Irregular Warfare Podcast - The Prisoner’s Dilemma: Hostage Diplomacy 101

Episode Date: October 5, 2023

Be sure to visit the Irregular Warfare Initiative website to see all of the new articles, podcast episodes, and other content the IWI team is producing! Why do states engage in hostage taking to advance their interests? What incentives are in place that make them choose hostage taking over other, more traditional instruments of power? How do conventional international relations concepts like deterrence apply to the unique challenge of hostage taking? This episode examines these questions and more, as our hosts are joined for a fascinating discussion by Ambassador Roger D. Carstens, the special presidential envoy for hostage affairs at the US Department of State, and Dr. Dani Gilbert, an assistant professor of political science at Northwestern University whose research explores the causes and consequences of hostage taking and hostage recovery. Intro music: "Unsilenced" by Ketsa Outro music: "Launch" by Ketsa CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

I'm Gordon Richman, Director of the Irregular Warfare Initiative Fellows Program. Before we begin our show on hostage diplomacy, I have a quick announcement. The Irregular Warfare Initiative is seeking applicants for our 2024 Non-Resident Fellows Cohort. We seek applications from practitioners and scholars at various stages in their careers. Our goal is to build a cohort that is professionally and intellectually diverse, but which shares a commitment to IWI's core mission, bridging the gap between a regular warfare scholarship and practice.

Over the course of the next year, IWI Fellows will expand their professional networks through engagement with senior members of the regular warfare community and through collaboration with one another. Check out IWI on Twitter or LinkedIn for the application link. We accept applications until October 31st and

expect to release the selection for the 2024 Fellows Cohort in early December. And now, here's our show. So hostage-taking is this ancient tool. All kinds of actors have used it across history to gain leverage from their adversaries. And so in a world where states are mostly concerned with fighting other states, it just seems natural that our adversaries would find a way to use this ancient tool to gain leverage and to improve their bargaining situation against more powerful countries. You know, you go back to the 1960s and start looking forward, every administration's had to deal

with some sort of hostage issue, whether it was something more akin to a wrongful detention, people taken by a nation state, or whether it was someone taken from a terrorist group, that's a pure straight up hostage situation. We've all had to deal with it, but from 2015 onward, we actually have a structure

that is organized to respond. Ben Jebb Welcome to the Regular Warfare Podcast. I'm your host, Ben Jebb, and my co-host today is Julia McLennan. Today's episode examines how states use hostages and hostage diplomacy to achieve their interests. Julia McClendon Our guests begin by addressing why states and non-state actors engage in hostage taking, as opposed to relying on other, more traditional instruments of power. They then talk about how the U.S. and other states have traditionally approached hostage crises to secure the safety of their citizens. Finally, our guests conclude by

discussing how countries can employ traditional international relations concepts like deterrence by denial and deterrence by punishment to safeguard their citizens from malign actors in the future. Ambassador Roger D. Carstens currently serves as the Special Presidential Envoy for Hostage Affairs at the US Department of State. Previously, Ambassador Carstens was the Deputy Assistant Secretary in the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor at the State Department, and he has decades of experience providing humanitarian assistance to refugees and internally displaced persons. Mr. Carstens is a graduate of the United States Military Academy at West Point and holds advanced degrees from the Naval War College and St. John's College.

Dr. Dani Gilbert is an assistant professor of political science at Northwestern University. Her award-winning research explores the causes and consequences of hostage taking and hostage recovery. She previously served as a professor of military and strategic studies at the U.S. Air Force Academy, was a non-resident fellow with the Modern War Institute at West Point, and a peace scholar with the U.S. Institute of Peace. In August of 2022, she authored a foreign affairs article entitled The Prisoner's Dilemma, which serves as the anchor for today's conversation. You are listening to the Irregular Warfare Podcast, a joint production of the Princeton Empirical Studies of Conflict Project and the Modern War Institute at West

Point, dedicated to bridging the gap between scholars and practitioners to support the community of irregular warfare professionals. Here's our conversation with Ambassador Carsons and Dr. Danny Gilbert. Roger, Danny, it's great to have you on the show today, and thanks for joining us. Thank you so much for having us. Thank you. So we'll just start off with a question that I think undergirds the entire episode, and I'll direct this to Roger first. But why do states engage in hostage-taking in the first place, and how do they try to achieve their interests via hostage diplomacy? Yeah, so I appreciate that question. It's good to be here

on this program with Danny Gilbert, someone who I respect quite greatly. But to jump into your question, I would say the answer depends on which country we're talking about. It's hard to, in my mind, give a broad stroke as to why nation states are doing this. I can give you a better sense of why I think the Russians might be doing this, or how the Venezuelans might be treating this. You know, an American crosses a border without proper documentation in Venezuela, for example, and he or she might find himself eventually in a prison, and then the United States has to bargain to get their return. So I think for me, it's harder. I think from the academic standpoint, Danny might actually have a more coherent answer.

