BRIAN FINLAY: Welcome everyone, and thank you for joining us here today. I’m Brian Finlay, President and CEO of the Stimson Center. I see we have some recognizable faces to our, to our guest.
You have made a good choice with your time over the course of the next hour. You need to hold on to your seats for this discussion with our, with our special guest. Before we get to that, for those of you that may be new to the Stimson Center, we are an international foreign policy think tank that focuses on some of the most nettlesome and challenging issues, from international security to joint prosperity around the globe. And we are a little bit of an oddball organization for think tanks in that we don’t just think the big thoughts, we actually roll our sleeves up, and we try to be very practical in the field.
So that may mean on the waters of the Mekong Delta, warning fishermen, farmers of water and food, insecurity challenges to their prosperity. It may mean walking the holes of the UN, or boardrooms in Silicon Valley, or it may mean working with peace missions, peace operations missions in Sub-Saharan Africa is an organization that, as I say, that goes beyond thinking to big thoughts and really tries to create tools that improve the lives of individuals around the world.
It comes really as no surprise, then, given that very operational mission, that at some point or other we would have run across this guy in our global mission. Mickey is a familiar face. I know to most of you that are tuning in. He is the executive director of the Richardson Center. He was born and raised in Israel, served in the IDF. Before emigrating here to the United States, where he has served in a number of lesser think tanks, and also other NGOs across the country.
He is, of course, I think best known for being on the speed dial of every American citizen that travels to complicated parts of the way. He’s probably tired of that joke, but it happens to be true, and you will hear some of the really remarkable stories. His business is really extracting. Americans that are political prisoners that are held under suspicious circumstances, in in some of the most complicated countries around the world, and given the unfortunate state of hostile relations that our country has with so many around the world, unfortunately, business is very good for Mickey, and you’re going to hear a little bit about that as well. He’s been involved in some of the most high profile cases — Brittany Griner, Danny Fenster, Otto Warmbier, Trevor Reed, and many, many others that are captured in this book, and you can look actually right on the screen, and I encourage you before you leave to walk up to that screen and take a picture that will link you to the book, and I encourage you to purchase the book I get.
No, I get no royalties from this, by the way.
MICKEY BERGMAN: But I am very appreciative, as my publisher is.
BRIAN FINLAY: I only get to make his appreciation, which is meaningless to me, which is meaningless to me! But really, it reads like a Tom Clancy novel, and you will see why, when he begins to tell some of the stories that he has been that he has been involved in.
Mickey, welcome to the Stimson Center, and thank you for all you do for Americans around the world. We’re so grateful to you.
Mickey and I reconnected after the release of an American journalist named Danny Fenster, who had been captured by the regime in Myanmar. The adrenaline was still pumping, and after that you had just arrived back in Washington.
And so I want to start with that story, Mickey, because to me it really best encapsulates the work involved in not just kind of identifying candidates for potential extraction, but all of the work that is entailed on the front end and the back end in in bringing American hostage on. So can you tell us the story about Danny?
MICKEY BERGMAN: Yeah, I thank you, Brian, and thank you all for for coming here. And the story of Danny Fenster is actually a pretty good one in describing so many of the elements of what we do just to set the level on this one. Myanmar — Burma — has gone through a decade long of a transition, an attempt of a transition from a military rule into democracy, a successful transition for the first few years leading into the elections in 2015, and the results and the taking over of the NLD, the Aung San Suu Kyi’s party over there.
And in 2021 the military took over, removed Aung San Suu Kyi from power, put her in prison house, arrest and and took over. So that’s kind of the the context of where all of this is happening. And Danny Fenster was taken at the airport as he was trying to leave the country about 4 months after the takeover of the military. And the circumstances of how he was taken were kind of it sounds, or it appears to be, a security person or passport. Officers just saw a white guy trying to leave the country, and said, ‘Let me just hold him back for a little bit to see whether my boss wants to do anything with it,’ and once they googled him they figured out that he used to work as an editor in a publication that was absolutely legal before the coup, but became illegal after the coup, even though he was not working there at that time, but that was enough to keep him in the system and escalate the situation.
And I heard about it through a friend of his cousin through a Facebook message because we don’t — our names are not out there, and we don’t advertise. And so she sent me. She went to camp with me, the summer camp 24 years ago, and she says, ‘Hey, Mickey, I have a friend on Facebook that has a cousin that that seems to have been detained. I remember you do something around this. Can you help?’
