Frustrated at every turn, Mary approached the most senior-level DFAIT official charged with responsibility for our situation to seek more regular and fuller briefings, but she was told that this would not be possible—other Canadians in similar situations could then make similar demands, which could not be accommodated. She pointed out that Louis and I had accumulated seventy-five years of public service between us—most of it with DFAIT—that they had seconded Louis to the UN, and that they had an obligation to treat families of staff members a lot better than had been the case thus far. Further, as DFAIT had demanded, understandably, that the United Nations butt out of the management of our case so as to ensure no confusion would result from the two players working at cross-purposes, DFAIT had effectively assumed full responsibility for me and my family as well. But they would not alter their policy. There would, Mary was informed, be no change in the nature, frequency, or content of the briefings. Happily, Janet Graham was eventually able to get this edict relaxed somewhat.
Some days later, Mary asked DFAIT for a meeting to clarify information about us that was circulating in the media, but she was told no such discussion could take place in the absence of the RCMP, and “the Force” (as the RCMP likes to call itself) was not available to meet with her.
On top of everything else, Mary and Mai were caught in a bureaucratic and financial Catch-22 at the United Nations that had resulted in our pay being frozen the day we were kidnapped. After all, since 14 December we had failed to submit signed attendance sheets.
Finally, to the discomfort and embarrassment of DFAIT, and to the deep annoyance of the RCMP, on 27 January Mary stormed down to UN headquarters in New York, where she had arranged to meet UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and a variety of senior officials to try to sort things out herself and convince the organization that sent us to Niger to assume more responsibility, at least for our families’ circumstances. The Secretary-General was shocked when he heard of the confusion and of how little Mary had been told. He promised her that the bureaucratic silliness would be straightened out “before you leave the building”—and it was, completely.
Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon then sat down with her, ignoring other scheduled meetings, and offered her a great deal of compassionate, personal support, sympathy, and practical encouragement. Then he told her, “We have good and explicit reason to believe that they are alive and in relatively good health.” Hope soared.
Lying in the hot Sahara sand, having made a proof-of-life video recording on Day 5, I never imagined that it would take forty-five days before anyone told Mary that we were alive, or that the person who eventually passed her such happy news would not be a Canadian.
The fundamental fact of our alive status was well known among those managing our case within a couple of days of our capture. Since my return I have learned that several people with knowledge of our situation discussed it with others in Ottawa who had nothing whatsoever to do with government or the public service, others who had no “need to know” beyond their interest in and, perhaps, concern for us. Groups of people in friendly capitals shared our status with their spouses and friends in a variety of languages, but our families could not be told.
This lack of indication from any quarter that we were alive, coupled with rare and inadequate briefings and breathlessly speculative media reporting about the horrible things that might well have befallen us, led members of both families to begin mourning the loss of their fathers. Our kids confidently believed that were such information available—if my colleagues in Ottawa, among whom our children had grown up, knew we were alive—then surely they would have been told. Unfortunately, such confidence was misplaced.
Mary, however, demanded that our children believe we were alive, insisting there would be time enough for grieving should they learn that we were not. But she acknowledges that there were many occasions (such as when the Globe and Mail ran a front-page story on the dragging of the Niger River for our bodies) when she found this brave façade hard to maintain.
How easy it would have been to ease that pain. The RCMP seemed to have decided that our families could not be trusted with the knowledge we were alive. I can only assume they believed our families would handle such information irresponsibly and thereby wantonly put Louis’ and my lives at risk. Nobody within the Ottawa bureaucracy seems to have challenged that preposterous assumption.
And how this retentive behaviour contrasts with the conduct of the Mellissa Fung case. John Cruickshank, the head of CBC news, has told me he was called daily, sometimes twice a day, by a very senior and sympathetic government official with a briefing on her situation. So the bureaucracy is capable of getting it right. When I came home, Mary asked me whether—if our situations had been reversed and she had been lying in the desert—I would have been treated as dismissively as she was. Very reluctantly, I had to conclude that that was simply inconceivable.
In fact, no Canadian told Mary that I had survived the grab on 14 December until RCMP officials called her in Ottawa on Day 48 (30 January) with news—”A videotaped message has been delivered in Mali”—and they wanted her to see it. On our Day 51 (2 February), just one day before we made the second proof-of-life video on Day 52, Mary viewed the first proof-of-life video message, the one I had recorded on Day 5.
The RCMP brought a laptop to our house. Mary and Linton were joined by Mai and one of her daughters, and Mary had asked our great friend Ted Johnson to be there as well. The screening was wrenching. Mary could tell that my back was bothering me, that I didn’t have my glasses, that Louis and I were both drawn and worried, and generally pretty fragile. Needless to say, the ferocious tableau behind us didn’t help, nor did my bizarre lapses about working for “the Secretary-General of the United States” and my reference to having five children. Despite all that, they were so very relieved to see that we had survived the grab. It seemed to them, therefore, not to be about assassination—even if it was all too clearly about Al Qaeda. So perhaps it was a typical kidnapping.
The issue became what had happened to us over the intervening forty-six days. RCMP officials offered no explanation for the delay and nothing about our current status, though I now know they had up-to-date confirmation that we were still alive, information they again refused to share.
