"In the Room with Peter Bergen" transcript: Episode 46

In this episode: How Does the U.S. Government Get Detained Americans Home?

March 19, 2024

"In the Room with Peter Bergen" transcript: Episode 46

Episode 46: How Does the U.S. Government Get Detained Americans Home?

Almost immediately after Hamas attacked Israel, the U.S. began a well-coordinated, high-level, high-wire effort to free the Americans taken hostage. It wasn’t always like this. Until a few years ago, the U.S. had no effective approach to securing the release of its citizens held overseas. After multiple Americans died in captivity while the government flailed, their loved ones set out on a campaign to force change. This episode's guests are two of the top-ranking administration officials currently tasked with bringing Americans home and two women who, through their grief, got the U.S. to do better.

Please note: Our show is produced for the ear and made to be heard. Transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and may contain errors. Please check the audio before quoting in print.

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Roger Carstens: When the crisis kicked off...

ARCHIVAL Newscaster 1: …Palestinians from Gaza...

Roger Carstens: We pulled the team in quite quickly.

ARCHIVAL Newscaster 2: …a stunning and surprising attack on Israel…

Josh Geltzer: From the earliest hours, I think, at least earliest days...

ARCHIVAL Newscaster 2: …unprecedented in its scale.

Josh Geltzer: …it became pretty clear that there were a number of Americans, first of all, killed, tragically, but a number more who were being held as hostages.

ARCHIVAL Newscaster 3: American citizens are likely being held hostage by Hamas.

Roger Carstens: And I would say as early as 3:45 in the morning on the 9th of October, we had people in my office working the phones, trying to reach out to the families of anyone that we thought at that time or knew to be taken.

ARCHIVAL Newscaster 4: An American hostage situation potentially in one of the worst places in the world, the tunnels of Gaza.

Roger Carstens: We were night and day working the phones, trying to connect with all of them. We were really just trying to wrap our heads around everything going on to get a sense of who was in need, who are the people that were being held, who had them, anything that you might do in a typical situation like this.

That is Roger Carstens, the Special Envoy for Hostages at the State Department … he’s been on the front lines of U.S. efforts to release Americans being held — anywhere in the world — for four years.

And this is Josh Geltzer:

Josh Geltzer: I serve as Deputy White House Counsel and Legal Advisor to the National Security Council.

Almost immediately after the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7th, Geltzer got a call from the US National Security Advisor, telling him he would be one of two people to lead a cell at the White House tasked with getting the American hostages home.

Josh Geltzer: And from those earliest hours. It was a priority of the president. It was a priority of the National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan to make sure that we were doing everything we could in very, very challenging conditions; first of all, to support the families of those whose loved ones were being held, or at least unaccounted for, and to get them home.

Josh Geltzer and Roger Carstens are key players in releasing Americans who are being held abroad — whether by terrorists in places like Afghanistan, Syria, and Gaza … or by foreign governments holding them on dubious or trumped-up charges in countries like China, Russia, and Venezuela.

Diane Foley: Josh Geltzer has been extraordinary. There's no one I know who knows, the issues and the families and the human cost and the pain. Roger has been a gift to the enterprise in many ways. And I think one of the strengths has been that Rogers Carstens has been the special envoy for hostage affairs for over two administrations. And I think there's nothing like consistency with this issue.

Diane Foley hasn’t always spoken with such admiration for the U.S. officials tasked with bringing Americans home. When her son, Jim, was kidnapped by the terrorist group ISIS in Syria in 2012, there was no government infrastructure in place to help her as she and her family desperately tried to find out who had taken him and why.

Diane Foley: Nobody knew what to do with me. What do we do with this situation? It was nobody's job. People cared. They were kind, but they didn't know what to do.

Because hostage-taking is an international crime, an FBI agent was assigned to the Foley family. But that agent wasn’t plugged into a larger government effort to negotiate or to do anything effective to bring Jim home.

Diane Foley: FBI did send a young man to our home who was so green. He didn't know anything, never been to the Middle East, knew no Arabic, He just had no idea how to help. I just really felt very diminished as an American that, you know It just was so appalling for me as a proud American that we would have been treated the way we were treated.

Sarah Levinson: The State Department didn't know how to handle it.

When Sarah Levinson’s father, Robert, was taken by the Iranian regime in 2007, her family also felt frustrated by the lack of help from the US government.

Sarah Levinson: I remember my mom fighting with the State Department on a regular basis. It was scary. I was really young. I didn't know how to handle any of it. I felt helpless, and you didn't know who to trust because everybody was telling you something different.

Simply put, there was no one person in the government who was responsible for securing the release of Americans, and no one assigned to deal with their family members.

That's why Diane and Sarah took on the job of changing the way the United States goes about trying to free its citizens held overseas.

Diane Foley: So it's a total shift.

Sarah Levinson: And now it's doing good for so many other people.

One of those people: The basketball star Brittney Griner, who was imprisoned in Russia and sentenced to nine years to work in a penal colony for a very minor drug offense.

