America maintains a promise to its citizens. A promise to never leave them behind and stop at nothing to return them to American soil. Over 200 Americans are wrongfully detained or taken hostage each year across the globe. The Special Presidential Envoy for Hostage Affairs is responsible for bringing them home.
Ambassador Roger Carstens served as the SPEHA from 2020-2025. A West Point Graduate, Green Beret, Army Ranger, and seasoned security leader, Roger and his team brought home close to 70 Americans during his tenure; including high profile cases such as WNBA star Brittney Griner and Wall Street Journal Reporter Evan Gerskovich.
Roger joined Fran Racioppi from the McCain Institute in Washington, DC for a conversation on the role of the SPEHA, why countries take Americans for leverage, and just how America negotiates with terrorists.
We explore the effects of wrongful detention and hostage taking on America’s national power, how families are turned completely upside down, and why only a Warrior Diplomat has the character required to make deals with America’s adversaries.
Roger and Fran also share the mission of Hostage US; a non-profit instrumental in supporting hostages and wrongful detainees – and their families – through captivity, return and reintegration.
Watch, listen or read our conversation. Special thanks to the McCain Institute for hosting us and sharing their mission to defend and enhance human rights across the globe.
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Ambassador Carstens. Lieutenant Coronel Carstens or Roger. You have a wealth of background there. We don’t even know what your title is but we’re going to get into it all. Welcome to the Jedburgh Podcast.
Fran, glad to be here. I know we’ve been talking about doing this for some time, so I’m grateful to finally have a chance to sit down with you and have a good chat. Looking forward to it.
Before we get going, we have to put out a huge shout out to the McCain Institute, John McCain’s organization, part of Arizona State University, working diligently as unsung heroes in the space of human rights, bringing our unlawful detainees back home to the US, a world that we’re going to dig into here so much. We have the Hostage US annual reception. We’ll get into that later. They’re hosting us here in their central DC office, an amazing space, and amazing work that they’re doing.
You probably know that when I left government just about 100-plus days ago, I signed on with the McCain Institute as a senior fellow, and I’m a part of something called the Freedom for Political Prisoners Initiative. It’s run by a good friend of mine, Pedro Pizzano. The job of this is to explore all those people that may or may not be US citizens who are being held in places around the world. The fact that McCain’s willing to put together a rock star group of people and to pursue this it’s just wonderful. I’m just honored to be a part of McCain and honored to be sitting here with you in this space.
Not only the work they do, but we have to give a shout out to the late Senator John McCain, who not only a great war hero, veteran, leader, and legislator. When you look at leadership through the generations. The fact that this is an individual who impacted the Vietnam generation through, even though he’s left us, is what an incredible man and a legacy that he left. I’m honored because I got a picture with him long ago, even before I went in the army. He’s always been somebody that I looked up to. It’s pretty cool to be here.
I see a little-known secret. I worked on his campaign in 2008 in a small role. What always impressed me about him is that he’s held for seven plus years in Vietnam, and went through some horrific experiences. Yet after he came back, he became a senator and then is one of the people that helped us rebuild a relationship with Vietnam and speaks to the heart of a man who is a warrior diplomat. Someone who’s able to, of course, put rounds on target, but later on in his life. Do the hard work of building bridges to include with the very people that held him.
That’s a character.
Big time.
You talk about character. We’re going to talk a bit about your career, most recently having spent five years as the special presidential envoy for hostage affairs. Presidential appointee working under the state department under both the Trump and the Biden administrations. Before that, you were a lieutenant colonel in the army.
You were in special forces as a Green Beret, served in the Ranger Regiment, and went to West Point. You have the wealth of knowledge of what it takes to navigate these difficult waters when we talk about wrongful detention, we talk about hostages, and you’ve were instrumental in your career and bring in over 60, almost 70 home during that time.
We’re going to dig into the difficulty around that, but there’s so much that we take from our careers in social forces. You mentioned the term Warrior Diplomat, Mike Waltz, national security advisor, and congressman. You wrote the book Warrior Diplomat, where we talk about the ability to walk the halls and build bridges, but when it’s time to use the sword, there’s no one better. I think you had to do that in your role. To kick it off, can you define the role of the special presidential envoy for hostage affairs?
In a nutshell, it’s a role that was created in 2015 by President Obama. The United States didn’t do a very good job of bringing hostages home. Americans that were held in Syria by ISIS in 2012 to 2014 time period. In the wake of those failures, President Obama conducted a hostage policy review. Out of that, he built the scratchings of the hostage recovery enterprise, as we call it.
A part of that is at the White House, there was a group of people called the Hostage Response Group, picture 2 or 3 people that convene people in the enterprise to render decisions, whether it’s to get people out or to decide which cases the government accepts. It also brought together the hostage recovery fusion cell, picture roughly 30 to 40 specialists housed at the FBI, trying to bring together information that will specifically help us bring back an American who’s held hostage.
A hostage, for definition’s sake, is someone that’s held by a terrorist group, whereas a wrong for the detainee is someone held by a nation state. The Hostage Recovery Fusion Cell focuses specifically on bringing hostages home. There’s the Special Presidential Envoy for Hostage Affairs, the role that I had the honor of holding for quite some time.
The job of the SPEHA, as we call it, is to number one, negotiate and coordinate the negotiation to bring Americans home who are not just held as wrong for the detainees. If it requires a negotiation to bring a hostage home. SPEHA jumps in there and facilitates, coordinates, or actually conducts the negotiation. SPEHA is also responsible for taking care of the families of both hostages and wrongful detainees, to provide them support, to give them information, when people come back to make sure that they’re getting medical care, psychological treatments, etc.
The last thing that SPEHA is responsible for doing it’s to build up prevention and deterrence, because there’s got to come a point where you don’t have to do a prisoner swap or trade anything to get your Americans back. We’re probably about roughly, I’d say about ten years to get to the point where the United States has a robust enough prevention and deterrence strategy that we won’t have to go to countries like Russia, for example, and bargain for the return of Americans because the Russians will have stopped doing that because we’ve successfully deterred them.
I want to dig into each of those because you framed up those three pillars well, which actually coincide pretty well with my notes. I wonder why, but I want to think about. Let’s first talk about the recovery effort. This is a vastly complex space to operate in. You broke out very eloquently the difference between a hostage and a wrongful detaining. The reality is, each one of these designations, which is also different than like a prisoner of war, but each one of these designations is different in the way it has to be approached in the recovery and negotiation aspect.
Each one of the cases is vastly different, and the drivers behind the cases are vastly different. When you look at the complexity of this, and you look at cases like Brittney Griner in Russia. You look at Evan Gershkovich, also in Russia, but you look at friends of the Jedburgh podcast, where we’ve had Jose Pereira down in Venezuela. We had Jessica Buchanan in Somalia, and Michael Scott Moore in Somalia. How do you go about really thinking about the strategy of how do you engage with a terrorist organization versus a nation state?
You’re going to love the answer. By the way, Michael Scott Moore said, “Hello. I was waiting for this by an hour ago. Say hi to Fran, please.” You’re going to love the answer. It’s the military decision-making process. Now, there are numerous ways to go about conducting a negotiation. There are books that have been printed by people like Bill Ury up at Harvard, who’s an incredible negotiator. Chris Voss, who conducted FBI negotiations.
