In 2003, when the United States invaded Iraq, I was working as a senior editor at the Washington Post. Our owner and publisher—Don Graham and Bo Jones, respectively—told those of us in charge of the newsroom to spend whatever was necessary to cover the war thoroughly and to keep our correspondents safe. We just had to give them a heads-up when it became clear how many millions of dollars would be at issue. (Those were the days.) They also decided to prepare for the possibility that one of our reporters might be kidnapped.
One afternoon, I was invited to an orientation meeting for an “operations cell” that would be convened the moment we received word of an abduction. My role would be to travel to Baghdad immediately, and help from there. Each of half a dozen other executives and editors would have complementary assignments. The paper had hired a private consultant who specialized in ransoming kidnap victims. He was a former C.I.A. operations officer who had spent much of his career in Latin America. He attended the orientation and explained a few basics about how the kidnap trade worked at the time. He spoke in a pronounced New York accent.
In some places, he said, kidnapping and ransom negotiation was so common that there was effectively a functioning market with transparent prices, like a stock exchange. If a gang kidnapped a mid-level petroleum engineer from, say, Brazil, both sides knew, within a narrow range, what the price would be for his release. If the gang kidnapped a high-ranking oil executive from the United States, it was also fairly clear what that price would be. (Much higher.) Then our consultant cleared his throat and said that, if we were going to work together, he wanted to get one thing straight: he had a particular approach to negotiations, honed over the years, and he wanted to be sure that we were on board.
Ransom negotiations are different from other business bargaining, because you don’t sit with your counterpart face to face. It’s harder to read body language and signals. Ransom talks are a call-and-response process, with time lags and some uncertainty about how the other side is hearing your messages. These gaps create risk. The question facing a corporation in our position, he said, would be: What’s your opening bid? This was where our consultant wanted clarity. “There are consultants out there—you can work with them if you want—that will tell you, ‘Open with twenty per cent of the market price.’ That’s a way to go. But I don’t do that. I open at about eighty per cent.
“Twenty per cent,” he continued, “twenty per cent—that’s where you get your mutilations.” Fingers, ears. We indicated our firm agreement with his thinking, should it ever come to that.
Looking back, it was a relatively innocent time for journalists at risk of abduction, but one could see the darkness gathering. The murder of Daniel Pearl, in 2002, had demonstrated that Al Qaeda-inspired kidnappers might see more value in executing victims for propaganda purposes than in negotiating for cash or prisoner exchanges. Yet there were still many places where correspondents travelled with violent guerrilla groups justifiably confident that they would be as safe as one could be in a war zone, free from kidnapping, because their reporting was seen as an asset, a way for the groups to publicize their grievances.
We discussed this problem of Al Qaeda-inspired kidnappers with our consultant, pointing out that, if we got unlucky in Iraq, we were as likely to be dealing with an ideologically motivated adversary as with a greedy one. What then? He answered that ideological kidnappers were a serious problem. The only strategy that worked, in his experience, was to open channels that, through negotiation, could convert ideological demands to economic ones. But it was nowhere near as easy to do that as to work within established marketplaces, like the ones in Latin America.
We were lucky: despite two very close calls, our operations cell was never activated. (And the paper has since changed owners.) During the past week, jihadi kidnappers in Syria have reminded editors and news executives, if they needed reminding, how thin and random the difference is between peaceful resolution and tragedy in a kidnapping case. James Foley’s abductors chose murder and propaganda. Peter Theo Curtis’s abductors sent him home, in exchange for favors or promises from Qatar, the Gulf emirate that negotiated his release, that we may never reliably know.
Those disparate results are generating a lot of talk about kidnapping and ransom policy, some of it misguided. One strain of debate involves whether it is unwise for the United States and Britain to refuse to support ransom payments to terrorists or other kidnappers. Germany, France, and other European governments have paid ransoms in the millions to secure the release of their citizens. The Times estimates that total European ransom payments to Al Qaeda-linked kidnappers may total a hundred and twenty-five million dollars. For Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, which operates in North African, ransoms are its principal income. How to judge the costs and benefits of Europe’s policy? Its citizens come home. The payments are affordable. But the policy empowers groups that may stage more attacks and whose defeat by military and other means will cost a lot more than a hundred and twenty-five million dollars.
The Anglo-American policy has the possible advantage of reducing the desirability of American hostages, as long as Qatar and similar intermediaries don’t change kidnappers’ perceptions. It also does not provide cash to groups that American taxpayers are already spending mightily to defeat.
But it is a fallacy to argue that the interests of governments and the interests of their citizens must align, in kidnapping cases or in any other endeavor that is not a crime. Paying ransoms is not a crime. (Direct ransom payments to Al Qaeda could violate anti-terrorism laws, but a prosecution of a desperate family would be a tough case to bring before a jury.) In a free society, corporations and families should be free to make their own decisions, even if they defy the wishes of their governments. If the Obama Administration or a successor believes that paying ransoms endangers the common good, let it try to pass a law banning the practice. It won’t be easy.
There has been an even more pernicious idea bandied about since James Foley’s death: that he was responsible for the crime committed against him, because he was too daring a traveller and correspondent. A few days ago, on NPR’s “Morning Edition,” Kelly McEvers conducted a moving interview with Nicole Tung, a photographer who had worked with Foley, and who wanted him to be remembered as a warm, charming reporter who stayed calm even in the worst of circumstances. In the middle of the remembrances, however, McEvers changed the subject: “When something like this happens to a journalist, people always ask the question, ‘Was he reckless?’ I guess I have to ask you that. Was he reckless?”
Tung seemed a little taken aback, but she answered no, she didn’t think so. It was not a question McEvers had to ask. Kidnapped journalists are crime victims. In most fields of crime, we’ve learned not to blame the victim—although exceptions persist, often because of racism or sexism. Foreign correspondence is a risky business with a public purpose. It is not as if the seductions of travelling in hard places for low pay and the possibility of death or imprisonment presents some form of moral hazard, particularly not for American correspondents, whose government has made it quite clear that it will not bail them out, except possibly by a special-forces raid.
The economics of digital publishing has given rise to media that soak up freelance work while offering little in pay or mentoring. That and the shrinking of staff jobs overseas may have put more young freelancers at risk of costly self-education than in the past. But war zones have always attracted young reporters who learn by doing, from their mistakes and from those of colleagues. For the foreseeable future, freelance journalism will be vital to public understanding. It requires resources, not second-guessing.
There is training that can help prepare a correspondent to work in a hazardous place for the first time, and there are tools—phones, cars, security consultants—that can help to keep them safe around the margins. But most of the great correspondents who have worked in hard places and walked away again and again have idiosyncratic methods for making judgments about which road to travel and which to avoid. And only the arrogant among them will say that they are not very lucky.
Over the weekend, Foley’s family and friends remembered him at a service in Rochester, New Hampshire, his home town. The Times quoted a childhood friend, Adam Dow, who remarked, “James had a purpose.” And the paper quoted his mother, Diane Foley: “I pray that we will take up the challenge to love like Jim did, and to really work for peace in this world.” Amen.