And also the American hostages who’ve been released so far from captivity in Gaza.

ARCHIVAL Newscaster 1: Nearly two weeks after they were taken at gunpoint by Hamas commandos, Judith and Natalie Raanan are free.

ARCHIVAL Newscaster 2: They're now safely at a military base in southern Israel and being reunited with their family.

Peter Bergen: There was a mother and a daughter, both from Chicago, who were released relatively early on in the conflict, which was within about two weeks of the first attack by Hamas on Israel. How did that come down, and what did that say to you?

Josh Geltzer: I think it was both a very good thing in and of itself, and we regarded it as something of, of a pilot, of a test, of whether these sorts of arrangements could be reached.

Today on the show: How does the US work to get Americans home? And the story of two women who, through their grief, forced the American government to do better.

I’m Peter Bergen, and this is In the Room.

[THEME MUSIC]

Over the years, I have often reported about Americans being held overseas. And I've gotten to know many of the people doing this work very well. People like Diane Foley.

Diane Foley: I was so clueless, Peter, about the risk that freelance journalists take; totally clueless.

Peter Bergen: So, just tell us about your son, Jim.

Diane Foley: The oldest of our five children. Fun loving, curious little boy. Once Jim found journalism, he just became incredibly passionate about it.

Peter Bergen: What did you say to Jim before he left, I mean, obviously he's an adult, makes his own decisions.

Diane Foley: Well, we all argued with him about it, you know, about returning to the front line. We all did. I mean, his good friends did, we did, but there was no turning him back. He said, “Mom, I found my passion. These people are counting on me. I mean, these stories have to be told. I'll be back for Christmas.’ I remember him saying that.

Jim stayed in regular touch with his family while on assignment in Syria. But when he didn’t call home to wish everyone a Happy Thanksgiving, Diane thought it was odd. The following day, two of his colleagues called to tell her that he hadn’t shown up where they’d agreed to meet.

Diane had been here before. In 2011, Jim was taken hostage by the regime of Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi... and those days were the longest of her life. He was released after 44 days in captivity. But it wasn’t the US government that got him out. It was a woman from Vermont who knew one of Gaddafi's sons who reached out to the regime on behalf of the Foley family. It worked.

This time around, Diane knew there was no magic answer to secure Jim’s release, but she did trust that the government had a plan.

Diane Foley: We were told by FBI not to talk to anybody, don't tell anybody that this has happened. So we did not, we, we didn't tell anybody what had happened. It went through Christmas, telling nobody but our closest family and friends.

But as the weeks and months ticked on with no news of Jim and her calls to people in the US government going nowhere, Diane felt like she needed to do something.

Diane Foley: I just felt we had to go public because we needed the help of journalists. Jim had disappeared. We had no idea where he was. We had no idea who had him. And that's when we had our first news conference to announce to anybody and beg anybody's help.

ARCHIVAL Diane Foley (at press conference): At this time, we're primarily appealing to the captors or, um, the people who have Jim for information, any information.

ARCHIVAL John Foley: We're gravely concerned about Jimmy's health, welfare, and safety. We miss him terribly. He's in our thoughts and our prayers every day.

Diane Foley: Michael, our second oldest son, received a rather cryptic kind of email from the captors that said that they were holding Jim. We want to negotiate and we'll send you three proof of life questions. Michael sent three questions that only Jim could answer and they came right back right on. And we knew they had him. So by November of 2013, we had found Jim, and we were so hopeful, Peter, so hopeful.

This seemed like an opening. An opportunity for the administration at the time — the Obama administration — to negotiate. And to make some progress in getting Jim freed.

Diane Foley: I remember having an opportunity to meet with Susan Rice at the White House because I'd met her in the UN.

Peter Bergen: Who was the National Security Advisor —

Diane Foley: Then. She had just become. And she was very kind to see me. And I gave her information from the captors about their emails. And so I brought all those to her and such and was very hopeful that our government was on it.

But nothing came of it. Jim’s captors had demanded a ransom … and the US has long had a policy of “no negotiations with terrorists,” meaning, effectively, no ransom payments. That’s a stance that many other countries don’t take. In fact, around the time Diane brought the ransom demands to the attention of the White House, about a dozen European hostages who were also being held by ISIS were freed, their ransoms reportedly having been paid.

[MUSIC]

Peter Bergen: And of course, unlike the United States and the United Kingdom who have a no negotiations policy, the Europeans are willing to pay ransoms and the Europeans who were taken by ISIS mostly were let go.

Diane Foley: Let go, I mean, they were negotiated for. It was very intentional. Obama went along with the US line that we don't negotiate with terrorists. We just don’t.