But from the practitioner's perspective, from my foxhole, it differs for every country. I'll jump in there. And I will say also, it's such a privilege and a pleasure to be here and to be speaking with Roger about this really important topic. So I think that the main reason that states use hostage diplomacy is that they have found that it works. Typically, these are autocratic or authoritarian states who have found a way of gaining leverage on their much more powerful democratic opponents. So they target Western wealthy democracies like

the United States, like Canada, like the UK, Australia, because those countries care about their citizens, because those countries are going to do something, are going to jump at the opportunity to try to bring their citizens home from an unjust situation that they are facing abroad. And so for any adversarial government around the world, whether that's Russia or Iran or Venezuela, they know that that will be a tool that will get the attention of a democracy like the United States and that it can be used to gain concessions through negotiating leverage, to embarrass national leaders, and use it to their advantage. Is there a difference between how the U.S. deals with sovereign states vice non-state actors when it comes to hostage diplomacy? Sure. So the first thing that I would say there is that when it comes to non-state actors,

I'm not sure I would use the term hostage diplomacy. I might just call it kidnapping, kind of a more traditional form of hostage taking that we are used to seeing that might be more familiar to a lot of listeners. But what I will say is that though these two forms of hostage taking do share things in common, of course, it's using captivity and human leverage to gain concessions, to make a point more broadly. There are some really important differences between state and non-state perpetrators that affect the way that the U.S. government can handle these cases. So one of the ways that I think about the differences between state and non-state actors is about the location where the hostage might be held. state and non-state actors is about the location where the hostage might be held. So for example, when states engage in hostage diplomacy, what we're really talking about is Americans or other Westerners who are being held in prisons. We typically know where they are, but they've been

arrested on bogus or trumped up charges. So they're being held hostage through a state's penal or criminal justice system. So for the United States, we know where that person is. Sometimes the United States government can visit that person in prison. There will be consular visits. Maybe they can talk to their families once a week. And so in some ways, they're treated like a prisoner in a way that can help us communicate with that person or know where they are. When we talk about non-state actor kidnapping, we often don't know where that person is and where they are. When we talk about non-state actor kidnapping, we often

don't know where that person is and if they are still alive. Similarly, the way that the United States government can work to resolve these cases differs quite dramatically across state and non-state actors. So when we talk about non-state actor kidnapping, there might be a military rescue option that is on the table. Now, military rescues, as you all know, and as I'm sure Ambassador Carstens can talk about, are extremely challenging. You need a high degree of intelligence. The most important thing is to keep the hostage alive.

They are risky, they are expensive, and they happen to be the most dangerous point in a hostage taking for the hostage themselves, the time when they are most likely to die. But that is an option that is on the table for non-state actor kidnapping that typically is not on the table when we talk about state hostage-taking. We are not really having a conversation about the U.S. military going into prisons in Tehran to get our citizens out. One other way that hostages might come home that differs across

state and non-state actors is when we talk about ransom payments as a form of concessions, that in some cases is illegal for the United States government to pay a ransom to recover a hostage. So if an American is being held by a group that the U.S. has designated as a foreign terrorist organization, it is illegal for a U.S. citizen or for the U.S. has designated as a foreign terrorist organization. It is illegal for a U.S. citizen or for the U.S. government to pay a ransom to bring them home because that constitutes material support for terrorism. But there's absolutely no legal prohibition on the U.S. government making financial or any other form of concessions when we're talking about state actors. Yeah, so that's a great segue. And I guess I'd just like to ask Roger, what has been the U.S.'s traditional approach when it comes to dealing with hostages?

