Inside the White House, Obama administration officials called David S. Cohen their “financial Batman.” His job as Undersecretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence at the Treasury Department was to cut off terrorist financing, and he oversaw a team of seven hundred and a budget of $200 million. While the position was created during the Bush administration following the September 11 attacks, the role took on a new urgency and prominence under Obama, who was looking for a range of “non-kinetic” strategies to confront the terror threat. Cutting off financing for terror groups would be one way to victory. It was also a lot less costly in terms of human lives. Cohen may have had a bureaucratic title, but he was a four-star general in the financial war on terror.
The myriad terror groups around the world are funded in a variety of ways. FARC made most of its money from the drug trade. Al Qaeda initially received a good deal of its revenue from donations diverted from Islamic charities. It also had wealthy financial backers in the Gulf. The Islamic State, which would not emerge until 2014, relied on extortion, oil sales, and plunder.
At the beginning of the new administration, U.S. officials viewed kidnapping for ransom with increasing concern. “There were a couple of different trends that elevated the importance of the issue,” Cohen recalled. “Al Qaeda affiliates were turning to new funding models, including kidnapping. Then there was the spike in piracy off the Somali coast.”
While Cohen relied on sanctions and criminal investigations to choke off other forms of terror financing, ransom payments were not coming from rogue actors. Often, they were coming from key U.S. allies in Europe. The best hope for stopping the funding was to forge a global consensus around no concessions. Achieving this objective would require diplomacy and public engagement.
In October 2012, Cohen spoke at Chatham House, the London-based foreign-policy think tank, to lay out the Obama administration’s most comprehensive arguments for a global no concessions policy. While Al Qaeda’s core operations, centered in Pakistan, had been weakened by the elimination of its top “financial lieutenants,” its affiliates, notably in the Sahel and Yemen, were being strengthened financially by the large ransom payments they had been able to collect. AQIM, Cohen noted, citing U.S. intelligence, was targeting Europeans because of their propensity to pay. The money generated had been used to launch large-scale attacks, and to finance expanding operations in Mali that led to the destruction of libraries and Sufi shrines in the cultural center of Timbuktu.
“Simply put, kidnapping for ransom has become today’s most significant source of terrorist financing because it has proven itself a frighteningly successful tactic,” Cohen explained. “Refusing to pay ransoms or to make other concessions to terrorists is, clearly, the surest way to break the cycle because if kidnappers consistently fail to get what they want they will have a strong incentive to stop taking hostages in the first place.”
Recognizing the obligations of governments to their citizens, of employers to workers, of families to their loved ones, Cohen acknowledged that, “Not to pay ransom to terrorists is to jeopardize innocent lives.”
“We acknowledge this dilemma—this tragic choice—but believe that so many lives are at risk of terrorist violence around the globe that the equation tips decidedly in favor of a ‘no concessions’ policy,” Cohen noted.
Cohen chose to give the speech in London partly because he wanted to make clear that the U.S. and the UK would have to work together to forge a global consensus around no concessions. And they would also need to convince the Europeans to get on board.
Yet, the U.S. policy has historically been inconsistent, even improvised.
In March 1973, eight members of the Palestinian terrorist group Black September launched an attack on the Saudi Embassy in Khartoum, Sudan, and took several diplomats hostage, including two Americans and one Belgian. They issued a series of demands that included the release of Palestinian prisoners in Jordan, Israel, and Europe. They also called for the release of Sirhan Sirhan, who had been convicted in the 1968 murder of Robert Kennedy.
The following day, President Nixon hosted a scheduled press conference. A reporter asked how the president planned to respond to the hostage incident. “As far as the United States as a government giving in to blackmail demands, we cannot do so and we will not do so,” Nixon proclaimed. “We will do everything we can to get them released but we will not pay blackmail.” Within hours, as word of the president’s remarks reached Sudan, the three diplomats were taken to a basement in the embassy, stood against a wall, and shot.
Nixon’s response at the press conference reflected the political realities of the moment. The president could not even discuss the possibility of releasing the murderer of his likely Democratic opponent in the 1968 presidential elections. But after the hostages were killed no concessions became a “policy sealed in blood,” according to Brian Jenkins.