Peter Bergen: You probably recall, Diane, you know, New America, the research institution where I work, we in 2017 did a very deep dive, and we found that you are twice as likely to remain in prison or to be killed if you're an American citizen than if you're a European. The only other country that had similar outcomes but not quite as bad was the British who also have a no negotiations policy, which, and the no, no negotiations policy really started, as I understand it in the Nixon administration in the seventies. It was kind of almost an accidental thing that happened, and it wasn't like people ever really thought about it very carefully because obviously, I mean, just if somebody's taken, they're going to not wake up one morning and say, “Hey, I just, I'm having a good day. I'll just let this person go.” Clearly there has to be a negotiation and the captors have the, they have the upper hand, right? Did they make any specific demands for Jim?

Diane Foley: Oh, absolutely. They wanted a hundred million euro or all Muslim prisoners. And FBI just told me, Well, let's just keep talking. Just tell them that you're just an ordinary American citizen who has no power to do any of that. And our FBI was not allowed to engage at all. They just weren't. And so it was left to us as a family to try to engage with the captors.

Diane Foley: We trusted the government for most of that first year, but slowly, the the Spanish came out, the French came out and at that point, there was one individual, who told the truth and said, ‘You know, our government is not going to do a rescue mission, is not going to negotiate in any way to get your son out. And you will be prosecuted should you dare to raise a ransom.’

Peter Bergen: And this individual worked at the National Security Council at the White House during the Obama administration —

Diane Foley: And he was the only one who was really telling the truth, really. Everyone else just told us Jim was their highest priority. Very highest.

In fact, Jim didn’t seem to be the priority of anyone — high up in the government or otherwise. So, the Foley family was left to desperately guess at what might be the best strategy to get Jim out.

In defiance of the government’s threat, they started to raise money — eventually one million dollars — but they never heard back from ISIS. They also didn’t hear much from the US government. They felt shut out, helplessly in the dark, and neglected.

[MUSIC]

And then, Diane received the call that would change her life forever.

Diane Foley: An AP reporter called me, sobbing on the phone. She couldn't talk. And then, finally she said, ‘Look at Twitter,’ and hung up. So, we looked at Twitter and saw that horrific image of Jim with his head on his back. And we were all in incredible shock.

[QUIET MUSIC]

Diane Foley: It was just horrible, and then the president went on the air the next night to announce to the world that Jim had been murdered.

ARCHIVAL Barack Obama: Today the entire world is appalled by the brutal murder of Jim Foley by the terrorist group ISIL.

Diane Foley: It was just very unfortunate. I did see President Obama once. He still said to me that Jim was his highest priority. I couldn't believe that he would say that to me.

Jim Foley wasn’t the only American kidnapped by ISIS. And the Obama administration didn’t seem to have much of a plan. Not long after Jim’s murder, another three kidnapped Americans were killed: Steven Sotloff, Kayla Mueller, and Peter Kassig.

Diane Foley: And I just really felt — I knew we could do better, Peter, and President Obama knew it too.

Under pressure from Diane and family members of other hostages, President Obama finally acknowledged that the government could and should treat hostages and their families better. It was too late for the hostage families and their loved ones killed by ISIS, but Obama ordered a comprehensive review of hostage policy. Josh Gelter, who’s been working to get Americans held in Gaza out, worked on that review.

Josh Geltzer: The role that the families played in the course of that policy review, especially with some of them very fresh in their grief, but spending time — hours and hours — with government officials describing their experiences, talking about what went well, and in many cases what they felt didn't, and helping make things better for the families that they knew, somewhere in America would encounter this some day in the future if they hadn't already. It was extraordinary.

ARCHIVAL Barack Obama: I want to say publicly, that it is true that there have been times where our government has let them down. I promised them that we can do better. Here's how. Today, I'm formally issuing a new presidential policy directive to improve how we work to bring home American hostages and how we support their families.

Peter Bergen: What did it look like before it was kind of ad hoc and how did it look like afterwards?

Josh Geltzer: It did not have what was created, which was a number of dedicated bodies, dedicated entities around the government with the right experts sitting in the right rooms with the mandate to prioritize and focus on these issues.

The Obama administration created a new government infrastructure to deal with hostages and their families, prioritizing communication with family members and declassifying sensitive intelligence to share with them so they have access to what the government knows about their loved ones. And it created two dedicated offices — one at the FBI, called the Hostage Recovery Fusion Cell, to deal with terrorist abductions and one at the State Department, called the Special Presidential Envoy for Hostage Affairs.

But for all the improvements, the changes didn’t make any difference in the case of Robert Levinson, a former FBI agent, who had already been held captive for eight years. Not by a terrorist group, but by the government of Iran.

Sarah Levinson: He was larger than life. He was six foot four and always had a smile on his face. He would light up the entire room. Everybody migrated toward him. Everybody wanted to be around him. He had beautiful blue eyes that, you immediately trusted him and loved him. And he had a way of making everybody that he met feel special. So even though he had seven kids, we all felt like we were his favorite.

Sarah Levinson was 27 years old when her father disappeared.

