 Good evening and welcome to the National Archives at Washington DC and a special welcome to those watching us live on YouTube I'm Dr. Nicholas E. Coddington, and I'm director of education public programs and visitor services and it's my pleasure to welcome you tonight's Brilliant conversation international relations in a dangerous world with their special guest Ambassador Roger D. Carstens Professor Bruce Hoffman and Robin Wright Tonight's program is presented in commemoration of the 200th anniversary of the Monroe Doctrine Which is in the holdings of the National Archives in the records of the US Senate Before we get to tonight's program, I'd like to tell you a little about two virtual programs coming up on our National Archives YouTube channel On Tuesday February 20th at 1 p.m. Authors Richard Edwards and Jacob K. Freifeld We'll discuss their book the first migrants how black homesteaders quest for land and freedom herald America's great migration Which explores a largely unknown story of black people who migrated from the south to the Great Plains between 1877 and 1920 in search for land and freedom on Wednesday February 28th at 1 p.m. A panel of historians and archivists from the National Archives in Arlington National Cemetery We'll discuss the history and records related to the Freedman's Village a community of formerly enslaved African Americans established in 1863 in Arlington, Virginia Previously owned by the family of Confederate General Robert E. Lee. It is now my pleasure to introduce the panel Ambassador Roger D. Carson's is a special presidential envoy for hostage affairs at the US State Department Prior to assuming this role Ambassador Carson's was a deputy assistant secretary in the Bureau of Diplomacy Human Rights and Labor He is a former his former positions include senior civilian Advisor on the commander's advisory and assistance team in Afghanistan Senior fellow at the Center for new American security special assistant for legislative affairs in the office of the Secretary Defense Ambassador Carson's a retired Army lieutenant colonel who served in special forces and the first Ranger battalion He is a graduate of the United States military class of 86 CNQ and holds master's degrees from the US Naval War College St. John's College Ambassador Carson's the recipient of the 2023 Robert E. Livingston Livingston excellence in government service award and was selected as a distinguished member of the Special Forces Regions Professor Hoffman is the Shelby Colburn and Catherine W. Davis senior fellow for counterterrorism and homeland security at the Council for foreign relations. He has been studying terrorism and insurgency for almost half a century. He is a tenured professor at Georgetown University George on University's Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service where he's director of the Center for Jewish Civilization from 20 to 23. Professor Hoffman is also an honorary professor and professor emeritus for terrorism studies at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. And he is the author of Inside Terrorism and co-author of God Guns and Sedition the far right terrorism in America both from Columbia University Press Moderating tonight's discussion is Robin Wright. She is a joint fellow at the US Institute of Peace and the Woodrow Wilson Center International Center for Scholars and a contributing writer to the New Yorker. She has reported over four hundred and forty countries on six continents and has covered dozens of wars and several revolutions. She is a former diplomatic correspondent for the Washington Post and has also written for the New York Times Magazine Time The Wall Street Journal The Atlantic and Los Angeles Times Foreign Affairs and many others. Ms. Wright is also the fellow of the Brookings Institute Carnegie Endowment for International Peace as well as Yale Duke and the University of California. Among her many books is The Rock of Casbah Rage and Revolution Across the Islamic World which was selected as the best book on international affairs by the overseas University Press. Please help me welcome these fine young people. Thank you very much and thank you for joining us tonight. I'm honored to finally meet Roger in person. He doesn't take my phone calls but I'm delighted that I have a chance to talk to him tonight. Bruce and I are very old friends so I want to put in another plug for his book God Guns and Sedition the far right terrorism in America. Just out highly recommended. He has great blurbs. So the issue of hostages is one that is near and dear my heart. I have covered this issue since 1979 and the takeover of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran. I stood at the foot of the steps of the plane in Algiers when they flew to freedom. I've had many of my friends taken hostage in Beirut in Iran and in other places. So I followed this one for a really long time. I wanted to kind of set the scene by telling you how far back the taking of hostages actually goes. I have four examples that might surprise you. The first is Julius Caesar who was taken hostage by Silesian pirates as he was sailing through the Aegean on his way to study in Rhodes. He was held for 34 days and they had to buy buy his freedom. In the fifth century St. Patrick the Catholic patron of Ireland described his kidnapping at the age of 16. By Irish marauders raiding the west of what was then the Roman Empire which is Great Britain today. He was held as a slave and claimed to have escaped six years later. There are varying questions about his account. At the age of seven Henry II the king of France and his brother were given in a swap to Spain in exchange for the freedom of his father who was held for and they were held for four years. And the author of Don Quixote Miguel de Cervantes was seized by a barbaric pirates in 1575 and he was held for five years. So this is a problem that goes back a long way and for the United States it's been a challenge for a very long time as well. Dating back and I love looking up this. I wrote about it actually that that. Let's see. Oh here it is. So under George Washington the United States paid ransom of more than six hundred and forty thousand dollars which was about a quarter of the US budget at the time. I paid it to the day of Algiers for freedom of over a hundred American sailors. The issue of ransom was a divisive issue among our founding fathers. Thomas Jefferson warned that demands for tribute would never end. Well Thomas John Adams argued that the financial concessions were a way to safeguard foreign trade for a young nation that was financially strapped. So we've seen these crises play out particularly over the last seventy five years. So I'm thrilled to be able to have a chance to talk to you about it. So I wanted to begin with a very basic question to Bruce. Why in the age of nuclear weapons are countries or players still taking hostages and still taking American hostages. Well first and foremost if they want money it can be a very lucrative business to engage in because you have to have a pretty hard heart not to pay for someone's life and especially when parts of their body sometimes are sent along with their answer demands that sort of opens the pocketbook. But I would say especially with respect to your question of why Americans how do you hobble a superpower. This is a way for the powerless that would be powerful to confront the United States or to confront any established nation state and firstly bring them to negotiating table secondly attract attention to themselves in their cause and given the power of the American media which is still the case it always has been the case shine really unparalleled attention on to themselves and also puff themselves up and makes them more powerful if they're getting the superpower. Or any established nation state to deal with them on any other basis they would be ignored but once you have one of their nationals of course the most fundamental compact between citizens and their government citizens expect their government to protect them. And democracies are more vulnerable than autocratic regimes. I would say democracies are more vulnerable first and foremost because of the open media and the open press. Secondly the demands of their citizens on government that if they're not recognized can result in people being elected out of office. Everybody also wants to appear that they can be if not necessarily tough on terrorists but at least if terrorists are seizing them but at least effective in getting their getting their citizens back. But even if it's a non terrorist situation again it's the expectation we have of government and elected officials feel that obligation to deliver on it. We've seen this in recent years in particular how it's a point of pride for successive presidents to get back hostages of any kind whether they're monetary hostages or whether they're political ones. So Roger one of the things that's really striking and maybe you your office has done some kind of comparison. There have been 45 Americans brought home since the Biden administration took office. I don't know whether that's you know you see an uptick in the numbers if you see any trend lines that kind of explained and then I want you to kind of