Roger Carstens: Do hostage deals risk making problems worse?

0:00This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. If journalism is the first draft of history, what happens if that draft is flawed? In 1999, four Russian apartment buildings were bombed, hundreds killed. But even now, we still don't know for sure who did it. It's a mystery that sparked chilling theories. I'm Helena Merriman, and in a new BBC series, I'm talking to the reporters who first covered this story? What did they miss the first time? The History Bureau, Putin and the apartment bombs. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.

0:59And what they had to do to pull it back from the brink. The bomb, Kennedy and Khrushchev. All episodes available now, wherever you get your BBC podcasts.

1:13Welcome to Hard Talk from the BBC World Service with me, Stephen Sacker. My guest in this interview recorded on the 5th of March has just left a job which presented him with potentially life-changing dilemmas on a daily basis. For almost five years, Roger Carstens, a former elite soldier and State Department official, was America's special presidential envoy for hostage affairs. His task was to engineer the release of US citizens held hostage or wrongfully imprisoned in hostile territory. He was appointed by Donald Trump in his first term, and unusually he was kept on by Joe Biden throughout his presidency.

1:55His tenure came to an end with Trump's return to the White House in January. By then, he had secured the release of more than 50 Americans from a host of hostile countries, including Venezuela, Iran, and most notably Russia. From his first day in the job to his last, much of Carsten's focus was on the families of those in captivity. He reached out to them, communicated constantly with them, and tried to show them that America was prioritizing the freedom of their loved ones. But of course, every release came with a price. And some of the deals Carstens engineered, particularly with Russia and Iran, prompted critics to argue America risked being seen as rewarding the hostage takers in a way that would encourage more of the same.

2:41Carstens' job is now done, but the debate goes on. What is the liberty of one captive individual worth? While Roger Carstens joins me now on the line from Washington. Welcome to Hard Talk. Thanks, Stephen. Appreciate it. Well, it's great to have you on the show. You've had a few weeks now to reflect on this extraordinary job you held for almost five years of being special envoy for hostage affairs. As you do reflect on it, do you think you fundamentally changed the way America responded to this challenge of captive citizens overseas? Stephen, I would say that it wasn't me. It was really a group effort.

3:20We say that bringing people home is a team sport. Truly, we do have a fundamentally different approach now to bringing Americans home. And that approach was developed starting with President Obama, nurtured by other presidents since, but also with the aid of our Congress on both sides of the aisle, Republicans and Democrats. It was aided by nonprofits, NGOs, companies, even the media. A lot of people put their time and effort to coming up with new ways to not only get people home, but think about what we're willing to do as a nation to make the sacrifices required to free our Americans. You say the shift started with Obama, but actually it seems to me Obama was representative of the old thinking, because it was quite clear through Obama's administration that he, the president and his team, believed it was fundamentally wrong to negotiate with hostage takers and offer them potential prizes, which the belief was would simply encourage them to do it again.

4:18Well, you know, it was under President Obama that we created the current thing that we call the hostage recovery enterprise. You know, frankly, the United States failed to bring many Americans out of Syria that were held hostage by ISIS. So President Obama ordered a hostage policy review in 2015. And that review resulted in the creation of my office, an office that's housed over at the Federal Bureau of Investigation called the hostage recovery fusion cell. And then a small group at the White House called the hostage response group. And this hostage recovery enterprise created by President Obama is essentially the architecture that we've used and tried to stack other tools onto over the past many years to bring Americans home.

4:56You know, the timeline is interesting because, you know what, one of the most emotionally engaging, moving interviews that I've done in recent times is with a lady you know very well, Diane Foley. Oh, yeah. Whose son, James, was a journalist who decided to tell stories from inside Syria when part of Syria was controlled by so-called Islamic State. He ended up being captured by Islamic State in 2012. And tragically, in 2014, IS beheaded him, murdered him. And they released a video which was truly shocking to anybody who saw it. Now, Diane Foley said to me that she was infuriated by the way she'd been treated by the US government.