Sarah Levinson: We didn't hear anything from him on his birthday, and that's very out of the ordinary for him. He had said he was going to be out of pocket to my mom for 24 hours and he'd call her when he was back in a place that he could call her. And when he didn't call her, she immediately called the lawyer that he had put her in touch with in case of something like this happening.

Levinson was detained in Iran while working as a contractor for the CIA. He had just retired from 22 years in the FBI.

Sarah Levinson: Mom was saying that he had been a contractor for the CIA. And the CIA was not taking claim for him having been a contractor, so there was the FBI saying, well, we have all of this intelligence saying he was, and the CIA saying, no, no, no. We would never do that. We would never have an FBI agent as a contractor. And so there was all this infighting and disagreement, and so we lost a lot of time because they were focusing on that instead of focusing on resolving his case diplomatically right away.

Just like the Foley family, the Levinsons felt abandoned. There was no one to call in the US government who could really help.

Around 2010, the Levinsons received hostage videos from Iran.

ARCHIVAL Newscaster 1: One of those videos that fills Americans with anger and horror, an American man pleading for help.

ARCHIVAL Bob Levinson (in video): I am not in very good health. I am running very quickly out of diabetes medicine.

And then, in 2011, they were also sent photos.

ARCHIVAL Newscaster: These are the latest images of Robert Levinson. The last proof of life, sent anonymously via email to Levinson's family….

That would be the last proof of life his family would get.

Sarah Levinson: He's wearing an orange jumpsuit, and his hands are chained, and he's holding up signs that are in broken English saying, help me. They're just hard to see because he's gaunt, and he was a jolly, like, little bit extra weight on him. He was always working on it. He'd always pat his belly and say, ‘Look, I lost some weight, Sarah.’ And to see him and how gaunt he is with no hair and his arms are so skinny, it's, it's haunting.

[MUSIC]

In March 2020 — with no proof of life for nearly a decade — Trump administration officials told the Levinsons they believed that Robert was dead.

ARCHIVAL Newscaster: The family says they've received information from U.S. officials that leads them to believe Levinson is no longer alive. They say they have no idea when he died….

Sarah Levinson: Even though we were told to accept his death, it's hard to accept something that you can't touch or feel or see. We were never able to talk to him. We had never been able to have any access to him. We have no answers whatsoever, and we still haven't had a funeral for him. I think that drove Congress to action. Because of how horrible it was, of what happened to our family and to my father, and how egregious it was that this could happen to an American.

The Congressional action that Sarah is talking about is the passage of the Levinson Act, named after her dad.

ARCHIVAL News coverage: The U.S. Senate has approved an act named after a former FBI agent from South Florida who was taken hostage in Iran.

When the Levinson Act passed, Americans were increasingly being taken not by terrorist groups but — like Robert Levinson — by governments that are rivals of the United States.

Prior to the Levinson Act, the US didn’t distinguish between Americans who actually had committed crimes in other countries and were being legitimately held accountable for them — and people who were being detained for political purposes.

The Levinson Act gave the State Department, for the first time, the tools and resources to designate Americans as “wrongfully detained”— meaning that they were being detained by another country only because they were Americans, not because they’d committed a crime. It also gave the Special Envoy for Hostage Affairs more leverage to pursue every diplomatic channel to get them out. That job is currently held by Roger Carstens. I went to see Roger recently.

Roger Carstens: We'll show you around.

He was more than happy to take me on a tour of his office, where the walls are lined with large photographs of recent success stories.

Roger Carstens: So we wanted families en route to the family room to see what the end state is. You know that this is hard, but I'm one day going to be on this wall. So this is our returns wall. So there's Jason Rezaian, you of course know this fine gentleman here, I'll just go fast up. Trevor Reed, Um, Mark Frerichs, that's on the plane ride back. Who was held by the Taliban. Yep, indeed. Paul Rusesabagina.

Peter Bergen: The Hotel Rwanda guy.

Roger Carstens: Right there. Yeah. Hotel Rwanda guy. Yep. And then this is Brittney Griner. There's Brittney.

I asked Roger what difference the Levinson Act has made.

Roger Carstens: When this office was set up, it was set up primarily to deal with hostages. And those are people taken by terrorist groups, but we didn't really have a game plan for dealing with what we call wrongful detentions. And that's people being taken by nation-states. So even though by hook or crook, we've been able to come up with ways of doing business, um, we still weren't really where we needed to be. And the Levinson Act, thankfully, gave us the resources and codified what we were trying to do on the wrongful detention side of the house, dealing with these nation-states.

Peter Bergen: And once you declare somebody's wrongfully detained, there's a bunch of things you could do that you couldn't do otherwise?

Roger Carstens: Absolutely.

Peter Bergen: What are they?

Roger Carstens: Well, let's say an American is arrested in, we'll say Russia. We may not know that that person's been wrongfully detained or not. So we have to, like, do the investigation to determine whether they're wrongfully detained. So the second a case is declared to be wrongful, it comes over to my desk. Now we're allowed to advocate on behalf of the United States government for their return, come up with ways and courses of action to, to get that return, and then actually conduct the negotiations to go about bringing their release.

