In March 2013, Italian aid worker Federico Motka got a new assignment. For the previous year, since relocating from Afghanistan to join Geneva-based Impact Initiatives, Motka had worked all over the world—South Sudan, Peru, and India. Impact Initiatives describes itself as a “think and do tank,” and works in partnership with the French humanitarian organization ACTED. Motka’s job was to carry out detailed assessments, to visit places confronting humanitarian emergencies, and, based on interviews with local communities, to prepare reports to guide international donors. Motka had recently completed an assessment in southern Syria. Camps of people displaced by the civil war there tended to be settled helter skelter, based on the timing of their arrivals. By organizing the camps along tribal and ethnic lines, aid groups could establish greater social cohesion and improve camp management.
Impressed with his report, the bosses in Geneva now wanted Motka to carry out a similar assessment in northeast Syria. This would be a more dangerous and difficult task, because Motka would have to navigate active front lines. But the work was vital, and the risk deemed manageable. Motka would also be paired with an experienced “security and logistics coordinator” named David Haines. Haines, a forty-four-year-old former British soldier, had gotten his start during the Bosnian conflict and spent two decades working in war zones around the world.
From his base in Jordan, Motka spent weeks doing preparations and making contacts. Motka recognized that he would be operating in a complex and fluid environment, but neither he nor Haines appreciated the radical transformation that was underway. A new rebel group, incipient and largely invisible outside Syria, was beginning to coalesce. It relied less on international support, and in fact seemed to spend most of its time and energy fighting other rebel groups rather than the government of Bashar al-Assad. The more moderate rebel factions now found it impossible to guarantee the safety of Westerners in their charge. Syrian criminal gangs that had long been involved in kidnapping were also taking advantage of the power vacuum. One key data point that Motka and Haines did not have was that two international journalists, James Foley and John Cantlie, had been kidnapped a few months earlier in the same area where they would be working. For the first several months, their abduction had been “blacked out,” meaning it was not reported in the media because it was believed that coverage would complicate efforts to locate and recover the missing pair.
Motka and Haines met up in Turkey, and made their final preparations to enter Syria. The border between Turkey and Syria was only open between noon and 4:30 p.m. each day, so once they crossed over they would have to spend the night. On March 8, they visited displaced communities around Aleppo, then stayed in a house they had rented near the Turkish border. They crossed back into Turkey on Monday, then headed back to Aleppo the following day, Tuesday, March 12. On the way back to their safe house, Motka and Haines made a snap decision to visit the Atmeh refugee camp near the Turkish border. They discussed the risk and the benefits. Motka needed to get a better understanding of the needs of the camp residents relative to families that had returned to their communities near Aleppo. Their security protocol allowed them to respond to circumstances on the ground. But on their way to the camp they passed through a checkpoint that they had not anticipated. Their driver was a bit nervous. It seemed to take a long time for their passports to be returned. “It was weird, but not enough to set off alarm bells,” Motka recalled.
After carrying out a quick visit, they were driving back to their guesthouse near the Turkish border when several masked fighters wielding Kalashnikovs approached the car. Motka was on the phone to his boss in Geneva. “I think we are being kidnapped,” he said. Then he dropped the phone without switching it off. The kidnappers yanked Motka and Haines from their car, leaving their Syrian driver behind. They threw them in the trunk of their own vehicle, then drove off at high speed. Motka still had his BlackBerry, and struggled in the trunk to type out a message. By the time he hit “send,” they were out of range of the Turkish border. The message was never delivered.
After a nearly three-hour-long drive, they were pulled from the trunk. They were in a rural area that Motka suspected was near Idlib. The kidnappers took their passports. “Welcome to Syria,” one said in a perfect North London accent. This was one of the Beatles, the name the hostages would give to their sadistic jailers.
Motka and Haines were put in a cell and thoroughly searched. The next day they were taken to the group’s leader or “sheik” to be interrogated. It was all very calm and very official, as if, Motka thought, the kidnappers were pretending to be part of the regime. Motka couldn’t be sure they weren’t. The hostages were blindfolded. Their computers were searched. The interrogators had lots of questions about spreadsheets and maps found on their hard drives. The questions were persistent and aggressive, but not abusive. “Which side do you support?” the sheik asked at one point. Motka tried not to answer, but realized there was no way out. From the trunk of the car, he had heard shouts of Allahu Akbar as he passed through checkpoints. He made the assumption that he was being held by some sort of rebel group. He told his interrogators that, based on what he had witnessed in the camps, he could not support the regime.
Motka had gambled and won. After he declared his opposition to the regime, his treatment improved. But it was now clear he was being held by some sort of Jihadi group, and he and Haines were confronting a long ordeal. Back in their cell, Haines gave Motka advice: Get a routine, always tell the truth, and play the game. Motka said it wasn’t until months later that he understood and appreciated the value of these insights. His mission was to play the terrible cards he was dealt and to stay alive.