5:37I was treated terribly, lied to, patronized, even threatened, she said. No one was accountable in the administration. How important was her testimony to you when you took on the role? That was huge. It was fundamental. In fact, I told Diane that I consider her to be the mother of this whole hostage recovery enterprise. I don't think my position would have existed were it not for Diane agitating and working with the administration and Congress to not only create these positions, but also codify them in U.S. law. But here's the most important point. Diane would call this Department of State and say, my son's been taken.

6:12Who do I go to? And she'd get passed around because there was not a central office. And if she ever got to someone who was kind of the central office, that person would say, well, ma 'am, I can't tell you anything because everything we're doing is classified. And then more to the point, when we finally were able to maybe direct some attention toward Diane, she would ask, what are you going to do to get my son home. And the government was unable to give her a response because the United States didn't talk to terrorists and we weren't really able to do anything to bring people home back then. So her frustration and the frustration of a few others is what's created this whole, as we call it, the hostage recovery enterprise.

6:47And Diane's thumbprint is on every successful return that our country has had since 2015. And it isn't one of the basic truths that in times quite recent, officials would regard the families of those held captive as, in some ways, part of the problem, an obstacle, an awkwardness, because, you know, their insistence on knowing what was going on wasn't helpful when covert negotiations may or may not have been taking place. Their emotion wasn't helpful when government officials were trying to be hard-headed and rational. Did you take that view or did you view families and loved ones as absolutely part of your job to deal with them and actually hold them close?

7:29I ran to them. I definitely held them close. I would say that when we were working on a case that was very classified, we would declassify top secret and secret information in order to brief the families so that they know what we were doing. Of the 70 plus cases I've had, I've been in every one of their living rooms. I'll fly anywhere on the earth to sit down with a family of someone held and spend four or five hours getting to know the family, getting to know their case, and then telling them that we're going to partner. We're going to work together to bring their loved one home. And that's going to be daily calls, weekly calls, developing strategies, giving them briefings.

8:05But we wanted to make them feel like they were partners in this process. And then I promised them the U.S. government was not going to keep them at arm's length. In fact, I would tell them the only people that I ever hired were people that were compassionate, passionate, empathetic, and frankly, workhorses. The standard being that if a family member calls you at 10 o 'clock on a Friday night crying because they read something in Russian media and they're worried about how it affects their son, we only hired the people that were going to stay on the phone for two or three hours and actually cry with them.

8:35And so the families, they can smell when someone from the government's being fake, when they're not being real. And we committed to being up with them on this fight and crying with them and holding them until we get the job done. So families, to me, are fundamental to the return process. We know that other governments, like the French, for example, negotiated with IS and actually handed over significant amounts of cash to get their nationals out. The United States never did that, but you weren't on board at the time. Would you, you know, in the hypothetical, in the moral sense, would you see a problem with handing over cash to a group like Islamic State to get an American citizen freed?

9:13Absolutely. And it would be against the law. We are not allowed to give concessions to terrorist groups. We have a little more freedom when we're dealing with nation states. For example, if Russia takes one of our citizens, we're able to have a little more, I would say, a wider right and left limit. But with terrorist groups, it's much harder. Having said that, I've negotiated with terrorist groups to bring our citizens home. Let's get to nation states then. You've done deals with the Afghan state, such as it is, but you've also done deals with the socialists in Venezuela and with an Iranian regime, which is regarded in the United States as a sponsor of terrorism.

9:48And in all the cases where you've got nationals, American nationals out, you have actually given those regimes what they wanted in terms of releasing their nationals, some of whom had been convicted of very serious crimes, and also in the case of Iran, giving them access to billions and billions of dollars, which they wanted from erstwhile energy deals. Any regrets about the prices you've been prepared to pay? Yeah, let me hit let me hit two things real quick. Number one, these deals are always tough. It's always weighing the moral imperative against the moral hazard. You usually go home after a deal trying to celebrate it.

