When General Félix Sanz Roldán was appointed to head Spain’s Centro Nacional de Inteligencia, or CNI, in 2009, he was sixty-four years old and headed toward retirement. But Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero needed a consensus figure to lead the troubled spy agency. Sanz Roldán pledged openness and transparency. He declared that “a secret service does not need to be that secret.”
The CNI had been wracked by allegations of fraud and criticized for its failure to prevent the terror attack on Madrid’s commuter rail system on March 11, 2004, which left two hundred dead and two thousand injured. The attacks, at least indirectly, had helped bring Zapatero to power.
Spain’s conservative incumbent, José María Aznar, was leading in the polls at the time the coordinated attack occurred, only days before elections. Voters punished Aznar for his clumsy attempts to blame the attacks on the ETA, the Basque separatist group, when evidence clearly suggested it was carried out by an Al Qaeda-inspired terror cell. More broadly, they were angry that Aznar had led Spain into the war in Iraq, a military campaign that exposed the country to terrorist violence without advancing Spain’s position in the world.
To many Spanish voters, the whole Iraq undertaking showed Aznar’s subservience to U.S. interests. His obsequious behavior toward U.S. President George W. Bush reinforced this impression. While Aznar earned a visit to Bush’s ranch, the deployment of Spanish troops in Iraq was opposed by 90 percent of the Spanish public. Zapatero waited only one day after taking office to fulfill his campaign promise by ordering the complete withdrawal of all Spanish forces from Iraq.
While Spain retained a symbolic presence in Afghanistan, its participation in the war on terror was over. Bush administration officials were furious. U.S. National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice told Fox News that terrorists could “draw the wrong lesson from Spain.” Donald Rumsfeld got into a screaming match with the Spanish Minister of Defense, denouncing the withdrawal as an act of cowardice that would embolden terrorists.
Needing to bolster his credentials with the Spanish military and repair the relationship with the U.S., Zapatero appointed Sanz Roldán as head of the Estado Mayor, or Defense Staff, the top military post in Spain. Sanz Roldán had a conservative pedigree and the rank-and-file support within the military that Zapatero needed. He also had a longstanding relationship with the U.S. military that would allow him to restore trust.
Five years later, with the CNI in crisis, Zapatero once again turned to the general. With the threat from the Basque separatist conflict fading, the CNI sought to reorient its domestic intelligence network to focus on Islamist terrorists. What the government had not anticipated was the external challenge. Within days of assuming his role, Sanz Roldán was consumed by two kidnapping crises which hit in quick succession. The first involved the hijacking of a fishing boat, the Alakrana, in the Indian Ocean. The second was the abduction of three Spanish aid workers in North Africa by Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb. The response to these two kidnappings would set in place an approach to hostage-taking that would endure through Zapatero’s term and into the next administration.
On October 2, 2009, Somali pirates spotted the Alakrana trawling the waters about four hundred nautical miles northwest of the Seychelles. The tuna-fishing boat, registered in the Basque city of Bermeo, was seeking more productive fishing grounds outside a safety zone patrolled by a joint European operation to combat piracy. The pirates themselves were operating out of a “mother ship,” which allowed them to extend their reach far from the Somali coast. Two smaller skiffs carrying thirteen pirates bristling with Kalashnikovs and rocket-propelled grenade launchers raced toward the Alakrana. With its nets deployed, the Alakrana was a sitting duck; the pirates soon boarded the ship and took control. The head of the pirate boarders, named Elias, ordered the ship’s captain to cut its fishing nets. When the captain demurred saying it would take less time to haul them in, the pirates beat him for his insolence. By late morning, the Alakrana was proceeding at full speed toward the Somali city of Harare, where the pirates had their base. Thirty-six crew members were on board, sixteen of them hailing from the Basque region and the rest from Asia and Africa.
Back in Madrid, President Zapatero convened members of his cabinet. Participating were Vice President María Teresa Fernández de la Vega, who handled the security portfolio, along with the Ministers of Foreign Relations, International Cooperation, Defense, and the Environment, which oversees maritime issues. Sanz Roldán was in attendance, along with General Julio Rodríguez, who had replaced Sanz Roldán as head of the Defense Staff. General Rodríguez exercised tactical authority over the Spanish naval vessels patrolling the Indian Ocean as part of a joint European anti-piracy operation dubbed Atalanta.