At his home in Dundee, Scotland, David’s brother Mike Haines got a call from ACTED letting him know the terrible news. The British police arrived within minutes. They moved into David’s home, setting up security equipment. They carried out detailed interviews. They helped the family rehearse its response should they be contacted by the kidnappers. Within two weeks, the Haines family was invited to London to meet with the Foreign Office. While Mike was told explicitly that the British government would not pay ransom, he was also assured that it would spare no effort to get David back. Prime Minister David Cameron even dropped in on one meeting to ask how the family was coping. The British government picked up the tab for the travel to London, and provided accommodation.
Like his brother David, Mike had served in the British Air Force. They were both aware of the risk associated with humanitarian aid work and the two brothers had spent many hours talking through everything that could go wrong.
“We talked about every scenario and I mean every scenario,” Mike explained. “Like if he were abducted by aliens. Like if he were attacked by lions. And we usually had a bottle of brandy. We talked about kidnapping. We talked about ransom. David had always said, ‘If you ever pay a pound for my release you will never see me again.’”
“Our family motto is prepare for the worst, hope for the best,” Mike continued. “We have a grand tradition of military service. Part of it meant that you don’t give in to terrorists. We agree with the government policy. Governments talk to terrorists—it’s part of what they do. But you don’t pay.”
Meanwhile, Motka’s family was contacted by the Italian government and brought to Rome for meetings. Italy, alongside Spain, is known for its willingness to pay ransom for the return of its nationals, although it officially denies doing so. In 2004, in a highly publicized case, two Italian aid workers kidnapped in Baghdad were ransomed. The following year, a well-known Italian journalist, Giuliana Sgrena, was also freed in an operation carried out by Italian intelligence. In 2013, the Italian government paid millions for the release of two journalists, an Italian and a Belgian, kidnapped in Syria. While it was never explicitly discussed and no commitments were made, Motka’s family hoped that the Italian government would also be willing to pay a ransom to get Motka home.
Back in the Idlib farmhouse, the two hostages recognized that they were on different sides of the no-concessions divide. Haines was philosophically opposed to paying ransom, and had made this abundantly clear to his brother. As a former soldier, he understood and supported his government’s policy. But he wanted desperately to live. Motka hoped that a deal could somehow be made for the two of them. They had been kidnapped together, and they should be released together. Meanwhile, their personal situation was deteriorating. After a period of reasonably good treatment, the sheik became convinced that Motka and Haines were acting with defiance and ordered that they be punished. This was a job that the Beatles assumed with relish. The two aid workers were punched, chained, shocked with electricity, waterboarded, and starved. They were told they could not use the bathroom, then beaten when they soiled themselves. Perhaps as a result of the beating, Haines suffered for the rest of his captivity from diarrhea so severe that he could barely eat.
In July, a few days after the start of Ramadan, Motka and Haines were brought together with two other foreign prisoners: journalists James Foley and John Cantlie, who had gone missing the previous November. All four were chained right hand to left hand, and for the first time since their capture they were moved to a new location. It was a farmhouse, but they called it the Swedish hotel, because the Jihadi who ran it seemed to be Scandinavian. All four hostages were in terrible shape, having been starved and beaten. But in the new environment, they were allowed to move around freely, to use the bathroom, and given plenty of food. After five or six days they were moved again, this time to an abandoned eye hospital in Aleppo.
Not long after they arrived together, Foley, who was raised Catholic, decided to convert to Islam. “James was quite a religious person,” Motka recalled. “For him, it was a way to practice his religion, to express his religious needs in a way that was safe.”
The jailers pressured Motka and Haines to convert as well. Haines never considered it, but Motka worked through every scenario. Motka had grown up in the Middle East. His father worked for Schenker AG, a German logistics and shipping company, and had relocated the family to the region. Motka had lived in Baghdad as an infant and been educated in British schools in the Gulf. He speaks English with a British accent and often goes by Fred or Freddy. He is highly rational and deeply analytical, attributes that served him well in carrying out humanitarian assessments. Now he applied those same skills to examining his own predicament. He thought that if he converted, his treatment might improve. But he also believed there was both a physical and a spiritual risk. If his jailers believed his conversion was not sincere, he would be punished. More importantly, he felt that if there was a God—and in that moment he needed to believe in a higher power—he would one day have to answer for his deception. He decided he could not risk his soul.
On June 6, three months after Motka and Haines were kidnapped, French journalist Didier François, and a colleague, Eduard Elias, were detained by rebel forces near Aleppo. François had moved on from Libération and was now a reporter for radio station Europe 1. He had covered the Syrian conflict since it emerged in 2011, and had been one of the first to report on the use of chemical weapons by the Assad regime. In a tribute published soon after he was kidnapped, François’s friend and colleague, Bernard-Henri Lévy, described his eloquent reports as “written radio.”