I think when I took a look at it, I decided to do something I was familiar with, and that was to use the MDMP, the Military Decision-Making Process. It came from something that someone said. I want to highlight something you just put on the air here, and that is every case is different. There is no cookie-cutter approach. That made this a little bit different. I went to see Jim O’Brien as soon as I got the job, many years ago. I go to see Jim O’Brien, he was the first SPEHA and he served under President Obama.
After about an hour, as I’m pretty much going out the door, Jim said, “One more piece of advice I need to give you, and that is there is no cookie cutter to doing this. It’s not replicable. Anytime you do this, you have to start tabula rasa, and figured it out from scratch, and then execute it. I know you want to try to find a way to keep doing this, a cookie-cutter, but there is none.” I said, “Very good.” I walked away thinking he was wrong. As an army officer, I was going to find a way to make this into a machine that I could just keep pumping out.
I went to see Robert O’Brien about a week later at the White House. He was the national security advisor at the time, but he also had been the last SPEHA under President Trump. After an hour of chatting with Robert, I’m getting up. I’m leaving. I’m shaking hands with him. I’m going out the door, and he goes, “Roger, one more thing.” I said, “Yes, Robert.” It was like that TV show, Columbo with Peter Falk. The most important thing Peter Falk would say during this TV show when he met with someone was not the conversation, it was what he asked as he was going out the door.
As I was going out the door, Robert O’Brien said, “Roger, there’s no way to make this into a cookie-cutter approach. You have to take each case separately, tabula rasa, and figure it out from scratch.” I’d heard the same thing from two of my predecessors within about a seven-day period. I walked out again, sure that they were wrong. Over the next two years, life beat it out of me. After case, you realize that you truly did have to start from scratch. We got to the point where like a battle drill.
Something that we all could do within our own organization is if we took a case, we would immediately go down to the SCIF at the State Department and invite over members of the CIA, the Department of the Treasury, the White House, members of SPEHA, and the regional experts. We get in a room of about twelve people, and then we would take them through specified tasks, implied tasks, limits, constraints, risks, and risk mitigation. That usually generated a course of action one, a course of action two, a course of action three.
We would weigh them, the variables we wanted to use to select our best course of action. Eventually, we’d come up with a course of action that made sense to us. That’s what we would start test driving, as we started to talk to the other side, the bad guys, who were holding our people in an effort to get our people back. There are other ways to do this. I would say that there may be a difference between what we did and do versus what the FBI might do.
It’s that we do have to start from scratch. The FBI, when they send their hostage trainers, or rather negotiators, to hostage negotiation school, they can go through scenarios, they can practice in a way, task conditions and standards, and you can do exercises. When that bank, a typical TV show. The bad guys go into a bank, they’re holding up the bank, the teller goes underneath and hits the buzzer, and then suddenly the cops all show up, and the bank robbers cannot get outside the bank, and it becomes a hostage barricade situation.
There is a way to approach that. When someone rather is taken by Al Qaeda, ISIS, JNIM, the Taliban, or when they’re taken by Russia, Venezuela, Syria, back in the olden days, Syria. There’s not necessarily a way to keep repeating the process because the variables are too great and you just don’t control much of it.
How do you decide what cases to take?
There was a time when it came down to your gut when Robert and Jim had this role back in the olden days. They would get a bunch of information, and they would just have to throw the information on the table. When they were done looking at it, they’d have to render a decision and then go to the secretary of state and say, “I think we have another case here.”
That’s actually hard because you’re almost required to take the purest of the pure cases because there’s not really a process to evaluate. In working with Congress in the years of 2019 and 2020, we were able to come up with some factors that we could at least evaluate the cases with. Congress passed the 2020 Robert Levinson Act. In that act, there are eleven criteria with which to evaluate a case.
What we have now is that if someone is taken in Russia, for example, we assemble all the facts that we possibly can on the case. We’ll get facts from the families, the intelligence agencies of the United States, and other countries. The Russians sometimes might give us information. We might get information from journalists, but as you lay everything on a table, now you can take the eleven factors given to us by Congress in the Robert Levinson Act and overlay the facts of the case, and that will give you a sense of whether someone’s been wrongfully detained or not.
When you now have to break it out between being wrongfully detained or not, it can actually become even more complex. Look at the two cases with Russia that we just referenced. In Brittney Griner’s case, you have a, we’ll call it a nugget of a potential crime. The fact that she had marijuana. Was there a law broken? Yes. Is the result of that imprisonment in a Russian prison until you’re exchanged for somebody else. Maybe not. You have Evan Gershkovich, who is claimed to be a spy. Who’s there, seemingly as a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, without necessarily the hard evidence of the crime? When you look at that, what’s that analysis?
Just because every case is different, let me hit both of those separately. It does apply to other cases, so check it out. When the Russians took Brittney Griner, when she came to the end of her trial, she said, “Look, I’d like to admit guilt and go from there.” She said to the Russian judge, “Your Honor, I’m going to take responsibility for what I did. I brought some expended cannabis cartridges into the country, and I want to take responsibility for that. There was no intent. I’d forgotten that they were there. They’re for medicinal reasons, but that doesn’t matter. Despite the fact that they forgot they were there. They were empty. I know I violated your law, and I want to take responsibility.”
You could say, as you pointed out, she’s guilty of the crime. However, the Levinson Act gives us a little more leeway. The Levinson Act says that if another country is specifically using an American for diplomatic leverage or leverage of some sort, that changes the calculus. If the sentence seems like it’s super high based on the fact that they’re probably an American, that adds another factor in the Levinson Act that leans us towards maybe a wrongful detention.
In Brittney Griner’s case, not only did she get sentenced as if she were a major drug dealer, someone who’s bringing like kilo after kilo, she was sentenced as if she were a drug mobster. Instead what she probably should have got, which I would say, based on Russian law, is, “Thank you very much, you can go. Here’s a fine of 10,000 rubles or maybe two weeks in the clink.” Instead, she was sentenced as if she were a major narco trafficker.
Secondly, the Russians pretty much winked at us. I don’t want to describe how they did it, but you can all say metaphorically or by analogy, they winked, nodded, and said, “By the way, we just got this basketball player and we are going to squeeze you, United States of America.” That hit another Levinson thing. That person, that American, is being used for diplomatic leverage. Brittney Griner goes from someone who you could say is guilty, and instead starts popping into the wrongful detention thing. You don’t necessarily have to be fully innocent.
You can be guilty of a crime, but if you still went through a jacked-up legal process, if you were tortured, if you were given a hundred-year sentence for something where you should have got a hundred days, you now start moving into wrongful detention territory. We had numerous cases where, in that ambiguity, the secretary of state was still able to say, “Look, I got it. They were guilty, or I got it, this, that, or the other.” The Levinson Act gave him a basis of evaluation, and that was helpful. I’ll try to keep my answers to not 20 minutes, but maybe like 20 seconds.
No, I like the twenty minutes because, look, the reality of the situation when we talk about any of these cases is that it could happen to anybody.
I’m going to hit that in a second. Let me go back. Evan Gershkovich?
Yeah.