The year before, another fishing boat, the Playa de Bakio, had been overrun by Somali pirates. The Spanish government responded, sending a military patrol, and helping to manage ransom negotiations through its ambassador in Kenya. The boat was freed after six days, reportedly for a ransom of $1.2 million.
Historically, the Spanish fishing fleet, one of the largest in Europe, had been dominated by companies based in the Basque country. Basque fishermen had a maritime tradition going back centuries. There is some evidence they were trawling the abundant cod fisheries off Newfoundland long before Columbus discovered America. The Basques also have their own language, culture, and national identity. For decades, a violent separatist group, ETA, had used bombings, kidnappings, and other terror tactics to advance its separatist agenda. But the conflict was winding down. As the Zapatero government sought to advance negotiations toward a definitive deal, the president looked for ways to send a clear and strong message to the people of the region that the Spanish government was committed to defending their interests abroad. There would be no better way to achieve this than to the bring the Alakrana and its crew home safely.
Besides, Zapatero had already absorbed the lesson sent by Aznar’s stinging loss in the 2004 elections. Using military force to confront the threat of Islamic terrorism outside of Spain was not a winning political strategy. Negotiation was the best way forward. While the French privately complained that the Spanish capitulated too quickly and paid too much, for Zapatero there was little advantage in taking a hard line.
The nearest Spanish naval vessel, a frigate called Canarias, was about eight hundred nautical miles from the Alakrana when the abduction occurred. It raced at its top speed toward the captured fishing boat, in the hopes of disabling it before it reached Somali waters, according to a detailed report published in El Pais. But there was too much ground to make up. However, General Rodríguez and the Spanish forces caught a break when a small skiff with two pirates on board veered off from the mother ship and headed west toward the Somali coast.
The captain of the Canarias informed Madrid of the opportunity to intercept the skiff. General Rodríguez gave the order to proceed. Using Zodiacs and helicopters deployed from the Canarias, Spanish sailors surrounded the small boat. One pirate was shot when he failed to follow instructions but he was not badly injured and was given medical treatment on board the Canarias.
Since the frigate was considered Spanish territory, the pirates were placed under arrest. The case was referred to the Spanish National Court, known as Audiencia Nacional. At 2:20 a.m. on October 4, Judge Baltasar Garzón—famous for his international prosecution of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet—ordered the two pirates brought to Spain to stand trial. Since the Canarias needed to remain in the area to support the Alakrana, the two pirates were placed on a French vessel, La Somme, which transported them to a military base in Djibouti. From there, the pirates were flown back to Spain.
The detention of the two pirates not only created legal complications; it also complicated the negotiations to free the hostages. The pirates holding the ship, now moored off the coast of Somalia, threatened to murder the crew unless their two comrades were released. They tortured the crew psychologically, through threats and mock executions. But when the negotiator informed the pirate representative that he did not have the authority to free their comrades, the pirates dropped the demand. “It was all a big media stunt,” General Rodríguez recalled, when I met him in Madrid in the summer of 2017. “For those looking to recover the ransom, the life of those two pirates didn’t matter for a moment.”
An agreement was reached after forty-four days of negotiations, and a ransom of approximately $3.5 million was packed into a duffel bag. Once the money was prepared, General Rodriguez was told to stand by. A small plane would fly over the area where the Alakrana was being held and airdrop the money. “The only thing I knew was the hour,” General Rodríguez recalled. “Our goal was to get as close as we could and have a helicopter at the ready.”
As soon as Rodriguez received word that the Alakrana had been released and the crew was safe, he gave the go-ahead for an operation to recover the ransom. An attack helicopter quickly located the pirates in a Zodiac with the ransom on board, speeding toward the Somali coast. Because of a directive from President Zapatero to avoid loss of life, the gunship fired only on the motor of the speeding boat, which failed to disable it. Once the boat reached the coast, the kidnappers jumped out and mixed in with the local population. Rodríguez aborted the recovery mission and took no further action.