And I said, Yeah, I’ll be happy to. But I need to be in touch with the family. And that’s an extremely important point, because we don’t work for the government. We’re a non-government, not-for-profit organization. We work only on behalf of families at their request, at no cost to them.
BRIAN FINLAY: The family does not pay you.
MICKEY BERGMAN: The families do not pay us, and we don’t accept donations from the families. Not during not after none of that. It’s it’s kind of confusing when you, when we talk about the business and clients. But it’s important to make it clear. And we raise our funds elsewhere.
But that led me to meet with Brian — Danny’s brother — on the phone within hours of the of the news breaking of the family, finding out that he’s been detained. So that’s kind of the concept of where that came in. And one of the biggest things to figure out is that even though the US has an embassy in Myanmar since the coup there, and the takeover of the military government in Myanmar, the U.S. Government does not talk to them.
So if you don’t talk to them, you’re not going to be able to figure out how to get an American back home. So we knew we had to step in to figure out a way and a lot of the work that we have done in Myanmar in the transition period — assisting, sending delegations, doing a lot of exchanges, doing some training for political leaders — not only, for instance, Suu Kyi’s party, but also for the military party — helped us get that familiarity and a basic level of trust which is so needed when you want to intervene.
And in this room we have Steve Ross, who was who was running that program for us over here. And actually a big fight that we had, with Aung San Suu Kyi, a public fight in 2018, over the crisis in Rakhine State, around the minority Muslim minority called the Rohingya. That public fight made us
more popular with the military which allowed us ironically to enter into the country.
But when you’re going to a country like that, you can’t go and say, ‘Hey, we’re here to negotiate the release of a political prisoner.’ Because I look like, ‘What political prisoner? We don’t have political prisoners. We have criminals.’
And so you have to figure out how to how to design a program that will do that. And that’s where Steve became extremely effective to say, ‘Hey, we’re in the middle of a pandemic. Yes, we had vaccines here.’ There were no vaccines in in Myanmar at the time. Let’s put a humanitarian mission around assistance with vaccines. Figure out how to help the people of Myanmar through this. And that was really the way we entered it. So again, it’s another element of, you go in. You have to find an engagement reason why you go in.
And then, once we went, once we got the invitation, which was about 3 months after Danny was taken, we had a really peculiar situation where the State Department — who we work with, even though we don’t work for, we coordinate — kind of turned on us and said, ‘Please don’t go,’ and asked us to delay.
Now I have to be very, very clear about this. They didn’t ask us to delay because they’re bad people. They’re not. They’re very good people. They didn’t ask us to delay, because they didn’t want Danny Fenster to come home. They wanted Danny Fenster to come home.
They wanted to do everything they could to bring him home, but they were actually worried. That’s my analysis of it, that if we go to Myanmar and we meet with the military leader who’s now the head of the country, and asked for Danny Fenster, that he will ask for something in return that the U.S. Government does not want to give, and therefore it will be boxed. And then there will be an equation that locks Danny in.
That’s a genuine fear. It’s not how we do our work, but it’s a genuine fear, and we think that’s why they asked us to delay and delay and delay, and we did delay for about 2 months, because we didn’t want to interrupt anything that might have been going on towards this release. But then we realized that’s not going to happen. And so we decided to go regardless, and when we went we had one meeting at the end of our visit between Governor Richardson, our team, and the leader.
And we knew that that meeting is going to be the meeting that actually counts. And within one meeting we had to figure out how we make those two connect. And Governor Richardson had a talent to do that with a lot of people that we absolutely disagree with in the world.
But we needed an extra thing. So we studied the military leader a lot. We studied his personality. We looked for things that can create an emotional attachment between them. And we figure out — we watched videos of him, we did all sorts of analysis. And we gave the governor basically a roadmap as he walked into as we walked into that meeting that we were not going to raise Danny Fenster’s issue in front of anybody else in the room, except for the end of the meeting will have. He will ask for five minutes, one on one.
And in those 5 min he needs to become best friends with this guy enough to feel like he can ask for personal favor to do this, and and whatever it is that we did, and I described it in the books, in detail, in the book in details. The approach on this was a personality approach. It was an emotional approach. It worked because the meeting that was supposed to be a five-minute pull aside ended up being a 45-minute, one on one between the very personal, that resulted with the leader promising Governor Richardson that he will give him Danny Fenster, but needed a couple of weeks.
And the condition was that nobody can know.