François and Elias were brought to the eye hospital, whose basement had been converted into a prison for the various rebel forces that sometimes collaborated in the fight against Assad and sometimes competed for control of the city. Fighters from the Al Qaeda-aligned Al-Nusra Front ran one wing, while those from the Islamic State controlled another. The screams of prisoners undergoing torture echoed through the building.
For the first several days of their captivity, François and Elias were handcuffed and chained to a radiator without food or water. Later, they witnessed the beheading of several prisoners through an open cell door. Eventually they were put in a cell with Daniel Rye Ottosen, a former gymnast and aspiring photojournalist from Denmark. Rye had been taken into custody a month earlier in the town of Azaz, during what he planned as a short stint inside Syria to document how civilians were adapting to life during wartime.
The head of the eye hospital prison went by the nom de guerre Abu Ubaidah al-Maghribi. He was of Moroccan origin, but a Dutch citizen. Many of the guards were also from Europe, and spoke Danish, Spanish, and French. One, Mehdi Nemmouche, a French citizen of Algerian background, would later carry out an attack on the Jewish Museum in Brussels that left four dead.
In July, only weeks after François and Elias were taken captive, the French Ministry of Defense confirmed that the two were alive and the government was working for their release. The guards informed the hostages that the French government had opened a channel and was negotiating. They also expressed frustration with the Danish government, which had a strict no concessions policy.
On June 22, two other French journalists, Nicolas Hénin and Pierre Torres were detained in Raqqa. They were later brought to Aleppo. American freelance journalist Steven Sotloff was captured in early August. The group shared a room in the eye hospital, but were left alone for extended periods and passed the time telling stories, doing yoga, and playing games fashioned from pieces of cardboard.
Conditions were terrible, but the French hostages were buoyed by the fact that some sort of negotiation seemed to be taking place. The jailers asked for their email contacts and recorded proof of life videos. François, who was the oldest hostage at fifty-three, was elected the “emir.” He had had regular contact with the jailers through which he picked up details about the negotiations. François, based on his own experience in the Aubenas case, had a good sense of how things would work. He believed that President Hollande would create a small group of trusted aides to manage the negotiation. He expected that the president would be guided by French national interests, but it did not hurt that he and Hollande were close friends. He believed that French negotiators would insist the deal would be for all the French hostages, or none. He knew the government would be willing to pay, but only if the demand was “reasonable” and was not a “game changer”—in other words, would not substantially alter conditions on the ground.
What François did not know was that Aubenas—returning the favor he had once done for her—had agreed to lead the support committee that was rallying for the return of the French hostages. He did not know that banners were being hung from buildings in Paris; that rallies were being held in the streets; and that France’s media community had come together to share information, coordinate coverage, and push the government toward action.
By late August after the hostages were moved to a new prison in an industrial area of Aleppo called Sheik Najarr, negotiations seemed to slow. New hostages joined the group. Marc Marginedas, a journalist from El Periódico de Catalunya in Barcelona arrived with news that was welcomed by Daniel Rye: Denmark had won the Eurovision song contest. Two other Spanish journalists, Javier Espinosa from the national daily El Mundo and photographer Ricardo García Vilanova, had been detained in Raqqa in mid-September. They were later brought to Aleppo along with U.S. aid worker Peter Kassig. They were journalists and aid workers, for the most part, and came from a variety of countries, including the U.S., the UK, France, Spain, Italy, Belgium, and Germany. None of them knew exactly why they had been taken.
For the hostages themselves, the bad news was that the Beatles were back in the picture. They showed up in November 2013, and adopted a much harsher tone than the French-speaking guards who had looked after the hostages in the eye hospital. The Spanish journalists theorized that the Beatles sought to create their own version of Guantanamo, filled with prisoners dressed in the same clothes and experiencing the same abuse and humiliation as Muslim prisoners held at the U.S. military base. Guantanamo was something the guards talked about constantly. “George,” one of the Beatles, came up with the idea of making all the prisoners wear orange jumpsuits, and proudly showed off the fabric when it was delivered.
For Motka, the parallels with Guantanamo were less a well-considered propaganda strategy than a reflection of the eye-for-an-eye mentality that guided the guards’ every action. He recalled that when he, David, John, and Jim were being held in Idlib, before the move to Aleppo, the guards made them all read a news story about Aafia Siddiqui, the MIT-educated Pakistani neuroscientist and alleged Al Qaeda operative, who had been imprisoned in the U.S. The article claimed that Siddiqui was beaten in the Texas prison where she is serving an eighty-six-year sentence for attempted murder. As soon as the hostages finished reading the article the guards set on them and beat them mercilessly. This was also the period when all four hostages were waterboarded.
