The ransom business
In the old days — before Al Qaeda, before the Islamic State — the worst thing that could happen to a foreign correspondent was getting shot by a sniper or blown up by a land mine or mortar. But since 9/11, there has been a rise in the targeting of journalists for ransom or propaganda by violent nonstate actors. The Committee to Protect Journalists estimates that in the Middle East/North Africa region alone there have been more than 100 kidnappings since 2013. And that figure does not take into account non-press abductions — of businessmen, locals, engineers working for oil companies. In some parts of Latin America, for instance, kidnapping and ransom negotiation is so common that one former CIA agent once said there is “effectively a functioning market with transparent prices, like a stock exchange.”
By the time he was kidnapped in 2008, Jere Van Dyk was already an Afghan expert — having made his first trip with his younger brother in 1973, returning in 1981 to report on the SovietAfghan war for The New York Times, and covering the region for CBS News after 9/11. He was held in captivity for 45 days by the Taliban before being released. The Trade is not about his imprisonment, but about his tenacious attempt to unravel precisely who ensnared him “like a fish onto a hook.” Mr Van Dyk writes about his voyage into the depths of this opaque world from a well of sorrow, shame and regret.
Mr Van Dyk is a methodical and sensitive reporter, and his emotions are made vivid. Like many released hostages, he feels guilt for those who did not make it out alive. There is further remorse for those individuals — some he did not know — who worked hard to release him. He feels ashamed that CBS, which worked tirelessly to get his release, found him, only a few years later, to be a “remnant from the past,” and fired him.
The Trade is about what happens in the “second life” you live after you have been released (here he quotes another American hostage, Steven Sotloff, who was captured and killed in Aleppo a few years ago). Unlike other hostages, Mr Van Dyk does not return a wounded hero. CBS orders Van Dyk not to write or talk about his ordeal, supposedly to protect other correspondents in the field, but perhaps also to hide its own involvement in procuring the ransom money. The FBI hovers menacingly.
Given the extensive Rolodex of Taliban contacts Mr Van Dyk has gathered over the years, thanks to the “essential” Afghan tenet that “the only way forward was for one man to introduce me to another,” it’s inevitable that the FBI tries to use him to glean information about them. Mr Van Dyk is vulnerable and weakened, and clearly suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. Initially, he trusts the agency to do the right thing. It’s a mistake. A creepy “therapist” tries to unravel his trauma, but she ends up being needier than her patient, as well as manipulative and controlling.
He is troubled by the knowledge of those who worked hard to save him to “prevent a second Daniel Pearl.” So he travels to Los Angeles to meet Pearl’s parents, and the journey proves yet another test of his bravery — “it was easier to cross the mountains into Pakistan than to come here.”
At the heart of this frustrating yet poignant book is the dangerous reality that there exists no solid, consistent global policy regarding ransom payments. We believe that the French, the Italians and the Japanese pay for the release of their hostages (though they all deny it), but even that is debatable. Before I left for Chechnya in 2000 for The Times of London, I was told by British government officials that if I were taken, they would not negotiate for me for fear of incentivising further kidnapping. Privately, however, I was told that a wealthy Russian friend of my newspaper’s owner would “bail me out” if necessary. Under United States law, it is also illegal for anyone to pay a ransom to groups the State Department deems terrorist organisations, like the Islamic State.
The same held true for those of us working in Syria. As Frank Smyth, a security expert for the Committee to Protect Journalists, sums it up: “The US and UK have policies of not paying ransoms to kidnappers,” whereas “many continental European governments have no such policy.”
Although many authorities denied it, after the release of several European journalists who were held captive with James Foley, the American hostage murdered in 2014 by the Islamic State along with Sotloff, different news sources reported that their governments apparently paid ransoms.
Mr Van Dyk chronicles this phenomenon of underground hostage negotiations, which he calls “the work of ghosts,” and each of his successive trips back to the region to retrace his footsteps gets murkier, more convoluted. The list of Afghan and Pakistani individuals he encounters — drivers, “fixers,” office managers, friends of friends — grows so extended that the reader becomes increasingly confused. Chapters are devoted to interviews with various men who provide different versions of his story. It begins to make “Rashomon” seem lucid.
This, of course, is in many ways the point of the book: To demonstrate the lack of clear information, the false starts, the blinding confusion, the ill treatment of hostages and their families by officials. A bungled White House attempt to discover how to help families is a disaster.
There is much to admire in Mr Van Dyk’s character: His perseverance, the stark pioneer spirit honed in his youth, his desire to seek the truth. But, there is no happy ending to Mr Van Dyk’s tale. Perhaps, in the grim world of The Trade, there never will be. My Journey Into the Labyrinth of Political Kidnapping By Jere Van Dyk PublicAffairs 448 pp; $28