Within the terror dynamic, there was one, specific, horrifying risk that emerged with Daniel Pearl in Pakistan, spread to Iraq, then to Afghanistan as that conflict intensified, then to Syria, once the jihadi rebels gained the upper hand, with flare-ups in other hot spots like Somalia, Yemen, and Mali. That risk is the institutionalized and now ritualized kidnapping, featuring hostage videos to exert political influence and secure ransom—and, if things went badly, the grisly execution. The actual number of journalist kidnappings is relatively small, although this is impossible to calculate precisely since many are kept secret. But their effect has been profound. Kidnappings have served in some instances as a vital source of revenue for militant organizations, helping sustain conflict. They have garnered significant publicity and attention for militant causes. And like all effective terror operations, they have had a profound emotional and psychological effect, changing the way that journalists operate.
As noted in the last chapter, journalist kidnappings are not a new phenomenon. Up to and including the Pearl case, the standard response was to use the power of the media itself to put pressure on the perpetrators to release their hostage. That strategy worked so long as those holding the journalist were affected by the negative publicity. But this logic was subverted by the Pearl case, in which publicity had no effect on the outcome and only served to draw attention to the kidnappers’ message. In other instances, intensive publicity drove up ransom demands. In recent years, the pendulum has swung to the other extreme. Now, many cases of journalists’ kidnappings are not reported at all. The controversial practice is known as a media blackout.
The media strategy for responding to journalists’ kidnappings developed over years through trial and error without ever being formalized. The discussion among media organizations about how best to respond to kidnappings began in the summer of 2004 following the abduction of the filmmaker Micah Garen.1 Garen was captured in the southern Iraqi city of Nasiriyah along with his translator Amir Doshi. The two were working on a documentary about the looting of archaeological sites and were accosted while filming gun dealers in the Nasiriyah market. They were trundled into a car and driven to the local office of the Mahdi Army, a militia that had formed in the Shiite slums of Baghdad in the aftermath of the U.S. invasion and grown into a formidable military organization with ties to the criminal underworld.
At the time of the Garen kidnapping, the Mahdi Army was engaged in a fierce confrontation with U.S. forces in the holy city of Najaf, and its leader Muqtada al-Sadr was pinned down with his fighters inside the Iman Ali Shrine. Perhaps because of the ongoing fighting, the Mahdi Army representative in Nasiriyah refused to take custody of the journalists. Angered at being rebuffed by Sadr’s representative after delivering a person they believed to be an “American spy,” the kidnappers drove Garen and Doshi to a remote hiding place they had fashioned in a cluster of date palms. As they rode in the car a young man wearing rectangular glasses reassured Garen in English: “Don’t worry, we are not Zarqawi. If you are innocent, everything will be OK.”
Garen’s family, friends, and colleagues who had gathered in New York knew none of these details and were haunted by the specter of the Pearl killing. In fact, they reached out to Pearl’s mother Ruth in California, who told them she was praying for Micah. “You need to keep positive,” she counseled. Garen’s girlfriend, Marie-Hélène Carleton, was besieged by the media and tormented over the decision of whether to launch the kind of public campaign that had been attempted in the Pearl case.
Soon word spread through Nasiriyah, eventually reaching Doshi’s family, that the abduction was linked to the Mahdi Army. The information was reassuring because Sadr and the Shiite religious leaders in Nasiriyah did not have a history of kidnapping journalists and might be vulnerable to public pressure.
But then things took a bizarre and unsettling turn. On August 18, the kidnappers released a video of Garen surrounded by four masked men holding automatic weapons and rocket-propelled grenade launchers. As Garen looked straight into the camera, one of his kidnappers read a statement saying that Garen would be executed if the U.S. forces did not pull out of Najaf within forty-eight hours. The group identified itself as the Martyr’s Brigade, and the video iconography was borrowed from the al-Qaeda playbook. But the fact that the kidnappers were calling for a U.S. pullout from the Shiite religious city of Najaf seemed to confirm that, as Garen’s kidnappers had told him earlier, this was not an al-Qaeda operation.
The challenge was to figure out how to convince Sadr and the Mahdi Army leadership that harming Garen and Doshi would undermine their political goals. The media became a key component of this strategy. At a time when Sadr himself was under siege in Najaf, the murder of a Western journalist would have helped the United States further vilify him and rally support for the military assault. Making a humanitarian gesture, on the other hand, could undermine that effort, allowing Sadr to demonstrate that while he was willing to fight to protect the interest of the Shiite population of Iraq, his struggle was principled.