Motka had a different theory. He believed—or at least he hoped—that the hostages had been brought together because the kidnappers intended to ransom them as a group. Indeed, by the fall of 2013 there seemed to be new and more systematic effort to negotiate, this time led by the Beatles. All the hostages were asked to provide email address for their families and employers and a flurry of messages was sent out in November and December 2013. The message sent to Motka’s family read, “Our demands for this negotiation are: Primarily, that you influence your government however you can to release our Muslim prisoners in exchange for Fedrico. However if this is unsuccessful due to your lack of influence or your government simply not caring then the amount of 100,000,000 euro’s will be accepted as our secondary demand.” This was substantially similar to the email sent to other families, including the Sotloffs and Foleys.
Despite the misspellings and typos, Motka said the message was carefully crafted to ensure that the demands were religiously justified, at least in the minds of his jailers. The Prophet Mohammed, the Beatles explained, had sought to exchange prisoners with his enemies, and had only accepted money when this was not possible.
This new round of negotiations forced each of the hostages to consider his particular fate. At one point, Foley, aware of the U.S. no concessions policy, proposed to François that the French lead negotiations on behalf of all the hostages. He even suggested that Qatar could be convinced to pay the ransom. But François told him that he knew how the French operated and said he could not risk his own life or that of his French colleagues on a new and untested approach. François believed that a channel had been opened, and that the French government would reach out to the other governments who could choose to negotiate or not, based on their own principles or interests. However, my own reporting efforts suggest this may not have been the case. Sources in the U.S. and Spain told me they were never contacted by the French, and that they did not share information about the negotiations.
In mid-September 2013, soon after Javier Espinosa and Ricardo García Vilanova were detained in Raqqa, Pedro J. Ramírez, the editor of El Mundo, got a call from Javier’s wife, Mónica Prieto. Mónica and Javier were a formidable reporting duo and had covered some of the region’s worst violence. The year before, Espinosa had survived the shelling of the press center in Homs that killed two of his colleagues, including the Sunday Times correspondent Marie Colvin. The couple now lived in Beirut with their two young children.
“It was a very emotional moment,” Ramírez recalled. “In the newsroom of El Mundo, we had various colleagues killed over the years.” In May 2000, columnist José Luis López de Lacalle was assassinated by an ETA hit squad outside his home in Spain’s Basque Country. In 2003, reporter Julio Anguita Parrado was killed in a missile attack while embedded with U.S. forces in Iraq. In 2001, Julio Fuentes was gunned down in Afghanistan along with a group of international reporters. An Afghan man later convicted of the crime claimed he was ordered by a top Taliban commander to execute the journalists. Prieto was married to Fuentes and she and Ramírez traveled to Pakistan to collect his body. Ramírez was determined to do all he could to ensure that Prieto was not widowed a second time.
Ramírez is a legendary figure in Spanish journalism. At twenty-eight, he became the youngest editor of a national daily when he took over the struggling Diario 16. After turning it around, he left in 1989 to found a new daily, El Mundo, which, though linked to the right-wing Popular Party, was quite liberal on social issues. The paper was also known for its investigations and its uncompromising stance against Basque separatists. In 1989, officials in Spain’s Socialist government leaked a sex tape in a failed attempt to extort Ramírez and get El Mundo to change its editorial positions. Along with his wife, designer Agatha Ruiz de la Prada (from whom he separated in 2017), Ramírez was half of Madrid’s ultimate power couple. Now, with the life of two reporters in the balance he got on the phone with General Sanz Roldán. The two would stay in touch throughout the crisis.
The challenge for the CNI was that Spain did not have a great network of contacts in the Middle East. In a notorious 2003 incident, seven Spanish CNI agents were killed in an ambush in Iraq, leaving a gaping hole in their intelligence network. Fortunately, Prieto had her own contacts built up over many years of reporting in the region. The CNI assigned an agent based in Beirut to work with Prieto on the recovery effort.
When Espinosa and Prieto had worked in Iraq, they developed a protocol to deal with the risk of kidnapping. They moved in convoys, with a motorcycle deployed ahead to pass through the checkpoints and radio back if there were problems. Espinosa grew out his beard, and they both dressed in local clothing. They tried to speak as little as possible in public. But in Syria, conditions were changing rapidly, and they were not aware journalists were being targeted. “We didn’t connect the dots,” Espinosa admitted later.
Still, Prieto became aware within hours that something was wrong, after Espinosa missed his regular check-in. She knew that he and García Vilanova were on the road from Raqqa to the Turkish border. Had there been fighting? Had they been detained?
Over the next few weeks, working her sources and contacts in Syria, Prieto was able to confirm that her husband and his colleague had been detained at a checkpoint and were being held in Raqqa. She met with every influential Jihadi she could think of to plead her case, even traveling to Istanbul to lobby leaders of various rebel groups who had gathered for a meeting with their Gulf financiers. At first, Prieto simply fed what she had to the CNI agent she was working with. But he was a quick learner, and by the end of the summer had developed his own sources. They were able to locate the specific house where the hostages were being held. Fearful that the U.S. military would try to launch a rescue attempt, they made the decision not to share the information with the U.S. government. Prieto was never contacted by the FBI or any U.S. authorities.
