Dec 13

Dec 13 Some lessons from hostage negotiations with barbarians By James Bruno

When my daughter, a Tulane sophomore, told us she planned to apply for a study abroad program in Shanghai, I was elated, but I also shuddered. Not out of concern for her safety. Child of a diplomat, she was born overseas and already a veteran globetrotter by the time she finished kindergarten. My concern was for my own safety while visiting her in China. But COVID scotched her plans, and my anxiety eased.

The reason for my nervousness may sound exceedingly paranoid, but having been seized at gunpoint and incarcerated twice in my diplomatic career, I was understandably skittish. And I had friends among the Iran embassy hostages. In 2018, the Chinese scooped up two innocent Canadians and jailed them on trumped up charges in reaction to Canada’s having arrested a senior Huawei executive at Washington’s request, for having violated economic sanctions against Iran. One was a former diplomat — hardly a coincidence. PRC police arrested the Canadians nine days after the Huawei executive was detained by Ottawa. All were released on the same day three years later in a swap agreement.

What if, while visiting my daughter in China, some contretemps between our countries drove Beijing to decide to scoop up an ex-U.S. government official to be a bargaining chip? Enter yours truly. Why not?

China is one of those countries where the rule of law is highly selective. Another is Russia, where we saw a similar hostage drama play out in the release of basketballer Brittney Griner in exchange for arms trafficker Viktor Bout. Griner was arrested for possessing less than a gram of medically prescribed hash oil for which she was sentenced to nine years. Bout was convicted in the U.S. in 2011 for aiding terrorists and conspiring to kill American citizens, for which he was sentenced to 25 years in prison. Griner, in the wrong place at the wrong time, was a convenient bargaining chip. As are two other innocent Americans in Russian custody: Paul Whelan and Marc Fogel, convicted in a kangaroo court for spying and marijuana possession, respectively. President Biden has come under harsh criticism for agreeing to this blatantly uneven prisoner exchange.

Hostage negotiating is exceptionally thorny, complex and fraught with unpredictability.

The Griner-Bout swap was agreed to only after months of dickering with Moscow. The Russians have been clamoring for Bout’s release incessantly since his arrest. As part of a multi-person swap, they also wanted us to lean on the German government to release a Russian serial assassin who is serving a life sentence for murder — a clear no-go. Into their bargain chip bag Moscow tossed Paul Whelan, Marc Fogel and Griner. It’s a ploy practiced by barbarian warlords for millennia. Seize another nation’s innocents to swap for your career criminals. It’s a one-sided game democracies do not and cannot play.

I was directly involved in two cases to free captive Americans during my years as a diplomat. A young American man was taken into custody by the communist authorities of one country where I served. Our intelligence enabled us to track where the captive was being held and by whom, which enabled us to pressure the authorities to release him, which they ultimately did. The lesson here is to have good intelligence.

The second incident involved a young American aid worker seized by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. This murderous guerrilla movement had assassinated a dozen other foreign aid workers. I worked patiently with the young woman’s NGO employer and Cambodian authorities in carrying out indirect negotiations with the KR commander who held the American. An embassy officer and I donned flak jackets and helmets when we traveled via armored vehicle to the remote locale where the hostage was held. We also had to intercede urgently with the prime minister at one point to get him to call off a military assault that likely would have resulted in the hostage’s murder. The young woman was eventually released in return for development aid from her employer. She was the only KR hostage to survive. The other foreigners were killed in captivity, at least some victims of their own governments’ ineptitude. Here the lesson is to establish channels of communication, keep them active, reach a level of rapport, and not spook the hostage-takers.

I find the criticism leveled at the Biden administration to be unfair. Yes, the swap was grossly uneven. But the reality is that so many groups — sports, LGBT, African-American, the news media — had applied so much pressure on the White House that the latter was forced to make concessions. It was a political call. For their part, the Russians played a cunning game. They swept up guiltless Americans, threw the book at them with bloated charges, then cunningly played on the American public’s emotions by applying more pain on their prisoners by sending them to gulag hard labor camps and leaking information on their deteriorating conditions, which the U.S. media reported on in great detail. It’s a modern play on the barbarian warlords of yore practice of boring tongues and yanking finger nails.

So, the lesson in this instance is that politics and public pressure can steer hostage negotiations in a direction that is disadvantageous to our side, but at least solves one case. As for the others, it’s back to the drawing board. The State Department has an office, headed by a special envoy, which works on these cases full-time.

The State Department reportedly doesn’t have reliable figures on how many Americans were residing in Russia before the war, or currently remain. But there are scores of American athletes still working there, so one can extrapolate the number is likely at least in the hundreds — every one of them a potential official hostage. They remain in Russia despite the State Department’s travel advisory urging all U.S. citizens to neither travel to nor stay there.

As long as they do, U.S. diplomats will be kept busy for the indefinite future working to spring innocent compatriots from unjust incarceration.

James Bruno (@JamesLBruno) served as a diplomat with the U.S. State Department for 23 years and is currently a member of the Diplomatic Readiness Reserve. An author and journalist, Bruno has been featured on CNN, NBC’s Today Show, Fox News, Sirius XM Radio, The Washington Post, Christian Science Monitor, Huffington Post, and other national and international media.