Jenkins, who had served as an Army Green Beret and as a policy analyst in the Defense Department, had joined the RAND Corporation, the Santa Monica-based think tank that often works under contract for the U.S. government. In 1972, he had begun work on a comprehensive study of terrorism, which looked in part at the U.S. response to kidnappings carried out by revolutionary groups in Latin America and around the world. When U.S. diplomats were targeted, the demands were often directed at the national government. In 1969, for example, U.S. Ambassador C. Burke Elbrick was kidnapped by a group of leftist “urban guerrillas” in Brazil. The Nixon administration urged Brazil’s military government to do everything necessary to secure Elbrick’s release. The Brazilians agreed to release fifteen political prisoners, an action they described as a “humanitarian gesture.” Elbrick was freed after four days.
Following the murder of the U.S. diplomats in Sudan, Jenkins expanded his research to look at hostage policies in the handful of countries that took a hard line in domestic kidnapping cases, including Argentina, Guatemala, and Turkey. The UK, which adopted no concessions following the kidnapping of a British diplomat in Uruguay in 1971, was the only global power at the time that embraced the approach. Jenkins and his team found no evidence that refusing to pay ransom led to better outcomes over the short or long term. “We could not come up with a rationale that demonstrated that no concessions was an effective deterrent,” Jenkins recalled.
Jenkins knew that Secretary of State Henry Kissinger opposed negotiations with terrorists. U.S. policy had already been hardening for several years, but the issue remained controversial, particularly among U.S. diplomatic personnel who were asked to undertake high-risk assignments. Some argued the U.S. government should be fully accountable for their welfare, and should take all necessary measures to secure their release in the event they were taken hostage.
As his research progressed, Jenkins held a series of meetings with State Department officials to brief them on the case studies and what he had learned, everything from negotiating tactics to reintegrating returning hostages. When Jenkins briefed Kissinger, he tried to be indirect. “I think I said something like, ‘We have been unable to identify convincing empirical evidence to support the presumption upon which the policy is based,’” Jenkins recalled. While Kissinger kept his cool in the meeting, the Secretary of State was not pleased by the findings. He expressed a more “earthy” response with other colleagues.
Jenkins’s central finding was that “the most powerful determinant of whether or not there would be further kidnappings is not the policy of the government, but the fate of the kidnappers or their organization. If kidnappers are apprehended and appropriately punished, if kidnapping gangs, or urban guerrilla groups, or terrorist organizations that engage in kidnapping are destroyed, kidnappings will decline. If this is not done, then it doesn’t make any difference what the policy is.”
The U.S. was already moving toward a more hardline approach to hostage-taking, but the Sudan incident accelerated the shift to no concessions. “Nixon was not thinking about broader policy, he wasn’t thinking about all these other issues that ended up being subsequently debated,” Jenkins argued. “He was responding to a reporter’s question.” It was after the fact that “people invented arguments. Of course we couldn’t make concessions to terrorist holding hostages because to do so would encourage more kidnappings. Refusing to do so will deter them from doing this again. But all of that came second.”
At the time, the no concessions policy was construed quite narrowly to apply only to U.S. government personnel kidnapped or taken hostage overseas. There were no restrictions, nor were any contemplated, on the ability of U.S. families or business people to pay ransom. The FBI often assisted American citizens who chose to do so regardless of whether the kidnapping was carried out by “criminals” or “terrorists.”
The no concessions policy also did not apply to hijackings. If a plane were taken hostage, the Federal Aviation Administration would be the lead agency to deal with the incident. Its priority was the safety and welfare of the passengers. In 1972 Nixon himself authorized the payment of a $2 million ransom to three hijackers who took over Southern Airways Flight 49 in Alabama. After a cross-country odyssey, the hijackers, who threatened to crash the plane into a nuclear power plant, landed in Havana, where they were arrested by Cuban authorities. The Cubans returned the plane and the ransom payment.
The no concessions policy also did not apply to U.S. military personnel. U.S. soldiers captured during armed conflict are designated as prisoners of war under the Geneva Conventions, which specifically recognizes the legality of prisoner exchanges.
It did not apply to domestic kidnappings, which, since kidnapping had been made a federal crime in the aftermath of the 1932 Lindbergh baby abduction, had been handled by the FBI. In domestic cases, the FBI had always been willing to negotiate, to facilitate ransom payments from the families, and to sometimes pay directly. In fact, the U.S. Treasury kept up to $300,000 cash on hand at local branches of the Federal Reserve for this explicit purpose. The strategy of paying money was known to FBI negotiators as “ransom as lure,” and was considered an effective approach because it often led to the safe release of the hostages as well as the subsequent apprehension of the criminals. “They have to pick up the money somewhere,” noted Gary Noesner, who spent thirty years at the FBI, twenty-three of them as a hostage negotiator. “Kidnapping for ransom is a very hard crime to pull off successfully.” So much so, that in the last few decades it has all but been eliminated within the borders of the United States and in European countries by effective law enforcement.