In December, after a three-month blackout in which the kidnapping of the Spanish journalists was not reported, Prieto decided to hold a press conference in Beirut. “Javier didn’t only survive the bombardment of Baba Amr, which killed two of his colleagues right before his eyes,” Prieto declared. “He even chose to stay in the neighborhood until the last civilian was evacuated…. When I asked him to leave before the fall of Homs, he told me he had the obligation to stay and report. I reminded him that our children needed him alive, and he replied by telling me that the children of Syria needed the world’s attention.”
It was not until near the end of the year, when the emails went out to all the hostage families, that Prieto finally made contact with the kidnappers. Some messages were encouraging, others terrifying and insulting. When the negotiations reached a point where particulars were being discussed, Prieto told the kidnappers that she was concerned about the security of her email and so had created a new account. In fact, that account went directly to the CNI agent, who handled the negotiations from that point forward. Prieto was kept out of the loop.
Meanwhile, back in Madrid, Pedro J. Ramírez was forced out as editor of El Mundo. The paper said it was a financial decision, but Ramírez alleged payback for reporting on corruption in the administration of President Mariano Rajoy. Despite his ouster, Ramírez made the decision to stay on at El Mundo in a non-executive role in part to support Prieto. Casimiro García-Abadillo, Ramírez’s deputy who took over as editor-in-chief, told me the final round of ransom negotiations were handled through a contact in Qatar “connected to the kingdom’s security or intelligence.” He said that the demands were strictly economic and not political but that he did not know the final amount paid. Ramírez believes the money was paid by the CNI from its “reserve funds,” but never received confirmation. When I spoke with El Mundo’s owner, Antonio Fernandez-Galiano, he said he knew nothing about the details, which were handled entirely by the CNI.
During the many years in which the Basque separatist group ETA was active in Spain, El Mundo had taken a hard line against the payment of ransom in domestic kidnappings. But Ramírez saw no contradictions in paying ransom to secure the release of Spanish journalists abroad. “I’ve always maintained that each circumstance has to be judged on its own merit,” Ramírez argued. “Even if you have a general principle of not paying ransom, there are always exceptional circumstances. Even with ETA, the government adopted a firm posture of not negotiating, but through underground channels helped facilitate the negotiations for families that wanted to pay.”
“You have to consider which option is the least bad,” Ramírez continued. “Probably we are confronting what Isaiah Berlin called the conflict of negative liberty in which any decision taken has negative consequences. But I believe that the authorities in a democratic country should be especially concerned when a journalist is kidnapped or detained by a military while exercising his profession. It seems correct and logical that the secret services worked to secure Javier’s release.”
Ramírez acknowledged that the calculus might be different for the United States because of its military involvement in the region. “Spain has peacekeeping forces in some places, but it’s a symbolic and marginal presence. I understand that the U.S. authorities see their hostages as an instrument of coercion in the face of a foreign or defense policy. This is something that has been taken into account. But in the case of a country like Spain, this is a very secondary question.”
“It’s looking good for the Spaniards,” George, the leader of the Beatles, announced in February 2014. A few weeks later, the Beatles entered the room in a house outside Raqqa that the hostages called the Quarry. The hostages had been moved to Raqqa in January 2014 after a combined rebel offensive in Aleppo drove the Islamic State from the city. Now, George announced, everyone needed to pack their belongings. Marc Marginedas was being released and the rest of the hostages were being moved. It was not a surprise that Marginedas was the first to be freed, since the other hostages knew he was suffering from a medical condition that required treatment. The hostages were loaded into cars, according to Motka’s recollection, and driven around in circles and then returned directly to the same house. Marginedas was no longer among them. The purpose of the ruse was to ensure that Marginedas believed the hostages were no longer in the same location, and would inform the intelligence agencies accordingly.
In early March, the Beatles removed a Russian hostage, Sergey Gorbunov, and shot him in the head. They forced the remaining captives to view pictures of Gorbunov’s execution that they shared on a laptop. They promised that all would suffer the same fate if a ransom was not forthcoming. On March 30, Espinosa and García Vilanova were released. This time the Beatles announced that the hostages were being moved, but didn’t even bother to drive them around.
In April, when the four French hostages were released, the Beatles simply walked in and ordered them to pack up their things. Just before they were freed, the Beatles brought in Kayla Mueller, an American aid worker who had been captured in August 2013, but had been kept apart from the men. Mueller asked the French hostages to inform the U.S. authorities that they would be freed in exchange for release of Aafia Siddiqui and 5 million euros in cash. This same demand would be conveyed to Mueller’s family via email the next month. As he was departing, George also whispered into François’s ear terms for the release of the other Americans, Foley, Sotloff, and Kassig.
