying expressing, this comprehensive review, because it included not just inside government assessment, it really took time to speak to many victims — many, many victims, returned hostages, and hostage detainee families were interviewed. General Sacolick, who did this review at the Center for Counterterrorism, did an outstanding job very patiently talking to families and getting that point of view. But one of the issues is we really haven't had a review that's included victims with a public result since then. So, it's been 10 years since that review was done, and that review was focused on hostage cases and our government, at that time, limited that primarily to people who are targeted by criminal gangs or terrorists or pirates, if you will, not nation states. That is the reason we've done this report annually to be honest, because we, as the foundation, really wanted to keep track of all the good progress because this structure that was put in place in June of 2015 has saved more than 120 innocent American lives. I mean, it's really made a huge impact on brave journalists, aid workers, businessman who go out in the world and do important things that are needed for our economy, foreign policy, etc. 

But they've come home thanks to this structure that was put in place. However, we wanted to know from a family point of view, are families being heard, are things being declassified. Families, like I, had been told several times that they would never do a rescue mission for Jim. And unbeknownst to me, a few week before he was killed, it was tried. But that was after, nine months later, after others were already released, and they were moved. So, it was those folks who risked their lives, and no one was there, no British or Americans were left So, the reason we are we do this every year is so that we can hear the voices of families who are currently going through the horror of having a loved one who is taken hostage either by a nation state or terrorist group and also to interview current people working on these issues to see what is working well and what not so well. So, this year, we found that, for one thing, the good news is that more than 60 Americans — half of the people who've come home since 2015 — have returned home in the last few years. 2022, 2023 were miraculous for many families because of the wonderful leadership, Roger Carstens has been held over from the Trump administration through the Biden administration. 

And that's allowed him in his department at the State Department to really grow in their expertise at figuring out ways to negotiate with captors and develop honing their own diplomatic skills. So, I really have to give credit to them. But there still continue to be issues, and one of the issues was one that Luke alluded to, actually, is that even though wonderful work has been done by the special envoy, and the fusion cell at different times, that agency, that fusion cell — in our opinion, from what the families are saying, and people working inside government — has suffered because the leadership has stayed siloed at the FBI. They've also suffered because they haven't had a direct line of funding. So, there have been dependent on funding within the FBI, which is often hard to get, and because more and more of the captors of our citizens have been nation states. That was another reason their funding has not been prioritized. So, we are concerned that the SPE has had, in some ways, to rebuild a fusion cell within the State Department. So, one of our recommendations is we would love to see them be mandated to collaborate and collocate and perhaps even have funding that can shift depending on who the captor is — whether it's state actor or in fact, a terrorist group. So, we would love some help to improve that. The other thing is — thanks to the bravery and the hard work of the Levinson family — in 2020, we helped support the Levinson family in putting through a bill in the name of Robert Levinson called the Robert Levinson Hostage Taking and Accountability Act. 

And within the that act, very important criteria were developed to identify when, in fact, a US citizen is arrested abroad, when is that wrongful or unjust? And I must say that thousands of Americans are arrested every year. I mean, Americans do wrong thing is for sure. And so other governments certainly have reasons to arrest them, but there is a small subset, but important subset, of those arrests that at times that are truly wrongful. So the Levinson act put forth criteria for windows were, in fact, wrongfully detained. So that put a big burden on the consular, which is a huge group within the State Department that lets us know when an American has, in fact, been arrested, but have no role in advocacy or anything like that and previously had no role in assessing the justice of that arrest, if you will. So now, all of a sudden, they had this huge burden to undertake. And so that still is problematic, the process of actually figuring out which of those citizens who are arrested abroad are in fact wrongfully detained. 

So that's another issue, among others. We have 10 recommendations, but those are two; and one of the others we've found is that often the fusion cell and the special envoy come up with great strategies, but sometimes it's difficult to access the hostage response group and the National Security Council, where the decisions are made. And so, every time there's a new administration, that access it can be has been problematic. And the first year of the Biden administration, that was the case. And then that's when thanks to good people like Josh Geltzer and others, he stepped in and became that liaison. So, that's another area that we feel there needs to be more of a liaison, a deputy presidential adviser, who can give that urgency to the people who are actually making the decisions — the tough decisions that are required to bring people home. So those are just a few of our 10 recommendations.