Peter Bergen: And what, what is your leverage in those negotiations? Because typically you're dealing with countries we have either very bad relations or even no relations with.

Roger Carstens: It's different in every case. If a case hit my desk today, I would say within the next three or four days we would call a meeting down in a secure facility that goes up to top secret. We'd invite the CIA, Department of Defense, White House, Department of Justice, FBI, experts from the State Department, lawyers. We'd all go down in the room and we'd just try to throw everything about the case on the wall. And then come up with our specified tasks, implied tasks, limits, constraints, risks, risk management, and then build out course of action one, course of action two, course of action three. Try to determine what leverage we might have. The weaknesses and strengths of the negotiating partner that we might be dealing with. We determine who has them. Is it the Intelligence Services, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of Justice? And then we try to come up with the pathway that might get someone to cough up an American, essentially.

One wrongful detention that is well-known to many Americans is the case of Brittney Griner. She’s the Olympic champion and basketball player who traveled to Russia in early 2022 and was stopped at the airport for having a tiny amount of medically prescribed cannabis oil in her possession.

Roger Carstens: If you take a look at the Russian law, there's a certain amount of drugs essentially that you have to have in your possession in order to receive a certain sentence. And even though she didn't even come close to that, they gave her a very tough sentence. But this is one where I could say very vaguely that the Russians let us know right from the get-go that they are going to use Brittney Griner as leverage in negotiations. That she was going to be used as a bargaining chip.

And so the US bargained. Not for ransom, but for a trade.

ARCHIVAL Newscaster 1: Brittney Griner on her way home after the U. S. and Russia worked out a swap deal.

ARCHIVAL Newscaster 2: Her release was part of a prisoner swap for international arms dealer Viktor Bout.

ARCHIVAL Newscaster 3: He was serving a 25-year sentence for providing weapons and other materials to terrorist organizations.

Peter Bergen: She was exchanged for a notorious Russian arms dealer, Viktor Bout, who was held in an American prison. Was that a tough call?

Roger Carstens: You know, I think they're all tough calls. There were things that we did to try to mitigate the risk and to make sure that we understood the risk. The president asked to get a national security review, so the intelligence community was able to bring together an assessment as to what threat Viktor Bout would be should he be released. Would he go back into the arms trade business? Would he have a residual threat, maybe not to us, but those people that are our allies or to humanity writ large. And the assessment from the intelligence community was that that risk was low… but I can tell you that unless you're willing to make a bargain like that, you're basically writing these Americans off.

Peter Bergen: There's always a scene in the movies where there's a bridge and on one side of the bridge there's the... the prisoner who’s going to be released, and then on the other side of the bridge, the hostage sort of exchange happens, or the prisoner exchange happens. Is it anything like this in real life?

Roger Carstens: Strangely, it is.

ARCHIVAL Newscaster 1: A cloak and dagger prisoner exchange.

ARCHIVAL Newscaster 2: Griner released into U. S. custody on a tarmac in Abu Dhabi.

ARCHIVAL Newscaster 3: Griner and convicted arms dealer Viktor Bout walked towards one another and then headed to separate planes home.

Roger Carstens: It's not over until their loved one steps onto that tarmac. I've had that experience a few times to where I've been blessed to watch these people connect after not touching and hugging each other for eight years or five years, depending on which case. It's happening before you, but it's so intensely personal and intimate, you almost feel like you shouldn't be there. And I'm always blessed to have seen those things. But at the same time, you always feel like there are times I've averted my eyes because it's almost too beautiful to watch.

Peter Bergen: You were on the plane for 12 hours with her. What did you say to her?

Roger Carstens: You know, to my mind she woke up in a Russian prison, not sure what was going to happen that day. Or she probably thought she was going to go through her regular day in the prison. And instead she's led to a car, taken to an airplane, flown for a few hours. And so when she finally got in the U.S. plane, you know, I wanted to show some distance to let her collect her thoughts. And so I said, Brittney, you know, Ms. Griner, there's your chair. The President of the United States is going to be calling in about 5 or 10 minutes. Please relax. Feel free to collect yourself. We'll give you some time to, you know, give you some space so you can kind of go through your thoughts. And she said, ‘No, I really want to talk to people.”

And then she started moving right past me and said, who are these people? And started to introduce herself to every one of the crew one on one. I'll never forget how she would look each one in the eye and in a very short time frame connect with that person. You know, like, “Hey, I'm Brittney Griner. Who are you again?’ And she went one by one and talked to all the members of the crew. And when she was done, she sat down, took a short phone call from the president of the United States. And then again, I said, ‘Brittney, you probably want to gather your thoughts and kind of relax, maybe catch some sleep.’

And she said, no, I want to talk. I've been listening to Russian for the last few months and I wouldn't mind just chatting and talking about what I've been through and what's going on. And we spent — of a 17 hour flight, we probably spent 12 of those hours just talking about what she went through, current events, basketball. I mean, pretty much everything.

