During the eighteen months that Jim Foley was held hostage in Syria, his parents, John and Diane, sought to make their son’s return a priority for the U.S. government. They were able to secure a meeting in the White House with National Security Advisor Susan Rice, whom Diane had gotten to know when Rice served as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations. While Rice was sympathetic, she referred Diane back to the FBI. Diane was disappointed. She believed that it was only President Obama himself who could cut through the bureaucratic infighting and “make things happen.”
On the day that Foley’s execution was uploaded to YouTube on August 19, 2014, Obama was en route to Martha’s Vineyard for a family vacation. Lisa Monaco, the president’s Homeland Security and Counterterrorism Advisor, watched the video and was in tears when she called NSC’s deputy security advisor Ben Rhodes on board Air Force One and asked him to inform the president. “Foley the journalist?” Obama responded upon hearing the news. “I should call the family. And make some kind of statement.”
Rhodes, also one of Obama’s chief speechwriters, drafted the statement that night in the vacation home where the president and his family were staying while the Obamas were having dinner with friends in the dining room. By the end of the evening, the president’s position had hardened and he argued that they should just release the statement rather than making a public appearance. But Rhodes and White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough urged Obama to speak to the media the next morning.
“People need to hear from you on this one, Mr. President,” McDonough argued.
“OK,” the president said. “But I think it just elevates ISIL.” (ISIL is what the administration called the Islamic State.)
The next morning, after calling the Foleys to offer his condolences, Obama spoke to the press. He praised Foley as a man “who lived his work.” He heaped scorn on the Islamic State. “No just god would stand for what they did yesterday and for what they do every single day,” he declared. Privately, he complained that his remarks gave the terrorists “exactly what they want.” After finishing his statement, Obama headed to the golf course where he was photographed laughing with friends. Facing withering criticism, he acknowledged that his golf outing had produced bad “optics.”
In January 2013, the Foleys had made a decision to go public about their son’s kidnapping. Public appeals can put pressure on governments, but they also have the potential to drive up demands and complicate negotiations. Other hostage families, including the family of John Cantlie, who was kidnapped alongside Foley, had decided to keep quiet.
While the Foleys were not able to use the profile they gained through their public campaign to bring their son home, after his death they discovered they had an important platform. They decided to use it to highlight the U.S. government’s dysfunction and to push for change.
In media interviews and public appearances, the Foleys talked openly and with unusual bluntness about the failure of the U.S. government to coordinate its response. They described the way they were shunted from agency to agency, and spoke with outrage about the heartless lecture they received from Mark Mitchell in May 2014, when he warned the Foleys and other families that they could be prosecuted for paying ransom. Mitchell also told the families that the U.S. would not conduct a military raid to rescue the hostages and would not ask another country to intervene on their behalf.
Three months after Jim’s murder, in November 2014, Diane was finally able to meet with President Obama at the White House. “Jim was always our top priority,” Obama told her.
“With all due respect, Mr. President,” Diane responded, breaking into tears, “you know he never was.”
The president didn’t argue. He told Diane that the U.S. had failed them and other American families.
Before Jim’s disappearance, Diane Foley was a nurse practitioner in a small town in New Hampshire. John is a doctor. Diane had never done media, never been an advocate, never been a spokesperson for a cause. But she discovered she had all the qualities she needed to succeed in her accidental role. She is an effective networker; a keen observer of facts; an efficient researcher; and an articulate public speaker. She is confident in her conclusions; polite and considerate in her personal dealings, but willing to ask uncomfortable questions and call things as she sees them. “Our original FBI guy was a joke,” Diane insisted when I asked her about her first interactions with the U.S. government. “He spoke no Arabic. He just sits here and suggests to us that we talk to President Assad, who could help us. It was laughable.”
Diane’s candor got attention, but it also rankled some people in the U.S. government who had worked on Jim’s case. Of course not all hostage families are as outspoken, or as aggrieved. But the Foleys’ media visibility gave them the floor and the ability to shape perceptions.