Talk about a no-brainer. An accredited Wall Street Journal reporter gets arrested while trying to do a story. That’s why it took eleven days. Danny Fenster in Burma, same thing, reporter, taken, and you can sit there, reporter, was allowed to be there, wrote a story, the regime didn’t like it. The reporters happened fast, because it’s a no-brainer. There are other cases where you don’t know. You’re trying to figure out, “Did that American commit that crime? Did he rob someone in China? Did he try to import drugs from Africa?”
There’s a time lapse thing where eventually you might take a case, but it might have taken you 7, 8, 9, 10 months to get there because you’re trying to vacuum up all the information. Just like if a crime was committed in Washington, DC, even though with all the security cameras and all the witnesses in this town, we still might have a problem figuring out is this person that we captured guilty or not. It’s worse when it happens in China, and the Chinese aren’t telling you any information about the case.
You’re dealing with an adversarial nation who’s not like, “Here defense, like let me hand over all the camera footage. Here’s all the questioning details.” You’re not going to get any of that.
You just are not. It’s challenging, but we try to suck all the information in as fast as possible and render those decisions to get to work.
Now, if you take, for example, some of the other cases we brought up, like Michael Scott Moore, riding in a vehicle attacked by Al-Shabaab, taken hostage for a very specific reason, $25 million. Same for Jessica Buchanan. Now you’ve got to negotiate with a non-nation state actor who you cannot even make the case that is more or less rational.
It is a different case for the hostage side. It’s a different process, and that involves more like the FBI. Are they going to open up a hostage case? If they do, that goes in the hostage hopper. There’s actually a different process for hostages versus wrongful detainees. Although there’s a strong argument made by a lot of people in this community that, in a way, it doesn’t matter if it’s a nation state or a terrorist group, if they take you, you’re held hostage.
Do we need to have the verbiage wrongful detention, or can we just call them all hostages? There is a different process, and there are also different rules. If it’s a hostage case based on Presidential Policy Directive Number 30, we’re not allowed to give concessions. You can never hand a bag of money to a terrorist group and say, “We want our citizen back.” It’s much harder to get a hostage as the government.
I know where you’re going next. I’ll stand by. If it’s the nation state, if it’s the Russians, for example, you might have a little more leeway in terms of not handing them bags of money, but trying to find that one thing or those two things that the Russians might want that will get it done. Same thing with the Venezuelans. What is it going to take to get the Venezuelans to release an American? We have a little more leeway in terms of finding that thing versus a hostage case, which were much more constricted as a government.
The question that I was going to ask you about when we look at recovery. We’re talking about the case, but now let’s talk about what it takes to actually get somebody back. We’ve seen now in just the cases we’ve mentioned here, which tend to be the more popular ones. I’m not taking anything away. I know we’re focused on these ones because they’re in the news. They’re not the easy ones, but they’re the ones that most people recall.
We’ve got anywhere from about 200 a year Americans are taken in various countries across the world. Not taking anything away from any of those folks who are sitting in captivity today, and the lesser-known ones. We’ve had to give concessions. My question was going to be, and you’ve now dispelled that, does America negotiate with terrorists?
You bet we do. I love what President Reagan said, and I believe it might have been President Nixon prior to him, that the United States does not negotiate with terrorists. Yet I have. Not everyone gets the right to do it. That’s okay, but they at least want to make sure that SPEHA and probably members of our intelligence community have the ability to reach out. Otherwise, no one comes back. If you’re not going to talk to the Taliban, for example, then you don’t have people returning to the United States.
You can do proximity talks, or you can use a third-party intermediary. We’ve worked with Qatar, for example, on numerous occasions to talk to terrorist groups because we’ve just made a policy decision that we do not want to have that conversation. If in the cases that I’ve been involved with, where we’ve actually talked to the Taliban or worked through a third party to talk to the Houthis, we’re at least making sure that someone’s advocating on behalf of that American to bring them home.
For those that are like, “We should never do that,” that all makes sense until it’s your daughter or it’s your son. You’re going to be like, “We should be talking to the bad guys.” That doesn’t mean you cannot chase them down later. It’s like when I met the Taliban, I sat down at the table and said, “Just to be clear, I spent 3 1/2 years carrying a rifle, chasing you guys around the battlefield.”
They came back and said, “I fought in Helmand province or I fought here.” In a way, as you’re establishing that rapport, but at the end of the day, your nation still might go after these terrorists, but at a certain point, you’ve got to talk to them to bring them back. I’ll say this, 1973, Vietnam. We’re on the battlefield trying to fight the North Vietnamese, and yet we were talking to the North Vietnamese in Paris, trying to bring home our POWs.
Currently, the Russians are in a brutal battle with the Ukrainians, and yet they’ve had numerous POW swaps. There’s something about this topic, whether the person’s a prisoner of war, a hostage, or what we call a wrongful detainee, that you’ve got to be able to reach out to the other side. A lot of times, you’re able to do that without pulling in the ugly policy things to the left and right of those decisions.
The whole thing is a gray area.
Which is the special forces. That’s why this helps.
This is a good time to bring in this thought process of in these negotiations, because it’s so gray, and you mentioned there’s no right. Essentially, there’s no right or wrong answer when we talk about how we are going to negotiate with them. How are we going to speak to them? We’ve given concessions. You used the term concessions when we talk about primarily the nation states. We’ve given bad folks back to rush us. Just to name one who we know that those people have committed acts of mass violence, have coordinated terrorist style attacks, and have killed international people, if not Americans, and we’ve given them back in exchange for our citizens who essentially didn’t commit a crime. Where’s the line in that? How do we assess the value?
By the way, in the Russian ones, the guy by the name of Krasikov, we believe, was probably an assassin working for Russian intelligence, captured by the Germans after he essentially assassinated someone in a German beer garden a few years back. Viktor Bout, weapons dealer. You’ll find people that have blood on their hands tangentially, but may not necessarily have been the person who was killing a ton of people.
I Krasikov is one where it’s much clearer. I think the line is, again, you have to make your case. I guess it would be easy. My job would have been so easy if I could have said, “We don’t talk to terrorists,” and then we don’t. I do what a lot of people want me to do, and that’s just simply go to a podium or in front of a television camera and say, “I am calling on the government of such and such or terrorist group X, Y, or Z to unconditionally give these Americans back. They’re innocent.” If I did that, the families would feel good because I was fighting for them.
Congress would be happy because I was fighting for them. You get cool points because you’re being tough, you’re yelling at the bad guys, and you’re saying you’re calling for unconditional release. Everyone would love you in this. You’d be a hero in Washington, DC, but you know what? You would bring no one home. No one comes back when you call on their unconditional release. When do they come back?
When you sit down across from a table from someone like Ali Manlouk in Syria, the head of intelligence, and you try to make the case to back Austin Tice. What’s it going to take to get this done? How do we do this? Now, Ali Manlouk is probably responsible for the deaths of a hundred thousand people in Syria. Yet, am I not going to talk to him? No. If it’s going to bring back Austin Tice, I’m going to sit across the table and just say, “What’s going to take for you and me to figure this out?”
It’s the same thing with the Taliban, with the Russians, the Venezuelans. At a certain point, you have to sit down and say, “How do we do this? How are we going to work this out?” Again, I probably could have had an easy five years had I just said, “We don’t talk to terrorists. There are no concessions, and I’m calling on the unconditional release.” My numbers, instead of being what you mentioned, would probably be zero.