tell people what does your office do about Americans who are detained. What tools do you have. What kind of how is it an interagency process bringing together whether it's the FBI intelligence community the Pentagon. Tell us a little bit about what what you guys do about it. Well certainly Robin thanks for that question. Bruce it's an honor to be up on the stage with both you and Robin. You two have been heroes of mine for quite some time so it's really an honor. Nick thanks for inviting us National Archives. Thank you also for having us and hosting this event tonight. Take your question first off. There was a point when I had over 50 cases and right now we're hovering somewhere between 20 and 30 cases. And so in a way you could almost say that the numbers to an extent are going down. A lot of it is because of I would say the aggressiveness of the administration and trying to find ways to bring Americans home. Bringing 45 Americans home in a three year period requires a lot of coordination and actually a way a lot of courage for the president to make some of the hard decisions that he has to make to bring people home and to make the deals that we've had to make. So strangely I would say despite the fact that we have made deals and people might think that we might be incentivizing the other side to take more our numbers right now are going down. However I'd caution everyone because you know two or three years now they might be back up for now. I don't think that the numbers have solidified. It seems that every few weeks another case starts to kind of make its way over to my desk and we're always mindful that no matter how good we're doing as a government bringing people home. There's there are always people that every night are counting on my office to bring them home and we've not done so. So right now I'm going to bed every night realizing that there are 20 to 30 families that have not yet achieved the success of having their loved ones come home into their arms. In terms of what our office does in 2015 the United States did very poorly in bringing some Americans back who are being held hostage in Syria. And as a result President Obama conducted a government wide survey on how we're doing in the hostage recovery business and what we needed to do to become better. As a result three entities were created. One was at the White House the hostage response group. Think of it as three or four people at the National Security Council whose job it is to convene meetings and help us render decisions on what path to follow to bring someone home. Secondly the hostage recovery fusion cell that's headquartered at the FBI but it's an interagency task force that's required to our task rather with trying to bring together the information that the Department of Treasury CIA Department of Justice pick your interagency that might have a role in solving the hostage crisis to bring all that information together fuse it and come up with operational ways to bring back hostages not wrongfully detainees but hostages. So when I say operational efforts think of like SEAL Team 6 Delta Force or a law enforcement effort that's going to actually affect some sort of a gambit to bring someone home. And then lastly my office was created the Office of the Special Presidential Envoy for Hostage Affairs we've truncated that to SPHA thankfully and we're responsible for coordinating the diplomatic approach to bringing back not only hostages if it requires a diplomatic effort but also wrongful detentions. The difference being that hostages are those taken by a terrorist group like Al Qaeda or ISIS a wrongful detention or wrongful detainee rather is taken by a nation state it could be like Russia, China or you know Venezuela. Our job really is to do three things at this point it's to come up with that negotiating strategy to bring Americans home so bring Americans home. Secondly we reach out to the families and really try to embrace them and give them information bring them into a partnership with US government on how to bring their loved ones home. And then the third thing is to build a deterrence effort so that one day we can prevent Americans from putting themselves in harm's way and becoming possible targets of either becoming a hostage or a wrongful detainee and also deterring countries to in a way raise the cost of taking people as hostages so that this practice goes away. And to do that we spend a lot of time in working in the multilateral space trying to build up a coalition of like minded nations that are willing to stand up at countries like Iran next time one of their citizens are taken. All I can say is good luck with deterrence. But you didn't answer my question about what tools do you have. I mean there have been criticism of whether it's freeing South Korean money or lifting the waiver on South Korea which owed several billion dollars to Iran for buying oil. It was not our money but that's the way it's kind of in place. So what tools do you have in trying to leverage freedom? You know the tools differ for every case. I think you're kind of hinting at that with 45 cases each one might require a different solution. I would say that a lot of times we could use a stick approach and threaten sanctions threaten some sort of economic financial action. A lot of times it's come down to actually conducting a personnel swap to take an innocent American who's held in a country like Russia for example and trade someone who's been rightfully convicted and held in the United States. So we've conducted prisoner swaps. But it gets into the broader question of when a case hits my desk what tools do we immediately go through. Well the first time the first second we get a case we actually go through almost a military decision making process. We bring in people from the entire interagency and spend hours in the room trying to figure out the specified tasks implied tasks limits constraints risk risk mitigation and eventually start coming up with courses of action that allow you to reach across the entire. You could say elements of US national power. Some cases might require diplomatic others information others military economic financial legal etc. And in bringing those solutions together we can start to work on what's going to work and what is not going to work. The toughest part about this though is that the the other side gets a vote and no matter what brilliant strategy you come up with sometimes you go and meet with the other side. And you put down what you're willing to talk about to get your American back and the other side has different thoughts on how that's going to take place. And so it becomes a business of narrowing the gaps between their side and our side in terms of what we're going to try to give and what they're what the other side is willing to take to bring someone back. And to be very frank it's an excruciating process and a lot of time a lot of times it takes a lot of time to get the job done. So Bruce I want you to weigh in on this and the contradictions in what the US says and what the US does. I'm thinking you know we vow no concessions and we usually do. And the trades when we human beings human beings I'm thinking the case of Brittany Griner the basketball player who was traded for Victor Boot who's who is the world's most notorious arms dealer and had been involved in selling arms to players that killed Americans. So talk to us a little bit about the contradictions and the inherent problems. Well the inherent problem one of them has been addressed and what Roger's point I think is so important is that his office was created in 2015. So it's not even a decade old before that and exactly as you've been describing the strategy for freeing people before that it was all that hot. So that was one problem. The second problem which I think is the main one is that the policy itself no concessions no negotiations no concessions was the mantra for many years. I mean that wasn't the result of a policy process or of smart people in the government deciding this is the best way to do things. It basically was an offhand remark by President Nixon at a press conference one morning after the previous evening a farewell party for a U.S. diplomat in Khartoum at the Saudi Embassy was in fact taken over by six Palestinian terrorists belonging to the organization Black September. They seized the U.S. ambassador the chargé whose party was in honor of a Belgian diplomat a Jordanian diplomat and a Kuwaiti diplomat and they said let's negotiate. Now like all negotiations for anything you always aim as high as possible and these individuals wanted Israel to release a swath of Palestinian terrorists that they were holding in prison they wanted West Germany to release members of a left wing terrorist group that was active at the time the bottom mine off gang and then the real issue I mean the sort of the sticking point that shaped this policy. They demanded the release of Sirhan Sirhan Robert F. Kennedy's assassin and obviously for President Nixon the brother of his previous opponent I mean it was it was a very difficult situation but perhaps rather than weighing the consequences he said the next day no negotiations no concessions and basically that that evening they took the two Americans in the