The French hostages returned home to a hero’s welcome. President Hollande declared that France was proud to have secured their release. François responded that the hostages were lucky to be French. After some hesitation, François agreed to speak with the FBI’s legal attache at the U.S. Embassy in Paris. He provided information on the location of the house where the hostages were held, and the terms for the release of the American hostages. He has never publicly discussed the details of the offer. When I talked with well-placed U.S. officials, they told me they had never seen anything specific conveyed via François.
François had also carried a letter from David Haines. This was the only contact that his brother Mike had with him through the entire kidnapping ordeal. The letter used an agreed-upon code to indicate that it had been written under duress. The only genuine sentiment it contained was a desire from David to send all his love to his daughters. This Mike duly did.
Next to be released were three women who worked for Medecins San Frontieres, followed by two men, nationals of Denmark and Belgium. Their negotiations were handled by MSF directly on a separate track from the other hostages. Dan, whose last name has not been made public, smuggled out a letter from Kayla Mueller to her parents in his enormous beard. Mueller and the male hostages had been exchanging messages left in their shared bathroom, a breach of the rules that the Beatles eventually discovered.
Motka was released at the end of May. The Italian government has never discussed with Motka or his family how the hostage negotiations were handled. In January, 2014 the Italian government paid an estimated $11 million for two aid workers kidnapped in Syria. Photos of the cash piled high on a desk were featured in an Al Jazeera documentary. Motka assumes a similar intelligence operation delivered the ransom that led to his freedom.
The last two hostages to be released were Daniel Rye and a German aid worker named Toni Neukirch. Since Denmark does not pay ransom, Rye’s family had to raise 2 million euros on their own. They could not have done so without the help of a security consultant, whose fees were partially covered by a K & R insurance policy that Rye had acquired before his trip to Syria. The man, who I spoke with but who asked not to be identified, delivered a black knapsack stuffed with cash to two men on a motorcycle who met him at a designated drop point on the Turkish-Syrian border. The same consultant was also part of a team that worked on the Foley case. Their fees were covered by a K & R policy acquired through the Global Post, Foley’s media outlet. They were the only two of the ISIS hostages known to have had active policies.
Motka believed until the end that the kidnappers were interested in negotiating for the release of other hostages, including his colleague David Haines, but there was plenty of evidence this was not the case. The American and British hostages were not asked to provide proof of life, even as the negotiations proceeded for the release of the other hostages. When the Spanish hostage Marc Marginedas was released, the jailers ordered James Foley to take a good look, announcing “this is as close as you will get to freedom.” They beat Foley repeatedly, accusing him, falsely, of having served in the U.S. military. At one point, the kidnappers forced the remaining hostages to witness an execution while holding signs demanding that their ransom be paid. But the Americans and Brits were left behind. Six new orange jumpsuits were delivered so that the British and American hostages could record videos making impossible demands, like a ransom of $100 million and the release of Muslim prisoners held by the U.S. Recognizing his likely fate, Foley dictated a letter to his family that Rye memorized and read to them once he was freed. While the Beatles encouraged Rye’s family to raise the ransom money and set an exorbitant though obtainable demand, there was no comparable effort for the American or British hostages.
On July 3, 2014, about a month after the last European hostage was freed, the U.S. military launched a raid and rescue operation codenamed Graphite Arrow. Based on intelligence gathered from the freed hostages, operators from Delta Force backed by helicopter gunships and armed drones targeted the building that the hostages had called the Quarry. It had taken time for the U.S. to organize the raid because it had to cross-check intelligence and locate the building using satellite imagery, according to an account published in the New Yorker. Motka found this odd, because after the first hostages were released in early March, the remaining hostages were held in the same building until at least early June, when Daniel Rye and Toni Neukirch were released. While in captivity, Motka had climbed on the shoulders of Dan from MSF to peer out a vent in their cell. Based on what he saw, Motka drew a map on a napkin while riding on the plane back to Italy. Later, he was able to locate the building where he was held on a Google map. He alerted Italian intelligence, and later debriefed the FBI and the British Metropolitan police. In any case, the remaining hostages had been moved by the time the American raid took place. The mission came up empty, except for communications equipment and other intelligence recovered from the house. Two ISIS fighters were killed in the raid, and a U.S. helicopter pilot was seriously injured.
The military raid had been authorized by President Obama because he believed the fate of the remaining hostages had effectively been sealed. The bombing campaign by U.S. forces that began in August 2014 in response to the massacre of Yazidi civilians on Mount Sinjar and the ISIS takeover of the Iraqi city of Mosul provided the political cover that ISIS needed to carry out their ghastly executions.