Peter Bergen: How did that make you feel?

Roger Carstens: I've had the chance in this job and some others to meet some fascinating people. World-class journalists and authors like yourself, who by the way, for the listeners, Peter was once my boss, my best boss ever. Everything I do, I've learned from him. But I've had the chance to to meet leaders of foreign countries, generals, um, you know, rock stars, senior officials, and I can say that I don't think I've ever met anyone who was more self-aware, more humble, more interested in the people around her than Brittney Griner. She's 32 years old, and I would count her as one of the most amazing people I've ever met.

While Griner’s release was cause for celebration, it was also bittersweet. Another American that Roger was working to free — a former marine who’s been detained in Russia on specious charges of espionage since 2018, was NOT coming home. His name is Paul Whelan.

Roger Carstens: We weren't able to include Paul in this deal because of the Russians insistence that it was a one for one that only would include Brittney Griner.

Peter Bergen: How did you communicate that to the Whelan family? Must have been a tough-

Roger Carstens: It was, it was. We sent my deputy, I think like probably 36 hours before the swap, to go see Elizabeth Whelan, Paul's sister, and tell her we were not getting Paul Whelan back on this trip, how the deal came about, why the deal did not include Paul. Personally, the toughest part was when Paul Whelan called me from Russia. He has 15 minute blocks. I spent two 15 minute blocks with him. I said, ‘Paul, it kills me to tell you this, but we just couldn't get the Russians to come up with a two for two deal. We tried. And at the end of the day, we, we had one deal, Brittney for Viktor Bout.’

Roger Carstens: Paul, at the very end of it, with a very even voice, he said, ‘This is a great day for Brittney Griner, this is a great day for Brittney's family, and this is a great day for the United States of America.’

Peter Bergen: And now, an additional complication is the Wall Street Journal reporter, Evan Gershkovich, who has been taken by the Russians and they've accused him completely, completely spuriously that he's also a spy, which makes it very tough. Obviously, when they charge somebody with espionage, it's much worse. Brittney Griner was, you know, accused of a crime that involved minor amounts of drugs. So, A, both of these gentlemen have been accused of being spies, which makes no sense, but that's what they've been accused of. And then B, Putin's invaded Ukraine; our relations with Russia are probably at the worst they've been since, like, the Cuban missile crisis, or certainly for a long time. So how does that make your job harder?

Roger Carstens: I found that when, no matter how bad it is, whether it's, our country being at loggerheads with the Venezuelans, having no diplomatic relations with the Syrians, being in a very tight spot with Russia, countries are still willing to engage and talk.

Josh Geltzer: It is true that the countries, the government's wrongfully detaining Americans tend to be ones with whom we are not getting along in a range of ways…

Josh Geltzer again.

Josh Geltzer: ... and indeed, we've penalized on a range of bases.

Peter Bergen: And in some cases may not even have diplomatic relationships with.

Josh Geltzer: Correct. So if you look at places we've been fortunate to bring Americans home from through a lot of hard work in the past few years. You're looking at Russia. You're looking at Venezuela. You're looking at Iran. And of course it is a vicious cycle in which this obviously makes our relations with them even worse because, uh, this is an appalling practice that the government should not be engaged in. That said, no matter how bad our relations are, we will work out something like this if we can, because that's what we owe it to Americans, to bring them home.

I was curious to know how the US deals with its citizens who are detained by more friendly countries, and so I asked Roger Carstens.

Peter Bergen: Are there any wrongfully detained Americans held by the Saudis?

Roger Carstens: There are not.

Peter Bergen: Does that sort of point to a kind of like, we tend to put these wrongful detention labels on countries where we don't have diplomatic relations, Because, I mean, there are clearly some Americans or dual nationals being held in Saudi Arabia that I - By my standards, I mean, there's a guy who got sentenced for a tweet.

ARCHIVAL News coverage: Saudi Arabia sentencing an American citizen to 16 years in prison, and doing that for tweets that he wrote when he was in the United States,

Peter Bergen: He's in his 70s, um, and he, I think he's a dual national. So, if a country is more friendly to the United States, does a wrongful detention determination, um, become less likely? Are there any countries that are somewhat friendly to the United States where you've come with a wrongful detention determination or are they always in the Iran, Russia, China, sort of Cuba, North Korea bucket?

Roger Carstens: Maybe this is the best way to say it. The goal is to have a non-political process to where it's really the facts of the case and the criteria, And in fact, that's probably a reason why my office was created. I think Congress felt that if this was left to people who had more bilateral or regional or political perspectives, we would have zero wrongful detentions. And so, since we've had a pretty good caseload, I think you can, the conclusion I'd draw is that we've done a pretty good job of like pushing the political perspectives out and just taking a look at a case on its merits.

[MUSIC]

Whether the Americans in captivity are being wrongfully detained by a hostile government or held hostage by a terrorist group, negotiations are often complex. But the negotiations to release the Americans still being held by Hamas in Gaza may be among the most complicated ever.