You know, I'm not really sure we had a traditional approach. I think that was the importance of the 2015 hostage policy review that was directed by President Obama and resulted in the creation of my office, the Hostage Recovery Fusion Cell, which is housed over at the Federal Bureau of Investigation building, and also the hostage response group that's at the White House. I think in the past, you could find different examples of the U.S. government providing an ad hoc response. If it was a nation state, it might bounce between the State Department, the National Security Council, CIA, and a bit of the Department of Defense. If it was a straight-up hostage-taking, you'd find DOD having primacy. But I can recall

talking to some of the families whose loved ones were being held in Syria around 2014, that when they were trying to figure out how the U.S. government works in this regard, they had a hard time. They would call up to the State Department and be passed around from person to person to person. They might get passed over to the Department of Defense. And no one was really taking primacy or ownership. And it's not because people don't want to take responsibility and they don't want to solve the problem. It's just that there was not really a receptacle for the queries that they had. And thus, the wonderful thing in President Obama's review is that we now have this architecture, something we call the hostage recovery enterprise,

to where we do have a way of doing business. There are entities that are tasked with taking care of the families, trying to get the people out through diplomacy or military or law enforcement lines of effort. But I'd say traditionally, it was an ad hoc solution. And yet, over time, I think we still had some successes. You go back to the 1960s and start looking forward, every administration's had to deal with some sort of hostage issue, whether it was something more akin to a wrongful detention, people taken by a nation state, or whether it was someone taken from a terrorist group, that's a pure straight up hostage situation. We've all had to deal with it, but from 2015 onward, we actually have a structure that is organized to respond. we actually have a structure that is organized to respond.

Dani, relatedly, in your foreign affairs article, you discuss the core logic of America's approach to hostage diplomacy. Could you explain a bit about that and what you mean by deterrence by denial? Sure. So some of your listeners might be familiar with the concepts of deterrence and coercion. And, you know, when we talk about, as scholars, a lot of these ideas come from Thomas Schelling and have been applied in the past to nuclear weapons and things like that. But when we talk about coercion, it's about using threats and promises to get your adversary to change their behavior. Deterrence is the idea that you employ some sort of threat or promise that will stop your adversary from doing something that you don't want them to do. And there are two main forms of deterrence that scholars and practitioners talk about, deterrence by punishment and deterrence by denial.

The idea of deterrence by denial means that you are preventing an unwanted action by making that action unlikely to succeed. And deterrence by denial, like coercion in general, requires the cooperation of your adversary, your threat. The way that you describe that their unwanted action is going to be unlikely to succeed, makes them reconsider and not take that undesired action. So to put that in more concrete terms, the idea of a no concessions policy that we might talk

about that's a popular mantra when we talk about dealing with hostage taking, it's the idea that if someone takes a hostage, that you're not going to make concessions to bring that hostage home. And while there's lots of different reasons we might have a no concessions policy or one might have a no concessions policy, it's pretty implicitly about exemplifying the deterrence by denial logic. It means that if hostage takers knew that they wouldn't get rewarded for the hostage, then maybe they would stop taking hostages in the first place. So that's the idea. I think that there are a few really big problems with a no concessions policy that is

based on a deterrence by denial logic. First, and I think most importantly, the U.S. has never really officially had a no concessions policy, despite the assumption that we do and conversations that we do. But it's never really worked. It assumes that hostage taking is only about the concession. And so the idea is if the hostage taker were not to get that ransom payment or get a prisoner swap, maybe they would stop taking hostages. But there are probably plenty of other reasons why hostage takers take hostages and might be embarrassing your adversary. It might be about, for example, trying to get journalists to stop covering a war zone or aid workers to withdraw from a war zone. And I think ethically, it is pretty problematic as well. It punishes the current hostages and their families

at the expense of some potential fictional future hostage that might not even really exist. And it's a serious collective action problem. It assumes that if you impose such a policy and agree to one with all of your allies, that no one is ever going to make concessions. But as we have seen in the past, there is always somebody willing to make concessions to bring their loved one or their citizen home. And so hostage takers have learned that someone is always willing to pay.

And so deterrence by denial has proven really ineffective when it comes to stopping hostage taking. proven really ineffective when it comes to stopping hostage taking. Danny, first and foremost, I'd like to point out that I know we've got a tier one political scientist when they start working Thomas Schelling and nuclear deterrence into our conversations. But I'll let Roger respond to those comments first. I think overall, I have to agree fully with what Danny just said. The way to solve this problem, and Secretary Blinken has pretty much charged my office with trying to organize this, is to work on a deterrence strategy, something that is probably going to take about 10, 15 years to pull together. But it started off with Canadians and their great effort. They released a declaration called the Declaration Against Arbitrary Detention

in State-to-State Relations in early of 2021. Currently, 70 countries have signed on to this. And yet, we probably need to take broader steps to pull together a multilateral coalition that can actually address hostage-taking by states, wrongful detentions. And what we've done, at least in the State Department, is we're starting to work with allies and friends to come up with a toolkit that spans all elements of national power. Like the dime fills, you're probably very well familiar with diplomatic information, military, economic, financial, intelligence, and law enforcement. There are tools that the United States has and other countries have in their toolkits that have never been put in the service of trying to deter hostage taking.

