A Rope and a Prayer

by David Rohde

  We note that Tahir is wearing a large gold watch. Dexter had made reference to “handcuffs” in his account of the video. It turns out he mistook the watch for a shackle. We are relieved and slightly perplexed. It is surprising that the money-grubbing Taliban would not confiscate valuable personal items like the wedding ring and watch.

  Once again, gunmen flank the edges of the video frame, but they appear at ease. Tahir speaks next in Pashto. Asad makes a brief statement as well.

  The video then cuts to a strange clip of our three walking up a hill in what looks like suburban Westchester County in New York. The incline is not steep, but the camera is tilted at an angle to make it appear more precipitous. They are surrounded by ten men in turbans, pajamatype pants, and camouflage jackets. Everyone sports oversize black basketball high-tops with thick white soles—Chinese knockoffs of Reebok. David has tucked his pants into his sneakers and the result is a somewhat comical fashion statement. They look more like a French street gang than a bunch of terrorists. The camera cuts to David and he explains that they are in the mountains of Afghanistan, where it is cold and difficult. In a matter-of-fact way, he adds that the food and water are making him sick.

  “I thought he might convert to Islam, but I never dreamed he’d go hip-hop,” I tell Lee. He smiles and adds: “Clearly they are feeding him. There’s no way he has diarrhea.” David appears to have gained weight. Maybe it’s the full beard. He looks like a burly mountain man. Grizzly Adams springs to mind. His beard, although thick, is well groomed. His face is tan. We are relieved to see this, and our relief takes the form of humor. We actually have a laughing fit over the footwear and general attire, which is incongruous with David’s traditional New England style: khakis and an oxford cloth shirt.

  In the next segment of the video Tahir laments, “It’s so cold, so cold.” Yet they all have their jackets unzipped and the tree branches are bare—the snow is clearly melting. One of the Taliban fighters sports opera glasses and pauses occasionally to survey the area.

  In the final portion David appeals to “President Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and special envoy Richard Holbrooke to meet the Taliban demands.” He also asks that journalists write stories about them so that they will not be forgotten. I do not think this is coming from David as he is clearly reading from a script and staring blankly ahead as he relays this sentence. “Please meet the Taliban demands. Please save the three of us, please save the three of us, please save the three of us.” He adds the word “again” before restating this plea, as if repeating the cameraman’s directions to him.

  We watch the video several times, obsessing over details. We are not quite sure who its producers consider to be the target audience: our family, the government, or the public. We ponder this as we head back to the apartment in lower Manhattan.

  It’s been quite a day and we decompress in the living room over diner food. We call Lee’s wife, Christie. Lee says Christie insisted that he join me in New York so I would not have to watch the video alone. She has been a source of strength and calm throughout this ordeal, willing to accommodate Lee’s last-minute trips to New York and Washington in support of David and me. We tell her about the video and admit that we are baffled by its somewhat comical staging, which seems at odds with its disturbing message.

  We discuss our impressions of the footage, briefly laughing as we recall the more absurd moments—the release is crucial, given the confusing reality of the situation. The captors have not made explicit demands in the video. We have no idea what, if anything, they plan to do next.

  We worry the video will surface on the Web and make our case public. Due to its political undercurrent—the mention of Obama, Clinton, Holbrooke—we feel more strongly than ever that we should keep the case quiet. While our government and the journalism community are well aware of the case by now, the public at large is not. I alert Holbrooke to the contents of the video and forward him my notes and a written transcript.

  Two days later, the FBI alerts me that a video execution of a Polish hostage is on the Internet. I’m haunted by the idea that we may one day receive similar footage of David.

  The New York Times agrees that we should remain silent, but wants us to have a plan in place in the event that another news organization or blogger is less amenable than Al Jazeera in respecting our choice.

  As part of the preparation, the newspaper’s public relations office arranges for Lee and me to receive media training. Defensiveness training is actually a more accurate description. The goal is to learn how to deflect questions. Neither one of us has any desire to appear on television. We decide Lee will be the family spokesman should the story ever break. He assumed this role before on behalf of David when he was imprisoned in Bosnia. He is the perfect choice. My mother often refers to Lee as “the epitome of an officer and a gentleman.” He has quite a fan club among our media experts and FBI agents because he projects both strength and calm. Cordial and soft-spoken, he could easily disarm reporters.

  We arrange for two separate sessions. I meet the training crew at a glass office building in Midtown after I finish work. A chair, video camera, and monitor have been set up in the corner of a conference room. In the mock interview, I feel like a deer in the headlights. A tired looking deer at that. I glance at myself in the monitor. I’ve aged several years in the last few months, I think. I am wearing a gray button-front crocheted sweater. I look like a tired old lady, a gray presence with circles under my eyes. My interviewer comes to my rescue and suggests the cameraman back up a few feet—“Give her a break,” she says.

  The public relations team has compiled a notebook of talking points and suggested answers. We role-play through them.

  Who is working on David’s case?

  Answer: Many people and agencies are involved in working toward his release.

  Have you spoken to David?

  Answer: Yes, but I am not going to discuss additional details.