Viola: Thank you very much Diane for that. That's really helpful. I just want to go back for a minute to some of the statistics that emerged from your report this time. Can you give us a few, just a few, top lines about that trend that you mentioned of so many having been released? Where are we now? How many are still detained? And how many countries are?

Diane: Really, it's been so exciting to see how many, I mean more than 60 Americans, 64 I believe, US nationals come home particularly strong during 2022 and 2023. To date, we have we know of 46 public cases, and I say that because that's not the whole number, but entire number is a classified number. There's not a public number of how many people are arrested, who really might well qualify to be a wrongful arrest. And that is a difficult process, because often captors will allege all kinds of crimes to detain folks. But as far as headlines, when our report came out last September, we were seeing that trend was definitely away from terrorist groups taking our citizens, and it was more towards nation states. But after October 7 of 2023, of course, with Hamas taking so many Israeli hostages, and at the same time, the Taliban taking hostages, that in 2023, 13 US nationals were taken by terrorist groups. 

And additionally, because of the wonderful releases from Iran and Venezuela, those were huge wins, but on the negative side, Russia has really been targeting Americans in the last couple of years. Now we're up to nine US nationals or 11, rather, that we know of who are detained in Russia, and only two of those have been designated by the Secretary of State as wrongful detentions — which of course is upsetting to the other families, many of which really feel they should be in that qualification. And China continues to be very difficult. We know of 11, at least 11, public cases, and a lot of those arrests have been really long standing, 11 years, 15 years held. And of course we have Syria, our concern about Austin Tice, and if there are any other remaining US nationals there. But yeah, so that's the headlines.

Viola: Austin Tice being the American journalist, photographer, photojournalist who has been held in Syria for what more than 10 years now, I think  

Diane: 12. So, we hope he's alive.

Paras: Thank you so much to both of you. Your perspectives really are so illuminating on both sides of this process, both from the families and from inside government and how those two perspectives are at times in tension but can also collaborate. Is there anything else that we haven't touched on yet that you'd like to add?

Diane: If I may, Paris, thank you for that question. There are several things, I think. I love what Luke said about the promise, because I think as a government it is important that our government needs to have the moral courage to prioritize the return of innocent fellow Americans and to do all they can to support their return. And so, a lot of that has to do with the leadership because there's always competing issues, and particularly with state actors, that's why a lot of nation states wish to use our citizens as political pawns, because they want to directly interfere with our foreign policy, with our economy, they want to hold us hostage by holding innocent Americans. So, an important issue that I know our government is thinking about, but all of us need to work on is deterrence. Deterrence by, in my opinion, working with other Western allies, so that collectively, we can help one another when a nation is faced with citizens who are attacked. And I think a good example of our doing that has been when Hamas took out the Israeli hostages and how our country has sought to work with allies, like folks in Qatar and Lebanon and Egypt to try to somehow both free the hostages, cease the conflict, and provide humanitarian aid. Those are very complicated. problems when they come to the fore. 

So, one of our big concerns is that there's a need, in my opinion, for another comprehensive review — both inside and outside of government — to include the complexity of when nation states target our citizens, because I really feel that's the part that President Biden is so aware of and he calls the national security threat. The fact that citizens who are going about in the world doing work are serving in various capacities when they're targeted and held hostage, our country in many ways is held hostage also. And so, I really feel that there is need for us to address the tweaks that Luke and I have both been alluding to, so that we have a stronger response when our people are targeted. 

And then the only other thing I would like to add is the importance of reintegration and the debriefing of people when they come home. We have many other good people helping us, but I mean, a lot of people when they come home, their credit is shot, the IRS wants taxes paid, their career is gone, often families are broken. So, there's a real need for more support in that regard to help families both during and after. 

Luke: I’d love to pick up on Diane's last point there because, you know there is some incredible work being done in this regard from Hostage US, which really focus itself on helping hostages once they've come home with reintegrating in all its facets. But you know, it's a nonprofit group that's reliant on donations from various folks who care about this and Diane and I, and I know Viola and Paras, you care about this as well, that this is so important as an issue, but it's not an issue where there's a lot of awareness across the country, right? So, it's hard. It's hard that we are reliant on the few people who know about this and want to fund this, these types of organizations that do this. And I do think there needs to be more restorative resources toward this. And I think some of those resources should be coming from the government. 