During the period that Jim was in captivity, Diane made two unaccompanied trips to Europe after the Spanish and French hostages were released. She was impressed with the French way of doing things. She met with Didier Le Bret, the head of the French government Crisis Cell. Le Bret was shocked about how little Diane had been told and aghast the U.S. did not have a person—or a system—responsible for keeping her informed. “I was absolutely puzzled,” Le Bret told me. “She knew nothing. All the work was happening behind locked doors. There was no single point of contact. No human relationship. The emphasis of U.S. no concession was displaying no signs of weakness—but the needs of the family had been forgotten in the process.”
Diane and John also met with Florence Aubenas and the support committee, who were working for the release of Didier François and the other French hostages held in Syria. They attended a bimonthly meeting of the “media group” where representatives from different media organizations got together to compare reports, vet rumors, and coordinate responses. “That’s the way French journalists really got the public behind them, to push the government,” Diane recalled. “There’s this advocacy feeling in France. They love their journalists.”
The Foleys wanted to apply some of the French experience in the U.S. They wanted greater media solidarity, with U.S. journalists not just covering events but working behind the scenes to put pressure on officials. They wanted greater coordination within the government agencies. They wanted greater compassion and sympathy. And while they didn’t challenge the U.S. no concessions policy, they noted repeatedly that the European governments that paid ransom got their hostages home, while the American and British hostages were killed.
“I want to continue Jim’s work,” Diane told a packed house at the Newseum in Washington in February 2015. “He would want to right this wrong. Our government can do better. Our press can do better. I hope part of Jim’s legacy can be to stimulate this discussion and to advocate for a clearer policy that will bring our citizens home.” Doug Frantz, a former New York Times and Los Angeles Times reporter who had become Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs, represented the government’s perspective on the panel. Frantz spoke about how the U.S. government had failed to anticipate the brutality of the Islamic State’s tactics and the trauma the execution videos had inflicted on the nation.
“I was the very first administration official to talk publicly about our hostage policy,” Frantz later recalled. “I thought it was important that we engage with the families in a public way, but the opposition was very strong.” Officials from the State Department and the FBI tried to block Frantz’s appearance and sent several people to sit in the audience and report back about every word he said.
In the fall of 2014, President Obama ordered a comprehensive review of U.S. hostage policy. Lisa Monaco had seen the anger and frustration from Diane and the hostage families. “I recommended to the president that we had to really step back and figure out how we could do better,” Monaco recalled. Jen Easterly, who had been the Senior Director for Counterterrorism on the National Security Council and the primary point of contact at the White House for Diane following Jim’s murder, urged Monaco to involve the families in the review process. Monaco agreed.
Monaco convened the deputy secretaries of all the government agencies involved in hostage response. They decided that the work should be led by the National Counterterrorism Center, which was created following the September 11 attacks to better coordinate intelligence and analyze terror threats. Lt. General Bennet Sacolick, a former Delta Force commander and the NCTC’s director for strategic operational planning, was put in charge of the effort.
The meetings took place in a secure conference room at the NCTC headquarters in northern Virginia, outside Washington. All the federal agencies involved in hostage policy and hostage response were represented—among them the FBI, the CIA, the State Department, the Treasury Department, the Justice Department, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, representatives from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Defense Department, and the Defense Intelligence Agency. At first the group was small enough to sit around a conference table. But once the agencies realized what was at stake, “they sent more people and more senior people and they had to open this removable wall and expand the room,” recalled one participant.
The larger group split into four breakouts that met weekly to discuss government coordination, family engagement, intelligence sharing, and U.S. government policy. Hostage families, among them the Foleys, were invited to share their experiences. Brian Jenkins from the RAND Corporation briefed them about the history and evolution of U.S. hostage policy. David Bradley described his personal experience—and frustration—in supporting the families of Americans kidnapped overseas. European allies were invited to make presentations via video-conference, and some were consulted in person.
Participants heard how families were shunted from agency to agency without a clear point of contact; they heard how families were given conflicting messages about whether they faced legal jeopardy if they paid a ransom; they heard how rivalries between government agencies and departments had compromised the government’s response.
In order to improve communication and coordination, the review team proposed the creation of a “fusion cell” made up of the different agencies that respond when a kidnapping occurs. Proximity, collegiality, and trust would improve information-sharing and ensure that the full resources of the government were brought to bear in resolving the cases. Ironically, the same rivalries that had crippled response played out in the room when the question of who would house the agency arose, the FBI or the State Department. Their differences were both philosophical and practical.