After all, the Americans are being held in a very active war zone, and the US government has no direct dealings with Hamas, a terrorist organization. Here’s Josh Geltzer again. He advises the president on hostages.

Josh Geltzer: It’s extraordinarily complicated.

Peter Bergen: You've been involved in, hostage recovery enterprise for many, many years. And so you were tapped to, along with Brett McGurk, who's the top Middle East envoy in the administration, to kind of be the cell that would direct this effort to get the Americans out, the ones that are being held hostage by Hamas. Forty Americans dead.

Josh Geltzer: Approximately.

Peter Bergen: And then 10 taken hostage. I mean, obviously Hamas didn't intend it to be an anti American attack, but that de facto sort of has become that.

Josh Geltzer: I think we in government absolutely feel it that way, and it's our responsibility to. You have Americans dead, you have Americans held hostage, of course, you have more Americans who were injured in, in the course of the attack. That is a terrorist attack against Israel, but also against the United States and against other nationalities and countries of the world.

Peter Bergen: When you're in the room discussing this with the president, without getting into details of what you discuss, I mean like what is the, put us in the room, what's the atmosphere like?

Josh Geltzer: There's discussion of the latest intelligence reporting at times. There's discussion of the latest diplomatic conversations about resolving cases. There's discussions of how are the families doing, how are they holding up, are we sure we're being responsive to them, uh, and there's discussion of kind of the fundamental humanity. How long has it been? What do we know about the conditions in which they're being held based on the reports from others who've been released? And that’s all in the room at the same time.

[MUSIC]

Peter Bergen: You've been doing this for how long?

Roger Carstens: Uh, just shy of four years now.

Peter Bergen: Okay. So, I mean, cause even every negotiation is very complicated because you're usually dealing with people that the United States government doesn't deal directly with, but I mean, this one seems particularly complicated because various players at the table, include the Israelis, obviously, and Hamas, but also Qatar that is facilitating this and Egypt that is facilitating this to some degree. And then you've got the Hamas political leadership in Doha, and then you've got the Hamas military leadership in Gaza who are fighting a very active war. And then you've got Palestinian Islamic Jihad, which is another terrorist group that may be holding some of the hostages, and even criminal gangs, because it's still not clear completely who's holding— So, you have so many different people who can veto, and also the communication problems, presumably, between Doha and the military leadership are all 60 foot underground in tunnels, you know, trying to conduct a war against the Israelis. Give us a sense of the complications here as you understand them, and am I, am I right that this is super complicated compared to almost anything you've dealt with?

Roger Carstens: So, yeah, the level of complexity, it's definitely at the PhD level. You know, on a scale of 1 to 100, it's, it's banging out 99 in terms of the complexity. You did a masterful job of kind of outlying, all the stakeholders and the various points of friction. So there is a lot of friction here. There's a lot of distance. There are a lot of communication obstacles.

Less than two weeks into the crisis, there was a first success.

ARCHIVAL News coverage: A mother and daughter from just outside of Chicago, Judith and Natalie Renan, are the hostages that have been freed today by Hamas.

Peter Bergen: Judith and Natalie Renan from Chicago who were released earlier, did you see that as sort of a roadmap? I mean, a proof of concept that this channel is going to work?

Josh Geltzer: I think the answer is that getting two Americans out was a huge relief and um, in the circumstances, felt like a huge accomplishment in and of itself and obviously a huge relief for the two of them and their families. And because we knew there were more Americans at that point, or at least believed there to be more, it was also a way to see whether all that we worked so hard to put in motion up to that point could be made real, that the negotiations were real, that the release was, was real, that the logistics worked and they came out.

Roger Carstens: You called it a proof of concept, and that's exactly what it was.

Peter Bergen: When you went into it, were you thinking this is a proof of concept or just that's the result?

Roger Carstens: It was being thought of as a proof of concept. They'd established communications with the right people, everything from phone communications to face to face communications. Because you can imagine there are higher level diplomatic talks that were, were being conducted at the time, by the most senior people in our government, certainly, Director Burns of the CIA, the Secretary of State, Tony Blinken, the President of the United States were all very much involved in trying to ensure that these negotiations were being conducted, that, people were trying to clear paths for greater communication, and then you had people like Brett McGurk, of course, flying from place to place trying to ensure that there was connectivity and that the negotiation was up and running and going in the right direction. And also the Israeli government, the government of Qatar and Egypt, and the details still had to be executed by people that were a little farther down the food chain. And I think, part of making sure that the proof of concept would function was making sure that people, at more of the tactical level in the Israeli government could call, for example, the ICRC.

Peter Bergen: The International Committee of the Red Cross.

Roger Carstens: The Red Cross. Yes, sir. And talk them through where they thought the pickups were going to be conducted. What the timeline was.