And there are tools out there that probably need to be created, at least in the United States side, through legislation, like being given authorities from our legislators in order to enact. So the idea is that if we can start bringing together 5, 10, 15, 20, or 30 countries that are willing to band together to stand up to countries, for example, like Iran or Russia, when they take a citizen, and that when they're trying to convey this message, they let the adversaries know that they're willing to use these toolkits across all elements of national power. At that point, I think we can start to see a deterrence strategy start to succeed. I think it's going to take some time. I think the exploration of tools is going to take a lot of effort. Bringing countries together, a lot of these countries,

they're not suffering through this problem like the United States is, and so they may not necessarily see the need. But I think success is if sometime in the future, if someone's taken from a country, let's say it's Botswana, for example, 20 or 30 countries will band together and go to the offending country. The country has taken the Botswanan and threatened to levy these pools against that country in question. It's after the fact, after that's happened, I think we'll get to Danny's point where countries know what to expect if they ever try to take a person hostage or take them and wrongfully detain them. And I think when you finally get to that point,

it'll essentially become too expensive for countries to take people as hostage. They'll have to essentially put that hostage diplomacy on the dustbin of history and move on to other ways of trying to achieve their foreign and national interests. Wouldn't it be great to see that evolution? So this could be recency bias, but it seems like there has been an uptick in high-profile international kidnappings of U.S. citizens. Paul Whelan, Brittany Griner, for example, come to mind. But is hostage-taking on the rise? And if so, why or why not, if not? I would say anecdotally, yes, but I wouldn't mind throwing a few things out. The Levinson Act, which was passed by Congress in 2021,

gave us a set of criteria that allows us to more easily identify whether a citizen is being wrongfully detained or not. Now, the 11 criteria given to us in more easily identify whether a citizen is being wrongfully detained or not. Now, the 11 criteria given to us in Levenson Act was such a valuable tool to us that we actually, from the State Department side, we reviewed almost 5,000 cases of Americans that are being detained around the world to see if we'd missed anything. And by applying the criteria, we essentially got a few more cases. So one thing I'll say is that maybe in, say, 1979 or 1983 or 1998, you may have someone who's wrongfully detained, but you just don't know it. You don't really have the criteria with which to base that decision. Now we have the criteria. So

there are people that are actually coming onto our caseload that would have never come onto our caseload had we not had the Levin-Snapp criteria. So I'd say that our awareness and the criteria have actually increased the case numbers. Having said that, as I said, anecdotally, there does seem to be a rise right now. And I know Dani's done a lot of research. I might want to turn the floor over to her and get her thoughts and reflections. Yeah, I completely agree with Roger there that, first of all, the organizations that work on these issues, whether that is the Special Presidential Envoy's office or the different advocacy organizations that support hostage families, they have seen an increase in their caseload. Now, there's a lot of

discrepancy across those different organizations in terms of numbers of exact cases, but all will say that over the past decade, that what used to be a majority of cases of hostages held by non-state actors has switched to people being held wrongfully or unjustly by states. Second is that issue of terminology. Now we can name it, We can call it wrongful detention. We can send the case to the special presidential envoy's office. And so even just having a name and a way to classify something might make it seem like it's more apparent. But I think importantly, there are reasons that it very well may actually empirically

be on the rise. And part of that is just the shifting nature of geopolitical conflict in the world right now. So hostage-taking is this ancient tool. All kinds of actors have used it across history to gain leverage from their adversaries. And with the end of decades of the global war on terror, where the United States was mostly focused in fighting non-state actors, and therefore those non-state actors were concerned with taking American and other Western hostages, now we are seeing what the current administration is calling a shift back to great power competition or strategic competition, to use the terminology of the