10:25But you look in the mirror and you're a little sick to your stomach because you know that you probably had to do something was tough to do. But having said that, jump into point two. And Iran's a great example in that Iran And you stated that we gave the Iranians access to billions and billions of dollars. What we essentially did was take, you know, over six billion dollars held in a restricted account in South Korea, moved it to a much, much more restricted account in Qatar that's overseen by not only Qatar, but the U.S. Department of Treasury and made that available to the Iranians only for humanitarian goods, which it's always been there for.

10:58You're you're never able really to deny another country access to humanitarian goods. And since the Iranians have not chosen to use it for humanitarian goods, not one dollar has been spent. So picture that. We got five Americans back and it cost us nothing other than moving money from one restricted account into a much more restricted account. That, to me, was actually a good deal. Well, it may have cost you reputational damage at the time because a whole host of politicians and other critics in the United States. I'm going to, Stephen, I got to take you on that reputational damage. here's the reputation I want to have, that if you hold a blue passport and a nation state or a non-state actor takes you as a hostage, essentially, your country is going to find a way to get you home.

11:41That's the reputation I think we want to have, that our citizens are important to us. And you used a very interesting phrase, said you have to weigh up the element of moral hazard. Let's talk specifically about one deal, which seems to me, arguably, you may have got the balance on moral hazard completely wrong. That is, in 2022, you were intimately involved in a deal between the United States and Russia, which saw one of the most notorious arms dealers in the whole world, Viktor Bout, who was based in Moscow and other places too. He was released from US jail in return for the female basketball star Brittany Greiner, who'd been imprisoned in Russia for possessing small amounts of cannabis oil.

12:25Obviously, it was a real achievement to get Greiner out. But you released back to Vladimir Putin, as I say, a guy known as the merchant of death because of the scale of his arms dealings to some of the worst groups in the world. Did that cause you any loss of sleep? Oh, every deal does. But a few facts I'll throw your way. Victor Boot had already served 14 years in custody and was getting out in 2029. Four years from now, Victor Boot would go free. That's four years, if he chooses to go back to it, of dealing arms to some of the worst groups committed to violent acts across the world. It's always a possibility that someone's going to go do something.

13:08But I know it's a fact, and the fact is that Brittany Griner's free. But more to the point, let's look at it this way. Victor Boot, when he went to prison, that was in the day of flip phones. The second he was arrested, his network disappeared. There were probably three or four people trying to carve it up and take it from him. Now he's coming back. He's not going to walk back into his already ready-made network. That network's long gone. In fact, if you take a look and dig in a little bit, you'll find that the people who used to give him arms, all dead are in jail. The people who used to sell arms to, all dead are in jail.

13:36And it's hard to just walk back in and say, hey, guys, I've been gone for 14 years. I'd like to jump back into the weapons sales business. But more to the point, I don't want to be cavalier about it, that we did an exhaustive study with all sorts of experts from the intelligence community, law enforcement community, so on, so forth, to try to determine that if Victor Boot was released back into the ecosphere, would he hold like a threat to the United States or its partners and allies? Should he go back? And we concluded that there was a low chance of that happening. And so, I mean, you are hitting me on a good point.

14:09It's still a moral hazard. You're trading someone who you want to get punished. You're trading someone who there's a possibility they'll go back and do nefarious things. But the one thing's for certain is that we got an American back and that person's now free and they're living their lives. let's talk about one other russia u.s deal and that came much more recently in the summer of 2024 which saw some very high profile people imprisoned in russia u.s citizens including evan gershkovits the reporter from the wall street journal brought back to the united states but in return there were eight russians who were serving prison terms for espionage and in one case a violent murder in germany i'm talking about vadim krasikov who was convicted in a german court of murder.

14:52He was a professional assassin. And the deal that, again, you were intimately involved with saw him returned into the hands of Vladimir Putin. Again, the guy who appointed you to your job in the first place, Donald Trump, thought that was a terrible deal. He called it an embarrassment. And a whole bunch of other Republican politicians piled in and said that it was fundamentally betraying America's interest. Did you, again, even consider that you might have got that wrong? You never know if you get it 100 % right. I don't have that crystal ball that allows me to see into the future. You look back, and right now I can tell you that there are 16 people that are now free, to include Evan Gershkovich and Paul Whelan, also Russian political activists, German political activists.