The FBI’s authority derived from the fact that kidnapping, both in the United States and overseas, is a federal crime. But international kidnappings can also pose threats to U.S. strategic and diplomatic interests. Solutions may require diplomatic engagement. The State Department provides consular services to Americans abroad, and is therefore often a point of contact for hostage families. It has the relationships and local knowledge to mobilize governments and to carry out negotiations. Outside the United States, the FBI has far fewer resources and is generally represented by a small team or a single legal attaché. Their relationships tend to be with local law enforcement, which are sometimes corrupt or incompetent or both.
State Department officials told me that they prefer to take a flexible approach to resolving hostage cases while the FBI is more rigid. FBI agents told me precisely the opposite and noted that they had far more experience in dealing with victims and their families. In the end, the decision came down to practicalities. The FBI had the space to house the fusion cell, and its leadership was behind the effort. It also had a computer system in place that could provide access to operational intelligence.
The review also led to the creation of a second coordinating body within the NSC, the Hostage Response Group, which would provide “policy guidance” to the fusion cell. A family liaison officer, a new position created within the fusion cell, would participate and ensure that the views of the hostage families were represented. A third outcome from the review was the creation of a new position within the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to better coordinate intelligence. The hope was also that intelligence could be more readily declassified and shared with the families.
While the hostage policy review looked at the issues from a variety of perspectives, there was little debate around the no concessions framework. “When we had the scoping discussions it became pretty clear that there was no interest, appetite, or voice in the room to address the no concessions policy,” Lisa Monaco recalled. Instead, the conversation evolved. “It was like, we are sticking with the no concessions policy. But what does it mean?” noted one participant.
It was the job of the policy subgroup to figure that out. They pored over the language of NSPD-12, the prevailing policy directive signed by President Bush in 2002, and found the language lacked clarity. For example, the existing directive did not address communication. The new policy, codified in Presidential Policy Directive 30, or PPD-30, made clear that the “government may itself communicate with hostage-takers, their intermediaries, interested governments, and local communities, to attempt to secure the safe recovery of the hostage.” The government would also be permitted to assist families in their private communication, to ensure they were not defrauded.
As the draft policy was circulated to review participants, David Bradley noted that there was no provision for a high-level U.S. government representative to do the kind of work he had done in the Foley and Padnos cases. A new position—the Special Presidential Envoy for Hostage Affairs, to be housed at the State Department—was created at his suggestion.
The night before the new policy was unveiled the hostage families were invited to a detailed briefing at the NCTC. The meeting, which was scheduled for three hours, lasted six. There were many questions, many raw emotions, and a good deal of skepticism. Diane Foley stood up to speak. “We hope that you will change,” she said. “We will watch and see. I don’t want to feel that my son died in vain. That I cannot accept.”
At a ceremony the next morning, June 24, 2015, President Obama declared, “Our top priority is the safe and rapid recovery of American hostages,” but quickly added, “I am reaffirming that the United States government will not make concessions, such as paying ransom, to terrorist groups holding American hostages.” While expressing sympathy for the plight of the families, Obama noted that, “As president, I also have to consider our larger national security. I firmly believe that the United States government paying ransom to terrorists risks endangering more Americans and funding the very terrorism that we’re trying to stop. And so I firmly believe that our policy ultimately puts fewer Americans at risk.”
In his remarks, Obama also noted that “no family of an American hostage has ever been prosecuted for paying a ransom for the return of their loved ones. The last thing that we should ever do is to add to a family’s pain with threats like that.”
Following the president’s announcement, U.S. officials and diplomats met with key allies to answer questions and address concerns. While American and British officials I spoke with said they did not raise any concerns directly, Tom Keatinge, who directs the Center for Financial Crime and Security Studies at the Royal United Services Institute, a leading London-based think tank, said that privately British officials perceived Obama’s statement as a kink in the unified no concessions approach. “The announcement was a surprise here in London,” Keatinge told me.
While British Crown Prosecutors have considerable discretion in choosing how to apply the law, the British government believed that any assurances should be communicated privately to the families rather than announced to the world. There was also a lack of clarity about how far the commitment would extend. What about families or friends who contributed to a ransom payment or organized a crowdsourcing campaign? What about the insurance companies? What about the banks? Could they face legal jeopardy? What about security consultants who deliver the ransom? What about soliciting the support of a third government, like Qatar? To cite Doug Milne’s preferred term, these remained gray areas.