The theory behind the non-negotiation was always this idea that if the world knows that we’re not going to talk to you if you do this, they won’t do it because why would you do it? It’s not going to get you anywhere. You’re not going to get any concessions. That goes into prevention. If that’s not really a prevention strategy, I guess what my question is, if you take the approach that you said, hypothetically, and you say, “We’re not going to negotiate, we’re not going to talk to anybody,” does it stop?
I’m glad you asked it the way you did. No, it didn’t. We had years where we really didn’t talk to bad guys, and guess what? The bad guys still took people. They just held them forever. You don’t get them back because we’re not negotiating with them. Now I say that, and yet if you want to really peel back the onion in the ‘50s, ‘60s and ‘70s, and ‘80s, you’ll find that almost every administration at some point has done something to bring their Americans back.
The bottom line is if we did not negotiate with, let’s say, the Russians, they would just take Americans and you would just see them stay 14, 15, 16 years there, or they die in prison. The idea that you’re not going to make a deal or work on some solution does not keep them from taking people. Now, we’re going to get to that point, but we have to explore all those things that are going to make it so painful to the Russians and everyone else that when they think of taking an American and using them for leverage, they cannot because we’ve raised the costs of doing so.
Part of the deterrence part is what are those tools that we’re not using in the areas of diplomacy, information, military, legal, economic, financial, and law enforcement? What are those tools, those areas that we’re not using, or what tools can we invent and receive authorities through Congress to use that will ratchet the price up so that ten years from now, the Russians are like, “The Americans and the rest of the world figured out how to beat us at our own game. We cannot take people and hold them as leverage anymore because everyone’s figured out how to make this painful for us.”
You just threw out the term dime fill.
You caught that. Elements of national power. Fran, you know what we do. Someone does something that pisses us off, and we go right to diplomacy/treasury, and we sanction them. Find me a sanction that we’ve not used on Iran, Venezuela, or Iraq. We’ve maxed out. We have to create new tools that can be used to compel these countries not to take our citizens, because the sanction tool has been used quite heavily.
When you look at a situation like the post-October 7th attacks in Israel, you now have a mass scale. Mass scale, thousands killed, hundreds taken them hostage. Now, the situation Israel is in, and we’ve seen this play out publicly over the last eighteen months or so, is where you have two camps. You have the families arguing with Netanyahu saying, “You’ve got to negotiate. You’ve got to do whatever it takes.” You got the hardliners saying, “We’re not negotiating with anyone.” They’ve leveled.
Absolutely, there’s nothing left of Gaza, and yet they’re still holding folks there, including Americans. When you look at a case like that scale with an organization like Hamas backed by Iran, and now you’ve added in the complexity of not only a proxy terrorist organization who, whether we agree or not, believes that they are a government of some sort backed by a nation state. Now you’ve got everything.
That’s the PhD level of hard. I used to say that this whole topic was the PhD level of hardness, but I think when Hamas hit, that took it to another level. It’s just super mega hard, if I want to use a technical term. At the end of the day, if you map out how do we get this done, and we probably spent days of our lives on whiteboards trying to figure out how we get this done. This is just super hard. I’ll say when you finally do get people home, there’s this whethers from Gaza, Russia, JNIM in Mali.
When someone comes home, you feel like, “Thankfully, all this hard work has resulted in an American coming home.” You also go home that night and look in the mirror, and you’re like, “You don’t feel that great because you usually had to do something really tough to bring them back.” That’s why these decisions almost always come down to the President of the United States. It’s never Roger Carstens saying, “How about if we do this?” It’s more like talking to the bad guys, coming up with a plan, and then it has to go up to the President to decide whether he’s going to make that decision, accept that risk, and pull the trigger on what it needs to bring an American home.
We’ve seen in the American cases where we’ve done prisoner swaps and stuff, it’s like a couple for one, one for one. You look at the situation in Israel, and you’re talking about what a 100 or 200 Palestinians for one Israeli soldier to have to assess and evaluate those levels of risk, because the question has to be asked. Is the Russian assassin back at work? Are the Palestinians who’ve been in Israeli prisons back on the battlefield? Now what?
When we took decisions to President Biden, more so President Biden than President Trump. When I worked for President Trump, I don’t think we didn’t have the Levinson Act until the very waning days of his first administration. I don’t think we really had a process for evaluating some of this risk. Under President Biden, we’d sit there and take a look at something like Viktor Booth, the merchant of death, and ask the intelligence communities, can you do an assessment to give us a sense of whether Viktor Booth will return to a life of crime once he’s released?
When we get the information that comes back saying, “Probably not,” then we can take that to the president, and he gets a better sense of what risk he’s signing up for. We tried to be conscious of that. We didn’t want to just make an emotional appeal. We want to have some mathematics in that so the president knew he was signing up for. Surely the point is, you assume risk in all these, and you truly have to come down to a balancing proposition that has to be made at the level of the president.
We’ve thrown out doctrinal terms. We’ve talked about the complexity of navigating this space. We’ve talked about having to build bridges. Now we’ve got to talk about bringing them home. What does that look like, because they all end differently? In Michael Scott Moore’s case, the family paid a ransom, granted it started at $25 million, but eventually, I think, what was it a million? I think it was even under 2 million that, eventually, after 944 days, he was returned. You look at Jessica Buchanan, who was rescued by SEAL Team Six. In my opinion, a great operation that resulted in her coming home and a lot of bad guys no longer with us. They can end very differently. Jose Pereira exchanged for the nephews.
The Nacro nephews. The Narcosobrinos.
They all end differently. Now, you talked about how you feel when they come home, talk about how they’re impacted and their families, and what the reunion and reintegration looks like.
On the family side, I made a decision when I first took the job that we were going to go out and visit every family. If Mr. So-and-so is taken by the Russians, within seven days, usually 7 to 10 days, I would be anywhere in the world to be in the living room of Mr. So-and-so’s family. Let’s say that his family lived up in Massachusetts. I’m on a plane up to Massachusetts, four hours with the family, and I try to get a sense of “What the case is like. Tell me more about your son, who was taken by the Russians. Do you have any pictures? What have you heard from him? Have the Russians said anything?”
We get caught up in the case, but also get a sense of the man or the person that’s being held. At a certain point of the meeting, after about an hour or two, you switch into, “Look, my office was created because the US government failed to negotiate or talk to the families. We’re trying to fix that. What we would like to do is partner with you, the family members, to come up with a solution to bring your loved ones home.” The rest of the meeting is talking about how we function, how we want to communicate with the families, and how we’re going to like plot and scheme to get their loved ones back.
I’d say specifically, “Look, we’re going to give you updates at least once a week, unless you don’t want them. If you want them daily, we’ll call you daily. If you want them weekly, we’ll do that too. If you only want to be updated when something new happens, whatever battle rhythm you want in terms of getting information, we’re going to jump on that. By the way, you can call us 24/7. If you want to call me on Friday night at 10:00 because you read something in the paper that referenced something that President Putin said, I’m picking up the phone and I’m staying on until your round’s complete, until you’re done asking your questions.”
More to the point, we’re going to declassify information so that we can give you a sense of where you are on the map sheet. We had two people from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence in the SPEHA team. Pretty much, I would say 70% of their time was spent declassifying information so that we could tell the families where we were.