Biden administration. And so in a world where states are mostly concerned with fighting other states, it just seems natural that our adversaries would find a way to use this ancient tool to gain leverage and to improve their bargaining situation against more powerful countries. The last thing that is really debatable, and I would really love to figure out the answer to this, I think it would both be important for a scholarly audience and would also really help us understand about the policy implications of how we should deal with these cases

is the extent to which our adversaries are learning that it works. Do we see more of these cases because the Kremlin or because our adversaries in North Korea or Iran or Venezuela are learning that this is a powerful tool and they can get more concessions from the United States, that would suggest that we need to think really seriously about what kinds of things we give up if we want to stem the tide of this going forward. So, Roger, I would imagine that during a hostage crisis scenario,

the U.S. government has to cooperate in a coordinated fashion to address the issue, right? So, generally speaking, how does the hostage diplomacy community corral all the interagency assets at its disposal? Because I would imagine this is really difficult to do, but to try and address crisis scenarios. address crisis scenarios? So actually, it's not as hard as you might think. I think when I first took this job, if I wanted to figure out who I had to talk to over at the Department of Justice or CIA or even the NSC, I wasn't really sure. I had to kind of blunder through a Rolodex and, you know, call around to see if I could find the right person. But we talked to each other so much that if I ever need to talk to someone at DOJ, I know exactly who my belly button is, the White House, the NSC, it would be inaccurate to say we talk to the White House five times a day. It would be accurate to say that we're talking to them continuously all day long on all these topics. Let me just give you a scenario, if I may. If someone is declared wrongfully detained,

within probably seven days, I'm usually in that family's house. So let's say the family resides in Texas and their loved one was taken by the Russians. Within seven to 10 days, I'm usually in the family's house, spending three or four hours trying to get a sense of what's their loved one's story. Who were they? What are you feeling? How can we help you? What are you going through? What resources do you need as a family to endure this? And while we're doing that, we also give them a sense of what the government's going to do to solve their problem. And we tell them before we leave that we're going to partner with you. We're going to do this together. But ultimately, the responsibility to get them out rests on our shoulders. We also let them know that if they

need to call someone at 10 o'clock on a Friday night just to cry and let us have it, we're going to be there. You know, this is not government as usual. You're going to get a human being who's going to give you an open heart, who's going to cry with you and attempt to talk you through what you're going through in an effort to solve your problem in addition to trying to get your loved one out. But within about that same seven to eight day period, we will also assemble a bunch of people over here, usually at the Department of State in a SCIF, and you might have 10 people whiteboarding, starting off with essentially the military decision-making process. So picture people from the regionals, Department of Justice, CIA, DOD, and the White House over at state, cups of coffee, notebooks out, and for three or four hours going through specified tasks, implied tasks, limits, constraints, risks, risk mitigation,

course of action one, course of action two, course of action three, evaluation criteria. And then by the time we leave, we slap the table on what we think the right course of action is. And then that starts getting briefed around and socialized. And that's what starts our initial line of effort, which is usually in a role of detention case, going to be a diplomatic one that does not negate other lines of effort, be they from the department treasury side, if we're thinking of sanctions, or if we're thinking of a military solution or law enforcement solution, or maybe even a legal solution, all those lines of effort start to come out. The one thing I left out is sometimes it takes a while to get that wrongful attention determination. If an American's taken by the Russians, for example, Evan Gershkovich, no-brainer, reporter,

given permission by the Russians to report for the Wall Street Journal within Russia. Suddenly he's arrested. That's much easier to make a decision on, just as Danny Fenster was in Burma. If it's someone else, we have to do a lot of the mathematics to ensure that that person is actually wrongfully detained. And that sometimes takes a few weeks or at times a few months. To add one thing to that, and that's, of course, with the caveat that I do not work in the hostage recovery enterprise. So my perspective is completely from the outside. But so much of the coordination that Roger is talking about is relatively new.

institutions and infrastructure that the U.S. government has developed to enable that coordination over the years typically occurs in the wake of the failure to bring Americans home. So JSOC was created as the result of the failure of Operation Eagle Claw, an attempt to bring home the Americans who were held hostage in the U.S. embassy in Iran starting in 1979. And the fact that Operation Eagle Claw was such a disaster suggested to the U.S. military and policymakers that they needed a way to coordinate those special operators to have, as one of its chief missions, the military recovery of Americans. Similarly, as Roger mentioned, the Obama administration's policy review in 2015 that created his office and the hostage recovery fusion cell and the hostage response group at the National Security Council, all of these are meant to be coordinating bodies, interagency cooperation that allows this to happen more smoothly. And with the Levinson Act and a lot of the legislative changes that are coming up in recent years, again, it's an effort by the U.S. government to make itself more efficient and to communicate more effectively in the service of bringing Americans home. So, Roger, you brought