Belgian the three western hostages down to the basement and executed them and then this policy really stayed in force until the creation of Roger's office and you're right there has been a lot of inconsistencies we say in the United States we would negotiate with with terrorists but of course in 1985 the TWA airliner 847 was hijacked. At the end of the day there were 39 Americans that were left out of I think it was about 178 passengers and the Reagan administration don't forget and I'm not saying this pejoratively or critically it's just how difficult this problem is the Reagan administration was elected on a very robust counterterrorism strategy in fact it was the first time in any presidential primary that a party had a plank about counterterrorism of course that was because of the 1979 hostage taking in terror. So President Reagan was always tough on terrorists or at least he came into office that way but he pressured Israel to release over 700 Shia that were imprisoned in Israel and basically secured the release of the Americans. It went whether it's downhill or uphill because I think any life that's rescued is enormously important and whether it's Koran or the Torah you know saving one life as if you've saved humanity. But there were about a dozen Americans seized as you well know when you wrote the classic book Sacred Rage about this about a dozen Americans were taken hostage journalists like Terry Ware, clerics like Father Jenko for example from different walks of life. And the U.S. under President Reagan was so desperate to win their freedom that they embarked on the infamous Iran Contra affair where they were willing firstly to sell arms to Iran, stated enemy of the United States, funneled the money from the Contras was very convoluted. But that almost was the undoing of the Reagan administration and a lot of it I think flowed from his interactions with the families of the TWA 47 hostages that they pressured Israel to release the 700 Shia. And this had a big impact on him and he was willing to even contradict his stated policies to secure the release of Americans. So I have a funny story about that. I go to Iran a lot. I think I've been there more than any American since the revolution. And I went right after the arms for hostage swap and I stayed at the same hotel they did and the guy at the receptionist handed me my keys and he said you have the Bud McFarlane suite. So I remember that period very well. But Roger talked about creating a coalition of the willing to get the West or countries of like mind to work together. But the reality is that our Western allies have been sometimes very duplicitous when it comes to playing straight with us. I think of the French particularly with some of their people in Syria. I had a colleague who was beheaded by ISIS. So you know how the idea is a good one but it doesn't always work. Yes. Well the complexity of this you know really is enormous which is why I really admire and respect Roger for the job that he does. I mean think about Britain and the United States are basically aligned. No negotiations no concessions in essence. Of course there's always exceptions but many European countries have a very different attitude. They believe that they're compact with their citizens. Not only requires them to pay ransoms but also to be very outwardly. I mean you know French presidents show up at the airport to greet their hostages when they're released. I mean this to them is a tremendous it's not something to be ashamed of or it's not something that's problematic or they're not necessarily worried that it's going to encourage more hostage taking. They see this is tremendously successful. I have to say from a personal perspective I attended almost every day of the trial two years ago the Beatles. These were the two British members of ISIS. One of them entered the plea agreement the other one was convicted of multiple charges of kidnapping hostage taking and so on. They were responsible for imprisoning the four Americans who perished James Foley, Steven Satloff, Peter Kasig and Kayla Mueller, two Britons, two Japanese and a Russian. And what struck me in the trial was maybe the Europeans don't have it entirely wrong because you see the American families there who lost their loved ones. European hostages came back. More than that too. They came back and bore witness. The convictions might not have been secured if they didn't have eyewitnesses. Daniel Rai Ottison from Denmark, people from Spain, from France, from Switzerland who attested to the heinous terrible treatment. And this is I think really important that the Americans in Britain's experience the hostage takers knew from the start that the United States would have negotiated with them. It didn't matter. It goes back to your first question. Why do you take hostages? Because of their value and the United States is a superpower and this is how you hobble superpower or at least create lots of political problems. So Roger I'm going to give you an opportunity to respond to that if you want to as well because you're in the position of having to understand that intimately. But I also want to ask you the series, the theme of the series tonight is Monroe Doctrine. And so maybe you explain how the issue of hostages relates to Monroe Doctrine. And I also want you to kind of explain to the audience the difference between people who are taken hostage and those who are wrongfully detained and actually are charged with crimes and tried. So go for it. Sure. I think on the question about the Monroe Doctrine, this might be a small thread that ties those two subjects together. But to our mind, if you have a blue passport, whether you're a dual citizen or you grew up in Minot, North Dakota, and you're an American citizen, you're traveling overseas and a country takes you wrongfully or a terrorist group takes you hostage, the United States is going to put in a huge effort to bring you back and to take care of your family while they're doing so. Does that tie into the Monroe Doctrine? Maybe we're not necessarily claiming territory and our view that territory to an extent has our oversight. But I can tell you when it comes to our citizens, I think we definitely feel that way. And it's been proven in administration after administration after administration. It's kind of an American thing. And that's been helpful to me in that when we do what we do to bring people home, pretty much I enjoy bipartisan support. I have Republicans and Democrats, independents, people that are willing to spend lots of time talking to us, helping us on Capitol Hill. And in fact, it was a bipartisan effort that helped create the Levinson Act, a piece of legislation that came out just a few years ago that actually gives us the criteria that we use to determine whether someone has been wrongfully detained by another nation state. So I think, I don't know if that really kind of scratches the issue on that question, but maybe that's how I would see it. We care deeply about our citizens and we're going to spend a lot of time and effort into bringing it home. In terms of maybe responding to Bruce's comments, I think I agree with pretty much everything that you said. I think one thing that you said I think that's kind of critical to my mind is that we wonder that if we're going to do a swap between someone like the Russians and it's going to be Brittany Griner for Victor Boot, are the Russians going to go out and take five, ten, twenty Americans over time? You know, remains to be seen, but again if you go back in history you'll find that these other states are going to take Americans regardless. Whether you do a trade, don't do a trade, whether you give something that could be considered a concession or not, these things still happen. And maybe the last thing I'd say is that maybe gently pushing back, we have a no concessions policy for hostages. You know, the president of course, when he makes decisions, he can kind of insert his authority into that equation, but with wrongful detainees we don't necessarily have those same restrictions. So we have a lot more latitude if a nation state takes an American than we do if say ISIS, al-Qaeda, or JNM takes an American, then we have to play by a certain set of rules that we just can't violate. Maybe I'll leave it there and let you react. Alright, so it's a good place, I want to ask my next question about non-state actors, because one of the things that's so striking is that for many years it was kind of government, it was the Iranian government taking the 52 American diplomats hostage. But since 73 we've seen the rise of non-state actors across the Middle East and elsewhere. And they have increasingly taken Americans, or just taken, whether it's Hamas taking Israelis and Americans or forward passport holders. How have the non-state actors changed the issue, changed the problem? I'll get both of you to talk about it, Bruce first, since you've been doing this for 40 years. Reflect for us on how the way of dealing with them, what their goals are, this is not a state, and of course there's no address to go to to say, hey, we'll broker government to government, these are underground cells. Many times we haven't actually known who physically held them for years. Well, I