The value of the terrorizing propaganda is suggested by the fact that Foley’s execution was filmed by several cameras and meticulously edited. According to an analysis carried out by Javier Lesaca, a Spanish academic, ISIS videos tended to focus on four areas: effective administration of their quasi-state, testimonials from young people drawn to the cause, their prowess in battle, and the execution of prisoners. The videos were modeled on popular video games and violent movies like SAW, Call of Duty, American Sniper, and The Hunger Games. While Al-Qaeda videos showed a “bunch of old guys in a cave,” ISIS videos were dynamic and featured the voices of the young multicultural recruits, not their middle-aged leaders. A key function of the videos was recruitment. ISIS recruiters would track engagement with the content, and reach out via direct message on Twitter to anyone who reacted positively. In this sense, the execution videos were worth far more to ISIS than any ransom payment they might have received.
The Foley execution video was uploaded on August 19. Two weeks later, Steven Sotloff was murdered, followed by David Haines. Alan Henning, a British taxi driver, was murdered in October. Peter Kassig was killed the following month.
Even as ISIS was murdering the male hostages, they continued to negotiate for the release of Kayla Mueller. Following up on the email sent in May 2014 demanding 5 million euros and the release of Aafia Siddiqui, they sent a note in June demonstrating a sophisticated understanding of how hostage negotiations work. Insisting that organizations that work in conflict zones have “special insurance” and that “governments DO pay ransoms! (when it’s done under the table)” the kidnappers reiterated their financial demands. But they also added a new argument. The release of five high-value prisoners from Guantanamo in exchange for U.S. soldier Bowe Bergdahl made their “one-for-one” demand of Mueller for Siddiqui eminently reasonable. The next note, sent July 12, adopted an angrier and more strident tone. It referenced the “miserably failed” rescue attempt and said Kayla would be killed in thirty days if the family failed to come up with the money. By September, a new condition had been added: The U.S. must stop its “criminal aerial bombardments of the Islamic State.” In February 2015, ISIS claimed that Mueller had been killed in a Jordanian air strike, and sent the family a photo of her battered body. Her family believes Mueller may have been murdered by her captors, although this has never been confirmed. Two Yazidi girls who escaped from sexual slavery claimed that Mueller had been held prisoner in the home of a top ISIS commander known as Abu Sayyaf, and repeatedly raped by the group’s leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. A May 2015 raid carried out by the U.S. military killed Abu Sayyaf and captured his wife. Under interrogation, she confirmed the abuse.
For the American families, the death of the American hostages demonstrated the fecklessness of the U.S. hostage policy. Unlike the British hostage families, all of the Americans claimed a lack of support, cooperation, and even basic empathy on the part of U.S. officials. The families were told to keep quiet and avoid the media. Initially, they had no contact with each other, a function of U.S. State Department regulations which prohibits the sharing of “private information.” At a notorious White House Department meeting in May 2014, Mark Mitchell, the NSC Director of Counterterrorism and a retired Army colonel, informed the families that paying ransom was illegal and families could be prosecuted. “We were told face to face, we don’t negotiate with terrorists,” Art Sotloff, the father of Steven Sotloff, told me. “It is against the law; you could be prosecuted; anyone that aids or abets could be prosecuted.” Mitchell later defended his actions, saying he wanted families to be made aware of the legal risk, and to understand that while hostage recovery is a priority it is not necessarily the top priority.
A source at the U.S. State Department who worked on the hostage cases told me that despite Mitchell’s warning the families were repeatedly reassured that they would not be prosecuted for paying ransom. They were also told that the no concessions policy was intended to give the families leverage in the negotiations with their kidnappers, allowing them to argue that they were on their own and could not afford the huge sums being demanded. But as someone who was in touch with several of the families during this period, I can affirm that they—as well as those who were trying to help them—were uncertain of their legal position. The notion that the no concessions policy would give families leverage was belied by the experience of the Muellers, who received nothing but scorn when they told Kayla’s kidnappers they were seeking to raise money on their own without the help of the U.S. government. In fact, the executions of American and British hostages so dramatically changed the calculus for the U.S. government that at one point State Department officers broached the idea of the American government finding a way to pay the $5 million the Islamic State was demanding for Mueller’s release. The idea was quickly shot down by more senior officials who made it clear this would represent a violation of U.S. policy.
The ambiguity around the U.S. position also stifled private efforts to win the release of the hostages, according to David Bradley. Bradley, the owner of The Atlantic, was moved by the experience of his own reporter, a freelancer abducted in Libya in 2011, to launch a personal campaign in support of the hostage families. In his travels around the world to investigate the cases of the missing Americans, “we just never came across the U.S. government,” Bradley told me. “I would ask people, ‘Are you talking to the U.S. government?’ Maybe out of 150 we met, three times we crossed paths with the government investigation.”
“I found the U.S. government in the early days not just unhelpful but an impediment to doing the work,” Bradley continued. “The Obama administration’s strong view, coming from the president himself, but down to the National Security Council, and out to the agencies, was that the United States does not pay ransom. And I know it’s a very well-intended policy, but it also had a chilling effect, it meant that allies around the world were concerned not to help the U.S. government for fear of being seen as paying ransom.”