And as was made clear years later during the Reagan administration, no concessions was a policy that was often honored in the breach. In a 1985 speech after the hijacking of TWA flight 847 by Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad, President Reagan declared, “America will never make concessions to terrorists—to do so would only invite more terrorism—nor will we ask nor pressure any other government to do so.” In fact, the hijacking was resolved after the U.S. pressured Israel to release hundreds of Shia prisoners held in its jails. Later, Reagan authorized arms sales to Iran in violation of the U.S. arms embargo in exchange for Iran’s help in resolving the Lebanese hostage crisis, and what began as “arms-for-hostages” later became the Iran-Contra affair. The effort to win the release of the American hostages was largely unsuccessful.
In other words, for nearly three decades following Nixon’s proclamation, “we don’t negotiate with terrorists” and “we don’t make concessions to terrorists” were closer to political slogans than expressions of policy. It wasn’t until early in the Bush administration that a decision was made to put a policy on paper. A Hostage Working Group, which met weekly at the White House to review active cases, provided input in formulating a new National Security Policy Directive, to provide policy guidance and ensure coordinated actions across government agencies. The working group, which included the chief of the FBI’s Crisis Negotiations Unit, sought to incorporate language that described the tactical reality.
Rather than emphasizing a prohibition on “negotiating with terrorists,” the FBI put forward language that described the stated goal as denying hostage-takers “the benefits” of concessions, though it did not rule out ransom if it was part of an effort to both free the hostages and capture the hostage-takers. For the FBI, this was an effort to align the response to international kidnapping with the domestic approach, in which ransom as lure was an important strategy. The working group also proposed adding the word “substantive” to modify “concessions,” indicating that while changes in policies, release of prisoners, or ransom payments could not be considered, minor concessions, like delivering food or making statements in exchange for the release of hostages, could be on the table. Both proposals were accepted and incorporated into the final document.
NSPD-12 covering “United States Citizens Taken Hostage Abroad” was approved on February 18, 2002. It remains classified. By the time the new language was finalized, the political landscape had shifted dramatically. The September 11 terror attacks had occurred, and the beheading of Daniel Pearl had made it clear that kidnapping was part of the Al Qaeda play-book. The Patriot Act, passed in October 2001, contained broad and sweeping language criminalizing material support for terrorism, potentially providing a legal framework to prosecute families or anyone who assisted or supported the payment of ransom to designated terrorist groups. Not surprisingly, the new hostage policy document, which sought to create operational flexibility, sparked a contentious debate at senior levels of the Bush administration. The most strident objection came from Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.
The policy debate over the limits of no concessions was theoretical until the following month, when the FBI, taking advantage of operational latitude under NSPD-12, sought to recover two American hostages held in the Philippines. Martin and Gracia Burnham, missionaries kidnapped the year before, were being held in miserable conditions by Abu Sayyaf. The group had begun as a local insurgency on the southern island of Mindanao, but had gained international attention through its strategic alliance with Al Qaeda. Seeking to use the ransom-as-lure strategy, the FBI withdrew $300,000 from the Federal Reserve in Atlanta and flew it to the Philippines.
The ransom was delivered, but unbeknownst to the FBI, Abu Sayyaf had opened up another channel of communications with the Philippine government, and was hoping to collect a second payment. It was a classic double dip. Abu Sayyaf kept the $300,000 but the hostages were not released. There was widespread disappointment and consternation across the National Security Council. The following year, relying on U.S. intelligence, the Philippine government launched a military operation that was more of an assault than a rescue effort. Martin Burnham was shot in the stomach and killed. Gracia was shot in the leg but survived. In 2007, fourteen Abu Sayyaf members were convicted in a Philippine court and sentenced to life in prison for the Burnham kidnapping and the beheading of another American hostage.