And so we had to come back from that visit, knowing that we have a promise, not being able to talk about it with anybody, including our own government. They thought that we messed up, and including Danny’s family.
who thought we messed up. Because, as we were flying back, the reason why the leader needed the extra time was he needed to accelerate his trial. He needed to give him a sentence, and he sentenced him for 11 years in prison.
So to the outside world it looked like we went in, we did not get Danny home, and we cost him 11 years of his life, and we had to figure out how we stomach that, because if we’re right, it’s not gonna matter afterwards.
And it didn’t take two weeks. It took one week. We got a text when we came back, saying, ‘Your special package is ready.’ We had to put a very, very quick mission — return mission — that ended up being for a lot of reasons. I’ll just give one thing I’m sorry — I told Brian before, like you ask me a small question, and you get a really long story. But that’s also hopefully what the book is enjoyable, for we managed to get a private jet to do this, this leg from Qatar to Myanmar and back, because there were no commercial flights in the middle of the pandemic.
But we figured out we didn’t even have Danny’s full name, or his date of birth, not to mention his passport, and we couldn’t ask our State Department for it, because they didn’t know that we’re going to pick him up, and we can’t ask his family, because they didn’t know that we’re going to pick him up.
So we did the only thing we could. We asked for the military government of Myanmar to send us his passport. Which they did.
Then we had — the second problem was that that was the middle of pandemic. We were going to put him on a commercial flight from Qatar to the US. Danny was definitely not vaccinated. We had no idea if he was. If we were sick and we needed a PCR test, not a Myanmar test, a PCR test that would be acceptable by an American airline, we don’t have the facility to do it.
And so we ended up relying on our Qatari partners to provide us. An ambulance on the tarmac in the four-hour window that we had with him in order to test him and give us the PCR test that will allow him to go on the flight before we miss that window.
And then the last, the last part of it was kind of funny, the owner of that jet. It was a Lebanese owner of a jet. That’s the only jet we can find in a short time that will be willing to do it. And he looked at the manifesto, at the, at the manifest. Sorry, and he saw four people going in, five people coming out, and he asked the operator, ‘Who is that fifth person and operator?’ ‘Oh, it’s this prisoner they’re rescuing.’
He thought, ‘We’re going with his plane guns blazing to a rescue.’ And he said, ‘Guys, you have to provide me a signed letter from this Department of State that this is legitimate.’
It’s like we can’t give you that because the State Department doesn’t know that we’re going but we signed I signed an affidavit to say that guns are not involved in this, and we promised him that we will provide release papers in English before we board the prisoner. Thank God, he agreed, and we ended up having.
It’s ironic, in a way, but it’s the real life. You can’t make it up. A Lebanese plane with a Lebanese crew carrying a former Israeli defense Forces officer to rescue a Jewish journalist from an anti-Muslim government.
BRIAN FINLAY: You mentioned the US Government. So you also said you work for the families. You do not work for the US government, but you have to coordinate with the US government absolutely, and so talk a little bit about what that relationship looks like. And why don’t we just leave this to the US government? Shouldn’t we just leave this all to the US government? Why do we need you?
MICKEY BERGMAN: Yeah. Well, first of all, I wish we didn’t need us.
We have — Let me give an example to kind of to make it tangible of why this is needed. Let’s imagine we’re looking at now, we have a bunch of American prisoners in Russia.
We have all sorts of other tensions with Russia. And let’s say, the Americans and the Russians decide, ‘Okay, we’re going to meet together. We’re going to talk just about the prisoners. We’re going to figure out how to do this.’
We have five diplomats from the US. Five diplomats from Russia meeting in a 3rd country, and sitting together.
Before the even the first sentence is said, the weight of the war in Ukraine, the weight of nuclear instability, the weight of world order. All the vast policy — bilateral policy issues — that we have with them ways on the shoulders of everybody, and they’re diplomats.
If they hear something that is antagonist, they need to protest. They need to do so. There’s certain suits and flags that we wear in this that prevents us from any way, no matter what the intention is, from keeping the conversation insulated into this issue.
When we step in on behalf of a family, in this case, the Russians can talk to me about Ukraine as much as I have no authority whatsoever. And also I’m not a diplomat, so I don’t need to get offended by something that they blame me. For I can let it roll, and we can keep the issue insulated, and refine and define a pathway of what it looks like to bring somebody home that will be acceptable for them.