Because the reality is, and Diane and I know a lot of hostages and wrongful detainees who have come home, is that it's really, really hard to come home. It's really hard to come home. And if the intensity that we brought to supporting their case and bringing them home, is not then extended to helping them resume their lives then we've ultimately failed these people, even if we managed to save them from their captors. So that's a really, really important point. The other thing I would say is that we are often thinking about hostage recovery and how can the government work better together and work with the family. But what we've seen in successful recoveries, and certainly something that I've seen from my own work as a private citizen, is just the importance of a network of private citizens who want to help in these types of cases. 

Diane mentioned, David Bradley, who's done incredible work on this. David Bradley, and full disclosure David is the owner of my company, so I have worked with David in a professional capacity as well. But David has been remarkable as a high profile individual, who has been able to use the stature he has to open doors to make connections to other prominent Americans, to prominent foreign businessmen, and to heads of state and foreign officials, etc., to be able to bring hostages home. So, it's a really important point, one that kind of gets overlooked. You know, I have my own experience with this kind of front and center. I joined a pickup team of people who were committed to helping bring home the American, Sam Goodwin, who was held in Syria for about two months, a couple of years back. And I came at this as a former government official and with all the knowledge that came with that. We had several other people who had different areas of expertise, regional knowledge, etc., and then we had just this extended network. And ultimately, the connection that ended up bringing Sam home was not something that the US government did. It was actually a random connection that his sister had to a friend who was a Lebanese woman who ultimately connected the Goodwin family with the Lebanese government and a particular official, and Lebanese government was able to get Sam out. So, it was a real case of it takes thinking holistically and broadly about those types of people who might have the connections, who might be more trusted than the US government would be, and can actually implement the strategies to bring people home. And it wasn't it wasn't an easy process, right. At several points when we had leads and thoughts about this, the government dismissed us right. 

And it was very disheartening to be on the other side, having been in a senior role and having worked so hard on these policy reforms, and to see advice that I was given to this family that I knew was very good advice based on the best information, being dismissed by FBI agents and others, was really disheartening. And that's why I say it's some of this is going back to the original promise of what we're trying to do. That all information is helpful. We can sort what's valid and what's not. But we should not dismiss information because it's not coming from within the US government.

Diane: I totally agree with that. Luke, I think third party experts are critical. And I really feel you know, the work of Governor Richardson, the Richardson Center, there are many security people who are doing work behind the scenes and pro bono work because often, it is easier to act quickly. Like in the case of Sam Goodwin, when you know somebody and can connect the dots. That's how David Bradley's team and some Teach for America researchers helped identify a woman who helped Claire Gillis and Jimmy come out of Libya. That was also a person, no, relationship that made that happen. 

So, I totally agree with Luke about that. And then there's still some policy issues that we need to work on to. I feel that that we need to protect citizens when in fact they do come home, so that you know don't have put the undue burdens of taxes and other things too — hoops to jump through. And issues like the use of, in hostage taking, of possibly considering being creative about the use of tools. Like our governments not allowed to use ransom as lure to lure out captors in a hostage taking situation. We've had some hostage cases that have required much longer to resolve because we could not use all the tools. So, we need to have creativity and return on the promise, as Luke said, because these are our people. So, I thank you very much for listening to that. 

Paras: Thank you so much to both of you for joining the show for sharing your perspectives. We'll be continuing to track all of these issues at Just Security and feature your analysis. I highly recommend Diane's written piece to our listeners. We'll put it in the show notes. Thank you again to both of you. 

Viola: Thank you so much, both of you, really appreciate it. Thank you. 

Diane: Thank you for your time. Thank you, Luke, Viola and Paras. So appreciate you.

Luke: Thanks, Diane. Good to see you.

Paras: This episode was co-hosted and produced by me, Paras Shah and Viola Gienger, with help from Harrison Blank. 

Special thanks to Diane Foley and Luke Hartig. You can read all of Just Security’s coverage of the US hostage policy, including Diane's analysis on our website. 

If you enjoyed this episode, please give us a five star rating on Apple podcasts or wherever you listen.