up something interesting that I didn't even think about. You mentioned that it takes time to determine if someone has been wrongfully detained. Is that a difficult process? Do states advertise that they've wrongfully detained someone to create a bargaining chip, or do they keep it under wraps to create psychological dilemmas and to create uncertainty? It's all different. I think in terms of the process we have here, we like to call it deliberative. We like to keep some of the mystery into how we do business here, and a lot of that's to avoid receiving political pressure. We want to take a look at the facts of the case and apply the Levinson criteria to those facts in order to render a decision that's hopefully devoid of any political influence. We're just, again, basing it on the facts. And sometimes

that does take time. In terms of the other nations, though, it's the whole gamut. There is one nation, one case that I can think of in particular, where the other side strongly messaged that they'd taken an American because they wanted to leverage us. They essentially sent through their intelligence services a little notification saying, yep, we got this person and we'll see you at the bargaining table. For the most part, you have to figure it out. You have to do the forensics, try to get a sense of what actually happened. Is that American actually guilty or not? And then work with the other nation, frankly, to see what the charges are. A lot of these nations, when you try to dig into what they're not really going through a legitimate legal process, then that case starts to edge closer over to my desk. And one of the things that most people know when they're arrested is what they're being charged with. So the long answer to your question is on very few occasions, we've actually been told that this is for leverage.

Most of the time, we have to kind of sort that out and figure it out. So in a similar vein, how does the U.S. government cooperate with international bodies and foreign partners when it comes to hostage situations? Does it just come down to intelligence sharing or base sharing, or is it more than that? I would say it's more than that. You gave two good examples of how we might cooperate with international organizations in other countries, but it's run the whole gamut. I mean, I would say every time we have reached out to other countries that might know the offending country quite well, or they might be strong allies of ours, and we try to find ways that we can all work together. I know it's kind of a heavy military audience here, but you're really trying to do troops to task. If there's someone that can advocate on your behalf to a country that's taken an American,

you're reaching out to that country. If there's a country that has a like experience, or maybe they have detainees in that country, you're conferring with them to get a sense of what they've been through, or maybe seeing if you can perhaps work together. So we spend a lot of time on the phone talking to members of other countries and international organizations. I spend a lot of time on the road. And when I go to foreign countries, I'm usually trying to meet with whoever might be my counterpart in that country. And if not, trying to meet with people in the foreign ministry, the intelligence services, or their National Security Council centers to get a sense of how we might work together.

We've even done that with countries with whom there really is no pressing problem. You know, you might as well build the network, though, so that if something does happen, you know who to call. You have to pick up that phone. International organizations, probably not as strongly as you might imagine. I mean, there's the Working Group on Arbitrary Detention that's headquartered over in Geneva. They do a lot of great work, but there's no real cause to actually get together with them to work a case. I think from the academic side and from the theoretical side and the policy side, there might be closer connections to be made. But I think from where I sit mainly as a practitioner who might span up to policy, we're mainly geared towards the soup to nuts of trying to identify who's wrongfully detained or held hostage and then trying to work the solutions. For Danny, I was hoping you could talk a little bit about the role that private entities like

maybe corporations or private citizens play when it comes to hostage crises or scenarios. Sure. Well, I'd also love to hear what Roger has to say about this one because their office, you know, might be in a position to coordinate with some of these. So in the first place, there is a growing appetite to ask different corporations and organizations to really think about the safety of their citizens traveling abroad. What kind of training do they have? What kind of restrictions do they have on foreign travel to dangerous places. The State Department has taken care to put in special travel warnings for countries where citizens are likely

to be wrongfully detained by state governments. That's China, Russia, Iran, Venezuela, North Korea, and Burma. And they've also put in special travel warnings for places where Americans are likely to be kidnapped by non-state groups. And so how are corporations, universities, NGOs, and multilateral organizations really thinking about paying

attention to those travel warnings and perhaps keeping their employees and their participants, their citizens, from traveling to places where they're at very high risk of something going wrong. So that's one of the first things and thinking about ways to educate the U.S. citizenry a little bit better on these travel risks, I think, is a really crucial imperative for all of us who care about this issue going forward. The other way that there's a relationship with non-government actors is that there are law firms and there are consulting groups and there are nonprofit organizations that actually work to support these cases on the ground, whether that

is about providing legal counsel and advice, helping families get through this, and then in some cases actually having, you know, track two and non-government negotiations to try to bring someone home. So there's a few different organizations that really focus on these cases, and they don't work for the U.S. government. They are not taking orders from the U.S. government. But my impression, again, from the outside perspective, is that they are always looking to do what they can to help in light of what the U.S. government is doing. And so they are probably in close conversation with Roger and his office to make sure that wires aren't getting crossed.