Back in Spain, President Zapatero congratulated all those who had worked to free the Alakrana. The two Somali pirates who had been captured—one of whom claimed to be a minor—were convicted and sentenced to jail. At trial, government attorneys claimed the ransom had been paid by the shipping company. But in her verdict, the judge determined that the Spanish government had in fact paid. Her legal logic was interesting. Noting that the CNI had invoked national security in refusing to testify, the judge deduced that such an exemption would have only been granted if the government had paid, as there would be no national security implication in denying their involvement. When asked whether the government had paid, President Zapatero said vaguely that the government, “had done what it needed to do.” From the president’s perspective the operation had been a success: There had been no loss of life, and the crew on the Alakrana were back home with their families in the Basque Country.
Ten days after the successful recovery of the Alakrana, Spain was plunged into the next hostage crisis, this time in North Africa. On November 29, 2009, three volunteers with a Barcelona-based humanitarian organization called Acció Solidaria, Albert Vilalta Cambra, Alicia Gámez Guerrero, and Roque Pascual Salazar, were kidnapped in Mauritania while participating in a caravan bringing supplies to neighboring Senegal. The three volunteers were traveling in a jeep when they were forced to the side of the road by several cars full of armed men. They had time to radio ahead to other members of the caravan, but their colleagues were distracted because they were listening to a broadcast of the Barcelona-Madrid football game that they were able to pick up from the Spanish island of Las Palmas, off the African coast. When Vilalta asked the attackers what was happening, they shot him three times in the leg. The kidnappers trundled the hostages into their jeeps. Then they drove them across the desert to their camps in neighboring Mali.
At the time, Catalonia was not quite as restive as it would later become, but the region has a history of fierce independence. Zapatero again recognized the political advantage of highlighting the ability of Spain’s central government to defend the interests of Catalans abroad. In addition, the charity for which the hostages worked, Acció Solidaria, had close ties to Zapatero’s Socialist Party. Once again, Zapatero told his cabinet he wanted the hostages back, but there would be challenges. AQIM was a ruthless group that had demonstrated a willingness to kill hostages for political purposes. In any case, Spain had no military assets to speak of in the region. If it wanted the hostages back, it would have to pay.
Sanz Roldán took personal charge of the operation. The CNI had little expertise or experience with AQIM, but the agency was eventually able to locate someone in Spain who had familiarity with the group. They brought her into the CNI’s offices and laid out a map of the region. She pointed to a route through the desert leading from Mauritania to Mali, which was the base of the AQIM operations. Relying on shared U.S. intelligence, the CNI was able to track the progress of the hostage caravan through the desert as it moved almost precisely along the predicted route.
The CNI’s most immediate concern was to find a way to deliver medical supplies so that Vilalta could get necessary attention for his wounded leg. As the hostages fled across the desert, Vilalta’s captors performed a rudimentary surgery using the headlights from one of their jeeps. But Vilalta needed antibiotics to avoid infection. The CNI enlisted Mustafa Chafi to serve as intermediary. Chafi, an aide to Burkina Faso’s president Blaise Compaoré, had become a conduit to AQIM leader Mokhtar Belmokhtar, whose katiba, or brigade, had carried out the kidnapping.
About the only interest that the kidnappers and the CNI shared was to keep the hostages alive. The CNI sought to exploit this by setting up a channel through Chafi to deliver medical supplies. Once some modicum of trust was established, the CNI was able to deliver less essential items, including a teddy bear secured from the bed of Alicia Gámez in Barcelona. Word had reached the CNI agents who were helping to manage the negotiations that Gámez was in terrible emotional shape. The agents hoped the sudden appearance of the teddy bear in her sleeping quarters would send a reassuring message that the CNI was on the case and doing everything in its power to procure her liberty.
The CNI agents repeatedly asked the kidnappers to provide proof of life, including videos. Partly this was a strategy to reassure the families back in Catalonia. As negotiations proceeded, Belmokhtar agreed to make an unusual gesture, to release Gámez after three months in captivity. Her captors said it was because she had converted to Islam, but it may also have been that her delicate emotional state made her a difficult hostage to manage. “She was absolutely terrified,” Chafi recalled in an interview with El País, describing the journey across the desert to freedom. Gámez was so distrustful of Chafi that she tried to escape at one point, running off into the sand dunes. His bodyguards had to retrieve her.