After the failed recovery effort in the Burnham case, the ransom-as-lure strategy was never used again during the Bush administration. In Iraq, where FBI negotiators were deployed, kidnap for ransom incidents involving American citizens were dealt with more restrictively on the presumption that terrorist groups were responsible, recalled a former FBI kidnap negotiator. However, very few victims were Americans. The vast majority were Iraqis employed by American contractors, from doctors to truck drivers. In these cases the companies quietly paid ransom. The variable was media attention. Media coverage brought the involvement of senior government officials, which complicated negotiations and limited flexibility. These officials, FBI negotiators grumbled, were far more focused on perceptions and avoiding criticism than resolving the cases.
When Obama took office at the beginning in January 2009, he inherited both NSPD-12 and the Bush administration’s conservative interpretation. In May, David Cohen was confirmed as Assistant Secretary for Terrorist Finance in the Treasury Department. In 2011, he was promoted to Undersecretary. The scope of his responsibilities was vast, and included implementing sanctions on Russia and Iran. But he was also the lead U.S. official charged with shutting down the ransom pipeline. Cohen recognized that this could not be achieved without international cooperation. Countries that pay ransom, Cohen believed, fueled the overall market for kidnapping and drove up ransom prices, making the crime more attractive and more lucrative. “You know what these organizations are going to use the money for,” said Cohen. “To carry out terrorist attacks and kill people.”
Based on his own experience, Cohen believed that the refusal by the U.S. and the UK to pay ransom protected the citizens of both countries. Meanwhile, the competing approaches in which some countries paid and others did not had a perverse effect that advanced the hostage-takers’ agenda. Kidnappers could get money from the countries that paid, and victims for their execution videos from the countries that didn’t. The fact that some countries paid and some didn’t also created a framework in which kidnappers sometimes believed that increasing pressure by abusing hostages or posting terrifying videos would force countries that claimed not to make concessions to eventually capitulate.
Cohen recognized getting everyone on the same page would not be easy. One expert I spoke with compared the challenge to trying to wipe out armed robbery by making it illegal to give muggers your wallet.
In the effort to build a global standard, France was perceived as a major challenge. Of course, many countries around the world paid ransom. But the Swiss and the Germans paid quietly. The Italians and Spanish did not have the same global footprint. Qatar and Oman paid, but generally on behalf of other governments. And some Asian countries, like Korea and Japan, had also occasionally paid. But France was different because when a French hostage was taken it often sparked a national mobilization. And when the French president met the returning hostages at the airport, everyone understood why.
Then there was the fact that French president Nicolas Sarkozy was all over the map. He rallied French support for the release of Ingrid Betancourt, a Colombian politician and dual French citizen who had been held captive in Colombia since February 2002. But he adopted more assertive rhetoric and authorized a series of military raids to free French hostages held by Islamic militants.
In the Betancourt case, France used diplomacy and public mobilization to pressure the Colombian government into making concessions that they hoped would lead to Betancourt’s eventual release. Beginning in the 1990s, the FARC had turned industrial kidnapping into a steady stream of revenue that it used to fund its military operations. Most of their thousands of victims were Colombians, who were ransomed for money. Betancourt was among the smaller group of about two dozen high profile hostages including three American military contractors who were dubbed “the exchangeables.” The goal of the FARC leadership was to trade high-value hostages for their own militants jailed by the Colombian government.
Partly out of indifference and partly because U.S. officials believed that any public statements would only raise their value for the FARC, officials in the Bush administration had been largely mum about the fate of three American contractors taken hostage in February 2003 after their plane crash-landed in FARC territory while on a drug eradication mission. The three were being held alongside Betancourt.
This perceived lack of action by the U.S. angered the families of the American hostages, especially after officials blocked the possible delivery of care packages containing basic necessities like reading glasses and clean clothes. Officials made the absurd argument that if the goods ended up in the hands of the FARC it would constitute a violation of the Patriot Act, which bans material support for terrorist groups.
Meanwhile, the Sarkozy government was deploying diplomatic resources abroad, while supporting public mobilization at home, which helped keep the Betancourt case in the spotlight. As the head of the support committee for Betancourt, Florence Aubenas was a constant presence at rallies, public events, and in the media. These efforts offended the Colombian government, which believed it was being vilified for its intransigence, while it was the FARC and its cruel tactics that were to blame for the hostages’ fate. “They were telling us to do deals we weren’t willing to do,” recalled Colombian Vice President Francisco Santos, referring to the pressure from the French government. “But in turning Ingrid into this important international figure, it just upped the price for her release.”