I love what Dani said, and she kind of opened the door for me to talk about some of the organizations I love. There are NGOs out there that have been incredibly beneficial to this entire enterprise. In fact, I'll even back up. When I took this job, we said the words hostage recovery enterprise that almost always got people thinking about the government. SPIHA, my organization, HRFC over at the FBI, and the HRG over at the White House. And we made a conscious decision to expand that. So when people talk about the hostage recovery enterprise, you're talking about NGOs like the Foley Foundation, HostageUS, Hostage Aid Worldwide, for example. You're thinking about private

corporations. We've had a chance to reach out to OSAC, the Overseas Security Advisory Council, which has like 300 members that have people that provide security for some of the major companies that do overseas work that are multinational or based in the United States. We've had a chance to reach out to religious organizations that have a strong presence in places like Africa or the Middle East. We've had a chance to reach out to religious organizations that have a strong presence in places like Africa or the Middle East. We've had a chance to reach out to some fantastic lawyers who do work in this space as well. So to my mind, when someone comes home, it's never just SPIHA or it's never just the U.S. government that brought it back. There's usually about 150 to 1,000 people that may have actually

contributed. And those people could be members of the media, members of Congress or their staffs, these NGOs, these empowered individuals, lawyers, people that might work in the private sector. But a lot of people actually pull together and create the environment and find the release mechanism that usually goes into effect. Now, the government might get credit for it, which I find interesting because for the most part, we don't care who gets the credit as long as someone comes back. But there are always a lot of people behind the scenes and a lot of organizations behind the scenes that actually are the ones that kind of pulled everything together and allowed us that environment to garner that release. So as we start to wind down here, I'd like to wrap up with some implications and recommendations for the academic policymaking

and practitioner communities. Danny, your article identifies two primary means that governments can use to mitigate hostage taking. The first involves prevention and the second involves punishment. Could you just explain those concepts in a little more detail? Absolutely. Thanks for the question. So this goes back to what I was discussing earlier in our conversation about deterrence and deterrence by denial. So I mentioned back then two things that I will return to. One, that deterrence and coercion requires cooperation from your adversary. we are talking about policies that do not require our adversary to cooperate with us or agree with our threat or our promise. And specifically, prevention is about disabling the conditions that lead to hostage taking in the first place, regardless of what the adversary does or wants to do. So prevention is what the military might refer to or academics might refer to as a brute force strategy. It doesn't require our adversary to be convinced. So basically anything that we can do to keep

Americans or other targets from being in the conditions in the first place that would lead to a hostage taking. So travel warnings are in many ways an important first step to that. If we prevent more Americans from going to places where they are likely to be taken hostage or wrongfully detained, that is a prevention strategy. And a very successful example of prevention in the past goes back to the era of airplane hijackings. So in the 1960s and 70s, this is a statistic that I use often because I find it so jarring, that for a decade in there, there was an airplane hijacking on average every five and a half days. It was extremely common for

airplanes to be hijacked around the world. And back then there was no airport security. The airlines were concerned that having airline security would annoy passengers. People don't like to go through an x-ray machine and take off their shoes and unpack their bags. But as soon as they put in security, that operates as a prevention strategy. It basically makes it near difficult, near impossible for anyone to bring the kind of weaponry on board that would allow for an airplane to be hijacked. And so after that, airplane hijackings dramatically decreased. So things like travel bans, while very controversial, would operate as a prevention strategy, anything we can do to keep people from becoming targets. The other policy that I wrote about in the article that Roger alluded to as the really

important imperative that the State Department is working on, that a group of us are working on at a commission at CSIS, the think tank. We have a bipartisan commission that's working over the next year and a half to come up with some new policies for hostage taking and wrongful detention, is thinking about the other type of deterrence. So there was deterrence by denial. The other form of deterrence is called deterrence by punishment. And deterrence by punishment means promising such severe consequences for hostage taking or any other act that no rational actors would take those hostages in the first place. So military rescues often operate in some ways as deterrence

