by Puk Damsgård
They emphasized that they had no control over the final practical arrangements or the delay, and that they didn’t want to extend the process any further. Finally, they asked for instructions on how the money should be handed over.
The ransom sum was to be exchanged for euros by the National Bank, at a cost of 20,000 kroner, and thereafter taken to Turkey in cash. The Danish state wasn’t allowed to transport ransoms, so the family – and, therefore, Arthur – would be responsible for taking the money to Turkey. Just two hours later, the kidnappers wrote back. The family had to verify when ‘the full amount’ in euros arrived in Turkey, and there was one further demand:
THE CASH MUST ALL BE IN 500 EURO NOTES that are not torn, misprinted or damaged in any way!
Arthur was beginning to prepare for Daniel’s release bit by bit, while the crisis psychologist acquainted the family with how such a process normally took place. No one could know the mental and physical state Daniel would be in when, as Arthur hoped, he came across the border into Turkey. There was still the possibility that Arthur would have to arrange for Daniel to be picked up in Syria and brought to Turkey.
However the exchange was going to take place, it was essential there was a crisis team around Daniel which, as a rule, didn’t include members of his family. Experience showed that it could be initially difficult for the person who had been released to relate to an unhappy mother, an overexcited friend or a delighted sister.
Even so, the crisis psychologist and Arthur suggested that Anita come to Turkey with them. She was capable of putting aside her emotions and could therefore be of assistance to Daniel, because she would be a familiar face among a lot of strangers.
A representative from the Danish Foreign Ministry was also part of the crisis team. The Ministry’s emissary was going to Turkey with them to provide so-called consular assistance, such as the issuance of an emergency passport and to sort out any hassles with the Turkish authorities. One scenario might be that Turkey would want to hold Daniel in order to get information from him or because they suspected him of complicity with ISIS. As Arthur explained to the family: ‘I’m your fixer, but I’m not the authorities.’
How Daniel was going to fly from Turkey to Denmark was also a subject of discussion. Since no one knew what state he would be in, Arthur suggested that it would be better if Daniel didn’t have to fly commercially, such as on Turkish Airlines. The Danish Air Force had an aircraft available which Peter Bartram, the Danish Chief of Defence, thought could do the job. If Daniel was in a poor physical or mental condition, he wouldn’t have to wait for weeks to come home to Denmark.
In addition, a doctor and an operative from the intelligence services would be part of the team in Turkey. Since a criminal offence had been committed against a Danish citizen, PET’s responsibility was to ensure that the procedures were followed and all the evidence was collected if there was a possibility of filing a case.
Arthur prepared himself for what he both hoped and feared was just around the corner: the money transfer to ISIS that would set Daniel free.
· * ·
The Beatles dished out thirty more dead legs. Daniel no longer screamed in silence. He resisted for the first time.
‘If you don’t stop, you’ll ruin my legs!’ he shouted, beside himself with pain.
It worked, but not as intended, as the Beatles then began beating up one of his fellow prisoners instead. He waited apprehensively for a proof-of-life question, but none came. Meanwhile, he talked with James about taking a letter out to his family in New Hampshire if Daniel was released. Perhaps it would be James’s last chance to communicate with them.
‘I don’t know if I’m strong enough to do it,’ said Daniel, looking at James’s three-page handwritten letter. He was frightened of carrying a physical letter from an American whom the Beatles were denying any channel of communication. He and James talked about whether Daniel should stick the letter up his rear end, or if it would be OK just to hide it in his underpants. They had no idea what would happen to Daniel when he left the cell. Perhaps he would be body-searched.
‘You shouldn’t take the risk,’ said James.
They decided that the safest method was for Daniel to learn the letter by heart. They sat next to each other, cross-legged with their backs against the wall. When Daniel read the first line, he ground to a halt. James’s i’s looked like z’s and his handwriting was almost illegible. James took the letter and read out one line at a time, which Daniel repeated. He also asked detailed questions about James’s family in order to remember the words better. James talked about his cycling trip with his mother and the shopping centre he visited with his father; about his sister, who was going to get married; and he repeated the names of his brothers, Michael, John and Mark, whom he missed every single day.
James started talking about the lack of any negotiations. He wanted Daniel to say to his family that he believed his captors had another plan for the British and American hostages, and that he had written this letter as a last farewell, because he was afraid that he would never come home.
‘Don’t ask me to deliver your own death certificate,’ pleaded Daniel and asked for more specific greetings to the family.
They reviewed the letter over and over again, until Daniel knew it by heart, so that they could finally tear it up and eat it.
In the following days, Daniel memorized the words and would sometimes ask, ‘Repeat that sentence again.’
James sent greetings to his brothers, his sister Katie, his mother Diane and father John and his maternal grandmother. Daniel promised that he would call them and pass on James’s message as soon as he was free.
· * ·
The tenth of June was a day of relief. When Susanne and Kjeld pressed ‘send’ on their email to ISIS, it carried a message that the ransom had arrived in Turkey. They also sent an apple-green question to Daniel.
Who bought his old car?