The last thing is like, look, we’re going to partner. This is not going to be government as usual. We’re not going to be cold and distant. We’re not going to push you away. We are going to have a powerful relationship. Sometimes you’re going to yell at us. Sometimes we’re all going to cry together, but we’re going to do this together.
I brought it up like this. Since I know you, and so we have a different relationship than maybe someone who’s one of your team members. Your team members, if they do something bad, I will politely say, “Could you please not do that?” You, because I know you, Fran, I’ll scream and I’ll F-bomb you and say, “I told you you cannot do it.”
That’s the relationship we wanted to have with the families to where we were close enough to where I wanted them to feel comfortable to yell at me, hug me, kiss me on the cheek, cry with me and hold each other when things go well or wrong, and partner and be vulnerable to give each other our ideas. I’ll tell a quick story, and I’ll shut up and let you go to the next one. I gave that one pitch about how we want to partner.
I’d said, “Sometimes the family’s going to come up with a solution because I surrendered 50% of my creativity every day I walked into the State Department and put on a suit and tie.” Why? The State Department building just does that. You’re creative at 8:00 in the morning, 8:15, you go into the building, 50% of your creativity just sucked right out of you. The families are the ones who are constantly 24/7 thinking about how to get their loved ones out.
I said, “Maybe you guys will come up with a solution.” We’re at the end of a family visit. We spent four hours in the living room. I’m trying to walk out the door and put on a coat. This seventeen-year-old boy comes up and says, “Mr. Carstens, I was thinking, you know what? Nevermind. It was really nice to meet you.” I said, “No, hold on now. Were you going to tell me something?” He goes, “I was thinking, no, it was really nice meeting you.”
I said, “Come on now. What were you going to tell me?” He’s nervous. He goes, “I’ve been following my dad’s case for years, and often wondered why we weren’t doing this.” To me, my world stopped. I just sat there for what seemed like an eternity. I’m sure it was only like 30 seconds. I was like, “That’s it. That’s the missing piece. We’re going to do that.” This family member came up with the release mechanism that we then struggled to make happen over the next few months.
To have that partnership was important to us, it was important to the families, and it was important to the return because in working together, we found we got a lot of stuff done. I’ll say one more thing. People often give me credit. You said, “Roger, you brought back 65 people.” The answer is “I brought back zero people.” Now, I participated as a member of a team in efforts to bring back 65 people. Sometimes I was the negotiator. Other times, I was writing the talking points for the intelligence team.
Other times, I was shouting my support at Jake Sullivan from the sidelines. It’s a team effort. The family members are a huge part of that team that sometimes includes hundreds of people, maybe a thousand, that when that returnee comes home, he may never even get to meet those people. These are big teams. Frankly, because of your interest in this, because of your work with Hostage US, and because you’re interviewing people like me and Michael Scott Moore, you’re part of that team. When people come home, everyone seems to have a thumbprint on that return.
Every case captures my attention. I think it’s critically important, you go back to what we’re going to talk about next and you go back to service. We were fortunate enough this morning to be in the Pentagon again with the Sergeant Major of the Army and the Sergeant Major of the G357, Sergeant Major Mullinax, where we really talked about why they call it service. Call it service because it’s hard. You can think about it. It’s like a concept where you go, “Wait a minute. That’s like so simple. It makes sense.”
I’ve never thought of it like that, but you’re right.
That’s why they’re great senior NCOs, and we were officers that have to make it more difficult. That’s it like, “Why do they call it service. You call it service because it’s hard.” You’d go back to things like the Ranger Creed. I’ll never leave a fallen comrade. It says it can be that simple. Now, you expand your definition of comrade. It was your ranger buddy. It was your teammate on an SF team. It becomes every American who finds themselves as part of this, that nobody wants to be a part of.
That’s right.
You fall back on this is the service aspect of what we’re doing in these roles. We’ve got to ask you, you went to West Point, which won’t hold against you being an OCS guy, but why serve in the first place?
I’ll get one target first. Wendy Sherman, the Deputy Secretary of State, was a great ally in bringing people home. She said that one day. She’s like, “We would move heaven and earth to bring a soldier back because we leave no fallen comrade behind or a comrade taken behind. Shouldn’t that be for every citizen? Shouldn’t we leave no citizen behind?” That’s why she was just really tough in these National Security Council meetings when others in the meeting would not want to return our Americans, she was always pushing the envelope there.
In terms of the service part, all those things that made us want to be Green Berets, some people had something fanciful as watching John Wayne in the Green Berets course, which should be one of the main reasons for every Green Beret. I want to go on record. There are usually other factors. For me, it wasn’t reading the newspaper at age eleven in Spokane, Washington, about the genocide that was taking place in Cambodia. It’s like, “This is horrible. At age eleven, you’re reading about people being murdered in a mass way.”
It’s probably something I shouldn’t have been reading, but I did. I thought, “I want to be the guy that helped stop that.” In my analysis, there was only one organization that had the will, the resources, and the wherewithal to stop something like a genocide. That was the US Army. It liberated Europe in World Wars I and II. I think you can find all sorts of examples where the military shows up and solves the problem.
You and I have been around long enough to where as you get older, you realize the military sometimes shows up, doesn’t solve the problem, or is not given the power to do so. Even in the recent history, if there was a tsunami or a hurricane, there’s a reason that we put an aircraft carrier and a hospital ship off the coast and send in soldiers or Marines to solve the problem because they can get there, they know what to do, and at the end of the day, they’ll figure it out and serve.
I wanted to be a part of that. I made a beeline for West Point. I figured, “I’m going to be a part of the team that I would call the greatest humanitarian organization that was ever created, the US Army.” Now, I say that as a person who also appreciates its lethality. If you want to stop evil, if you want to crush the next Adolf Hitler, dial 1-800-US-ARMY.
If you also want to prevent evil from doing the other things. Again, the army. West Point seemed like a natural fit. The army seemed like a natural fit. The infantry seemed like a natural fit. More to the point, special forces, the motto, de oppresso liber, to free the oppressed. Early on, I got caught in this idea of helping and protecting those who are most vulnerable.
That’s something that stayed with me from West Point, through the Ranger Battalion, through special forces, through the nonprofits that I ran in Somalia and Jordan, to working in the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor at State, and eventually being the hostage negotiator. What’s your job? Find the people that need help and need to be brought home, that need rescue. I love your word, serve.
My job is to find the people who need help and need to be brought home, those who need rescue.
The first time we met was because of your potential need to be rescued. I vividly remember, and I was in Djibouti running the East Africa operation. I was in the J3 shop there, and it was the J35. One of the mechanisms we were creating there was some combat search and rescue capability for SOF in the region. We were doing some interoperability training with the Air Force assets that are out of Lemigny, and then also some international NATO organizations. You were in Somalia, and I got a call.
I don’t know, like, where you got to get to us. I remember the conversation we had on the phone, and I asked you, “What do you need?” Your response was, “I just need a number to call in case I need it.” I’m like, “I don’t know what I could do for you, but if you need a number to call, we’ll be here and we’ll do everything we can.”
I think that gave me a feeling of comfort.