On several occasions, beginning at the end of 2013, Bradley and former FBI agent Ali Soufan traveled to Qatar, where they met with Ghanem Khalifa al-Kubaisi, the head of the kingdom’s Intelligence Service, to ask for help in securing the release of Foley and Theo Padnos, an American freelance journalist kidnapped by the Al Qaeda affiliated Al-Nusra Front. Bradley delivered the talking points provided by the FBI and the State Department, declaring “the United States does not pay ransom, and I as a private citizen, am not allowed to pay ransoms and I don’t want you to pay ransom but can you help us in any way?” The Qataris promised to be helpful. Padnos was released on August 24 after two years in captivity and only days after Foley was murdered. The Qataris said no ransom was paid, and that Padnos was released on a humanitarian basis. Given Qatar’s record of paying ransom in other cases, many experts I spoke with were highly skeptical of the claim. In a 2018 interview with the Saudi-owned broadcaster Al Arabiya, Padnos himself said he suspected that Qatar paid a ransom for his release as part of a strategy to channel money to the Al-Nusra Front without running afoul of its Western allies.
Motka does not believe the Beatles had started out with some master plan to exploit the differences in hostage policies. Like the hostages themselves, they had simply “played the game” and stumbled into an opportunity. When they made the decision to kill the American and British hostages rather than ransoming them is difficult to discern, and many of those I spoke with, including intelligence officials, security consultants, and the hostages themselves, have different views. My own conclusion, based on interviews with the surviving hostages who described the shifting treatment of the Americans and Brits, is that ISIS initially intended to ransom all the hostages, either together or separately. At some point in early 2014, that changed. While the murders were not a specific reaction to the American bombing campaign or to the failed rescue attempt, those events may have reinforced the determination to carry through on their brutal plan.
The ransoming of European hostages and the videotaped murders of the American and British hostages was a huge propaganda victory from ISIS’s perspective, allowing them to highlight their political demands while making the U.S. in particular appear indifferent to the plight of its own citizens. Each hostage I spoke with viewed the issue through their own perspective. Javier Espinosa told me that “foreign policy rather than hostage policy” determined who lived and who died.
At the time that David Haines was kidnapped, both and he and Mike were firm supporters of the British no concessions policy. But as David watched the European hostages being ransomed one by one, his commitment began to waver, according to Motka. More than anything else, David wanted to see his two girls again. “You can say you are opposed to paying ransom, but until you are in that situation you don’t know how you are going to react,” Mike pointed out when we spoke. Mike told me that he watched the Europeans being freed and thought, “those bastards—they gave in.”
The anguish that Mike feels is reflected in the convoluted thinking required to make sense of his brother’s death. “My family knows where I stand—no ransoms,” he said. “I think the British and American policy is the right one. David always said that if you pay ransom, it will just be used to buy weapons for terrorists. Still, if I had it within my power, I would have paid a ransom to get David back. Even if my brother never spoke with me again.”
Mike is also grateful that Motka was ransomed. “I am so glad that Fred got out,” he said. “Fred is as close to me as David. I know that Fred has such an immense amount of guilt. As do the other hostages.”
By March 2015, Motka, who had settled in London after winning his freedom, attended a lecture by Jonathan Powell at the London School of Economics. Powell, the former chief of staff to Tony Blair, had written an acclaimed book entitled Talking to Terrorists: How to End Armed Conflict. Drawing on his experience as chief British negotiator on Northern Ireland, Powell argued that while governments claim they will not talk to terrorists, in the end nearly all do. They do so out of strategic interests—because dialogue is the only way to end a conflict. Recognizing this inevitable dynamic, governments can save lives by engaging with so-called terrorists at the outset. Even engagement with Al Qaeda and the Islamic State, Powell argued, must be considered.
Not surprisingly given the recent murders of Haines and other British hostages in Syria, one of the first questions out of the audience was about the British no concessions policy. “I don’t work on hostages because it’s a different sort of discipline from political negotiations,” Powell conceded. “The question of whether you should negotiate over hostages is a classic prisoner’s dilemma. If you’re an individual hostage, you’d very much like them to negotiate on your behalf. But the reason that the British and the Americans and others have been trying to persuade the French and the Italians and other governments not to pay ransom is because it encourages further kidnappings and funds terrorist groups to a large extent.”
Motka, still reeling from having left Haines behind, left the event feeling angry and disappointed. He had similar debates with Haines during their shared captivity, so the answers were not merely academic. “To me it sounded completely schizophrenic, in the sense that you are saying you can talk to the Islamic State but you can’t talk about hostages,” Motka told me. “This can’t be a black and white discussion. We are living in a gray world. Your principles are not your policy.”