Meanwhile, global events exposed apparent contradictions in the application of the no concessions policy, undermining confidence in the depth of the U.S. commitment. In May 2014, Army Private Bowe Bergdahl was released in exchange for five Taliban prisoners held at the U.S. Naval Base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The arduous negotiation that had led to the agreement had been hosted in Doha, and conducted via Qatari intermediaries. Qatar also agreed to accept the released Guantanamo prisoners. The controversy surrounding the release was exacerbated by the Obama administration’s ham-handed communications. In an interview, National Security Advisor Susan Rice claimed Bergdahl had served with “honor and distinction” despite the fact that he had abandoned his unit. Her language infuriated many members of the U.S. military and their families who claimed that soldiers had been killed and wounded searching for Bergdahl after he walked off his base.
President Obama publicly welcomed Bergdahl’s family to the White House Rose Garden, treating the prisoner exchange not as an unpleasant but necessary concession to bring an American servicemember home, but rather a policy victory and cause for celebration. While the U.S. government would not make concessions for the return of an American civilian held by the Taliban, the framework was different for Bergdahl. After all, he was a member of the U.S. military captured when engaged in a Congressionally authorized military action. He was thus considered a prisoner of war. Under the Geneva Conventions, which govern the law of armed conflict, prisoner exchanges are specifically allowed. Besides, as one senior official noted, the Obama administration had indicated it was not planning to hold prisoners in Guantanamo forever. If they were going to be released at some point, why not get something in return?
While there was a legal basis and a rationale for the negotiations that led to the release of Bergdahl, the distinction was utterly lost on the families of American hostages, not to mention members of the Islamic State. After Bergdahl was released, Jim Foley’s captors tormented him and the other American hostages, pointing to the Bergdahl negotiations as an example of American perfidy, according to Federico Motka. In their email exchanges the kidnappers of Kayla Mueller also cited the Bergdahl case to cast doubt on her family’s claim that they were negotiating on their own, without the support of the U.S. government, which would not make any concessions.
Then there was the Jason Rezaian case in Iran. Rezaian, the Tehran correspondent for the Washington Post, was arrested along with several other reporters, including his wife Yeganeh Salehi, in July 2014. While the others were eventually released, Rezaian was held for eighteen months, put on trial, and convicted of espionage. His case was used by hard line elements within the Iranian government to put pressure on the more moderate factions engaged in negotiating the nuclear agreement with the United States. Their leverage was that they could scuttle any deal they did not like by keeping Rezaian in prison and provoking a crisis with the U.S. News accounts, and officials with whom I spoke, reported that Rezaian’s case was discussed on the sidelines of the nuclear negotiations between Secretary of State John Kerry and his Iranian counterpart, Mohammad Javad Zarif.
Soon after Rezaian was released from prison, on January 16, 2016, the U.S. delivered $400 million to Iran, which because of U.S. sanctions had to be paid in cash. It was loaded onto wooden pallets and put on an unmarked cargo plane. The funds had been deposited in U.S. banks as escrow for an arms deal concluded under the Shah but the money was frozen following the 1979 Revolution. U.S. officials claimed that the money was not ransom because it rightfully belonged to Iran. However, it was used as leverage to secure Rezaian’s release. U.S. officials made the case that Iran may have been entitled to the money, but they would not get it so long as Rezaian and three other Americans were being unjustly imprisoned.
In June 2015, the White House announced the creation of the Hostage Recovery Fusion Cell and the establishment of the Family Engagement Team. Mike McGarrity, an eighteen-year veteran of the FBI with extensive experience in counterterrorism, was named the director. His two deputies were from the State Department and Department of Defense. McGarrity served for a year and a half, and was replaced by Rob Saale in March 2017. When I met with Saale at the end of 2017, he told me he is willing to consider any approach to hostage recovery that is “moral, ethical, and legal.” He was in the process of assembling an external advisory group made up of leading experts.
Families and others who have worked with the fusion cell have been very positive and told me coordination and outreach have improved dramatically under the new structure. But not everyone is impressed. Terry Anderson, the former hostage held for seven years in Lebanon, called the fusion cell an expensive public relations exercise and “the fastest example of bureaucratic empire-building I have ever seen in my life.” Some grumble that despite the new coordinating structure, intelligence is not being shared with the families.