It’s funny. We talked about that earlier, and I remembered I talked to Mike Sheehan, who at that time was ASD SO/LIC. I was like asked him the same question. I’m like, “Mike or Mr. Secretary, if I need help, who do I call?” I think I finally necked it down to your phone number, between that and the people in Somalia, some of the military folks I was working with. It ended up being your number. It’s an SF thing, or it’s just to be prepared. Maybe it’s a pay-as-scout thing. When it goes wrong, that’s not when I want to figure out who I needed to call.
Being able to call a barrel-chested freedom fighter like you, knowing that on the other end, you’re going to put the the boys in the helicopter or put the net call out, that’s a feeling of comfort when you’re either running a nonprofit in Somalia or working with, as at that time, Bancroft Global Development.
It was good to connect with you. It was also a pleasure to watch your career, serving some pretty distinguished roles. That’s also cool to watch you doing what you’re doing now, spreading the wealth and providing awareness through the Jedburgh effort.
That’s why we have to talk about transition, because I think we do these great things. We threw out the term service. We have these careers that bring us to experiences and bring us to places that we could never dream about. You go back to your decision to go to West Point, and you said earlier that everybody serves for a different reason. I wanted to be a journalist.
I went to Boston University to study broadcast journalism. I wanted to be Tom Brokaw and Dan Rather, and Peter Jennings, and 9/11 was my junior year in college. I said, “What am I going to go do? I’m going to go to like the middle of nowhere in America.” We still had VHS tapes, and I would envision myself. Watching the news, and I’m watching the effort in Afghanistan in October of 2003. There are guys with beards and long hair, and they’re riding horses. Subsequently, we went to Iraq, and I envisioned myself sitting in an editing room a year from now, taking a video from one VHS tape player to another.
I just thought, “There’s no way. I cannot do that not at this point in time. If I want to be a journalist, if I want to do this profession later on in life, then I can go into the army. I can gain these experiences, this perspective, and then if that’s my calling later on down the road, that’s what we’ll do.” You go into this career, and I would have never imagined or thought I would have gotten to go to the places that I got to go to do the things and meet the people that I got to meet.
It really changes your life. One day, it ends. In general, Tovo, the former use of a sock commander, the current chairman of the Green Beret Foundation, has a great quote. We actually put it up on our social media the other day from an interview I did with them. He says, “Every Green Beret will leave the service one day, whether you believe it or not, when you’re in there, like you’re going to leave.”
We all vividly remember that last day. I turned my ID card in. I got in my car, I drove off of Fort Carson, somebody walked me out, shook my hand, said, “Thank you for your service.” I got in my car and I literally started crying because it’s everything and you got this, thirteen years that comes down to a handshake of somebody you don’t know. All of a sudden, you’ve got to figure out what you’re going to do. We struggle, I believe, in the Green Beret community with transition.
We spend a career on these teams, where even if we don’t like the guys we’re with, they’re our best friends, and we do everything with them. Yet we get out and then guys say, “I’m going to go live in the woods. I’m going to hunt and fish all day and not talk to anybody.” They take their own life. You’ve transitioned and continued to serve in so many different capacities. When you look at the transition challenge that we have out of special forces, what are you seeing?
You and I talked about this earlier, and it got onto that mission part. I think that unless you really are self-aware and know yourself, it’s going to be hard to get into something that doesn’t have a mission or some sense of camaraderie. Even then, let’s say that your entire life you knew you wanted to be, I’ll choose something ridiculous, a car salesman in Marmarth, North Dakota. You leave special forces and go out there, and you want to be that.
You want to be that. SF was just something you were doing for ten years until you did that. When you go to Marmarth, North Dakota, if there’s not some higher mission where you are allowed to serve and you don’t have that camaraderie, you’re going to have a hard time. People don’t realize that. I know we’re doing a much better job of counseling people on their way out the door. You can maybe highlight these things.
I think I was self-aware about that. I knew that I wanted to serve. I wanted to have a higher-level mission. I want to be around people that I liked and shared the same values. I tried to shape some of my decisions that allowed me to be in those groups. I would say that’s given me a sense of mental stability, a sense of comfort, physically, emotionally, financially, and even spiritually, because I wanted to stay on that same thread of continuity that brought me into the army.
I would say in my world, I really blundered into every job I’ve had. As I’m blundering into the job, I could at least say, “Is this the same threat of continuity? Am I still interested in protecting the most vulnerable?” As I look back, I’ve done a decent job of doing that. The very same things that brought me into special forces are the same things that brought me into SPEHA as the hostage negotiator, and frankly, brought me into the McCain Institute. There’s a mission statement, and what the McCain Institute is doing aligns with my personal values.
If I had to talk to a young captain or E7, a captain who might be getting out, or a lieutenant colonel or an E7, like, “I’m thinking about getting out, or I’m put in twenty, it’s time to go on and try something else.” It’s like, “Could you have any advice?” They’re probably thinking I’m going to point them to a job. I would not point them to a job. I would point them to a thought on a mission. That is, “Don’t worry about where you’re going. Worry about what the values are. The things that excite you and animate you about life, whatever you’re about to do, make sure that’s in what you do next because without it, you’re going to fill a little off your map sheet.”
I teach a leadership seminar, and one of the blocks that we’ve built on this leadership seminar is about, we call it choice, but there are three components to it. Its purpose, which is what you’re talking about. What’s your purpose? What’s your mission? Why are you here? The second one is autonomy. Do you have input into how you do things? If you have input into how you do things, you’re more motivated to do it versus micromanagement.
The third piece is efficacy results. Are you seeing tangible results? The thought process is that if we have purpose, if we have autonomy, if we see the results of our actions, we make the right choices as a leader. I think you summed it up there when you talk about transition, because guys are looking for a job. What’s the job? We’re all guilty of it. I mean, I was guilty of it. I interviewed in my transition with everyone, every big name that you could list, I tried, and he didn’t do any jobs.
I was fortunate that they took a chance on me at Merrill Lynch to go be a financial advisor. I was miserable because it didn’t fulfill the purpose. It didn’t resonate with who I was. Ultimately, you had to go on and go do other things back into the security industry, and then start this show, which people ask me now, “Why do you put the effort into the show? What’s so important about it?”
I’m like, “It’s about impact. It’s about telling the stories, and it’s about getting the message out there that is missed because we as quiet professionals have also become silent professionals and we will forever be in competition with our SEAL brothers, whether that be in service or beyond, but they’ve done a great job of transition.” They’ve done a great job of supporting each other in transition.
Now I don’t think everyone should go out and write a book about every experience they ever had, but I do believe they’ve done a phenomenal job about saying, “You come out of your 10, 15, 20 year career on a seal team and now we’re going to put you in a role in an organization with like-minded folks.” They’re always doing that. I don’t think we as Green Berets do as good of a job when a guy comes in and says, “I’m just going to be a recluse back up in the San Juan Mountains of Colorado.” Three years later, they’re no longer with us. We go, “I cannot believe that guy did that.” It’s like, “What do you mean?” “He lost his community. Nobody helped bring him in.”
I think we’ve got to do a better job of that. I absolutely agree. I think your characterization of the SEALs is spot on. Even when I was in, I always recognized how the SEALs get out and they stay on the attack. “I’m getting out.” “What’s next for you?” “I’m going to Harvard Business School. I’m getting out. I am writing a book. I’m getting out.” Everyone had a plan, where they were still in the fight in one shape or form. I think your comments are spot on. By the way, that class that you teach, I want to take it. Did you come up with that?