Then we need to sell it
to our own government. Now, this is one way of what we do. There’s ways like Danny Fenster, in which we figure out how to bring somebody back ourselves. But most cases, we do a lot of the legwork. We experiment with ideas. We figure out what the pathways are. And then we need to make sure that our government really wants it.
So that means that we’re negotiating not only with the captors we’re negotiating also with our own government at times.
BRIAN FINLAY: Which is the Brittany Griner example.
MICKEY BERGMAN: Which is the Brittany Griner and Trevor Reed’s examples. And of this and many others, and you know Xiyue Wang and Michael White during the Trump administration, etc. So our relationship with the government is one. That is that we need to spend as much time investing in it as we do with captors, not because they’re equal in terms of the intentions, but because at the end of the day — and that’s one of the things that I hope is you will get if you if you read the book — it sounds like a book about foreign policy and national interest. It’s not.
It’s about people. And it’s about relationships. It’s about emotional intelligence. It’s about investing in the people. And, trust me, I don’t always get it right. I fail a lot, and I failed in the last few years specifically with our own government because there are things that you take for granted, and expectations from your own friends and colleagues that are in the government, that I shouldn’t have taken for granted.
They also deserve that same appreciation, the same understanding that we deploy and empathy that we will deploy to others And the best scenario of this — we have a maturity of a personal relationship with individuals in the White House, in the State Department, Department of Justice, everywhere that is involved in something like that — to know and to trust that our intentions are the same, to bring Americans home, even if we disagree in the pathways to do it.
And those disagreements sometimes become public. Sometimes they seem to look public. But they’re not. It’s really more of understanding that we have different roles and we coordinate a little bit more. And sometimes they’re very collaborative. So Danny was an example in which it was not collaborative at all until the end. Then we kind of reconciled and figured out what everybody was trying to do on this.
But there are other cases in which — it’s like Venezuela is one of the cases. It’s not included in the book, but we collaborated very well, and with the American administration on this, because the end of the day they’re the ones that need to do, they have what the captors want. And unless they are on board, it ain’t gonna happen.
BRIAN FINLAY: So let me try to provoke you with this criticism. This is a critique that I’ve heard of the US Government when it acts alone in cases. And I’ve heard this criticism of the Richardson Center as well –that while these negotiations to free individual Americans is a great thing for the captive, obviously, and for the captain’s family, what you’re doing, Mickey, is just creating an incentive for other regimes to grab Americans in order to extract something from the United States.
MICKEY BERGMAN: And that is a criticism that of course, we hear a lot. It also resonates. I have to say it makes sense. Oh, my God, you’re you’re helping those captors get what they want out of the kidnapping. Therefore you’re incentivizing them to taking more. Emotionally, it resonates very well, it makes sense.
Where I push back on this — and again, by the way, there is no question – in our world and in this work, just like the rest of our world, there is no the right silver bullet, value-based answer.
We’re talking about compromising on values constantly. We’re talking about competing values and morals, and we have debates and internal conversations about what is right, what is wrong in each case — a lot of it — but it’s a struggle.
But here’s where that criticism to me fails, and where I attack it back.
Two levels: One, and I believe it is — I’m sorry it comes out strong — intellectually lazy.
And second, it’s morally bankrupt, and I’ll explain why.
Intellectually lazy, because if you actually spend time looking at data — at research — on this, and there isn’t much research, so I can’t say that it’s comprehensive. But the research that does exist. One of them is ranked cooperation. Brian Jenkins, who’s a 50 years experience of counterterrorism, has done a fantastic research around this. He’s a mentor of mine. I love him, and the data shows complete ambiguity between the ways and the times in which deals are conducted to bring back Americans, and the number of Americans that are taking after complete ambiguity doesn’t mean that it helps doesn’t mean that it doesn’t help. But just data doesn’t show it.
And I can add to that. And if I look at the cases of Russia and Venezuela, I can argue, can create an opposite narrative.
Before there was Evan Gershkovich, there was Brittany Griner. Before there was Brittany Griner, there was Trevor Reed. Before there was Trevor Reed, there was Paul Whelan, and when the Russians took Paul Whelan they wanted a deal. How do I know? Because I talked to them. We negotiated. We passed it. That was the Trump administration. They didn’t go for it at the time, for you know, not because Trump didn’t want to bring Americans, but because it didn’t fit. It looked like he was giving something in return. He didn’t want that.
But when the Russians realized that Americans are not negotiating over Paul Whelan, they took Trevor Reed.
