Prisoner Swaps, At What Cost?
WASHINGTON — When President Barack Obama flew to Idaho for a speech last winter, he met privately with the wife of an Iranian-American pastor held prisoner in Iran since 2012. Freeing her husband, he promised, was a top priority.
A year later, Mr. Obama called the wife, Naghmeh Abedini. Her husband, Saeed Abedini, would soon be coming home, the president told her.
But the arrangement came with a cost. To secure the release of Mr. Abedini and other Americans held by Iran, Mr. Obama freed seven Iranian and Iranian-American men charged with or convicted of violating sanctions against the Islamic republic. Mr. Obama again decided to trade for Americans despite concerns that it might encourage others to target Americans.
Several leading Republican presidential candidates, including Donald J. Trump and Senators Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, criticized the trade.
“Governments are taking Americans hostage because they believe they can gain concessions from this government under Barack Obama,” Mr. Rubio said.
But the families, supporters and administration officials said sometimes a trade is worthwhile. Aides said Mr. Obama was haunted by the possibility that Mr. Abedini and other Americans would spend years in Iran’s notorious Evin Prison.
Mr. Obama deemed the release of a few people who had violated the sanctions a reasonable trade- off, despite the complaints of critics.
“You hear that a lot, and I un- derstand the point,” said Representative Dan Kildee, who flew to Germany with the family of Amir Hekmati, another freed American. “This is a complicated world.”
Few dilemmas are more difficult for a president than deciding whether to barter for citizens held abroad at the risk of submitting to blackmail. During the Cold War, it usually involved soldiers or spies.
But in recent decades, presidents have confronted civilians held by terrorists or hostile governments as geopolitical pawns. President Jimmy Carter agonized over embassy workers held hostage by Iran for 444 days and sent an ill-fated rescue mission. President Ronald Reagan was so consumed with American hostages held in the Middle East that he traded arms with Iran to secure their release.
Reagan also freed a Soviet spy in 1986 in exchange for a journalist arrested in Moscow.
Other countries have traded as well. Israel has routinely exchanged imprisoned Palestinians for its own people. In 2011, Israel freed 1,000 Palestinian prisoners, including some it deemed terrorists, for Sergeant Gilad Shalit, who had been a soldier held by the militant group Hamas for five years.
Mr. Obama made clear that meeting relatives of prisoners has an impact. “I’ve seen their anguish, how they ache for their sons and husbands,” he said. “I gave these families my word — I made a vow — that we would do everything in our power to win the release of their loved ones.”
The Iran trade was the latest of several by Mr. Obama. In 2010, on the tarmac of a Vienna airport, his administration swapped 10 Russian sleeper agents arrested in the United States for four Russians held by Moscow for their connections to the West. In May 2014, it traded five Taliban detainees held at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, for Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl, an American prisoner of war now charged with desertion.
In December 2014, it traded three Cuban spies for a Cuban who had worked as an American agent. Cuba also released Alan Gross, an American contractor accused of spying, but the administration said it was not part of the deal because it did not want to equate him with spies.
In the Iran case, the two countries were reaching closure on ma- ny disputes that had divided them for decades. In addition to releasing the seven, the administration withdrew notices seeking the arrest of 14 fugitives overseas.
The deal came on the same weekend that Iran fulfilled the terms of last year’s nuclear agreement and the United States lifted sanctions, giving it access to as much as $100 billion in frozen overseas funds. The United States also agreed to pay $1.7 billion to settle a 1981 claim over payments for military equipment never delivered.
But the decks were not completely cleared. Robert A. Levinson, a C.I. A. contractor who disappeared in Iran in 2007, was not part of the swap; Iran insists it does not know his whereabouts. And Siamak Namazi, an Iranian-American consultant arrested in Tehran in October, was not part of the exchange.
U. S. Secretary of State John Kerry denied that the exchange would encourage more Americans to be taken. But Mr. Kerry acknowledged that there would probably be such situations again.
“That, unfortunately,” he said, “is part of the reality of today’s life on a global basis.”