Yeah.
Those three steps?
All the components of a performance mindset.
Have you written a book about that yet?
No, people tell me that.
You can write a book. That’s great because that really does encapsulate how I feel about the work that I do. I often thought that I never wanted to be a thing. I never want to be a doctor, a lawyer, a rock star, a politician, fill in the blank. That would have made my life easy because I could say, “I got out of med school. I’m now a doctor, mission complete.” Instead, I wanted a mission to take care of those who are vulnerable.
You could have your mission could be to kill your nation’s enemies. It could be whatever. If you have a mission, you have to approach your next few steps differently than those who just want to be a thing or to have a job. By the way, not saying anything bad about those who go into the financial world and succeed wildly, because the people I’ve met who do well in the financial world align with who they are.
It just wouldn’t align with who you and I are. You’re right, I think the mentorship part or pointing to the guys getting out to just say, “You think you’re not going off to Louisiana, live in that shack on that lake, that property you bought back when 1986. You might want to rethink that. How about joining me on this? There’s a group of guys doing this to keep that team thing going on.” I’m with you on that. I don’t think I’ve seen too much data on why we lose 22 veterans every day, but I would have to wonder if it’s because of the loss of those three things that you’re teaching about in your class.
I firmly believe it is. I feel very passionately about that. I think we’ve got to do a better job. We used to call it looking for work. Remember you’d buy a clear room?
Yeah.
“Look for work. Don’t just stand there.” Guys would stand there and be like, “What are you doing? I’ll pull in security.” You’re like, “No, dude, you look for work.” You’re in a bit of a break, or you thought you were going to be in a bit of a break, but I would argue that you’re not, considering we’ve talked about your work here at the McCain Institute and here very shortly as we leave here, we got to head over. We’re to go to the Hostage US.
You are definitely a guy who’s looking for work and getting involved in a number of stuff. You took 3 or 4 phone calls while we were setting up over here, but the importance of Hostage US in this role. We talked about the families. We talked about the impact that it has, but here’s an organization led by the executive director, Liz Cathcart, also a great friend of mine on the show. Also, Dave Komendat is on legend in the physical security space, chief security officer at Boeing for a long time.
He jokes that his whole career was at Boeing. Now you’re really leading the efforts at the board level of the organization. We’re going to go tonight to the annual reception. We’re going to see so many people we talked about earlier and so many more. They’re working with the families. Can you talk for a minute about the impact that they’re having in working with the families, and then the post-recovery efforts that when somebody actually does step foot back on American score?
The work that Hostage US has done and is doing and will do it’s been, I’d say, fundamental to our success as a nation in bringing people home and reintegrating them. Liz has done an amazing job. I’m glad you mentioned her. Amy Monson, John Smith, who first came out of Hostage International and helped build Hostage US, and all these other heroes. I really could probably spend about five more minutes by name, but let me tell you why I like them.
I’m just going to give you a specific example. We get an American back from Venezuela. It was unexpected. We didn’t think we were to get anyone, but we got two people. One person we fully expected, we know about. We know where his family is. We know all about him. One person we didn’t know much about, but suddenly he’s flying home with us to Texas. We land, and he didn’t have any family members in the United States, had lost his job when he was taken hostage in Venezuela a year prior, and showed up with nothing.
On one hand, I have an American that I know all about. I know his family, and they’re right down the road and they’re coming in to greet him, meet him, take care of him, and eventually take him home after he leaves post-isolation support activities in Texas. Another person who essentially has nothing. We took him out to a mall, bought him some clothing, got him some food, got his passport, bought him an airline ticket back to where his job was.
You know who made all that happen and paid for all of it? Hostage US because no one else could really at that moment move that fast, cut through the bureaucratic red tape to make that happen. Certainly, the US government couldn’t do it. With all the time that we put in and all the effort we put into making it a soft landing when someone comes home, we were unable to adapt quickly enough to handle this unexpected kerfuffle.
I’ll say a blessing, an unexpected blessing. Hostage US was able to pay for the clothing, pay for the food, and pay for the airline ticket. In short order, working with Hostage US and my team, we were able to get him his old job back. Within a week, he was going back to work. That’s the impact that Hostage US has.
Whether it’s in wellness for people coming back, making sure that they have psychological care and counseling, whether it’s making sure that people have cushioning financially when they come back, or whether it is advocating on behalf of someone who is fighting an issue with the IRS. Hostage US is right there in the trenches with the family members and the returning when he comes home to either A, bring them back, or B, make sure that they’re functioning and getting off to a good start once they come back to freedom.
I think that they’re relentless in their pursuit.
Amazing. Yeah. They are.
They’ve built just great partnerships, I think, at the corporate level. Across the community, in the private sector, and then being able to bring in really just the who’s who of the security industry to get them to understand that, as we mentioned earlier, this can happen to anybody. This can be your employee. This can be your family member. Do you know what resources are out there to support them? I look forward to that here pretty shortly. Where do we go from here when we look at hostage diplomacy as we space the threats, which can be defined as almost greater than we’ve seen in quite a long time from nation states, from peer to peer and near peer adversaries? The threat of hostages from a terrorist organization level isn’t diminishing.
I would say that there was a time until just recently, until like the last few weeks, I would have said the numbers are going down dramatically. There was a time when I had 54 cases on my desk. I had a total of active cases throughout my time there. By the time I left, we had under ten. We were not finding that people were going out and restocking the bond, taking more people. However, I’d say just in the last 90 days, the US government’s identified more people in certain countries. You could make the argument that numbers are starting to climb back up.
The bottom line is you have to do a few things simultaneously. In a way, we already mentioned them, the future is this. Number one, there may not be a cookie cutter, but you can get better about negotiating. Find out what works and don’t waste time. Get right to it. It always was frustrating to spend two years bringing an American home when maybe in the first few weeks, we knew exactly what we needed to do, but then we had to fight through the bureaucracy to get it done.
There may not be a cookie-cutter approach to doing things, but you can improve at negotiating. Find out what works and don’t waste time—get right to it.
Also in bureaucracy.
That’s it. It’s like, “Roger, what’s the hardest country you’ve ever negotiated with the Venezuelans, the Syrians?” “No, the hardest negotiation I ever did was in the United States government, just trying to get alignment because everyone wants to solve the problem, but everyone has their own way of doing it.” Trying to get everyone on the same sheet of music in the US government is definitely a challenge. You’re really conducting 360-degree negotiations with the bad guys, but also with your peers, compatriots, and fellow government types back here to make sure that you come up with your release mechanism.
Do you know there’s a term for that.
Tell me.
It’s called meta leadership.
I thought I was going to have something that we couldn’t say on air.
No, but there’s a lot of that too. We’ll talk about that later after a few drinks. It’s called meta leadership. There’s a book, which I would highly recommend if you haven’t read it already, but it’s called You’re It. It was written by Eric McNulty.
Eric. He owes me money. No, it’s a funny thing. Never is what you say if you’ve never heard of it.
That guy.
Whoever it is you’re going to be like, “That guy could run?”
They owe beer. If it’s their first time, they owe beer. Eric McMulty he works as part of the Leadership Institute at Harvard. The National Preparedness Leadership Institute, that’s what it is. He and a number of other professors wrote this book called You’re It. It’s a short read, and I would recommend it to you because they highlight numerous leaders, including another great friend of the podcast who was a Boston police chief during the marathon bombing.