Conversion was a constant focus of the militants. Realizing that their treatment would improve, Pascual and Vilalta also decided to embrace Islam after seven months in captivity. Belmokhtar, a fearsome figure who had lost an eye fighting in Afghanistan, was moved to tears. After their conversion, their food rations increased, they got more water, and their guards treated them with slightly less disdain. But the conversion did not fundamentally change the nature of their relationship with their captors.
The CNI had been making slow progress in hammering out a deal, so Sanz Roldán traveled dozens of times to the region to urge the release of Al Qaeda prisoners that the kidnappers had demanded in exchange for their Spanish hostages.
By August, a deal was struck. In addition to securing the release of an Al Qaeda militant from a Mauritanian jail, millions of dollars in ransom was paid. The money may have been fronted by the government of Burkina Faso and offset by an increase in Spanish development aid. Beyond the ransom, there was the commission allegedly paid to Chafi, and the millions of dollars spent on the operation itself, including assembling a field team of CNI agents in the region, developing a network of contacts, flying senior officials in and out, and even purchasing new Land Rovers and then adding dents and wear so they wouldn’t stand out operating in the desert.
The ransom was delivered by Chafi at a ceremony in the Malian desert, attended by fifty AQIM fighters who arrived in eight all-terrain vehicles. They fired their guns in the air and embraced their new Spanish brothers before turning them over to Chafi. The hostages were driven across the desert, then flown by helicopter to Gorom-Gorom, in northern Burkina Faso. There they were received by CNI agents who provided them with clean clothes and food, including Iberian ham. Pascual and Vilalta quickly discarded their new faith and ate the haram food, downing a few beers. They shaved their beards and donned new clothes. This was part of the re-integration strategy that the CNI had developed to quickly give the hostages control over their lives. On the flight back to Spain, Pascual asked the CNI agents how much had been paid in ransom. “Don’t worry about that,” a CNI agent answered. Newspaper reports alleged it was as much as $8 million.
Former International Cooperation Minister Soraya Rodríguez, now an opposition member of Congress, justified Spanish government policy of handling complex negotiations and providing support for the families. “I was personally in charge of the relationship with the families and this is an area where I think we did a good job,” Rodriguez explained. During the hostage crisis, she made daily phone calls to the families, trying to give them hope. But she was always truthful. The trust established, Rodríguez believes, helped convince the families not to go to the media, and not to succumb to the fraudsters and opportunists who called claiming they were in touch with the kidnappers.
“The families simply don’t have the means to resolve a kidnapping by themselves,” Rodríguez argued. “Only the state has them. Even if the family has the money and they want to pay, they don’t have a way to get the money to the hostage-takers or to find an adequate intermediary.”
The efforts to end two successive crises would define an approach of hostage-taking that endured through the Zapatero administration. In 2011—buffeted by the Euro crisis and a near collapse of the Spanish economy—voters returned the conservatives to power. But the hostage policy under the government of Mariano Rajoy remained unchanged. It’s a policy of negotiation and restraint that places a maximum emphasis on the safe return of the hostages. The French government actively denies paying ransom, but Spain uses more ambivalent language. When Rajoy’s Foreign Minister was asked in 2012 whether his government had paid to secure release of two aid workers kidnapped in Africa the year before, he responded, “The government did what it had to do”—the same phrase Zapatero had used in 2009. The non-denial denial is a way for the Spanish government to take credit for the successful outcome.
If your goal is to bring the hostages home, paying ransom works. Every one of the estimated seventy Spaniards taken hostage by Islamist groups and Somali pirates have come home alive. This record is unmatched by any other country.
On the whole, the Spanish public and the media support the government’s efforts. When citizens are taken hostage in Spain there are no committees, no banners hung from buildings, and no street protests. As the wife of one former hostage pointed out, there is no need to protest if you are confident the government is already doing all it can.
