HELD HOSTAGE
An eight-part investigation into what happens when a Canadian is kidnapped abroad reveals a federal response system that leaves families feeling shut out, let down and abandoned
It comes in like a hurricane without warning, that moment of the taking: one minute, you are going about your life; the next, you are side-swiped, seized, swept away.
From free-willed Canadian to helpless hostage, hurled into a terrifying world. Nationality doesn’t matter to the kidnappers. They are on the hunt for westerners. But as time ticks by, your Canadian passport, it turns out, can be a flimsy shield.
As the ordeal grinds toward four outrageously difficult outcomes — rescue, ransom, escape or death — everyone involved becomes a hostage. Not just those who face the blades of their captors, but also family and friends half a world away.
Sworn to secrecy by Canadian officials, families of the hostages find themselves alone in a parallel uni- verse, unable to share their burden.
Such is the grim reality of a 21st-century kidnapping crisis, Canadian-style, as told to the Toronto Star by families who have lived it. Many of the stories that follow throughout the next week are first-time accounts from relatives, surviving hostages and eyewitnesses, together with insights from former and current government, military and intelligence officials and private security consultants who have had direct involvement in Canadian kidnappings since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. In all, more than 50 people shared their experiences.
This much is certain: many capable people with the best of intentions stand at the ready when a Canadian goes missing abroad. But the Star’s investigation into what really happens after a hostage taking reveals a system ripe for overhaul.
The biggest frustration is the glacial-like drip of information from Ottawa, where Canada’s hostage response system has struggled to keep up since 9/11, regardless of the party in power.
Many relatives say they feel not so much valued as handled, as if the government sees families as a problem to be managed.
For some, it was deeply painful to revisit and share details of their ordeals. But in breaking silence, they hope their stories will trigger a wholesale review of Canadian kidnap protocols.
That hope may not be misplaced: one Ottawa official, responding Tuesday to a series of questions from the Star, confirmed the government is midway through a “lessons learned” process of how it handled recent kidnap events.
The official described it as “a comprehensive effort to genuinely look at what happened — you know, ‘What could we have done differently?’ ”
But the relatives of hostages are asking for more than words. Simply put, they want Ottawa to do a better job for the next Canadian family that gets the call.
Every country has its wins and losses when it comes to overseas kidnappings. For Canada, it is difficult to conceive of a more disastrous loss than that of John Ridsdel, 68, and Robert Hall, 66, who were snatched and held for ransom by the Abu Sayyaf Group 14 months ago, only to be slain on camera seven weeks apart, in April and June of 2016.
Four were taken on that rainy Monday night of Sept. 21, 2015, in an audacious armed raid on the Holiday Oceanview Marina in the southern Philippines, including Hall’s Filipina partner, Marites (Tess) Flor, and the marina’s Norwegian manager, Kjartan Sekkingstad.
Only the Canadians would perish. Flor and Sekkingstad ultimately were released, the latter involving a ransom payment believed to be some $1.1 million.
At first, it seemed the Hall and Ridsdel families were united in their grief, apportioning all blame to the kidnappers. The Hall family even released a statement after Hall’s murder, endorsing Ottawa’s no-ransom policy.
“Our family, even in our darkest hour, agrees wholeheartedly with Canada’s policy of not paying ransom,” the statement read.
Five months later, a different story is emerging. In interviews with the Star, Hall’s two sisters, Trudi Shaw and Bonice Thomas, together with extended family members, speak with fury of how Canada handled their case.
“We were essentially being held hostage by our government,” says Trudi Shaw of the nearly nine months her family lived in limbo during Hall’s captivity.
One of Ridsdel’s two daughters, speaking on behalf of the family, expressed frustrations of her own, saying the family was asked to make key decisions, but were rarely given any of the government’s intelligence.
Journalist Amanda Lindhout’s mother, Lorinda Stewart, says she put her trust in Ottawa to free her daughter, rather than try to raise the ransom the kidnappers demanded. After a year of reassurances from the RCMP that they were making progress — without telling Stewart the details — they “released” her to pursue her own options.
“I was really angry because I had been questioning them — ‘Am I do- ing the right thing? If you had children in this situation would you be doing this?’ ” Stewart says. “I was reassured . . . and after a year they dropped us.”