mean, you're right actually to talk about the trajectory of terrorism over the past 30 or 40 years and to put that in the context of hostage takings. I mean, what was the most prominent frequent terrorist tactic in the late 1960s, 1970s? It was actually hijacking airliners, it wasn't taking individual hostages, it was taking entire plane loads of people and turning that, again, to attract attention to themselves and their causes, turning it into a traveling theater. The PLO? People wanting to go to Cuba, for example, was apolitical as well as political, but yeah, the first 1968, in fact, you're right, despite many disagreements by terrorism specialists, basically everyone agrees the advent of modern international terrorism began in July 1968 when an LOL airliner and route from Geneva to Tel Aviv was hijacked to Algeria. And as probably one of the world's experts on terrorism and hostages, Brian Jenkins, another former Green Beret, said terrorists are more imitative than innovative. Once they innovate, the others imitate, and it became a thing. And of course, by the early 1970s, it had become so frequent, steps were taken to prevent terrorists from seizing airplanes, in other words, metal detectors, security searches and so on. Then terrorists turned to, let's say, blowing up embassies, was also something that was very common in the 1980s and the 1990s. You just have to visit a United States embassy anywhere in the world, and especially a more modern one. They're very difficult to access. They're not centrally located as they once were. They're in places that have very long setbacks that the street traffic can be controlled. So terrorists, basically, because we've gotten better at countering their traditional or the more typical attacks, have basically defaulted into what's kind of the watchword now, softer, more accessible, civilian targets, so individuals. And with global media the way it is, and with social media also the way it is in exerting pressure on governments, they know that the seizure, especially of an American citizen anywhere in the world, is guaranteed to catapult them one way or another into prominence. And also force the United States to deal with or to negotiate with them, which is a tremendous boost to their credibility in terms of attracting recruits and in terms of attracting support. To my mind, the most dangerous term has become that hostages are taken now, at least if they're American hostages. And again, we're talking more about terrorists than we are long for detainees by foreign governments. It's to brutalize and execute them. It's a heinous form of theater, what you might call ultraviolence. For example, ISIS knew full well that the United States, because of its policies, was not going to negotiate for the Americans they seized. Their value was these heinous acts of beheading. And what ISIS found and what is so chilling is that rather than repelling the world, it actually drove more recruits to them. I mean, ISIS was unprecedented as a terrorist organization, some 40,000 foreign fighters from at least 120 different countries. And they found that these beheadings, the major news networks might not show the blade on the neck, but just someone kneeling in an orange jumpsuit was enough to send this frisian of whore throughout the world that the terrorists found out they could benefit from. So I just want to add one little bit of color, because I think I witnessed one of the major turning points. I lived in Beirut for five years, and I was awakened by the bombs at the First American Embassy. Well, it was in the afternoon, but the Marine compound, the largest loss of U.S. military life in a single incident since Iwo Jima, both of them by the embryonic cell of Hezbollah, and then a second American Embassy all in the period of about 18 months. And what Hezbollah discovered very quickly was that by killing people, they were dead and buried. But if you took them hostage, you could prolong the drama, the human dimension of a crisis for much longer. It was much more effective for them in terms of propaganda than blowing up an embassy was. And there was a fundamental turning point in the mid-80s when Hezbollah started taking more Americans hostage. And it was partly in response to the fact that four Iranians had been taken hostage and were murdered by a Christian militia in Lebanon. And so when nobody paid attention, they said, well, we'll go take some Americans. And so there was a dynamic that it was unleashed, and you're absolutely right. When something is effective, then it's imitated widely, and that's been true all over the world. Can I add one thing, though? It's really important. In Iraq in 2004, the same thing happened. There had been this series of high-casualty suicide attacks, much like in Lebanon, 20 years before. And then just as everybody got used to that, the terrorists changed. In Nicholas Berg, a young American who had gone there to help rebuild Iraq was kidnapped. And then there was the spate of Westerners, Margaret Hassan and an Irish aid worker, for example. But it was the same thing. Once everybody got used to the mass casualty, they saw that they could keep something in the news much longer by seizing a hostage. Absolutely. So, Roger, could you kind of weigh in on the problem of dealing with non-state actors? Since there's no address to go to a government and say, well, we'll freeze your assets, and then you release Americans and we'll unfreeze your assets and so forth, how does the dynamic of non-state actors complicate, prolong, and how is it different than dealing with a government that holds hostages? I think for starters, we do have different rules that we have to play by. The non-concessions policy definitely weighs heavily on the hostage side of that equation versus the wrongful attention. On the good side, though, we have a very experienced group of people at the hostage recovery fusion cell that do nothing but this all day long. Whether it's JNM or whether it's Hamas or whether it's Pick Your Group, it could be a group in Yemen. It could come in various different forms. We have people that from the FBI, the CIA, the Department of Justice writ large, Department of State. I have people that represent this Department of State over at the HRFC, as we call it. And we spent a lot of time doing nothing but this. As Bruce brought up, in 2015, we just didn't really have that. In fact, if your loved one was taken by ISIS in Syria, in fact, Diane Foley, I think has a book coming out about what she went through and her son Jim was taken. She would call the State Department and that person who answered the phone would pass her to another department, pass her to another department, eventually over to the Department of Defense. Now there's a single point of contact. They can call us, we can work with the HRFC. And if it's a hostage case, the HRFC will have the lead in trying to develop those strategies if it becomes more diplomatic. That's when my team starts to press in and starts to work with the HRFC. But are there differences? There are. I mean, a nation state, to an extent, is an easier target to actually say, hey, we'll meet Geneva. Let's discuss what we're going to try to do here. I would say the non-state actors that we've dealt with, it's often been harder to start that conversation. And yet, in the last three years, we've brought people back from Mali. We've brought people back from Afghanistan. I think when I was working in the Trump administration, we brought people back from Yemen. So we find ways to do this, whether it's painful or not. I think on the diplomatic side, I really try not to worry all that much about who's the supporting state. I have a problem and I have to play the cards as they're laid on the table. And we work with the HRFC and the intelligence community to find different levers to use. But at the end of the day, I might have to actually deal with that non-state actor to come up with that solution because they might be the ones presenting me with an ask. So I'm just curious now. Can you tell us what non-state actors the U.S. has worked with? I mean, I think it's common knowledge that we talk to the Taliban on numerous occasions. It's no longer a non-state actor, though. It depends on who you talk to. The State Department has not yet recognized the Taliban as a nation-state. So they're not quite there yet, I think, in terms of how we approach them. I think the first time that I had a chance to talk to the Taliban, it was, gosh, I won't say about like over three years ago. So they were still definitely not nation-state status. I think we've definitely had to deal with Jainim. We've had to... Which is? Sorry, it's a group that's centered out of Mali in that northern Qaddaal region of Mali. We had an American that was being held there for quite some time. Jeffrey Woodkey, six and a half years. He came out just last year after six and a half years of being held hostage. And then, of course, we've had to deal with the Houthis at times. So I'm probably missing one or two here in my adult brain here, but is it harder? They're all hard. There's not one easy one. Whether it's a nation-state or whether it's a proxy group, a terrorist force, or whatever you want to call it, these are all really tough