‘Susanne and I guarantee that we will keep our part of the agreement. It is extremely important that nothing goes wrong at the last moment. We hope to hear from you soon.’
After an hour and fifty-five minutes, the answer was in their inbox.
We are pleased to hear that you have our CASH ready.
For once, there were fewer capital letters, but before the kidnappers would give proof of life, the family had to confirm that the money was in €500 banknotes and that they had included the daily penalties.
This confirmation MUST be within 24 hours. Also you MUST be ready to follow any instructions given IMMEDIATELY.
Susanne and Kjeld confirmed straight away. Arthur was waiting in Turkey, ready to hand over the €2,040,000 as soon as they had a proof of life from Daniel and instructions on where and how to deliver the money.
The payment of the ransom took place at a critical moment. On the same day, ISIS launched an offensive in Iraq that could have put Daniel’s life in danger if he remained in captivity. Thousands were fleeing Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city, with whatever they could carry, while clouds of smoke rose into the air over the metropolis and the nearby military camps. ISIS fighters quickly seized control. The Iraqi security forces, who had been trained in the 2000s by the United States and Denmark, among others, fled from their positions faster than the civilians. Widespread corruption and lack of loyalty in the Iraqi army led to the soldiers discarding their uniforms as soon as they sensed an attack was on its way.
‘The city fell like a plane without engines,’ a businessman from Mosul told the Guardian.
It was no coincidence that Mosul fell to ISIS so easily. After the American invasion of Iraq and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi army had been dissolved; an action that stripped away the livelihood of hundreds of thousands of soldiers. Moreover, the Americans introduced a policy of ‘de-Ba’athification’, the purpose of which was to remove the influence of Saddam’s Ba’ath Party on any new politica
l system. This meant that all civil servants affiliated with the Ba’ath Party were banned from future employment in the public sector. In short, many Iraqis were excluded from participating in building the new Iraq. This strategy contributed to an uprising among Sunni Muslims, whose role in Iraq had diminished due to their affiliation with Saddam’s Ba’ath Party.
After US forces withdrew from Iraq in late 2011, the now heavily Shiite-dominated government further excluded the country’s Sunni Muslims. Despite what President Barack Obama proclaimed, it wasn’t a ‘sovereign, stable and independent Iraq with a representative government’ when the Americans left, but a cauldron of sectarian tension and a corrupt power apparatus.
ISIS was born in the shadow of the western invasion, nurtured in the chaos of the Syrian Civil War and matured into a fully fledged army and political presence in Iraq when its warriors captured Mosul, where many Sunnis welcomed them as an alternative to the Shiite government in Baghdad.
ISIS looted hundreds of millions of dollars from the city’s banks and took over military equipment that had been given to the Iraqi army by the Americans. Within a few days ISIS troops were driving around in American Humvees in their capital of Raqqa. They had successfully abolished the borders between Iraq and Syria with their self-proclaimed caliphate.
It was only a matter of time before the United States would return to Iraq with bombs.
· * ·
On 11 June the Beatles pounded heavily on the wooden door and the hostages turned towards the wall. The British guards went round, hammering their fists into the hostages’ ribs, before George stopped at Daniel. While holding his nose, he asked, ‘Are you the Danish boy?’
‘Yes, I am.’
‘We have a question for you,’ continued George.
Daniel tensed. He was about to know for certain whether he was on his way home.
‘Who bought your old car?’
There was no question in the world he would rather answer, because his old car was, of course, apple-green. Green. Freedom.
‘My parents bought it.’
‘Write about the car on this piece of paper. How much did they pay for it?’
‘Thirty-five thousand kroner, about five thousand euros,’ said Daniel.
‘You stupid boy. Did you really sell your car to your own family?’
He wrote it all down: that he had bought it new in 2007 for 110,000 kroner; that it was a Chevrolet Matiz with a 0.8 litre engine; that a medal from the Danish national championships hung from the rear-view mirror; and that the car was apple-green.
‘OK,’ said George. ‘Daniel, you are going home.’
They hadn’t said it so directly when any of the other hostages had been freed and the relief that Daniel felt for a moment was replaced by anxiety. What if they knew the code with green, red and amber? What if they had tortured Pierre and he had told them everything?
The Beatles disappeared and Daniel turned to the others, who knew the code with the apple-green car. Fear showed on their faces. They couldn’t hide the fact that they had only one hope: that they would soon be released too.
Yet they all gave Daniel a hug.
‘You’ve earned it,’ one said, but Daniel couldn’t take it in. The idea that he might be the last man to leave the prison alive was unbearable.
‘If you have something I should say once I’m out, tell me,’ he urged.
James stood up and gave Daniel a warm embrace and then he sat on his blanket between his countrymen. There was silence.
· * ·
Just before 3 p.m. on the afternoon of the same day, 11 June 2014, the family received answers to the proof-of-life question.
‘His parents bought the 2007 apple-green Chevrolet 0.8 from him for 35,000 DKK,’ wrote the kidnappers, who also wanted clarification of where the money was in southern Turkey.
Susanne was happily surprised by all the details about the car that Daniel sent back.