The Spanish media goes along as well. “When there is a kidnapping, the government asks for discretion and the press acts responsibly,” explained José María Irujo, who covers the intelligence beat for El País. “No newspapers have broken the pact, which has the support of everyone, from the owners to the reporters. We could scoop each other, but what value does a scoop have if you put someone’s life in danger?” Sanz Roldán points with satisfaction to a column published in 2015 by José Apezarena, the editor of an online news portal, El Confidencial Digital. The headline reads, “Silence, the CNI Is Working.”
“The government has decided to put above all the life of the individual,” Irujo argued. “Spanish society is not prepared to accept that our citizens will die for a principle. The government will pay. The political cost of letting someone die would be enormous. The government would be perceived as not having a heart. I can’t imagine living in a society like that, a society that is so distant and cold.”
The benefits of the Spanish approach are obvious. The hostages come home. The costs are more difficult to assess.
One of the most frequent arguments against the payment of ransom is that it encourages further kidnapping. This correlation appears so obvious that it has been taken as an article of faith among governments that have adopted a no concessions policy. But the research is far from conclusive.
In the early 1970s, in response to a series of kidnappings targeting American diplomats in Latin America, the Santa Monica-based RAND Corporation carried out research to assess the effectiveness of a no concessions policy. In the end the RAND researchers were “unable to find persuasive evidence supporting the assertion that a no concessions policy provided an effective deterrent” against future kidnappings. More recent research confirmed this initial finding. A 2015 study by the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point found no correlation between the hostage policy of a particular country and the likelihood that its nationals would be targeted. “Although kidnappings are often thought of as preplanned events against specific individuals, they often seem to occur opportunistically against individuals who are in the wrong place at the wrong time,” the report noted. A 2017 New America Foundation study reached a similar conclusion. It analyzed data of 1,185 Westerners from 32 countries kidnapped since 2001 by terrorist, militant, and pirate groups, and concluded that “there is no clear link between a nation’s ransom policy and the number of citizens taken hostage.” Instead, it found that kidnapping is driven by “conditions of general instability,” meaning war and lawlessness.
A 2016 study entitled “Why Concessions Should Not Be Made to Terrorist Kidnappers” and published in the European Journal of Political Economy used a different set of data and reached a very different conclusion. Applying sophisticated quantitative analysis, the authors concluded that making concessions does increase the likelihood of future kidnappings by between 64 and 87 percent. The authors claim their data includes more information regarding negotiations and ransom payments. However, that data is drawn from media sources, which based on my own reporting and research, can be unreliable on such matters. The study also failed to take into account the relative “supply” of Western hostages. In others words, the fact that Europeans rather than Americans are kidnapped in North Africa may have nothing to with differences in concessions policy and everything to do with the fact that there are simply more Europeans present.
While the available data is inconclusive on whether a policy of no concessions leads to fewer future kidnappings, it is solid on another point: Countries that pay ransom tend to get their hostages home alive. “Eighty-one percent of European Union hostages held by Jihadi terrorist groups were freed,” the New America study noted. Meanwhile, hostages from the U.S. and the UK, both of which refuse to pay ransom, were freed 25 and 33 percent of the time, respectively.
Anecdotally, European journalists who operate in conflict zones told me they do not believe that kidnap victims are targeted based on nationality, and therefore feel safer rather than more vulnerable knowing their governments are prepared to negotiate for their release. Others, like American journalist Graeme Wood, who has reported extensively on the Islamic State, take a different view. They argue that the European policy of paying ransom puts all journalists and aid workers at risk. “As an unkidnapped journalist with no living colleagues I know of in captivity, I can say that making huge payments to terrorist groups, as Western governments have done in recent years, has been disastrous,” Wood wrote in The New York Review of Books.
While the studies I cited indicate that most kidnappings are opportunistic and not based on nationality, this may not be true in every case. U.S. government sources with access to intelligence reports told me that AQIM leaders spoke of targeting Europeans because of their propensity to pay. Only a handful of the U.S. and British hostages were taken by AQIM. One of them, Edwin Dyer, was beheaded in 2009 after the British government flatly refused to pay a ransom.