conversations to have. I feel, State Department I think does a lot of hard things, but whether you're negotiating a treaty or a border dispute or even trying to end a war, that's pretty hard to stop. But I feel like when we're trying to talk to the Venezuelans or the Russians about getting an American back that they've seized just to leverage us or to embarrass the United States, to my mind that takes it into the PhD level of hardness. But your country is going to do whatever it needs to do to get you back if you're taken. So I want to ask both of you a question that's kind of sensitive. And that is, is there different cultures, different kinds of governments that have taken Americans, taken hostages? Are there any common denominators? Is there anything that tells you about our times or that has evolved in terms of modern terrorism or extremism? For much of my life, there were Islamic extremists and so forth, and yet Islam is not a militant religion. When you look at the places that people are taken, is it that there's poverty or destitution or political repression? Is there something about the environment that makes people more vulnerable? I'll start with you, Bruce. Gosh, to my mind I think it's the differences between the hostage or the people seizing Americans. That's the most important. For the simple reason that if good old ordinary criminal gang or narco traffickers sees you as a hostage in Latin America, not only can you turn to Roger in his office and the American government to help, but you can engage private negotiators as well and you can pay as much as you want in ransom if you can raise the money. If it's a foreign government, you then of course can count on the State Department and various diplomatic pressures and exchanges, good pro-quoes can be made, but if you're seized by a terrorist, you're in trouble, because it's illegal to pay ransom. That was the biggest complication was the USA Patriot Act, when it was passed in 2001, I think it's sections 2339A and B, prohibits providing material support to terrorists. So until Roger's office was created, what the poor families of Americans taken hostage from terrorists found out is that even if they wanted to do something back-channel, they could end up in jail. Sometimes they were told by the FBI, if you do this, you could be prosecuted. So it's enormously problematical and it's enormously different, I think, if it's a terrorist group as opposed to a state or to ordinary criminals. That to me is the biggest difference. Want to weigh in on that? I may answer in a way that might be unsatisfactory, but I can't say like the countries that we worry about, the ones that seem to have at least that part as a common denominator and that they take people, we've identified them, the State Department, as leveled what we call a D indicator upon nation-states that do this, not terrorist groups of nation-states. And so the public, if they go to travel.state.gov, they can actually see the six countries that they probably shouldn't go to or if they go to, they should do so with extreme caution. I would say that in terms of really trying to parse out what to look for, I spent a lot of time doing that. I talked to people like Brian Jenkins to try to come up with an interesting, you know, kind of figure out what those trends are. We work with universities around the United States to do the same. We have what we call the hostage recovery enterprise. People in NGOs, the academic community, and of course people in the government to try to identify that, but I always remember what my two predecessors told me upon taking this job. I went to see Jim O'Brien, who was the first special presidential envoy for hostage affairs, and I sat down with him, had a great conversation for about a full hour and towards the end he said, Roger, you're a soldier. I know you're going to want to find the common way of solving this problem, but I'm telling you straight up, there is no cookie cutter for what you're about to get into. Every case is different. Quit trying to find those commonalities. Just hit every case straight on and figure out how to solve it. And I left and I thought to myself, he's absolutely wrong. I will find a cookie cutter solution to this. I was pretty confident I would. Then I went to see Robert O'Brien a few weeks later and had a one hour conversation with Robert. In the last five minutes, he said, Roger, as you're going out the door, I want to tell you one thing. There's no cookie cutter solution to doing this job. You're going to have to hit every case and take it as a tabla rasa. Just put it on the table and just figure out how to solve it. You're not going to find out with something that's repeatable to get the job done. And I knew that Robert O'Brien was wrong. So in the next two years, I came to the conclusion that they were right. There's absolutely no way to cookie cutter this. There are certain things that you can do to an extent, like we don't really just sit there when someone's taken just scratching our head like, oh, what do we do now? There are certain things that we do, protocols. We know who to talk to within the U.S. government. We have ways that react like a military battle drill. But when it comes down to figuring out what the other side's going to want to bring someone home to an extent, it is hard to find those trends because the asks at times are very different. I would say 50% of the time that I've had the chance to sit across from the other side and make that first offer, 50% of the time I'm usually stunned that with all the hard work that we did, our first offer was roundly rejected by the other side and that we were a few degrees off to the left and right. But really the job is to just keep going back and having these conversations until you can keep narrowing that gap to finally bring someone home. So what are the six countries? By the way, I did do a map of where Americans have been taken hostage I think on four different continents between 2010 and 2024. So what are the six countries? I am going to screw this up. I'm one of the people that if my wife tells me to get ten things at the grocery store, I remember nine. If my kids say that I need to do six things that day, I will only remember five. So I'm going to challenge myself and I'm looking at Sam to help me out if I screw this up. Or even Gordon, you probably know it. But we have China, Russia, Iran, Venezuela. I'm going to say North Korea and... Help me out, Sam? No? I don't think it is. Is it? Okay. There we go. See? Thank you. That's a good one. Travel.state.gov, everyone. Go ahead and look it up. But it's really our way of just telling people that they have to watch out. Having said that, I get calls probably every month where someone says, Roger, a friend of mine is bound and determined to go to Russia or Iran. Could you talk to them? And I'll talk to this person. And it will be like a 50-year-old person saying, you know, my mother's dying in Iran. I need to see her one last time. And I'm like, I wouldn't recommend it. And a lot of times they go anyway. And I would say that they truly are putting themselves at risk. Or somebody wants to go back to China for a wedding and I'm like, you might want to think twice about that and yet people go. But at the end of the day, we're Americans. We like to travel. We are journalists that like to go places and see things. We're researchers who want to go places. We join nonprofits that want to bring goodness to the world out there. And a lot of us just want to travel because we're Americans and I want to see the world. And, you know, we have to be supportive of that even though we try to do our best to warn people when they might be at great risk. So that's an actual segue to my next question, which is about in this globalizing world, there are a lot of people, more and more people who have dual citizenship. I remember, you know, in the 60s, 70s, when I was starting to travel, it was very unusual. I think Israel was one of the first places that we kind of legally, it used to be that your password said, you cannot be a citizen of another country. And because there were Americans who were fighting in the Israeli army and there were exceptions made and once you opened the door, the floodgates opened. And now you have people who, a lot of people who have, whether it's Irish passports or Cuban passports or whatever. And there was one American who was held in Iran released in December who had citizenship in two countries and it was a permanent resident of a third and he'd gone to Iran as many of the Iranian Americans have on their Iranian passport, got picked up and then expected the US government to get them out or the British government in the case of this, one with three, three, you know, residences. So talk a little bit about, you know, in this globalizing world when we don't, we think of ourselves as one citizenship but we may have, you know, because of relatives or parents or whatever, we may have passports of another country too and how that kind of complicates or adds a different dimension to the problem of taking hostages and who's responsible for winning their freedom. Well, it comes down to where we started this discussion is just the value of having an American hostage. You