White House pushes to find hostages
US contends with adversaries, allies to assist in recovery
WASHINGTON — Last year, administration officials briefed President Donald Trump on a hostage whose case he has taken an interest in: Austin Tice, a former Marine missing in Syria. The CIA pledged to ramp up efforts to learn where he is being held and why Syria refuses to negotiate his release.
The CIA’s renewed focus on Tice, who was working as a journalist when he was captured in 2012, reflects a broader push by the Trump administration to focus more intently on Americans being held hostage abroad.
The administration has helped free Americans held in Egypt, Iran, Turkey and Afghanistan and is trying to win Tice’s freedom as well as working to find Mark Frerichs, a former Navy diver kidnapped last month in Afghanistan. The White House wants him freed before American troops leave the country in a peace deal with the Taliban, an urgent deadline for the Pentagon and intelligence agencies to locate Frerichs.
Returning American hostages is Trump’s “top priority,” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said last week in a statement marking the 13th anniversary of the disappearance inside Iran of Robert Levinson, a former FBI agent and CIA contractor.
For the U.S. military, the CIA and other intelligence agencies, focusing more on hostages is a way to show an often mercurial commander in chief that the government is responding to the priorities he has set. The appointment of the former top envoy for hostage negotiations, Robert C. O’Brien, as national security adviser has also elevated the issue, and the National Counterterrorism Center is leading a review of hostage recovery efforts.
Trump’s interest in seeing American hostages brought home is a reflection of his us-versus-them worldview that often puts foreign policy issues in stark terms, a senior administration official said, adding that the president takes it personally when adversaries illegally detain Americans.
Trump invited to the State of the Union the parents of Kayla Mueller, who was taken captive in August 2013 before being killed by the Islamic State group in early 2015. The military mission last year to kill the group’s leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, was named after Mueller’s birthday.
“America’s warriors never forgot Kayla — and neither will we,” Trump said during the address last month.
Before the speech, Mueller’s parents were given a tour of the White House and met briefly with Trump and Vice President Mike Pence. They also spoke with both O’Brien and Kashyap Patel, then a senior counterterrorism official who was handling hostage issues.
The killings of Mueller and of journalist James Foley in 2014, another American in Syria, helped prompt then-President Barack Obama to make wholesale changes in how the government dealt with hostages and their families. The Obama administration established a Hostage Recovery Fusion Cell and created a special presidential envoy for hostage affairs, the post O’Brien held.
The Trump administration’s look at hostage operations is part of a five-year review of the Obama directive.
While he was the hostage czar, O’Brien pushed hard to figure out a way to free Tice. He cited the case to Mueller’s parents when they visited the White House as one of several the administration was trying to resolve.
Based on a mosaic of intelligence, officials believe Tice, now 38, remains alive and is being held by the Syrian government, according to former and current officials. Questions remain about why the Syrian government has neither admitted to holding him in the nearly eight years since he was abducted nor negotiated his release, and why it has released other Americans who were captured after him.
The Trump administration has pushed unsuccessfully to win Tice’s release. Early in his 15-month tenure as CIA director, Mike Pompeo tried to set up back-channel talks with Ali Mamlouk, Syria’s powerful intelligence chief who is close with President Bashar Assad. The effort fizzled but also prompted concerns among some administration officials that the CIA’s outreach might have left the mistaken impression with the Syrians that Tice was a spy.
In August 2018, the CIA dispatched another top senior agency official with expertise in the Middle East to meet with Mamlouk in Damascus, former American officials said. During the meeting, the CIA official brought up Tice, the former officials said. What came of the meeting is not clear.
The administration has also tried without success to engage both the United Arab Emirates and the Vatican to assist with the Tice case. The Emiratis, who played a key role in 2019 in freeing Danny Burch, an American oil worker who had been held hostage in Yemen, reopened its embassy in Damascus in 2018.
As the hostage czar, O’Brien embraced the idea of traveling to Damascus to negotiate with the Syrian government. Pompeo, now the secretary of state, nixed the proposal for security reasons, though some administration officials were skeptical that O’Brien’s life would have been in danger.
Other administration officials viewed such a trip as a mistake because a visit by a high-ranking American official could bolster the Assad government while probably doing little to prompt it to release Tice.
Tice’s family has sought to keep public attention on his case to pressure the government to continue working for his release. Debra Tice, Austin Tice’s mother, has held news conferences and granted interviews in which she praised Trump’s focus on the case of her son and other hostages.
Critics have accused the Trump administration of missing opportunities to win Austin Tice’s release. It has made concessions to the Assad government without demanding Tice’s release or anything else in return, including when administration officials announced in 2017 that they would no longer pursue Assad’s ouster and again last year when Trump abruptly pulled back American forces fighting the Islamic State group, essentially giving up much of the land in Syria that the military had seized from the group back to Assad’s government.
Frerichs’ case is similarly caught up in delicate geopolitical negotiations. As the military begins to withdraw its personnel from Afghanistan as part of a deal with the Taliban, the White House has stepped up its pressure on the Defense Department to get home hostages still held there, according to a senior official.
Frerichs, the former Navy diver who was working as a contractor in Afghanistan, was captured in February, and officials believe he is being held by the Haqqani militant network in Afghanistan. Some officials expressed concern that if Frerichs is not found quickly, he could be smuggled into Pakistan, making a rescue more difficult because of the political sensitivities and potentially treacherous terrain.