In September 2015, veteran diplomat Jim O’Brien was appointed as the first Special Presidential Envoy for Hostage Affairs. O’Brien described his role as “representing the government in engaging with captors, with third parties, and the families” as well as participating in the high-level meetings at which U.S. policy is decided.
“In bureaucratic terms it meant I always had a seat at the table,” O’Brien explained. His job, as he saw it, was to make sure that the families had a voice at the top levels of government and that hostage cases could be quickly escalated and brought to the attention of leadership, as opposed to the situation described by the Foleys in which their son’s case languished for a year before the government became engaged.
O’Brien’s model for how to use U.S. influence to secure the release of American hostages—his template—was taken from Richard Holbrooke, the veteran U.S. diplomat who had negotiated the 1995 Bosnia peace accords. O’Brien, who was the State Department lawyer assigned to Holbrooke, recalled the peace negotiations which took place at the U.S. Air Force base in Dayton, Ohio. For the first week of the negotiations, Holbrooke stonewalled Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic, making the case that the only way that Milosevic could demonstrate that he was truly in control and thus a reliable negotiating partner was to compel the Bosnian forces holding journalist David Rohde to release him. Rohde, at the time a correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor, had been taken captive while reporting on the Srebrenica massacre. The tactic cornered Milosevic; he felt compelled to demonstrate to Holbrooke that he was in charge. On November 9, 1995, Rohde was released. Less than two weeks later, the Dayton Peace Agreement was wrapped up.
During seventeen months in his position—until the end of the Obama administration—O’Brien dealt with about a hundred cases of U.S. citizens kidnapped abroad. Most involved short-lived criminal incidents in places like Mexico and Nigeria, but about three dozen were longer-term hostage situations, mostly related to armed conflict in places like Yemen. Rather than leave the hostage negotiations only on a separate track, O’Brien, channeling Holbrooke, sought to link the resolution of any hostage situation to the possibility of broader political dialogue. “My theory is that it’s the best way to establish command and control,” O’Brien noted. “Maybe you build confidence, maybe you don’t. But you establish who’s in charge.” While he never faced a challenge as daunting as the mass kidnapping of Westerners by the Islamic State in Syria, O’Brien came to believe that “even the most nihilistic group reports to somebody, and so you’re always looking for those pressure tactics.”
O’Brien sought to push the limits of the no concessions policy following the Hostage Policy Review, looking for political solutions and taking the view that the “U.S. government has to be in the middle of these discussions.” But there was one line that he could not cross—money. “Paying ransom is fine outside of designated terrorist groups,” he noted, referring to the families of the hostages. “It’s normal. It happens all the time.” But the matter is obviously more complicated when terrorist groups are involved. “During the 2014 period we left a lot of families to figure out what was a legitimate demand, to try to raise money, to try to pay it,” O’Brien noted. “It’s a complete failure of government to leave some poor family to sort out how this is supposed to happen. The open question from the policy perspective is what we would do if a family were to say, ‘we’re paying, we need to make sure the money gets to the right person.’ In a normal K & R case, the government would handle it all for the family. I feel the government should handle terrorist cases the same way.”
The Hostage Policy Review and the new structures that were put in place came about in response to a genuine crisis. But governments are lumbering beasts, and they don’t move unless prodded. A good part of prodding came from Diane Foley.
But her drive to transform the landscape for American hostages and their families was not complete. Diane’s next effort was focused on establishing a nonprofit dedicated to providing support and guidance to the victim’s family.
During a trip to Europe in the spring of 2014, the Foleys met with representatives from an organization called Hostage UK. The nonprofit had been co-founded by Rachel Briggs in 2004 following the 1996 kidnapping of her uncle by the ELN in Colombia. He was freed after seven months when a ransom was paid by the Danish company that employed him, according to news reports. Briggs, who was a college student at the time, recalled feeling isolated and overwhelmed. Hostage UK helps families understand the government bureaucracy and provides for their emotional and psychological needs. When Briggs visited Washington later in 2014 she met with Diane and Jim’s girlfriend, April. “We talked about what we were doing in the UK,” Briggs recalled. “And Diane said something like that had to exist in the U.S.”