Where was DFAIT in all this? Where was the Foreign Affairs department in fighting for the rights and welfare of the broader foreign service family? What about the Foreign Service Community Association, or that most improbable of unions, PAFSO (the Professional Association of Foreign Service Officers), of which Louis was a member? Is this how the families of Canadian officials and aid workers (or indeed any Canadian citizen), sent into harm’s way by international organizations or their government to all those challenging, difficult, and dangerous places, expect their families to be treated? Indeed, is it how any self-respecting enterprise ought to handle its staff and families when tragedy strikes?
Everything suggests that Canada had been offered the first video almost immediately after it was made on 18 December 2008, possibly for a price. The RCMP did not trust (good heavens!) the intermediaries and may have refused to pay or even meet with such people until more than six weeks later—as we lay alternately freezing and broiling in desperate circumstances in the desert. Finally, and only when the RCMP saw press reports from Agence France-Presse detailing what others had seen, the video was acquired either directly or from some other service.
I cannot prove this thesis, however, and “the Force” will not talk to me about it. Maybe those inexplicably wasted six weeks offer some clue why, even now, the RCMP steadfastly refuses to give me copies of these recorded video messages; or, perhaps, some thorny issue of Al Qaeda copyright is to blame.
Following my return, I wrote repeatedly to the Commissioner of the RCMP, Bill Elliott, asking for copies of the videos made on Days 5 and 52 and noting that Louis supported my request. The Commissioner wrote back on 16 April 2010—five months later—to say, “The RCMP is not in a position to relea
se the videos to you,” and while offering no explanation, he added (however wisely) that were I to apply under the Access to Information Act, the response would be the same.
Mary constantly travelled between Ottawa, New York, Toronto, and London to keep in touch with our children. From 6 to 16 February she was visiting Antonia and her family in London. They had not benefited from most of the support and bonding that the three North American–based daughters had enjoyed and had extended to Mary since our kidnapping. The day before she left for London, on 4 February, Mary met with the DFAIT/RCMP team and had them promise her that they would contact her, directly or through the Canadian High Commission, should anything significant occur.
On 10 February, Mary and Antonia had lunch with our friend Jim Wright, Canada’s High Commissioner to the United Kingdom. Over lunch Jim remarked, “You must have been pleased to hear of the new video message, and to know Bob is still alive.” Seeing the shock on both their faces, he clenched his jaw and excused himself, returning some time later without a word. Some minutes after that, a member of his staff interrupted to say there was an urgent call for Mary from the RCMP in Canada. She took the call in an adjoining room and learned—surprise—that there was a second video message.
She asked to see it immediately. The RCMP spuriously claimed that “for security reasons” the video could not be sent electronically to London and further, that to do so “would contaminate the evidence.” Thus, if she wanted to see it, she would have to return to Canada. Mary declared that to be nonsense, but only after she appealed to a much higher authority did the RCMP concede that the video could be shown to her in London. The next day, 11 February (our Day 60), Mary and Antonia watched the recording at the High Commission—this time only eight days after it was made but three days after its existence was revealed through an Agence France-Presse report out of Mali. So they then knew we had been alive on Day 52, but again the RCMP offered no further update.
I had written a letter to Mary to accompany the second video, but she was not told of its existence for many days and not allowed to see it for two weeks. Even then she was shown only a copy. To this day, the RCMP insists on retaining the original of my letter to my wife “as evidence.”
RCMP officials were incapable of seeing our situation outside the narrow and highly distorted prism of a Canadian criminal investigation; beyond, that is, the compilation of a case file, the amassing of forensic evidence. For “the Force” it was exclusively about bringing Mokhtar Belmokhtar and his accomplices to court in Mali or even in Canada, securing a conviction, and putting him and the members of his katiba in jail. The RCMP officers were neither capable of understanding nor much interested in the broader geopolitical complexities and implications of the fraught and dangerous situation in which we found ourselves, even though many of those complexities were quite capable of ending our lives.
The first Canadians I spoke to following our release were RCMP officers, and they interviewed me endlessly: on the plane from Gao to Bamako, in the Radisson Hotel in Bamako, between tests at the hospital in Germany, and as soon as I set foot back in Ottawa. They were not interested in learning how to defeat Al Qaeda, how to protect Canadians working in that part of the world from experiencing what we had just been through, or how to rescue the two remaining captives. Their exclusive interest was forensic—whom had I brushed up against and when during my captivity so they could search for and catalogue the relevant DNA on the sleeve of my tattered shirt in order to build a case for the criminal prosecution of our AQIM kidnappers. I believe that, instead, we ought to have been using most of that energy, those resources, and every available moment to work with others simply to destroy the threat that AQIM represents.
Our misadventure took place dramatically far beyond the RCMP’s known world and bore little resemblance to a kidnapping in Canada. Nevertheless, the RCMP jealously defended its turf as “the Canadian government’s hostage negotiator,” insisting that this authority applied to Tombouctou as fully as it did to Regina and that its expertise was equally applicable to either, when so manifestly it was not. Its officers consistently asserted that theirs was “the lead department” (and while some have denied this was the case, there were certainly no other evident contenders), but never understood the extent to which West Africa was not western Canada.