  Do you have any indication of what the abductors want?

  Answer: We are not going to discuss details.

  Why has the Times not reported on this?

  Answer: We were told by his abductor that the safety of David and his colleagues would be in jeopardy if we discussed this publicly.

  Then the interviewer asks me a series of more personal questions:

  What is your husband like? How are you getting through each day, how are you not falling apart? Is there something you’d like to say to David or to his captors?

  This is no one’s business, I think. My voice gets notably more formal as the questions get more personal. It’s impossible to define my husband and our relationship with a sound bite. It throws me off kilter to talk about David in this format. I have expended so much energy trying to stay positive and strong. Once again, I feel the desperation of our situation.

  I have no desire to sit across from Matt Lauer. Ever. I do not wish to be comforted by Ann Curry. I keep this in mind as I practice thwarting direct questions about ransom, government agencies, communication with captors.

  While I am no screen goddess, I am a quick study at deflecting questions and, after several takes and critiques, I am given permission to call it a day.

  I talk to Lee on the phone afterward to compare training stories. It’s past 11 P.M. and I have just polished off some leftover pizza. He has flown home and is back in New Hampshire.

  He informs me he was caught off guard during the training session. Normally cool and composed, he choked up when confronted with questions about David. Neither one of us has had a chance to stop and reflect. He confides that this is the first time he has really felt the depth of his sadness over his missing brother.

  ARE YOU THERE?

  David, Early to Mid-February 2009

  In the first week of February, our hopes plummet. An American who works for the United Nations is kidnapped on February 2 in the Pakistani province of Baluchistan. Gunmen open fire on the car of the worker, John Solecki, kill his driver, and abduct him.
Solecki, a career humanitarian aid worker, leads the United Nations refugee office there. Over the next several days, I learn about the details of his case from radio and newspaper reports.

  A previously unknown group calling for Baluchistan to become an independent country—the Baluchistan Liberated United Front—claims responsibility. Secular nationalists, they have no relationship with Pakistan’s Islamic militants but their demands are just as astronomical. They threaten to kill Solecki if 141 women they say are being held captive by the Pakistani government are not released. The Pakistani government responds that it does not have 141 women in custody. In the perverse world of ransom demands, their call for the release of 141 female prisoners—who may not even exist—makes my captors seem reasonable.

  Five days after the kidnapping of the American UN worker, a Pakistani Taliban group beheads a Polish hostage. Piotr Stanczak is killed after the Pakistani government refuses to release twenty-six Taliban prisoners. He is the first foreign captive to be executed in Pakistan since the murder of the Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl seven years ago. I never met Stanczak but immediately grieve for him and his family. I assume Stanczak, like me, spent months pacing in a small yard, dreaming of release and trying to reason with his captors. In the end, none of it mattered.

  His abduction and execution are a symbol of the growing reach of the Pakistani Taliban. They kidnapped Stanczak, a geologist who was surveying oil and gas fields, an hour’s drive outside the country’s capital in September 2008, two months before our abduction. They shot his driver, guard, and translator and took him into the tribal areas.

  Stanczak’s killing calls into question the logic of the one instruction I remember from my hostile environment training course: prolong a kidnapping. A kidnapper is hypothetically less likely to kill a hostage after investing funds, manpower, and time into their care, according to experts. They want to recoup their investment, in a sense, after spending time and resources on the prisoners. In Stanczak’s case, his captors held him for five months and then killed him. They received no money or prisoners in return for their effort. As I read about it, his case presents a different logic.

  The Pakistani Taliban seemingly want to defy the Pakistani government, show its weakness, and generate widespread press coverage of their brutality. While a criminal is in search of ransom, militants may be simply interested in generating publicity. I don’t know which path our captors will follow.

  Evan after Stanczak’s death, the Pakistani Taliban find a depraved way to still make money off his case. Echoing Badruddin’s threat to sell my bones to my family, Stanczak’s executioners vow to hold the Polish geologist’s body until the Pakistani government pays a ransom for it.

  His execution leaves me grasping at straws. In an earlier conversation, Badruddin told me that the Haqqanis had decided to never set a deadline in our case. I don’t believe him. As an American, I don’t know if they see me as worth more alive or dead. Stanczak was Polish and hailed from a small country with several hundred soldiers in Afghanistan. I am American and hail from the nation the Taliban view as their central enemy. My captors’ demand for five prisoners is small in comparison with the demand of Stanczak’s captors for twenty-six prisoners.

  Other cases in Pakistan involving foreigners set no clear precedent. Over the last several years, the Pakistani Taliban had kidnapped four Chinese engineers in an effort to embarrass the Pakistani government and deter foreigners from coming to the country. Two were released, one was still in custody, and one had escaped. None of the Chinese had been executed within days like Daniel Pearl.

  Throughout my captivity, I often thought of Pearl. I never met him but had many colleagues who passionately liked and respected him. I had become close friends with the Wall Street Journal correspondent who succeeded Pearl as the newspaper’s South Asia bureau chief. Pearl was tricked into going to an interview as well. A British-born militant of Pakistani descent, Ahmed Omar Sheikh, first held a friendly meeting with Pearl in the northern city of Rawalpindi in January 2002 and won his trust. Then he promised Pearl an interview with a senior militant accused of involvement in the case of Richard Reid, the British “shoe bomber” who tried to blow up a U.S.-bound passenger jet in December 2001.