While the correlation between ransom payment and targeted kidnappings is debated, no one denies that the money paid to terror groups is used for terrible purposes. Ransom has become a significant source of financing for military operations and criminal enterprises carried out by Jihadi groups around the world. In Afghanistan, the Taliban claimed they used the $10 million ransom paid for the return of twenty-one Korean missionaries in 2007 to underwrite a major military offensive targeting European and American security forces operating in the country. In the case of AQIM, ransom money helped the group develop into a significant military force and a threat to regional stability.
This is why the loudest and most consistent objection to European ransom payments often comes from local governments affected by such policies. In 2007, Afghanistan’s President Hamid Karzai succumbed to pressure from the Italian government and released five Taliban prisoners in exchange for the liberty of kidnapped journalist Daniele Mastrogiacomo. Karzai then went on television to declare that he would never negotiate again. The Taliban responded by beheading Mastrogiacomo’s Afghan news assistant. The Algerian government, which has been targeted in terror attacks carried out by AQIM, has repeatedly called on European governments to end their practice of paying ransom.
Ransom money has also been used to finance Al Qaeda’s global operations. Osama bin Laden was known to be personally involved in negotiations and in setting strategy. In 2011, he advised AQIM to kill the hostage with “the lowest rank.” Nasser al-Wuhayshi, the leader of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, wrote in a 2012 letter to Belmokhtar that, “Kidnapping hostages is an easy spoil which I may describe as a profitable trade and a precious treasure.” Later, Al Qaeda leaders excoriated Belmokhtar for only obtaining $1 million for Canadian diplomats Robert Fowler and Louis Guay, according to a letter obtained by journalist Rukmini Callimachi. (That deal was also brokered by Chafi, advisor to Burkina Faso’s president, according to Fowler’s book.) The U.S. government estimated that ransom paid by European governments to terrorists between 2008 and 2014 totaled more than $165 million. A New York Times analysis put the number at $125 million over the same period. (A senior U.S. official told me in December 2017 that the updated figure was closer to $300 million.)
AQIM used the proceeds from ransom payments to expand and diversify its operations in ways that directly threatened European security. The group—along with more criminally minded gangs operating in the Sahara—expanded its smuggling operations using existing routes to move cocaine obtained from Colombia’s FARC guerrillas into Europe. They also branched out into human trafficking, in later years moving desperate migrants from Sub-Saharan Africa through the deserts and onto flimsy rafts launched into the Mediterranean in the hopes of being picked up by a European patrol.
“These roads have always been used to move cigarettes, weapons, and cocaine coming from Colombia into Europe,” said Alain Juillet, a former senior official in France’s DGSE and now a private security analyst. “Today, the same people are involved and are dealing in migrants. Criminals and terrorists are making money on the back of migrants, fueling more terrorism.”
For Vicki Huddleston, who served as U.S. Ambassador to Mali and later as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for African Affairs, the willingness to pay ransom on the part of European governments strengthens terror and criminal networks and undermines regional security. In several instances, she saw European aid money diverted to fund ransom payments, an approach that she believes fuels local corruption and weakens trust. “The Europeans have a lot to answer for,” Huddleston told The New York Times. “It’s a completely two-faced policy.”
European officials and analysts I spoke with pushed back against this characterization. Ransom payments finance terror groups, but so does international drug trafficking, the global arms trade, and the misappropriation of aid payments, all areas where poorly conceived or executed U.S. policies play a role. “It seems the United States wants to cast itself as the good guy, and Europe as the bad guy,” Spain’s General Rodríguez told me. “I’d be very careful comparing numbers, like the amount that Europe has paid in ransom with the sale of weapons to Saudi Arabia and other countries which are suspected of having ties to terrorism.”
By refusing to negotiate, the U.S., the UK, and other governments that favor no concessions are also missing out on opportunities to exploit kidnapping negotiations to secure intelligence that can be used to recover the ransom or target the individuals or organizations involved. Didier Le Bret told me that France relied on intelligence gathered from hostage negotiations in planning and carrying out its military campaign in Mali, following the AQIM takeover of Timbuktu in late 2012. Two separate European officials told me that they had tracked and recovered ransoms after they were paid.