‘He’s understood the message with the green car!’ she said excitedly to Kjeld and wrote in her diary, addressed to Daniel, ‘You responded nicely to our question.’
From then on, Arthur took over the email correspondence. It was now up to him to bring Daniel home.
· * ·
Late at night on 11 June, the first instructions about the handover of the money arrived.
You will make your way to Kilis ASAP.
The kidnappers ordered Arthur to be in Kilis by 4 p.m. at the latest the following afternoon. He was told to constantly keep an eye on his email – ‘BY THE MINUTE’ – and have a yellow taxi waiting on standby until the last instructions were sent.
There were also demands about how the money would be transported: a strong, matte-black rucksack with a padlock on the zipper.
Hostage cases and handovers of ransoms were inherently volatile, but Arthur had never experienced anything like this. The terms came exclusively from ISIS. He felt extremely vulnerable and the exchange had so many risks at play that he stopped counting them.
Arthur lit his pipe. Although it could have consequences, after long consideration he chose to depart from the kidnappers’ instructions on one point.
He rented a white four-wheel-drive vehicle rather than be transported by an unsuspecting taxi driver who couldn’t speak English. He didn’t want to expose other people to the risk associated with handing over €2 million to ISIS.
Furthermore, he could imagine a scenario in which a nervous taxi driver called the police, because he was sitting on an abandoned road along the border with a strange, chain-smoking foreigner in the back seat, who was perhaps about to blow himself up or kidnap him. Arthur couldn’t confide in a random person about his intentions. He at least wanted to be the master of his own means of transport if the terrorists were dictating everything else.
On 12 June at 4.50 p.m. he received further instructions about driving east from Kilis to the town of Elbeyli.
At the beginning of this town there will be a welcome sign that reads ‘Hosgeldin’ and will possibly be worn out and unreadable. Nevertheless, this sign will be your meeting place, WHERE YOU WILL STAY, WAIT AND HAND OVER OUR CASH.
He should arrive at 8.30 p.m and wait until 10.30 p.m. at the latest. Someone would meet him and say the password ‘Turkcell’, to which he would respond ‘Vodafone’.
Arthur waited a little over an hour before answering with a meticulous repetition of the instructions and adding: ‘I have had difficulty finding a taxi driver who I can communicate with and provide detailed instructions to. I would therefore like to ask for your permission for me to come alone in my white 4x4 rental car.’ He added the number plate.
Arthur checked the rucksack with the cash one last time, as well as the satellite tracker that was his only lifeline. It would send a signal every minute to an operations room in the city of Aalborg in Denmark, which was in contact with his backup team, who were on standby two miles from the meeting point. The team included a doctor, who could handle a sudden emergency and would sound the alarm if they received coordinates that indicated Arthur was about to cross the border into Syria.
Arthur drove about six miles to Elbeyli, found his way through the small town and reached the sign that stood near the border. There were no street lights. The only light he could see came from a town some way off.
He parked the car so that it pointed in the direction of Kilis, turned off the engine and wound down the windows so that he could hear if anyone was approaching on foot in the dark. He could just make out a border fence and some vegetation in the rear-view mirror.
Arthur lit his pipe and thought about possible escape routes. At the side of the road heading into town there was a ditch, which he could jump into, but the nearest house was quite far away if he needed to take cover. He had previously studied the area on satellite photos and knew the terrain in his sleep.
The silence was broken only
by the cicadas. Arthur waited and stuffed more tobacco into his pipe. The first vehicle he heard rumbling in the darkness was a tractor that was being driven without lights.
It’s probably just a Turkish peasant on his way home, thought Arthur. The next vehicle had its lights on. It was an armoured personnel carrier containing Turkish soldiers coming from the border. If they asked him to move on, Arthur had several explanations ready, about needing a pee and an engine that had stalled. Personally, he thought it looked strange that he had parked right there. The soldiers slowed down and gaped at him, but drove on.
Then he saw a motorcycle tearing up from the border towards Elbeyli at high speed with its headlights off. That drove by, too. A bunch of refugees then appeared out of the dark and stared into the car as they slowly walked past.
Suddenly he heard the motorcycle again. This time it stopped about ten feet from the car. There were two men sitting on it. They were both dressed in black from head to toe, including black ski masks, and Arthur could see they were armed. The engine was idling, while the man sitting behind the driver stepped down. Arthur opened the car door and got out. He had rolled up his shirt sleeves and clearly revealed his palms and arms as proof that he was unarmed as he walked a few steps towards them.
‘Assalamu alaikum,’ Arthur greeted them.
‘Wa alaikum assalaam,’ replied the man who had got off the motorcycle. He was about six feet tall and broad-chested under the black tunic.
‘Turkcell,’ continued the hooded man.
‘Vodafone,’ said Arthur.
Moving slowly, Arthur stuck his arm through the car window and lifted the rucksack off the floor behind the passenger seat. With the ransom money in his hand, Arthur went over to the ISIS fighter and gave him the rucksack. For a moment, the man lifted it, as if to check its weight was equivalent to €2 million.