On August 19, Garen’s family gave an interview to Arabic-language satellite channels, making clear that while they did not hold Sadr responsible for the kidnapping, they were asking for his help in ending it. The following day, Sadr himself, still in hiding in Najaf, released his own written statement on his letterhead. It read, “From the lips of Sheik Muqtada himself, let him go within forty-eight hours and do not harm him.” Garen and Doshi were soon brought to the Sadr office in Nasiriyah, where they were formally released. A week later, on August 27, the U.S. military agreed to a ceasefire, allowing Sadr and his men to vacate the Imam Ali Shrine in Najaf peacefully.
In early November 2004, Garen and his then-fiancée Carleton visited CPJ’s offices to discuss their ordeal. Garen agreed that the use of the media was crucial to the successful outcome in his case and that in principle publicly affirming that a kidnapping victim is in fact a journalist can help dispel suspicion that he is a spy. He pointed out that his kidnappers had access to high-speed Internet and satellite television, which they monitored constantly. He was wary of emotional public appeals, which he believed were unlikely to have much of an effect on the kidnappers.
The Birth of the Blackout
While the media strategies became more sophisticated following the Garen case, the first attempt to impose a media blackout did not come until more than a year later, when the Christian Science Monitor correspondent Jill Carroll was abducted in Baghdad. Gunmen commandeered Carroll’s car while she was on her way to interview a Sunni politician and executed her translator on the spot. Word of Carroll’s kidnapping spread quickly among journalists in Baghdad, but her editors at the Monitor asked that media organizations withhold any coverage of the abduction. Their argument was that Carroll might be lying, denying to her kidnappers that she was a journalist for example, and media coverage might blow her cover. Monitor editors were also hoping that a blackout might somehow facilitate a quick negotiation for Carroll’s release. After a few days, journalists grew uncomfortable withholding vital news, and the Monitor agreed to release a statement acknowledging Carroll’s abduction.
In the end Carroll spent eighty-two days in captivity.2 She was forced to make about a dozen videos, but only four of them were made public by the kidnappers. Meanwhile, the Monitor organized a media campaign calling for Carroll’s release. While taking a relatively low-key approach in the United States, they sought to use local Iraqi media to paint Carroll as a friend of Iraq. It is not clear what role, if any, the media campaign played in the eventual decision to release Carroll. One of her captors’ key demands was the release of Iraqi women held at the Abu Ghraib prison, of which there were only a handful. On January 26, the U.S. military released five female detainees, along with some 450 male prisoners. While the U.S. military insisted this was not done in response to Carroll’s kidnapping, it did, as Carroll herself later noted, make it “harder to justify killing me.”
In the aftermath of the Carroll kidnapping, international news bureaus in Iraq once again beefed up their security, and journalists limited their movements. To give one example, the New York Times bureau in Baghdad in 2006 consisted of “two houses with blast walls on all sides with crosshatched machine guns on the roof, forty-five armed guards, and three armored cars at a cost of about $250,000 each,” according to the correspondent Dexter Filkins.3 Describing conditions at the time, he noted: “We have at least one security advisor there all the time, and he’s about $1,000 a day. Sometimes we have two. We haven’t been able to, for some time really, go anywhere outside of Baghdad, and most of Baghdad is increasingly off limits to us, and increasingly off limits to our Iraqi staff, who would ordinarily be able to go out there. And so your circle just gets smaller and smaller every day.”
Captive in Afghanistan
As a result of this kind of increased security, kidnappings of journalists declined in Iraq. The cost to newsgathering was high, but under the circumstances media organizations had few options. However, in Afghanistan, the situation was different. There, a relatively freewheeling media culture came up against a dramatically deteriorating security environment, resulting in a spate of new abductions. Journalists and other Westerners were targeted by both the Taliban and criminal organizations seeking to extract ransom.
One of the most devastating kidnappings took place in March 2007, when Taliban fighters nabbed the Italian journalist Daniele Mastrogiacomo and his assistant Ajmal Naqshbandi. The two had traveled to Helmand province for a prearranged interview with a legendary Taliban leader named Mullah Dadullah, who had lost a leg in the fight against the Soviets. While Naqshbandi had successfully arranged numerous Taliban interviews, there was always a risk, and this time things went terribly wrong. The entire interview was a trap. Mastrogiacomo later realized that Mullah Dadullah had orchestrated his abduction.