15:38So they're free right now. And again, it's weighing that moral imperative against the moral hazard. In this case, we opted to push for that swap. and get these people home. They're never easy decisions. What do you think Vladimir Putin reads into all of that? I think most people around the world would agree that Gershkovic was in prison on trumped-up charges. But in the end, Gershkovic being held by the Russians gave the Russians a very powerful card, and you had to acknowledge the power of that card. Isn't the lesson there that Putin might well think, you know what, that's a strategy that works for me?

16:11Yeah, the strange thing is the numbers don't back that up. I mean, during my time under both President Biden and President Trump, we cycled through about 70 cases, got the majority of them home, and yet our numbers really never went up. It's kind of a, it goes against common sense. You would think that if the United States made deals with the Venezuelans, the Chinese, the Russians, et cetera, et cetera, that people would start taking more of our citizens hostage and holding them as diplomatic pawns, as bargaining chips, and yet the numbers don't support it. I can't wait for a PhD student to look into this, to maybe get into the psychology of this, But our numbers aren't going up.

16:47So the thought that by making these trades that you incentivize other people to take more people, the math doesn't support that. Some governments, and I'm thinking of the UK government here in London, still adamantly insist, at least in public, that no concessions will be made in these wrongful detentions or hostage taking situations. Do you think that that public stand is now just wrong? I mean, I can tell you just in terms of the United States, I would never ever want to really comment too much on what another country does because countries have different national interests that they want to support and feel.

17:22But I think from our side, you have to come to the conclusion that either you make some sort of deal or they just don't come home. They're just not going to release an American held in a foreign prison when they can feed them 43 cents of rice per day and just hold on to them for 14, 20, 30 years. So to get that person home, you're going to have to do something uncomfortable usually because the other side usually asks for something extremely impractical, if not impossible. And that's where you have to wrestle with this. Are we willing to, number one, talk to the other side, and number two, bargain, try to come up with the best deal, and then number three, execute that deal?

17:59And so far, I think our country's been willing to make a lot of these deals. Heck, going back to the 1950s, every administration has had to make accommodations or find ways to bring Americans home. And sadly, it's not for something simple. Right. Let's talk a little bit more about Donald Trump. He appointed you, but he's obviously not kept you on in his second term. Just a very quick question. Were you disappointed about that? And why do you think you weren't kept on? Well, you know, I'd hate to get into a why, because you never know what senior leaders think. I would say that when I found out that I wasn't going to continue on the job, frankly it just hit me in a millisecond i felt like hundreds of thousands of pounds being taken off my shoulder because to do this job it requires every part of you it's it's 24 7 365 it's cost me personally in terms of my relationship with my family with others because when you do this job you just can't afford to leave anything back because if you do someone's not coming home and so i i didn't make the choice maybe if anything that was a blessing i didn't decide to leave.

19:04So in a way, it's interesting the way you put it, Roger, but maybe there's something a little deeper going on here. Maybe Donald Trump didn't think you were the guy to handle what he wants to do with Russia. I mean, what is really interesting is that a US citizen, Mark Fogel, was released by Putin just a few days ago. And that deal was done not by your successor in the Envoy for Hostage Affairs office, but it was actually done by Steve Witkoff, who is Trump's special, actually, Mid-East envoy, but clearly goes much further than that. He flew to Moscow. He had a three-hour session, one-on-one with Vladimir Putin, emerged from it saying it had been a fantastic conversation.

19:47He even referred to what he hoped was going to be a burgeoning friendship with Vladimir Putin. And sure enough, Mr. Fogel is released into the care of Steve Witkoff. You didn't work like that. What do you think of the way Trump is working and handling Russia in particular? Well, it's interesting. I think I might have worked like that. You know, again, our track record, we brought 65 people home during my time in the office. We flew around and talked to a lot of people and brought a lot of people home. Did you go to Moscow? Did you covertly go to Moscow? Didn't go to Moscow. Pick a few other countries.