In fact, at one point early in her captivity, the French government tried to negotiate a ransom for Betancourt. Instead, the French mediator ended up the victim of a Brazilian scam artist who claimed to be representing the guerrillas. Later, the FARC also sought to enlist the French as interlocutors with the Colombian government for a prisoner exchange deal. Under pressure from Sarkozy, Colombian President Alvaro Uribe agreed to release hundreds of FARC prisoners as a goodwill gesture. The FARC never reciprocated. When rumors surfaced that Betancourt was gravely ill, France dispatched a hospital plane in the hopes that the FARC would allow their hostage to be treated.
While the Colombian government resented the pressure, it did serve as a reminder that resolving the Betancourt kidnapping was an international priority. Of course, the Colombian government had another motivation, which was that freeing Betancourt and the fourteen other high-value hostages would deprive FARC of important strategic leverage. Beginning in early 2008, the Colombian government began to put in place elements that would lead to a daring rescue.
Relying in part on U.S. intelligence, the Colombian military was able to identify the approximate location of the hostages’ jungle hideout. It established a military cordon to contain the hostages and prevent them from being moved. On July 2, 2008, Colombian agents who had infiltrated the FARC’s inner circle convinced guards to assemble the hostages in a jungle clearing, where a helicopter pretending to be carrying journalists and members of the Red Cross would take them to meet with a rebel commander. Once the hostages were on board the helicopter, their FARC captors were subdued and the hostages freed.
When word of the rescue reached France, Aubenas declared it “Christmas in July.” Sarkozy dispatched his Foreign Minister, Bernard Kouchner, to Bogotá to escort Betancourt to Paris, where the President and First Lady Carla Bruni received Betancourt on the tarmac. For a period, she was celebrated as a national hero.
But Sarkozy took a very different approach with Islamist militant groups. Concerned with the mounting toll of French nationals being taken hostage, particularly in North Africa, Sarkozy promised aggressive action. In July 2010, the president authorized a military rescue of a seventy-eight-year-old aid worker named Michel Germaneau. The operation killed several AQIM militants, but failed to rescue Germaneau. In retaliation, AQIM beheaded Germaneau, while its leader Abdelmalek Droukdel declared that “Sarkozy had opened the doors of hell on himself and his people.” Sarkozy responded to the war of words, calling the raid “a major turning point” in French hostage policy. But military action did not produce better outcomes, according to the study by the New America Foundation. Four more hostages were killed in rescue attempts or murdered in reprisal for failed efforts.
The Sarkozy government also tried to take a harder line when it came to ransom payments. Part of the recalculation was a recognition that the groups that were now kidnapping French nationals were also engaged in action that undermined French strategic interests, particularly in the case of the AQIM. These included direct attacks on French regional allies; extortion of French businesses; and massive smuggling of drugs, cigarettes, and migrants, who relied on criminal networks for the dangerous Mediterranean crossing. At one point, Sarkozy tried to implement a new policy of charging French hostages for government efforts to secure their release, a move opposed by Kouchner, who argued it would undermine the security of French journalists and humanitarians working in conflict zones.
As noted in Chapter One, the conflicting desires to secure the release of French hostages while safeguarding French strategic interests came to a head with the case of Hervé Ghesquière and Stéphane Taponier, two journalists kidnapped in Afghanistan in December 2009. The journalists left a French military embed in Kapisa province to report independently from surrounding villages. They decided to pursue their story despite being warned by the French military commander that the Taliban were active in the area. After the two journalists were kidnapped along with their Afghan assistants, Sarkozy denounced them as reckless. Aubenas pushed back. “We should not make these accusations when they are in the hands of terrorists,” she told the president during a meeting.
Aubenas found it particularly galling that at a time when the journalists were being vilified by French officials she could not even refer to their records as experienced reporters who had responsibly covered conflict around the world because the government had requested a media blackout. On the six month anniversary of their kidnapping, after the names of the missing reporters had been released, Aubenas published an impassioned appeal in Le Monde in defense of public advocacy, writing, “Now that difficult negotiations are underway with the Taliban group holding the two journalists, many of us believe that talking about them not only saves them from being forgotten, but protects them. A hostage who matters in the eyes of public opinion…becomes more valuable and will be better treated by his captors. A hostage who matters in the eyes of the public is also like a needle stuck in the daily lives of the leaders of this country….Remembering each day the existence of these hostages is, ultimately, defending their integrity, and honoring a certain ideal of freedom of the press and democracy.”