Throughout the five-week kidnapping, the Taliban used the media and the threat of violence masterfully to achieve their objectives and inflict the maximum amount of political damage on the government of President Hamid Karzai. Several days after snatching Mastrogiacomo and Naqshbandi, the kidnappers beheaded their driver Sayed Agha. The videotaped murder—replete with fighters gloating as the executioner wiped the bloody knife on his tunic—was aired on Italian television and also featured Mastrogiacomo pleading for his life. It so shocked and terrified the Italian public that Prime Minister Romano Prodi, his governing coalition shaky, put tremendous pressure on Karzai to capitulate to the captors’ demands and release Taliban prisoners including Mullah Dadullah’s brother. Prodi knew that an execution video featuring Mastrogiacomo could have easily led to the collapse of his government, and Karzai knew such a scenario could lead in turn to the withdrawal of the 1,800 Italian troops stationed in Afghanistan at the time. This was no doubt a factor in Karzai’s calculations.
Mastrogiacomo was released on March 19 in exchange for five Taliban prisoners, but the Taliban captors held on to Naqshbandi, demanding the release of two more. On April 6, President Karzai went on television to declare he would not negotiate and described the deal for Mastrociacomo’s release as “an extraordinary situation that won’t be repeated again.” Two days later, the Taliban announced that they had beheaded Naqshbandi. Anger at Naqshbandi’s execution was directed at Karzai rather than the Taliban, and Afghan journalists took to the street to protest what they saw as a standard that placed a higher value on the life of a Westerner. In the documentary The Fixer, a former Taliban militant asserted that the order to execute Naqshbandi came from the Taliban’s Pakistani backers, who saw an opportunity to weaken Karzai and advance their own strategic interests.4
In the aftermath of the Mastrogiacomo kidnapping, requests for media blackouts became more or less routine. There were exceptions. For example, when the BBC correspondent Alan Johnston was kidnapped in Gaza in March 2007, the British broadcasting network launched a highly effective global campaign that put pressure on the Hamas government to secure his release. Johnston was freed after 114 days in captivity. But there was also a clear consensus that if the kidnapping were carried out by an al-Qaeda-inspired group or even a criminal organization, then publicity was unhelpful. In the worst-case scenario, publicity increased the emotional toll the kidnappers could inflict through a videotaped execution, as had occurred in the Pearl case. Media coverage was also likely to fuel street protests and rallies calling for the journalists’ release, which had no effect on the kidnappers but put pressure on governments to resolve the case, which in the European context generally meant paying ransom.
As someone who was in regular touch with media organizations to provide counsel when journalists were kidnapped, I also observed that they were increasingly relying on professional security companies. These companies systematized the response—setting up command centers, rotating staffing, keeping families informed, liaising with governments, and in some cases carrying out ransom negotiations with the kidnappers. While media organizations were conflicted about media blackouts because they sought to balance their essential responsibility to report the news with a desire to help their colleagues, security contractors experienced no such conflict. Their only obligation was to their client. Media coverage, they believed, could complicate sensitive negotiations and increase ransom demands. They also believed that managing media and responding to journalists’ queries was a tremendous distraction during a period of crisis. Unless there was a specific objective to be achieved through the media, they believed, it was better to keep things quiet.
This was the dynamic that played out during the October 2008 kidnapping of the Canadian reporter Mellissa Fung, who was abducted while traveling to a refugee camp just outside Kabul. Her employer, the CBC, immediately requested there be no media coverage, a request that was honored for the twenty-eight days of her captivity. Fung was held in deplorable conditions, kept in a dank hole, denied adequate food, and sexually abused. Her kidnappers, led by two brothers, were not insurgents but rather common criminals who wanted a ransom payment; they did not have explicit political demands, nor did they make a video. In fact, Fung later reported, they did not even have a video camera. Fung was released after Afghan officials identified the kidnappers and detained their relatives, essentially orchestrating a hostage exchange that won the reporter her freedom.5
One of the most sustained and sophisticated media blackouts involved the New York Times journalist David Rohde, who was abducted in Afghanistan in November 2008 along with his fixer Tahir Ludin and their driver Asadullah Mangal.6 Rohde, who had taken a leave from the newspaper to work on a book project, had arranged an interview with a Taliban leader he knew as Abu Tayyeb. Again, the interview was a trap. After being captured, Rohde, Ludin, and Mangal were marched across the border to Pakistan, where they were held for seven months, mostly in the town of Miranshah in North Waziristan.
The Times, in consultation with Rohde’s wife Kirsten Mulvihill and the Rohde family, immediately requested a complete news blackout, which they actively enforced during the entire seven months of the captivity. The original motivation for the blackout was an early request from the kidnappers that there be no media attention. At some point, the kidnappers had a change of heart, producing a series of videos of Rohde that they hoped to get on al-Jazeera. In fact, according to Mulvihill in the book she coauthored with Rohde called A Rope and a Prayer, al-Jazeera purchased the tape for an “undisclosed amount” and even aired a short teaser. Al-Jazeera agreed not to air the tape only after the Times’s executive editor Bill Keller called the station’s top brass in Doha to make a personal appeal.7 Al-Jazeera’s failure to put the video on the air apparently frustrated the Taliban captors, who, according to Rohde, saw the media as a tool they could use to demonstrate their brutality, raise their political demands, and increase the value of their hostages. It also frustrated Rohde’s colleagues Ludin and Mangal, who had hoped media attention would stimulate ransom negotiations.