Lindhout was freed in 2009 after 460 days of tortured captivity in Somalia. Her mother hired a private security group and raised a ransom of $600,000. “I had 100-per-cent confidence in the government . . . and really resented that we were kept hanging for so long. Amanda should not have had to suffer all the months she did if we had been given options.”
Robert Fowler, a Canadian diplomat working as a special envoy to the United Nations in Niger, was kidnapped in December 2008 by Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb and held with his colleague, Louis Guay, for 130 days. His book, Season in Hell, is an indictment of how the Canadian government — the RCMP, in particular — treated his wife, Mary, during his captivity.
“The RCMP seemed to have decided that our families could not be trusted with the knowledge that we were alive. I can only assume they believed our families would handle such information irresponsibly and thereby wantonly put Louis’ and my lives at risk,” Fowler writes. “Nobody within the Ottawa bureaucracy seems to have challenged that preposterous position.” And it seems little has changed. When it comes time for families to make crucial decisions, Canadian officials outline a menu of options during calls or meetings — from military rescue to the paying of ransom — that offer the best hope of bringing the hostage home alive. Worried about government liability, they rarely will offer advice. Some families have been told paying a ransom is a criminal offence. None have been charged.
Bonice Thomas, Hall’s sister, says the strained relationship with government officials only added to their grief.
“From the day Robert’s abduction was confirmed, it was a terrible and frustrating struggle to get any sort of information. No matter how much we badgered the RCMP, we simply didn’t ever get straight or timely answers about anything.
“Here’s one example: one of the first things we found out is that Robert’s satellite phone had been taken by the kidnappers. So we asked, ‘Well, are you tracking it?’ That phone got him across the Pacific. It has GPS. Find that phone, it’s the starting point to finding Robert.
“And to this day, we never got an answer back.”
Every family member has seared into their memories how they found out. They always remember the call.
CBC journalist Mellissa Fung delivered the news herself after she was snatched at gunpoint at a refugee camp in Afghanistan in 2008. She dialed her partner, CTV correspondent Paul Workman.
“Hi, P. It’s me. I’m OK, don’t worry, I’m OK,” she said as her kidnappers grabbed the phone and added: “She is with us.”
She begged for another chance and called back. “Hi, it’s me again. I’m just calling to say goodbye . . . Bye. Love you.” Not for another 28 days would her fate be known.
The call reached Jim Loney’s brother, Matt, that Jim had been kidnapped in Iraq in 2005 as Matt was preparing to hike in Machu Picchu in Peru. With the help of Canadian officials in Lima, he made the journey to his parents’ home in Sault Ste. Marie, Ont. The Loneys would wait120 days to know if Jim would survive.
When the doorbell rang at the Boyle home outside of Ottawa, Dan Boyle, Josh’s younger brother, opened the door to see three officials in suits.
“I immediately decided that they were probably not (Jehovah’s Witnesses) since 11 p.m. seemed too late for witnessing,” Dan says. “I asked them if my brother was in trouble in Afghanistan.”
Josh Boyle and his wife, Caitlan Coleman, then five-and-a-half months pregnant, were backpacking through the ’Stans in 2012 — Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan — and no one had spoken to them in a few weeks. Ten days before “The Suits” arrived, Dan had noticed a news report about an American and Canadian taken hostage in Afghanistan.
Josh and Caitlan were not supposed to travel there, but Dan still worried. He woke his mother, Linda. He hadn’t told her about the report but had shared it with his father, Patrick, who was co-chairing a law conference in Munich, with two of his three daughters in tow.
As Linda and the three RCMP officers talked, Dan went out and sent a text to his dad: “Call home.” But before Patrick could reply, Dan was warned not to tell anything until they could do so in person. He sent another text: “Mom just wants to know what time you’re home tomorrow.”
“My antenna goes up,” Patrick says. “But even though I’ve spent the last 10 days doing a Google News search for ‘Canadian American kidnapping,’ I just confirm to him when I’m arriving.”
Patrick and his daughters Kaeryn and Heather had landed at the Ottawa airport, on separate flights the next day. The girls, jet-lagged, longing for sleep, were already at their apartment when Patrick arrived to take them home for dinner.