20:21I went there. But more to the point, Here's the bigger lesson. We had a saying in our office that it doesn't matter who comes up with a plan, who conducts the negotiation, or who gets the credit as long as people are coming home. That's why if someone were to say, actually, Roger Carson, you brought X number of people home, my real answer is I didn't bring anyone home. I was a part of a team that brought a lot of people home, and that team included members of Congress, members of the media by shining awareness, members of different parts of the U.S. government, individuals like Governor Bill Richardson.

20:53It takes a whole community to bring people home. And I salute the people that the Trump administration has brought back since he assumed office on the 20th of January. I'm cheering him on from the sidelines because it doesn't matter who brings him home or how they get home. Right. But I just wonder whether you think I just wonder whether you think that Trump showering Putin with carrots and beating Zelensky with a stick is a part of the story, which is seeing Putin release people like Mr. Fogel. Well, it's funny. One thing I did learn that I didn't know about seven or eight years ago, and that is, and maybe I should have, as a former special forces officer, I always knew that there were things taking place that you would not really find out about until years later about why those things happened.

21:38And I would comment about whatever is happening behind the scenes since Trump took office. I just don't know what those are. We may never know. We may find out like 13 years from now. But the end state's clear. And that is Americans came home. And so rather, I mean, in a way, it's hard for me to comment on what it might have taken to get them home because I don't know. But more to the point, yeah, things are done at very high levels that are kept away from people like me now that I've left government. And I'm OK with that. I just want to see people come home. To end, I just want to have a thought about Gaza.

22:11You were not personally, I believe, intimately involved with efforts to get the U.S. nationals who were taken by Hamas on October 7, 2023, out of their captivity in Gaza. But we have seen that Donald Trump has prioritized this. But Donald Trump appears to believe that projecting strength rather than anything else is the way to handle this situation. You know, he talks about all hell being unleashed on Gaza if all hostages aren't released. In that situation, do you think that Trump, with his insistence on this strength that he will project and that the world must see in America and his leadership, is that the most effective approach?

22:59Well, you can hate this answer because it sounds like I'm running away from the question. But there are so many variables that go into hostage negotiations. To me, it's almost like war, poetry, love. There are things that you just can't enumerate. And sometimes it comes down to gut feelings. Sometimes you're not sure which lever to push. Is it going to be the carrots or the sticks? And you have to feel it in the moment. So it's hard to know whether his strategy is going to be successful. I certainly hope it is. I can tell you under my time, though, I spoke to not just the families of the 12 Americans and not just the Americans that came home, but I spoke to over 100 hostage families that had no association with Americans held in Gaza.

23:39And it's heartbreaking. I still wear Edan Alexander's dog tags. And I'm going to show you my chest here, Steve. And I hope you gird your loins here. But I still wear Edan's dog tags around my neck. And I hope every day that we find a way to get these people back. And if Donald Trump tries something different, maybe it'll work. And again, I'm cheering him on from the sidelines. I want Americans to come home, and I'm certainly hoping that this president is successful. Roger Carstens, sadly, we're out of time. I thank you very much for joining me on Hard Talk. Thank you. Grateful for the invite. Thank you, Stephen.

24:13If journalism is the first draft of history, what happens if that draft is flawed? In 1999, four Russian apartment buildings were bombed, hundreds killed. But even now, we still don't know for sure who did it. It's a mystery that sparked chilling theories. I'm Helena Merriman, and in a new BBC series, I'm talking to the reporters who first covered this story. What did they miss the first time? The History Bureau, Putin and the apartment bombs. Listen on bbc.com or wherever you get your podcasts. I am Nina Khrushcheva, the great-granddaughter of Nikita Khrushchev, the leader of the Soviet Union in 1962.

24:54And I'm Max Kennedy, the nephew of U.S. President John F. Kennedy. We explore what was a terrifying moment in history. The story of the Cuban Missile Crisis. How close the world came to nuclear war. And what they had to do to pull it back from the brink. The bomb, Kennedy and Khrushchev. All episodes available now, wherever you get your BBC podcasts.