can have another passport but it's basically because of the blue American passport that you're being seized and because it activates the United States government and it plays exactly into the dynamic that the hostage takers want. I mean, many suspects it's making it easier for them that someone can travel to a country on, let's say, the original passport, their birth passport, I think they'll be fine but the fact that they're a dual citizen is known to that government and makes them just immensely valuable. I mean, they're a pawn in a bigger game. That's unfortunately the reality that we're discussing too when it's brought down on this very personal level. It's very difficult to have a hard heart or a cold heart and consign them to a fate of decades in Evian prison. I mean, it's unthinkable really and as I do, if you still believe in the goodness of Americans and the effectiveness of American government, there's a demand that something be done and there's an expectation I think that our leaders will do something and I think on the part of the leaders they want to do something. The risk of stating the obvious, there is a vast difference between the approaches of the Trump and Biden administrations to any number of things but the one thing that they both administrations have been riveted on, the fact that Roger is a holdover, is proof of this, is freeing Americans overseas. So this is a good, I mean, it's a good thing that our leaders have this commitment. It's not a good thing that Americans are taken but the problem is dual citizenship is not going to protect you. Actually in some respects create a false sense of security. Yeah, exactly. So I want to talk a little bit about the human dimension, Roger, and to what degree do you end up spending, you know, what percentage of your time dealing with families and the trauma that they're going through and to what percentage of your time is spent dealing with, you know, how do we get them out and also, because I've known several people who've been taken hostage over the last half century, you know, families try to do their own thing sometimes. They think because of their connections or their resources that there is some way they can get their loved ones out. So talk to us a little bit about, you know, the two different sides of your job and the kind of, those who go in with the best intentions in the world but that makes it sometimes a little bit more complicated. Indeed, so I spend probably at least two hours a day talking and interacting with families. Sometimes it's four hours, sometimes it's one hour, and that's every day. So Saturday, Sundays, holidays, there are people that I've talked to every day because at a certain point they just need that touch. Other people, you know, maybe it's not as much. I have seven case officers who work geographical regions. So in addition to me talking to families for two hours a day, they are doing the same, often with, not with the same families. We have probably, I said, I think I've had probably 70 cases since I've been in this job. It's currently, as I said, hovering from 2030. I've probably been to 95% of their houses. So when an American has taken, let's take it in Russia and their loved ones live in Massachusetts, within seven to 10 days I'm on a plane with one or two of my people. We fly to Massachusetts and sit down in the home of that person or that family to, number one, learn more about the case, hear more about the person that's been taken, understand what the family's going through. Number two, say, the government is now going to put their hands on the steering wheel and put their foot on the gas. So if you've been worried about your loved one, go to bed tonight knowing that we've got this. But number three, say, we're going to partner and work together on this. We're going to declassify information to make sure you know what's going on. And give you updates whenever you want it. Most families want it weekly. We call them weekly. If a family wants to talk daily, we call them daily. If they just want updates when something's happening, we'll honor that. But I would say a lot of the, I'm not sure about a percentage, but a lot of the families also end up coming to Washington, D.C. And when they do, we try to give them a nice soft-worn welcome and that they get to come to the office. We try to take them over to the White House, connect them with meetings and such. But we hire people that are compassionate, passionate and empathetic. I tell the people when I'm hiring, I'm like, look, if you can't pick the phone up at 10 o'clock on a Friday night and talk to a family who's in distress, and it happens. A family reads something in U.S. news and World War II is a bad example. I think it's something in the online press, like New York Times, and they'll read a report coming out of, say, Russia, for example. And they'll call us late at night saying, I just read this. Is this true? What's happening? I can't get to sleep. And my people have got to be able to sit there and cry with them and hang out for two hours on that phone call. And if they want to call seven hours later and it's only, like, whatever, 3, 4, 5 in the morning, pick the phone up. If you can't do that, you can't work in my office. You need to come to this office in this game with empathy. We tell families this is not government as usual. We are not going to be cold and distant. We are going to partner with you. We're going to bring you in. We're going to cry, laugh, talk, and solve this together. It doesn't prevent them from coming in at times with a blowtorch to, like, take it on me and, like, hammer me for not getting the job done. I expect that. I welcome that. I ask them to hold me accountable. I'm not afraid of that. But I want them to feel that when they talk to us, they can have that informal relationship with us to let us have it. I think everyone knows what I'm talking about. Like, if I was ever mad at any of you, it would be very formal. I'd probably be very gentlemanly and let you know I was not happy with something that was going on between us. If it's a brother or sister, you guys just start yelling and screaming. Why? You love them. You're close. And that's the relationship we want to have with those families out there. We want to be that close. We tell them a lot. We bring the families in very close and give them a sense of what's happening. Why? They never leak. Why would you leak? If you leak, it could cost your loved one a chance to get home. And we also tell them that there will come a time if this goes well that we won't be able to talk to you because it will be so classified and so sensitive. And when you call me and say, Roger, what's going on? And I say, remember I told you there would come a time when I can't tell you? We're here right now. That doesn't mean you're going to get their loved one back, but that means that there's some movement that's that dramatic that you can't really discuss it. But we at least let them know that moment's coming too. Remember that I think I'm looking at Gordon, you know that old phrase is special forces. You can't surge trust. You can't. You've got to be there with the families because eventually they're going to hear what you say and know that you're telling the truth. When they first meet you they're still wondering that if I say nothing's happening, am I lying? Or am I telling the truth? After a few weeks or a few months they realize no matter what comes out of my mouth whether it's good news or bad news because we deliver bad news too the US government's going to give them a straight shot tell them the truth and try to solve this case. In terms of the families that try to go their own way you know sometimes they're right. You know we've had a few cases where I've been dying to jump in and a family says hold off we have this and we honor that. And on a few occasions the families are able to by just taking a moment using some connections pull the lever or two that gets someone out. I would say however more often than not that doesn't happen and we pause to let the family try to work it out but eventually a family will you know in many cases the family will come to us and say look this is not going the way that we thought it's taking too long we don't have the levers that we expected and when they do that we usually try to give them the government perspective and usually is you know kind of maybe taking what Bruce was saying there's a bigger game being played it's not that you made the local judge mad and you can call your brother in law who still lives in that country usually there's a geopolitical game taking place and what's going to happen it's going to require nation state here and nation state there to figure out how we're going to pull this off and we talk to the families but at the end of the day we have to respect the fact that they may have to come to that decision by themselves over time. I wanted to open up to your questions too we have until we have about 10-15 minutes if you have questions raise your hands I just want to say that I was briefly held hostage in Angola during the Civil War and my father was a law professor one of his students who formed a military went to him and said I'll go free her thank god my dad said no because