It’s these leaders who are in these, Daniel Linskey, as who it was, and in a moment they’re, “Interesting. I’ll that book.” Now, how do you lead when a moment ago, you were a spectator at the Boston Marathon? You’re still a police chief, but now you’ve had a bond. The whole world is looking at you, and you’re it. You don’t want to be it. Very much like the hostage situation. It’s a club you don’t want to be a part of, but once you identify you’re a part of it, or you’re in charge in this case, what are you going to do?
They highlight, I don’t know if I can go on a tangent here, but the reason, why it’s important is because they talk about this concept of mental leadership, and we talk about it in the leadership class that we run and we credit Eric and his team for giving us that language. It’s about the need to, as a leader, you have to lead up to your bosses and those you report to you, have to lead down to your team.
You have to lead across to your peers and your supporting elements, and you have to lead across and out. You have to lead out to the third-party organizations and folks who influence your organization. It’s this three-dimensional, four-dimensional leadership sphere that in order to be effective in crisis. I would argue that in any complex leadership in our region, you have to be able to identify who you’re talking to.
What’s the messaging is to that group because, as you referenced earlier, how we talk to our team and how our team receives information. Isn’t that how we talk to our boss? It’s not how our boss talks to us. It’s not how we speak with our peers. It’s not how we communicate with outside organizations. Our ability to effectively identify and do that is what separates great leaders from not-so-great leaders.
See, I feel like I got more out of this chat than I gave to you because that’s important to me. I’ll probably go buy that book, and it’ll be my next book that I read. I think the leadership thing is that it’s a 100%. That’s how I think I’ve tried to run my life, but also in DC, that’s an important way of doing business. I don’t think everyone does it, but I think that’s how you should conceptualize trying to get things done in DC.
I would just add that instead of leadership, you could substitute negotiations, and you have the SPEHA job right there. I appreciate that that’ll be on my reading list as of now. I guess, continue on answering your question, what’s the future look like? It’s continuing these negotiations. It’s coming up with prevention and deterrence to raise the cost of taking our citizens to the point that countries no longer do that. Again, it’s going to be a multi-year fight.
The last thing is to keep up in our game in terms of taking care of citizens. We have done such an amazing job in the last few years of going from nothing to suddenly something and taking care of the families of those who are being held. The things that we do now from information, visits, flying them to Washington DC to brief them and let them see their congressional reps, providing medical and psychological care, not just to the people that are taken when they come home, but also to family members while their loved ones are still held overseas.
The US government has essentially gone light years. Yet I look at what the Israelis are doing in terms of providing stipends to family members. I like that’s the future. If someone’s taken by a nation state or by a terrorist group, the Israeli government will, A, pay a stipend to the person that’s been taken. If you’re making $100,000 a year, the Israeli government’s going to continue those payments into your bank account if you’ve been designated as one of their wrongful detentions, so to speak.
Secondly, the Israeli government recognized that family members will quit their jobs and focus full-time on getting their loved ones back. They’re now starting to cut checks as stipends to those family members that are involved in the recovery process. Thirdly, they’re assigning an active duty military officer and a retired military officer, and a social worker to every family to help them navigate, A, talking to the government and, B, get things done in the social space, whether it’s medical care, psychological care, and all this stuff.
There are things that we still could be doing. Let me recap. Number one, get better and faster at negotiating with a sense of urgency. Number two, work on prevention and deterrence so that this problem one day goes away. Number three, keep improving the way we take care of the families of those who have been taken. That’s going to be the future.
Get better and faster at negotiating with a sense of urgency. Focus on prevention and deterrence so this problem can one day disappear. Keep improving how we support the families of those taken—that’s the future.
We’ve got to give another plug to Hostage US here because everything you mentioned in terms of the recovery effort is coming back, is what they’re working on. What you were talking about with the financial piece is, I think, when we look at these cases and we see what gets reported in the media, what they don’t talk about are things like the family who quit their job. You look at Jose Pereira, part of the Sicko Six whose son stopped working and was sending him food.
It’s running the packages, and Jose talks about the letters that they snuck into the tents from his wife, which is what motivated him and had his son leave his job and move to Venezuela to be there to move to an adjacent country. I think to send him food, uproot your whole life. You’re not getting paid from your job because your employer says, “You’re not here, and we don’t have the obligation to pay you anymore.” Now you don’t have income, but now you’re down multiple incomes.
Jessica Buchanan talks about the fact that her credit was destroyed because nobody was there to pay her bills. Nobody knew she had the bills, and there’s no box to check at Experian or Equifax that says like, “I was held hostage by Somali pirates. I couldn’t pay my bills for Michael Scott Moore for years.” You spend then a decade coming out from bankruptcy, with a zero credit score rating as an adult. Those are all things that become so challenging as you have to rebuild your life.
We now give out a letter if someone’s taken hostage or wrongfully detained, and it has the signature of the SPEHA on it saying, “This pursuant to the Levinson Act, so and so has been declared a wrongful detention, signed by Roger D. Carsen SPEHA, or now my person who took over, Adam Bowler.” That letter is then used to go to the IRS, and the US government says, “Take these guys off your to-do list. Stop everything. No more penalties. Don’t pound on them for having not paid their taxes.”
We go to the banks. The letter’s there to go to the families. They can send it to the creditors. It’s still too passive. I think we need to be active in terms of aggressively going to all of these creditors, as the government is doing it. Again, the Israelis have figured this out. I’ve got to give credit to Hostage US, but there are other players in this space. The Foley Foundation has done a marvelous job in not only bringing awareness to this topic, but working with members on Capitol Hill and the executive branch, and the families to mitigate some of this pain.
When someone’s taken, the one thing I’m very grateful for is that there now is a hostage recovery enterprise. We used to think of that as just the government, but I think we now think of it as the government plus NGOs like Hostage US, McCain Institute, Foley Foundation, and others, members of Congress on Capitol Hill, and their staff. I would say super empowered individuals like the late Governor Richardson.
I would say partners and allies like some of the countries that helped us on last year’s 1st of August swap. We brought people back from multiple countries. It’s a bigger crew. I’d say businesses. We talked about the security industry that Dave was working in. As you mentioned, he’s a legend. We’re bringing this wide community into this whole topic to solve this problem. Whether again, it’s negotiating or it’s taking care of families or it’s prevention or deterrents, this is a team effort.
The one thing we know is it’s not going to end anytime soon. We’ve got a lot of work to do.
We do.
I appreciate you taking the time to sit down with me. When we look at impact, I mentioned efficacy, we want results. Green Berets get results.
We do.
Warrior dip, we get results. If we don’t get it the first time, guess what? We’re coming back at you and we’re going to do it again. I do think much like we talk about for 25 years and beyond, the global pursuit of our adversaries, we have a global pursuit mission to go get those who’ve been taken from us. You’ve led that effort. I know that you will continue to lead that effort in whatever capacity that looks like for the very long future to come. I appreciate very much everything that you’ve done for us, for my team, and the McCain Institute for hosting us here. Hostage US, we’ll see you here in a little bit and stay in the fight.
Fran, I’m glad you stayed in the fight as well. What an honor to be here with you. Thank you.
Thanks.
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