In June 2009, as those negotiations dragged on, Rohde and Ludin escaped, using a rope to climb out a window. They then made their way to safety at a nearby Pakistani army base. Mangal was eventually released from captivity and reunited with his family in Kabul.
Rethinking the Blackout
After Rohde was back in New York, I spent some time meeting with him and Mulvihill, talking to them about their own experience and considering how CPJ could be helpful the next time a journalist was kidnapped. While the media blackout obviously had nothing to do with Rohde’s escape, he believed it was vital in making a complex and volatile situation easier to manage. I supported the blackout of Rohde’s case and believed it was the right decision at the time. But after much consideration and reflection, I am no longer sure that blackouts are advisable except in the rarest of circumstances.
First, there is the question of their effectiveness. Certainly widespread media attention, including the broadcast of emotional appeals from family members and hostage tapes from the kidnappers, can drive up ransom demands or make it easier for the kidnappers to achieve their political objectives. But I’m hard pressed to come up with a case where the complete suppression of news was essential to a positive outcome in a kidnapping.
Second, requests for blackouts are difficult for media organizations to evaluate and can be confusing and contradictory. When they come from media organizations, such requests are generally honored, but when the requests came from governments they give pause. In December 2009, two journalists from the national broadcaster France 3 were kidnapped along with their Afghan colleagues by the Taliban while reporting on a road construction project outside Kabul. The French government called for a media boycott, but the families and press freedom organizations pushed back, holding public rallies and events to keep the case in the public spotlight. The two journalists were released in June 2011 after 547 days in captivity.
I have also seen cases in which family members and employers disagree on the need for a blackout and make contradictory requests. There was even a situation in Syria in early 2013 in which two journalists disappeared while working together, and the family of one asked for coverage while the family of the second asked for a blackout. Media organizations did their best to comply.
That kind of selective coverage—even with the best of intentions—damages the media’s credibility since for the most part it is international journalists working for major international media outlets that receive the consideration. This is not a question of policy. As Bill Keller noted in defending the blackout in the Rohde case, the Times considers requests to suppress news of kidnappings not just for journalists but for others as well.
But in reality it is usually editors with large media organizations that are in the best position to make the request because they know whom to call in the critical first minutes and hours before the news becomes public. Moreover, the web of mutual obligations that have been created after repeated blackouts makes it hard for individual media outlets to deny requests even if they believe that the news value outweighs the potential risk for the kidnapped journalist. After aggressively enforcing the media blackout in the Rohde case, is the New York Times in a position to reject a blackout request?
The use of blackouts in journalists’ kidnappings is also uncomfortable because media organizations routinely publish information that is embarrassing, damaging, and even dangerous to individuals for a variety of reasons. They do this because their primary mission is to inform the public, and they justify all sorts of intrusions on that basis. The issue of blackouts and media credibility arose again in December 2012 when the NBC correspondent Richard Engel was kidnapped while reporting in Syria. The media gossip website Gawker learned of the abduction and refused to honor a request from NBC to withhold coverage, incurring the wrath of many frontline journalists.8 By late 2013, over thirty journalists were missing in Syria, many believed kidnapped by the Islamist factions of the Syrian rebels. Some of these cases were public, but about a dozen were not. The decision to black out coverage may have made sense in each individual instance, but collectively the large number of blackouts obscured the scope of the problem and reduced media coverage of the troubling shift in the security environment in Syria. In order to draw attention to the risk, CPJ decided to make public the total number of kidnapped journalists in Syria without providing names or details of specific cases.9
Going forward, however, I believe the best course of action would be for media organizations routinely to report the news of a journalist’s kidnapping in a straightforward unemotional way, omitting, for example, demands from the kidnappers and indicating in clear language that they are withholding certain information at the request of family members or editors. Of course in the Internet age it would be a simple matter for the kidnappers to record their demands on a hostage video and post it online, and those who are interested in the information will find it. But if the mainstream media does not actively report on it, it is less likely to generate the kind of public pressure and visibility that complicate hostage negotiations. This is a compromise solution and one that poses significant challenges in a highly competitive environment in which news organizations no longer exercise a media monopoly. Nevertheless, if media organizations all over the world can agree among themselves not to cover journalists’ kidnappings, then surely they can also agree on how to cover them.