Only a few weeks after Jim was killed, Diane and John called Briggs in London. “Do you want to do this?” Diane asked. “Then let’s do it together.” Diane helped secure a major grant from the Ford Foundation. She also made her own contribution through the James W. Foley Legacy Foundation, which had been established following Jim’s death.
In September 2015, Briggs moved to Washington, D.C. By April 2016 Hostage U.S. had launched with a staff of two, and with a host of strategic partners ranging from law offices to financial advisors. Briggs assembled a roster of about a dozen volunteers who accompany hostage families to meetings and provide support and guidance on such basic matters as how to obtain power of attorney, access bank accounts when someone is in captivity, or deal with the inquiries of neighbors and friends. In its first year and a half, Hostage U.S. handled about fifty cases, a mix of terrorism-related, criminal kidnappings, and political detentions.
In early 2016, Diane directed an additional small grant to Hostage U.S., which allowed the organization to hire interns to comb through publicly reported cases, existing datasets, and other public records and assemble an inventory of hostage incidents going back to 2001. This data was provided to the New America Foundation, a leading Washington think tank which added its own research to carry out a systematic analysis of effectiveness of U.S. hostage policy. The New America study, launched in January 2017 and entitled, “To Pay Ransom or Not to Pay Ransom,” concluded that “American hostages have suffered disproportionately bad outcomes compared to other Western hostages.” Based on an analysis of the data, the study’s authors noted, “The United States’ strict adherence to its no concessions policy has also contributed to the failure of American efforts to recover hostages. The no concessions policy is defended on the basis that paying ransoms would create incentives for U.S. citizens to be kidnapped and that ransom payments finance terrorist groups. No clear evidence exists to support the claim that Americans are targeted less often because of the no concessions policy. On the other hand, there is strong evidence to suggest that a no concessions policy puts hostages at greater risk once abducted.”
The New America study precipitated a public debate around the no concessions framework and challenged the government to present better evidence to support its policy conclusions. With a few thousand dollars donated to Hostage U.S. to support the organization of its data, Diane had helped shift the national dialogue around a key issue of public policy. “Diane is always pushing,” acknowledged Peter Bergen, CNN’s national security analyst, a New America Foundation vice president, and co-author of the study.
During the chaotic transition from Obama to President Donald Trump, Lisa Monaco made a point of personally briefing her successor as Homeland Security Advisor, Tom Bossert, on the hostage policy review and the status of the pending cases. She urged Bossert to give the issue focus and attention, and to ensure that the families had someone in the White House they could call on. Bossert met with the hostage families—including the Foleys—as well as with cabinet members, with members of the Hostage Response Fusion Cell, and with a range of outside experts. “There were not a lot of policies from President Obama that I would accept without change, but the hostage policy is one of them, in part because it was created in consultation with the families,” Bossert told me. After completing his assessment, he recommended to President Trump that the Obama hostage policy and the newly created structures be maintained. President Trump accepted the recommendation without comment, according to Bossert.
In fact, in his first year in office President Trump took a strong personal interest in the fate of Americans held overseas, both hostages and those wrongfully detained by governments.
In October 2017, U.S. officials told Pakistani authorities they had located a group of hostages being held by the Taliban. An American woman, Caitlan Coleman, her Canadian husband, Joshua Boyle, and their children were being transported by car to a new safe house. The family had been held hostage for five years by members of the Haqqani network. Unless they acted, the Pakistanis were told, the U.S. would send a Seal Team which was on standby to execute a rescue. The Pakistanis managed to stop the car and free the hostages.
Brian Jenkins calls hostage-taking “political dynamite.” If not carefully managed, a single hostage incident can blow up an entire administration. At times President Obama seemed to be so focused on executing the policy—which was intended to deprive terror groups of funding—that he failed to fully consider the emotional dimensions of the hostage issue. Trump, on the other hand, appears uninterested in the issue’s strategic complexity.
But Trump has quickly grasped the political implications and recognized that if he can get an American home it will be a political win that will resonate with his America First base. Hostage families say they are pleased with the attention that President Trump has given the issue. On the other hand, Trump has demonstrated a disregard bordering on contempt for the kind of local knowledge and relationships that come from having a robust and seasoned diplomatic corps. This kind of support is vital in any complex international hostage situation.