by punishment. Yes, it brings the hostage back, but in sending in Delta Force or the Navy SEALs, the hostage back. But in sending in Delta Force or the Navy SEALs, you are also punishing the perpetrators because they typically do not leave survivors behind. So there are a lot of prior hostage-taking trends that were curbed by deterrence by punishment strategies, most famously here in the United States. So the FBI did an exceptional job really upping its ante to combat domestic hostage takings. And so while there are plenty of child abduction and missing person cases in the United States, we almost never see domestic hostage taking crimes in the United States anymore. Other countries like Colombia have focused on those kinds of strategies. So deterrence by punishment, very difficult when we're talking

about state actors. There's a real limit on what the United States can do to punish our adversaries in the international system. But thinking through clever and creative and collaborative ways to impose that threat of punishment, I believe would be effective at starting to curb this trend. I believe would be effective at starting to curb this trend. So based on the conversation today, what would you distill as the relevant implications for the practitioner, academic, and policymaking communities interested in hostage diplomacy? Key takeaways. I think the key takeaways here, it's probably just a few. First off, increasing awareness is not a bad thing.

So I think there was a time back in the past, not too long ago, where if someone was wrongfully detained, the knee-jerk reaction was to not talk about it, not put it out there. Let's try to solve this in smoke-filled backrooms. But the reality is that just does not happen anymore. And frankly, I'm not so sure it's been a bad thing. I think increasing everyone's awareness actually keeps people from going to places like Iran or Venezuela to a sister's wedding or an adventure trip or such. I think the awareness also helps lawmakers kind of wrap their arms around this. It helps nation states decide that they're going to band together and solve it. So I think increasing the awareness and keeping this on the front burner, not a bad thing in this case. I think to be aware is to be

forearmed in terms of either protecting yourself or deciding what to do. Maybe a second thing is that this is a hard business. I sometimes sit around the State Department with some other people that have some tough jobs, and we all kind of feel like the hostage game is almost the PhD level of diplomacy because the other side holds the key to the jail. And they are trying to get us to do something that, for the most part, we really, really don't want to do. And thus, our job is to try to get the other side to come up with something else that we can give that does make sense. In a perfect world, they'll give someone up without having to give something at all. But this is a hard business, and it takes a little time. And so I guess that way of conceiving this, when we talk to members of the families, the media, members of Congress, that this is a tough business and

it takes a lot of time. And at times we're going to perhaps need more resources. But maybe the last thing I'll throw out there is that under this administration, we brought home 29 people in 29 months. We have a good record. We do have a structure now. We have strategies. And I think the president, this administration have embraced this as a bipartisan issue, an American issue that has support from both Republicans and Democrats. And we've had some successes. And sadly, we have a long road to go. We have many more cases out there that are going to require some hard decisions in order to resolve. I'll completely agree with everything that Roger just said. I think that the American public are really interested in this issue, in learning more about it, in preventing it, in combating it going forward. I think that in many

ways, Brittany Greiner's experience over last year really brought this issue to a new level of national attention and that has spurred some really interesting and meaningful conversations about these prevention and punishment strategies. And so thinking more about educating the public about travel risks and that kind of collaboration and cooperation that we were talking about across different sectors, thinking about how the government can work with academia, with the media, with sports, with business, about keeping Americans safe around the world.

I feel really grateful that the United States government has taken this issue so seriously, and also that we apparently have some really valuable and committed partners around the world. In particular, the British government and the Canadian government have launched new efforts to really think about this issue. And so I think there are willing partners to make difficult decisions and hopefully come up with some more effective policies going forward. Well, Roger and Dani, that was a truly fascinating discussion on an often understudied facet of irregular warfare. So thank you so much for joining us today.

Grateful to have been here. Thank you. Thank you so much. This was a real honor. Thank you again for joining us on the Irregular Warfare podcast. We release a new episode every two weeks. Next episode, Ben and Adam will discuss how states weaponize narratives to wage information warfare against state and non-state actors with Dr. Andreas Krieg and Dr. Andrew Whiskeyman. Be sure to subscribe to the Irregular Warfare podcast so you don't miss an episode. The podcast is a product of the Irregular Warfare Initiative. We are a team of all volunteer practitioners and researchers dedicated to bridging the gap between scholars and practitioners

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And one last note, what you hear in this episode are the views of the participants and do not represent those at Princeton, West Point, or any agency of the U.S. government. Thanks again, and we'll see you next time. Thank you. Thank you.