Terrorism experts I spoke with also say there is little evidence that withholding ransom payments actually leads to a decline in kidnapping. What reduces kidnapping is resolving conflict, increasing security, or in some cases destroying the organization carrying out the attacks. Hostage-taking was a central feature of the conflicts in Lebanon and Colombia but declined as those conflicts wound down. It was common in Peru until radical organizations like MRTA and Sendero Luminoso were wiped out. Meanwhile, increased military patrols in the Indian Ocean combined with enhanced security measures implemented by shipping companies have reduced the threat of Somali piracy.
Some experts believe those gains are temporary because the conditions that led Somalis to get into the hostage business—poverty, lawlessness, and festering resentments about depletion of their fisheries—remain unchanged. “I think the main reason piracy declined was that local people rebelled against the pirates,” London-based Somali journalist Jamal Osman told me. “The legitimacy that the pirates had earned by casting their actions as just retribution for the plundering of the Somali fisheries by large European trawlers was squandered when newly wealthy pirates began using drugs, drinking alcohol, and abusing local women. Somalia is a violent place, but it’s also a conservative place. People are still saying, ‘they are stealing our resources and we should do something about this.’The warships that people see off the coast are watching the pirates. People say, ‘why can’t they stop the bad guys who are entering our waters and emptying our seas?’”
With its low-slung concrete buildings and manicured lawns, the CNI headquarters on the outskirts of Madrid looks like a Los Angeles office park. Sanz Roldán’s vast corner office is decorated with mementos and maps and a few cherished possessions, including a photograph of Charlize Theron. For years Sanz Roldán would arrive each morning and ask his secretary if he had gotten any calls from the South African actress, who had become a bit of an obsession. His staff decided that for the general’s birthday they would actually get the actress to call. But the “operation” was unsuccessful. Theron did, however, send a signed publicity shot.
In person, Sanz Roldán combines self-deprecating humor with Old World charm. For someone who is Spain’s top spy, he likes to talk, and he waved off aides who wandered into the room to tell him it was time for his next appointment. But when I asked Sanz Roldán to discuss Spain’s approach to hostage-taking he did not answer directly. “No government will ever admit it negotiates with terrorists or pays ransom,” Sanz Roldán pointed out.
There are ethical, moral, and security-related issues that determine the response in any international kidnapping. But the decision is fundamentally and appropriately political, Sanz Roldán believes. While no concessions countries seek to depoliticize decision making by putting in place a policy framework, Spain expects the president to determine the response based on the specific circumstances. The role of the CNI is to use its analysis and intelligence assets to ensure the president has the information to make the best possible decision. In 2011, this relationship was formalized. The CNI was restructured and removed from the Ministry of Defense. Henceforth, Sanz Roldán would have a direct line to the president. In 2014, Rajoy reappointed the general to a second five-year term. There are no competing intelligence agencies in Spain, and the CNI handles both internal and external functions. “I have no problem coordinating with myself,” he points out. Once a decision is made by the president, it’s the CNI’s responsibility to execute it.
Spain’s national crisis center is located in a separate building on the CNI campus. The enormous round room is empty when I am invited to stop by. But when Spain confronts an emergency, the dozens of terminals arrayed along curving rows and facing a giant arched screen blink and buzz. The president and his senior advisor sit at the head of the large conference table in the middle of the action. When the president is not present, Sanz Roldán is often the senior official in charge.
At the back of the room is a small collection of photos featuring Spanish hostages. Here is the Playa de Bakio being escorted by a military frigate. Here are Pascual and Vilalta sitting at the feet of their armed captors shortly after being kidnapped. Here is aid worker Ainhoa Fernández de Rincon being handed over to CNI agents in Mali in July, 2012. Here are journalists Javier Espinosa and Ricardo García Vilanova arriving at the Torrejon de Ardoz military base, after being freed by the Islamic State in March 2014. Not one of these hostages was rescued. Not one escaped. The cost of their freedom was millions of euros given to militants and criminals.
Sanz Roldán appreciates the moral challenges, but is clearly gratified by the success of the CNI’s efforts. Each year, he receives a Christmas card from one former hostage he helped free. It reads: “Thanks to you, I am celebrating Christmas this year.” Says the general: “This is the only recognition that I need for a job well done.”