you know the idea of freeing me from an angle in the middle of a Civil War you know it was like a non-starter so anyway I think we have a question back here and yes please okay is this on can you comment on what type of profile are you know which American hostages are being taken I mean you've already with the D list you know indicated that there's geographical considerations there also may be opportunity considerations you know the role or the position of the person being taken you know whatever you haven't talked about there I'd love to hear more about you know what the criteria are for either bad actors or nation states to take a hostage what are they considering or is it just any American I think we both could probably answer that should I take the first shot maybe in fact all three of us could probably so give me about 30 seconds I'll turn it over to everyone else it's different in different countries it's hard for me to say this is it however when I think of some of the people that have been taken in places like Iran it's someone who is probably in their 35 to 50 year old time or how old they are I'm not very articulate not forgiving educated probably very well connected and you have to think that already living in Iran there are over 10,000 Americans who are dual passport holders they're American and Iranian citizens that live in Iran and they need one of those people there and yet who are they picking it's that educated person who went to a conference to speak or who went to start a business or who went back see the parents but if I were to say what do they look like educated, connected usually a little not wealthy but maybe in a little higher economic class and that's who should probably be most worried about that you can go to other countries like Venezuela or Syria or even Russia and that's where it gets into more like it could be anyone but I wouldn't mind hearing what you all say targets of opportunity in many respects it's someone who's literally in the wrong place but it could be the wrong country at the wrong time and just as Roger said diplomatic relations of foreign policy imperatives and just is completely unknowingly swept away I mean it could be someone doing research or a backpacker but again it's at least from the terrorism point of view and that's my specialty I can't speak about wrongful detainees it's it's really the value of probably this is the case it's the value of that individual to a particular group and it's you know it's possible in many cases to anticipate why and when that value at that time is so important that it happens for many of these groups it's also terrorist groups it's low risk they control the countryside they can hide people in many different places it's impossible to find them they can move them to distant locations so it becomes a very low cost way of either earning money if you're a criminal or if you want to make a splash and get your terrorist or guerrilla group in the news you seize a foreign hostage because they have much more value let's say than one of your fellow countrymen that's the other reason too so it could be just being a foreigner Americans probably at the top of the list Britons, Necks, Europeans and so on in other words western countries with money with influence and with the media that's going to report on the fate of the hostage I think that's critical and probably before your office that must be one of the biggest debates that hostage families would take do they go public with it and you focus a lot of attention on your loved one but at the same time you're raising their value there's a lot of publicity it means to the terrorists or the hostage taker that they even bet more value than you even imagined and you then complicate as soon as a helper does it hinder I'm not sure that there's always a right answer to this it's always so situational and specific I'll answer that because I've had many many friends who were taken hostage I knew all of them one was a Catholic priest one was a journalist one was a very good friend of mine I used to run an American University of Beirut track and go have a drink with him afterwards he was dean of agriculture and he'd gone off to see his daughter graduate from college in the United States he came back and the limousine that was the president of the university was sent to pick him up and his bullet thought they had the president of American University of Beirut instead of the agriculture dean but he happened to get a ride in the wrong car and he was held for six years Tom Sutherland and so they look for those who are human stories and there was also another big turning point which I witnessed that in the 80s there were all men who were taken and so I was at the time one of only two women reporters in Beirut one was the wife of husband who'd been there and so the news organizations thinking they were all men started sending women producers and women journalists out because they thought they were safe they weren't and there was a woman taken and that was the turning point so it was less gender safe that you were and it used to be that journalists were safe too because we would report those stories and when Terry Anderson was taken chained to a radiator for seven years he had the office next to mine in Beirut that lifted Charlie Glass at ABC and that lifted Jim Foley then became in Syria so a lot of my friends have been taken hostage who are journalists and so we've seen the gradual evolution of who's taken hostage you know you talk about an age group you know Terry Waite was the British negotiator with Iran on hostages and he was taken in hell for several years so they look for those who are sometimes high value in government like the Americans and the Beirut or the Tehran Embassy but most often they look for those human stories and that's why there is such vulnerability and why nobody is safe so okay way in the back hi my name is Ina I have three questions put your mic closer to your mouth okay oh so much louder so I have three questions so you talk about all these countries that have taken Americans hostage right do you have commonality across the board when you are trying to rescue them you know try to take them out of the hostage and bring them back home because I notice there are two either they are communist based countries or Islamic or Muslim countries so that is the first question do you have a common practice the second question is I'm a Taiwanese American and I focus on China more and I always heard that a lot of terrorist attack that happened in the Middle East or to the Americans or to the Europeans indirectly or indirectly linked to the Chinese government and I am curious what other percentage of all the cases that we have encountered during this period that are actually linked or indirectly linked with the Chinese government thank you I'll take the first question and say that what my two predecessors said and what I've experienced is I would love to find tons of commonality that would allow me to just get into something and do it a lot quicker with a better sense that I was going to succeed but you really do have to take everyone separately so whether it's someone in China whether it's someone from a good Greek rush up or Syria you really just have to start from Toddler Ross and just try to figure out how we do tons of homework we work with the intelligence community to build up all the profiles to have an understanding of what the country might want to get a sense of whether between culture, religion who the negotiator is going to be what the senior leaders are like but at the end of the day you in a way have to just meet with the other side and figure out what it is that's going to take to free this American and from that point try to talk them into something that's obviously going to be a little less than what they've asked for on the second one I'm going to actually take a buy on that because I have the pleasure of not being the policy guy it's something I get to say to the other side when I go meet with say the Venezuelans they want to talk about this policy option, this policy option I get to say whoa hey hey I'm just the hostage guy I'm happy to take that back to the policy team and we can chew on that for a bit but so I'm going to take a buy and say in terms of that I really have to just take the cards that are played and put on the table and just play those but you might, Bruce or even we've had your question thank you very much over here hello my name is Daniel my question is how do you leverage relationships with partners and allies for example Switzerland in negotiations with Iran or how do you balance those relationships when there are other countries hostages involved, thank you you both want to deal with that it's hard to see you actually we love working with other countries to be honest, I know in the past we worked heavily with the Swiss they were protecting power in Iran they did a lot of hard work in trying to come up with releases that took place in the Trump administration certainly I think in the Biden administration it's commonly reported that we worked with Qatar and the Swiss but Qatar to try to find some solutions that might work to bring back the Americans that came back last September we've also like