“The car ride up was miserable for all three of us,” Kaeryn says. “I was so tired I wanted to cry, and I was biting my tongue and clenching my nails into my palm to keep my eyes open. I’d been texting Dan on the drive up, trying to get some sort of explanation but he wouldn’t answer.
“Finally, right as we entered the town, he sent one word: Josh.”
At home, Patrick turned into the dining room from the kitchen and saw the three RCMP officers. “Nothing can prepare you for that,” says Patrick. “It looks like you’re in a movie with three suits sitting at your table with sombre faces.”
Marites Flor, now 39, looked shellshocked as she was paraded before the cameras the day of her release in June. The photo-op was a quickly assembled victory lap for newly elected Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte. Five months later, she feels strong enough to share her story for the first time.
Free, yet heartbroken, Flor has slipped back into the embrace of her family, still on the mend; still grieving for her partner, Hall; still struggling to cope with their months in the jungle, tied together and forced to march, day and night.
It helps that Flor is in almost daily contact with one or both of Hall’s sisters. United in sorrow, they have found in each other shoulders to lean on. For Flor, their support has kept her close to Hall as his sisters push to ensure she receives medical and trauma treatment in a country where neither is easily accessed. And Flor, in turn, has been a balm for them, sharing stories of the courage he showed, right to the very end. She has been able to give his family many answers that Ottawa couldn’t, or wouldn’t, provide.
Flor and Hall had met online about three years ago, striking up an electronic romance that blossomed, ultimately, into the real thing, with Hall flying twice to the Philippines to spend time with Flor and her family.
Hall returned to Canada one last time to set sail on the adventure of a lifetime, navigating Renova, his 36foot Cape Dory sailboat, toward the Philippines.
There was one false start — a sudden squall did serious damage, forcing Hall and his brother Bill to return to port. Three months later, the brothers set out again and enjoyed smooth sailing to Hawaii, arriving just before Christmas 2014. Bill flew home, Robert continued.
“The big concern for all of us was just the fact that he was sailing across the Pacific — about all the things that could happen and that he was by himself,” remembers Trudi Shaw.
“When he made it to the marina in the Philippines where they were eventually kidnapped . . . we thought, ‘OK, the dangerous part is over.’”
John Ridsdel was also an avid sailor, first as a young man living in Yorkton, Sask., and then in Calgary, as a young father, where he made time to teach his daughters the skill.
A little more than a decade ago, Ridsdel started working in the Philippines as a manager with the Calgary-based mining company TVI.
“He was a very socially minded person for someone working for a mining company,” said one of his daughters in an interview. She asked that her name not be used for privacy concerns.
“It was something he and his activist daughters would have clashes about, I guess, like, ‘Dad, how can you work with these people?’ And he’s telling us, ‘I’m out here in these rural communities and they have no income, you know, they’re all involved in these more traditional mining practices which are environmentally unfriendly and bad for people’s health, and they’ll send kids down mine shafts.”
A couple of years ago, he moved permanently to a small beach community. Divorced in Canada, he met his girlfriend in the Philippines and befriended a young Filipino crewman, Jayson, who had grown so close to Ridsdel that he would sometimes call him Dad.
“He had a view out on the beach and a community of friends in his local yacht club and would go sailing on the weekends and drink beer and had a nice little retirement life,” says his daughter.
News of the kidnapping reached Ridsdel’s family first, through friends in the Philippines. Slowly the news spread across Canada, the U.S. and Europe, as they desperately tried to reach those closest to Ridsdel before they learned of the kidnapping through media reports.
His family called a government hotline. Those who took the calls, more accustomed to dealing with lost passports or illnesses, seemed taken aback, but within hours, an imperfect system was grinding into action.
One tragic dimension of the Hall family’s plight, not previously disclosed, is that at the time of his kidnapping, both of Hall’s sisters were battling breast cancer, one undergoing treatment, the other newly diagnosed. Layer upon layer of pain was compounded by fear and feelings of helplessness. Bonice, Hall’s sister, was going to bed at her home on B.C.’s Sunshine Coast. It was around midnight. “I heard a little15-second snippet — I always have CBC on in the background — and my heart sank. I just knew.”
It would be the last time for a long time she knew anything for certain.
A special eight-part series
Tomorrow: Inside Canada’s war room, good intentions meet kidnappers’ demands — and political inertia.