For the next year, until the hostages were finally freed, the acts of remembrance were constant. There were marches through the streets of Paris and banners hung in the Luxembourg Gardens. To mark the two-hundredth day of their captivity, a stage of the Tour de France was dedicated to the missing journalists. When the journalists finally gained their freedom in June 2011, the French government claimed no ransom was paid, while the Afghan government said the journalists were released in exchange for Taliban prisoners. But a detailed account published in The Daily Beast and based on reporting from Afghan journalist Sami Yousafzai claimed that neither version was correct. The kidnappers originally presented the French negotiators with a list of fifty Taliban prisoners they wanted released. The French explained that many were held at Bagram Air Base and that they had no leverage with the Americans. Instead, the French offered $10 million in ransom in December 2010. The deal was rejected by the Taliban, so the French upped the offer to $15 million. The money was eventually delivered to the Taliban in Pakistan.
Cohen visited France and other countries in Europe during this period. He relied on persuasion rather than public shaming to make his case, and was sympathetic to the dilemma that governments faced. In France, he met with a senior French official who was personally supportive of the no concession approach, but also attuned to the political realities of France at that time. “You may be right as a theoretical matter,” Cohen recalled the official saying. “But we’re not going to abandon our citizens.”
Cohen had similar exchanges with other European officials. “I completely understood where they were coming from, why they were taking that view,” Cohen recalled. “I think they understood why we were taking the position we were taking, and I never had the sense that anyone disagreed with the basic premise—that this is a good way to dissuade terrorist organizations from taking hostages, and this was an important financial vehicle. I think they probably thought these Americans are cold and heartless, a little bit. My response to that is that it is somewhat cold and heartless as well to allow these terrorist organizations to become very well-funded so they can then go and kill innocent citizens.”
Even as France and other Europeans had continued to pay ransom, the U.S. and UK sought to build a global consensus around no concessions. Cohen recognized that ransom payments come from a variety of sources, and he addressed each differently. “I drew a distinction among governments paying, companies paying, and families paying,” Cohen explained. “It’s hard to expect a family to care about the broader policy implications, and we never made that argument with a family.” But he took a tougher line with the insurance industry. “We made clear in various ways that is not a legal defense to a terrorist financing charge that we were paying a terrorist to free a hostage.”
Cohen’s focus, however, was on forging a consensus among governments, and “we were getting some traction on the issue, and it was encouraging.” In December 2009, the UN Security Council adopted Resolution 1904, which condemned Osama bin Laden, the Taliban, and Al Qaeda for its “ongoing and multiple criminal terrorist acts,” particularly kidnappings and hostage-takings carried out for the purpose of raising funds or extracting political concessions. The resolution specifically banned the payment of ransom to groups or individuals included on the UN’s Consolidated List of Terrorist Organizations and streamlined the process through which groups could be added or removed.
In June 2013, UK Prime Minister David Cameron took another step forward. Chairing the G-8 Summit in Northern Ireland, Cameron secured a pledge from all its members not to pay ransom and called on international companies to follow suit. “We unequivocally reject the payment of ransoms to terrorists and call on countries and companies around the world to follow our lead and to stamp this out as well as other lucrative sources of income for terrorists,” the summit communique read. The consensus was made easier by the bold attack on Algeria’s In Amenas gas plant carried out the previous January by the AQIM affiliate led by Mokhtar Belmokhtar. Nearly forty hostages, many of them Europeans, were killed in an assault on the facility conducted by the Algerian military. For Cohen, who worked on the preparations for the summit, the joint declaration was a victory. “Not that it magically transformed the practices of those counties, but it was a pretty high profile embrace of the principal,” Cohen noted. “In these endeavors it’s step by step.”
The next milestone came in January 2014, when the UK followed up on the consensus it had built at the G-8 Summit by putting forward a new UN Security Council resolution that called on states not to pay ransom to terrorists. It was passed unanimously. One provision went further, calling on states to “encourage private sector partners to adopt or follow relevant guidelines for preventing and responding to terrorist kidnappings without paying ransom.”
While ransoms were still being paid by European governments under the table, the UN resolution represented a rhetorical recognition of the dangers of such an approach. However, the victory was short-lived. Even as the UN resolution was being passed, events were occurring in Syria that would shatter the fragile consensus.