when I think about Iran we've had conversations with the Brits other countries that have people that are held there but I would say as we go through that first day or two of trying to figure out what to do when someone's taken we are taking a look at the multilateral space and I would say that three years ago when I took this job I did not know who to call in Germany if something happened who's my counterpart who's my counterpart at the Vatican who's my counterpart at the Mormon church who's my counterpart in Australia or Austria and what we've done is try to build this network frankly of all the good guys out there all the speha like characters either in big organizations or countries and even build the network of the dark network of all the bad guys if something happens I can call a bad guy and say hey come on just cross your border just deport him let's not do this again and that network I think has been very critical it's speeding up the process we're not there yet I'm going to fly to Munich in fact the second this is over Gordon and you're going to want to talk to me I'm leaving I've got to catch a flight at 10 to Munich and I'm going to meet with five of my counterparts on the sidelines and we're going to discuss not only things that might be happening in Gaza but how do we improve our processes and work together as the hostage guy for their respective countries and I think multilaterally we're trying to find ways to not only come up with prevention and deterrence but if the big horrible problem goes down it's a speed line not just between the secretary of state and a foreign minister but the people that may actually get sucked into the business of negotiating and the people that have been doing it so we can like compare notes and playbooks I've called a colleague or two on a few occasions and said look I've got a huge problem an American was just taking this African country you've been successful there before what am I missing and then I've actually flown and met these people and said okay let's spend a few hours over some beers and discuss what it was that gave you the edge and by the way could you introduce me to this person if you would be okay with that so I think that's critical we definitely are not trying to be unitary actors and I would even say when I'm looking at an American that's being held in the country I will often go to another country and say you have one or two people that are there do you want to partner and try to get this our people up together and I would say we're not quite there yet either but over time we will get there if I could just add something to your thought I'm not in government so I only know what I read in the newspapers or read elsewhere but it seems to me over the years there have been reports of other countries in order to gain favor with the United States in order to support the United States or in order to get something from the United States have deliberately interjected themselves in a very helpful way in freeing apostages so that's another way that diplomacy works it's not necessarily as Rogers described him or US officials going to a country sometimes a third country coming to the United States and offering to be of assistance very often behind the scenes not wanting any attention or publicity but they're in the good graces of the White House and that counts for a lot I have to say I'm just flabbergasted that we hadn't had those kind of networks created until four years ago given the history no I'm just really yes but I think there's also when you talked about the geopolitical side of it that it's the economic partners just like we go to the Chinese and say please weigh in with the Houthis on the Red Sea issues that we look not necessarily just who are our political allies but who has economic leverage over a country and weigh in so we have I think time for one more okay perfect so I guess I was curious how has social media or just the 24 news cycle more generally changed how hostage situations need to be handled Bruce you want to take that? I will just tell you that I'm as a journalist having covered this for half century I'm always infuriated by my government that I can get an anonymous call from a group that claims it I can go I've interviewed Nazaral ahead of Hisbola, Hania and Mashal ahead of Hamas I've interviewed the last six Iranian president I had a working breakfast as supreme leader and I can't get my own government to talk to me and so people kind of Bruce mentioned the media will cover it and I always get angry at stuff like that frankly the US government sucks at weighing in and offering guidance and so forth whereas the other players other governments are very good at social media or providing information that none of us have and so people like to blame the media and we are literally a medium between those who know and the public which doesn't have access and so I get pissy about this but Bruce go ahead well I mean this is the interesting thing is that years ago people did used to blame the media and say that terrorists were doing things to get media coverage well now just as Robinson they don't need necessarily the media coverage they get it over social media and it hasn't you know private means not traditional news sources and it hasn't you know it hasn't slowed or stopped the process down in fact I think terrorists themselves terrorist organizations I should say themselves have shown themselves to be the most adept and the most effective at harnessing social media and harnessing diverse sources of media to manipulate and exploit for their own ends and if anything they've benefited certainly from the media revolution that has empowered everyone to communicate to state their opinion to share ideas and often to break stories often the stories are broken by people who are on the scene with their cell phones and frankly we'll get Roger to have the last word on this but the reality is the U.S. will have a public diplomacy program or something that puts out some pablum tweet that you know doesn't really address anything and you kind of scratch your head and there's hasn't been I think a very effective U.S. program that tries to counter this except to say oh these are bad guys or well let me do an interesting don't forget during the Cold War we had the United States information agency we actually had an agency that did this and then we decided after the Cold War we didn't need to have the same investment in public diplomacy and I don't think we've ever caught up and this was always the case during the war and not just not just about hostages this is like on every subject but Roger as the representative of the U.S. government here gets the last word thankfully so I just agree with both of you I would say that we my office spent a lot of time talking to the press I'm looking at one member of the Wall Street Journal and I've spent hours with this gentleman talking about what we do but we don't shy away from the media if you were to type in my office, SPIHA or my name you'll just say whether it's in the print form whether it's on TV what have you we talked to local radio stations we talked to local news corporations in other countries we're constantly trying to get the message out and a lot of the things that are important to us what we do shy away from is all the details so what are you doing right now in this one negotiation, I'm like I don't want to negotiate in public we have to keep some things behind the scenes and with families, this is not what you asked but I want to tell you something anyway and that is families will come up to us and say should I talk to the media and there was this thing it probably was true back in the olden days where the U.S. government would say don't talk to anyone because it will raise the price it's too sensitive right now what do you need to do like if you feel like in your heart you need to go to CNN or the Wall Street Journal and talk about your loved one do what you got to do if it's really going to crash a negotiation that I have up and running I will call you and beg you not to but if I'm not going to do that if it's simply going to make my job harder or if it's going to make me uncomfortable do it we're the government face to face we're on a zoom call and he tells them the same thing like look if you got to go on CNN and even get mad at the U.S. government to say Roger Carson is not doing his job I welcome that that's what the press is supposed to do that's what Congress is supposed to do it's oversight and so I'm never going to shy away from the media unless it gets into the dirty details of an ongoing negotiation I encourage the media to reach out to us and hold us accountable and I actually owe a response and we ask the families to do the same thing do what is in your heart and we'll figure it out after the fact so now he's going to return my calls I've never not turned I look at my media I've always entered them, right Sam? yeah yeah so I want to thank you all for coming fascinating conversation on a really important subject I'm very grateful to Roger and Bruce again Bruce's great book and Roger's great work so thank you all thank you oh you're here so I'll give you a card so what's the middle initial RD Carson's RD it's got yourself? it does