Peter Bergen: Because they would be …

Roger Carstens: The ones actually driving vehicles into Gaza to pick people up and then bringing them back to the border for transfer over to the Israelis. And, to really break it down, the negotiation at the end of the day is between Hamas and the Israeli government. Everyone else, Egypt, Qatar, the United States, we're doing our best to facilitate and set the conditions so that the terms can be met by both sides and we can ultimately get a release.

Roger mentioned the government of Qatar, a tiny, oil-rich monarchy in the Persian Gulf. It’s played a major role in the release of hostages from Gaza, and it’s also helped get Americans out before; some who were being held by the Taliban in Afghanistan and Americans imprisoned in Iran. Qatar is also where key political leaders of Hamas live, and the negotiations went through this channel.

Peter Bergen: The role of Qatar, what are they bringing to the table that makes them successful?

Roger Carstens: I think, in addition to knowing all the players and all the stakeholders quite well, um, they have entrée that we just don't have.

There are people and organizations on earth that when the United States speaks to them it's going to be a more challenging conversation just because of not only cultural differences, maybe language differences, ideological differences. But there might just be some tension and animosity that's hard to cut through. And I think in Qatar trying to pull all these audiences together, they've been able to breach that and bring these organizations together in a way that allows this communication to be well facilitated. So picture, it's not going to be, for example, Israel and Hamas in the same room with Qatar in the middle, you know, talking. It's going to be much more distant than that.

Peter Bergen: Well, how does it work? I mean, put us in the room for that.

Roger Carstens: Well, this is the great part. I get to say I've not been in that room because it's been conducted at such high levels. And I wouldn't want to get too much into mechanics either.

Peter Bergen: Okay. But without getting in the mechanics, obviously on the Iranian side or the Taliban side, you've been in the room with the Qataris and what are they, you're not sitting down with your Taliban counterpart, having tea. To the extent you can say it works without getting into any details that you don't want to talk about. I mean, I think people would be interested to know.

Roger Carstens: They would be extremely interested to know. And I'm dying to tell you, but I probably will not. [laughs]

[MUSIC]

Peter Bergen: This seems like there's a lot of emotional toll for the job, and also it must be very rewarding. Yeah. Is it more toll than rewarding? Because, I mean, these cases go on for years.

Roger Carstens: Oh, they do. Yeah, if you're doing it for the reward, it's probably, you don't see those enough in order to get another charge. You have to be fueled by something else. Because for the most part, you know, we go to bed having failed. Like I go to bed every night, failing 30 plus families. I didn't get their loved ones home. And I have to talk to these families all the time, so I can't hide from them. So you have to be able to get up every morning and, and start it all over again.

[MUSIC]

Diane Foley: It's just an incredible ordeal that I wouldn't wish on any, any family.

Diane Foley continues to work tirelessly on this issue. So does Sarah Levinson:

Sarah Levinson: We have to stop it from happening in the future.

They are trying to educate the public about the dangers of traveling to countries where Americans are being detained. They meet with and advise family members of currently detained hostages, and they lobby Congress on behalf of hostages and their families.

There is now a national hostage awareness day, on March 9th – the day Sarah’s father was taken – and also a hostage flag, a reminder to all Americans that there are countries who seek to take Americans for diplomatic leverage.

Sarah Levinson: We have this great flag that, much in the spirit of the POW MIA flag, is meant to bring awareness to this issue. We've got people who are excited to travel to every country in the world, not realizing the great risks that they're putting themselves and their families at by doing it and the flag is meant to be a reminder of that.

Since the Levinson Act passed four years ago, 45 Americans have been released from captivity from countries like Iran, Russia, and Venezuela.

[MUSIC]

Peter Bergen: A lot of other mothers come to you for help and advice when their loved ones are taken. I mean, what do you say to them?

Diane Foley: So with families, I found the best thing is to be available, to walk with them, listen to them, and persevere with them. Because it's often years, it's really a poignant, difficult journey.

Diane has just come out with a book about how she helped to force change in a government that couldn't save her son Jim.

Diane Foley: The book is called American Mother, and I've wanted to tell this story for 10 years, but my family just wasn't…it is a parent's worst nightmare to lose your beloved child, you know? People will find themselves in my story because I think all people lose loved ones, and so my loss of Jim is not unique. I'm just hoping that others will find some healing in their journey of grief and loss, too.

If you are interested in hearing more about the stories and issues we discussed in this episode we recommend American Mother by Diane Foley and Colum McCann; and We Want to Negotiate by Joel Simon and News of a Kidnapping by Gabriel García Márquez, which are available on Audible.

CREDITS:

IN THE ROOM WITH PETER BERGEN is an Audible Original.

Produced by Audible Studios and FRESH PRODUCE MEDIA.

This episode was produced by Tresha Mabile.

With help from Holly Demuth.

Our field producer was Ellen Rolfes.

Special thanks to Sarah Moriarty Levinson.

Our executive producer is Alison Craiglow.

Katie McMurran is our technical director.

Our staff also includes

Alexandra Salomon

Erik German