  I wrote about Pearl’s case. I visited the site of his captivity and execution—a small tree nursery several hundred yards from a conservative religious school in Karachi. I saw the perimeter wall Pearl tried to scale when he attempted to escape. Five years later, I know that the only thing that separates me from Pearl is luck.

  In mid-February, Timor Shah, our chief guard, informs us that Badruddin has sent the video to Afghan and foreign media outlets but that only Al Jazeera has broadcast it. The news frustrates Tahir and Asad, who had hoped that the video would be widely broadcast and stimulate negotiations. I am not surprised and assume my colleagues believe that my request to publicize our case was coerced. Incensed, Badruddin washes his hands of us. Timor Shah says that Badruddin has declared me “worthless” and will no longer pay for our food.

  Desperate to spark negotiations, we ask Timor Shah to call Abu Tayyeb and beg him to help us. To our relief, Abu Tayyeb says he will return to Miran Shah in a few days. He promises to take charge of the negotiations and finally secure our release. After so many lies, I doubt he will actually do it.

  Several days later, on February 14, two missiles fired by an American drone kill thirty people in South Waziristan, the area to our south. Most of them are Uzbek militants, a development that infuriates our guards and others around us. The guards say the Uzbeks were teaching the Afghan Taliban how to make roadside bombs.

  Four weeks into the Obama administration, it is clear that the United States is not decreasing drone attacks. In fact, it is increasing them. Several times a week, drones circle over Miran Shah. Tiny specks in the sky, the whir of their propellers announces their arrival. They sound like single-engine Piper Cubs circling overhead for hours at a time. Seemingly surprised by the escalation, the Taliban bitterly criticize President Obama, who is the focus of more hatred from the Taliban than President George W. Bush.

  I am not sure of the exact number, but it seems like roughly a half dozen drone strikes have been carried out in the three months since we arrived in Miran Shah. Based on the reaction of the guards, the attacks appear to primarily kill militants. Yet the Taliban exaggerate the number of civilian casualties killed and use the strikes to attract more recruits. A stalemate has emerged between the United States and the Taliban. The Americans kill top leaders and inhibit their movements with drone strikes, but the Taliban slowly generate new leadership. Neither side is able to win a decisive victory. To me, the deadlock will continue until the Pakistani army ends its cease-fire and moves into the tribal areas in force.

  The drones also represent an entirely new form of warfare. The United States is able to carry out assassinations thousands of miles away without deploying American troops. No declaration of war is required. The American public hears little about the attacks. And no American lives are lost. The military itself is not necessarily involved. Some drones are operated entirely by the CIA. An agency employee sitting in an office in northern Virginia can guide the drones remotely and fire its missiles.

  Our guards believe I am a target of the drones. United States officials want to kill me, they say, because my death will eliminate the enormous leverage and credibility the Haqqanis believe a single American prisoner gives them. Whenever a drone appears, I am ordered to stay inside the house. The guards believe that its surveillance cameras can recognize my face from thousands of feet above.

  A week after he promised to return to Miran Shah, Abu Tayyeb, to my surprise, actually arrives and says he will allow me to call Kristen. The engineer, who is still acting as a liaison between the captors and my family, has brokered a deal to exchange us for five male prisoners from the Afghan national prison, Abu Tayyeb says. A lingering disagreement is over money, but he promises to lower the Haqqanis’ demand from $15 million to
$7 million. The figures are still astronomical, but I cannot keep from yet again seeing him as a potential savior. He is bound to settle for far less in direct talks with Kristen.

  Later that night, Abu Tayyeb toys with me again. He and Akhundzada, his intelligence chief, announce that I am good friends with Obama’s new envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan. They ask me his name. I play dumb. They have apparently Googled my reporting in Bosnia and seen that Richard Holbrooke was the American diplomat who pressured the Serbs to release me in 1995. Fearing this moment, I have not mentioned Holbrooke’s name since we were kidnapped. In January, he was named the Obama administration’s special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan. In my captors’ eyes, this proves yet again that I am a “big fish.” In truth, I felt that Holbrooke has been mildly irritated with me ever since I complicated his Bosnia negotiations. Each time I have seen him since then he has reminded me not to get myself kidnapped again. I have repeatedly promised him it would not happen.

  The disappointments continue the following day. Instead of leaving early in the morning to call Kristen, we are delayed because no phone is available. Finally, several hours late, we depart with Abu Tayyeb for a spot near the Afghan border where we will make the call. On the way Abu Tayyeb tells me what to say. I make a detailed list in the battered reporter’s notebook that I brought to what I thought would be a Taliban interview. I also have a plan. With Tahir’s encouragement, I have compiled a list of the first names of friends I believe can help Kristen raise money. The vast majority of them are reporters with limited resources, but thoughts of my family selling their homes haunt me. By giving her the names I will ease the burden on Kristen.