All this said, a number of individual RCMP officers worked selflessly and tirelessly and to the very best of their abilities, risking their health and abandoning their families, to secure our freedom, and I owe them a debt of gratitude.
By now it will be all too evident that I believe the RCMP did not manage our kidnapping intelligently, expeditiously, or effectively, and certainly not sensitively. I do not think those police officers are equipped to handle cases of such complexity—cases that go far beyond the purview of international police liaison, the RCMP’s classic international remit. The RCMP is a huge bureaucracy and bound to have its weaknesses, but our case revealed that the most egregious ones were at the top. In addition, the way our kidnapping was managed exposed fundamental failures of policy and procedure and highlighted significant jurisdictional anomalies.
On 23 February, in a briefing at Foreign Affairs during which Mary asked for confirmation of the accuracy of media reports that suggested AQIM had made ransom demands, a senior RCMP officer interrupted, pointing his finger across the table to where she sat, and gratuitously snapped, “As long as I am in charge of this investigation not one cent will be paid for the release of these high muckety-mucks.” Her confidence in the RCMP, or at least its senior management, was finally and irrevocably shattered.
The issue that still causes me visceral anger is the lack of trust, courtesy—even respect—on the part of some of those charged with dealing with our families. This attitude, in our family’s view, too often threatens, however unreasonably, to overshadow the hard, innovative work done by so many others to win our release. This particular high muckety-muck has nothing but scorn for a senior RCMP officer who would seek to bully Al Qaeda kidnap victims’ families already distraught and vulnerable enough, and nothing but contempt for those who would stand aside and allow this to happen.
This book is not the place to engage more broadly the current and recurring woes of the RCMP. Suffice it to say that any suggestion it is an organization suffering a deep leadership crisis and in need of radical repair, and a fundamental re-examination of its mandate, would meet with my hearty agreement. The thought that these posturing naïfs are the locus of knowledge and expertise regarding international kidnappings and are responsible within the Canadian government for managing and negotiating complex international hostage crises, to say nothing of playing an essential part in countering terrorist threats to Canada, simply chills the soul. They are not, in my view, up to such tasks, and the sooner the government comes to understand this stark reality the better it will be for all Canadians.
The significant exceptions to the above assessment were the warm, sympathetic, and stalwart family liaison officers, or FLOs, whom I will always admire for the way they cared for Mary and our girls. Tony and Mike’s regular duties consisted of considerably more hands-on police work. Mary and the girls reported that they were open minded and had strong, proud family, professional, and civic values—in addition to being downright decent guys. They will forever remain a welcome extension of the Fowler clan.
Most personally disappointing, however, is that those few in DFAIT, my old department, charged with the management of our case in Ottawa allowed themselves to be browbeaten and marginalized to the point that the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade was often incapable of bringing to bear its now too often vestigial understanding of how things really work in far-flung parts of the world. While this is deplorable, nobody who follows the fortunes of that once proud department could pretend to be surprised. That DFAIT allowed our families to be treated with such disdain by the RCMP is, however, nothing short of disgraceful.
The vast bulk of our colleagues in the cowed
and bankrupt Foreign Affairs department strove mightily, against the aforementioned odds, to bring us home, and they have my deep respect and gratitude. Similarly, in other departments and agencies of government, legions of people worked tirelessly and effectively on our behalf and were prepared to assume significant personal risks to get the job done.
I should stress that my criticisms should not be read to include Mr. Harper’s government. I have been and remain a vocal critic of his foreign policy, but I am assured the Prime Minister set the tone for the response to our kidnapping from the outset, making clear that no effort should be spared to get us home. Had that not been the case, such an outcome could never have been achieved.
On Sunday, 26 April, while Louis and I were undergoing medical tests in Germany, AQIM issued the following communiqué: “With this statement, we declare to the public opinion that with praise to Allah alone, four prisoners among our mujahedeen were released in exchange for the release of the hostages of the organization, namely: the Canadians (Robert Fowler and Louis Guay), the German (Marianne Petzold), and the Swiss (Gabriella Burco Greiner). On the other hand, we declare that the organization still holds the British tourist (Edwen [sic] Dyer) and the Swiss tourist (Werner Greiner) until the achievement of our legitimate demands.”
A few days later I learned of Abou Zeid’s demand for the release of Abou Qatada (allegedly the head of Al Qaeda operations in Europe) from a UK prison in return for Edwin Dyer’s life. I knew then—was certain—that Mr. Dyer would be killed and offered that view, unbidden, to DFAIT along with my prognosis that after an unbearably horrible number of weeks or, less likely, months, Werner Greiner would be released, were he to survive the aftermath of such torment and summer in the Sahara.
However much I had expected that AQIM would kill someone, I was devastated by Dyer’s beheading, on 31 May 2009, principally, of course, because so very often I had envisaged that Louis or I, or both of us, would suffer just such an end. And how easily it might have been one of us. Greiner then had to spend a further six weeks as Abou Zeid’s prisoner before being released on 12 July 2009.
A Season in Hell Page 31