And when we didn’t negotiate over Trevor Reed, even though they wanted to — how do I know? Because again they worked with us on this — they took Brittany Griner and guess what? We were negotiating.
And then we got Britney Griner back home. Trevor Reed is back home. Paul Whelan is still there and negotiation stalls again.
They take Evan Gershkovich.
So I can argue that actually the lack of negotiations can also be attributed to taking in the risking more Americans. Same goes in Venezuela of the CITGO 6. And then it built up over the years. Now we have no Americans anymore in Venezuela, thank God!
So that’s the intellectual part of it. Sorry I told you I long stories for short, for so short questions.
The second one is more important to me, and that’s the moral bankruptcy of that thing, because at the end of the day, when we’re saying, oh, we shouldn’t negotiate with them because it will incentivize taking more Americans, we’re talking about deterrence.
But we’re talking about building a deterrence policy on the backs of innocent Americans that are being held abroad. That is morally bankrupt in my mind.
When we have hostages and political prisoners held, we need to do everything we can as long as it’s not existentially threatening the United States. And that’s a conversation that we can have about some of the people that are being released on these. We need to do everything we can to bring them home.
And it’s our responsibility, once they’re home, to come up with the with the deterrence policies that can actually help mitigate this issue going into the future. But I have to tell you again. My job is to get people home, and we do engage in a back in the commissions and stuff like that, and recommending deterrence policies as a country were very bad at building up the deterrence when we don’t have a problem because when somebody comes home we celebrate — we’re so excited, for good reasons — and then we forget about it. And when we don’t have a problem we don’t want to extend or expand resources to build deterrence. And that’s where we fail.
BRIAN FINLAY: So let’s stick with the morality for one second, and I want to bring up the case of Brittany Griner. So in the case of Brittany Griner it was not a Danny Fenster. It was a prisoner swap — it was one for one with the Russians, and they did not release.
They released Brittany Griner, a WNBA star. We did not release a Russian hockey star. We released Victor Bout, who was the Merchant of Death. He’s a bad dude.
How do we square? How do you square? How does the Richardson Center square that, you know, on the moral plane, Mickey. You know, we got back Brittany Griner. Yeah, that was our objective, but we released a pretty bad dude.
MICKEY BERGMAN: Correct. We released a bad dude, and not only that, I’ll even add to your criticism or the the challenge even more because when we were trying to negotiate for the release before Britney Griner was even taken, it was just Trevor Reed and and Paul Whelan. And at the time — and this was before the war in Ukraine — we went to the Russians, and we talked about it, and there were kind of a sense of understanding.
President Biden just stepped in before the summit between the two presidents and the Russians said, Okay, you know what, we can figure out a way in which again, it’s not an exchange, but it’s a reciprocal gestures of humanitarian release of, if you release Konstantin Yaroshenko, who is a Russian drug pilot that was held in Connecticut. That ended up being released for Trevor Reed.
And we will give you Trevor Reed and Paul Whelan in return for Konstantin Yaroshenko and Victor Bout.
And our response to that was, we laughed.
And the Russians looked at us like, ‘Why are you laughing?’ And we said, ‘Look, guys, give us something we can win with.’
Give us something. Victor Bout? I can take it to the White House. I’m not going to be able to convince the White House. Give us somebody else that we can win with
And the Russians, at that point, add another name: Roman Seleznev, who’s sitting serving 27 years in prison in North Carolina for credit, fraud.
Bad Guy stole millions of dollars from Americans, hundreds of millions of dollars from Americans 27 years, you can figure out. His father is also a Duma member in Russia. And he himself, Roman, is suffering from health issues. There’s a ground for this. That was something I felt like I could win with.
Why am I saying that? Because we tried to do that. This was in the early Biden administration. We couldn’t get them to agree to that. And so we failed on that one. And once the war in Ukraine started and we went back to the Russians, and at that point we went to Russia in the eve of the war. We were there when the war started in the Red Square. That’s when we were negotiating again.
That was end of February. Brittany Griner was already taken for a week. We didn’t know, because the family didn’t tell us, and the White House didn’t tell us so. We thought it was only Paul Whelan and Trevor Reed. We’re negotiating there. And then the Russians came back to us. It’s like, Yeah, it’s not the Seleznev anymore. It’s back to Bout.
And here’s something that is so important for me to express. And this, there’s I’ve been doing it for 18 years. There’s a lot that I don’t know, definitely part of what the governments do that I don’t claim to know.
But there’s two cardinal truths that I’ve learned about this —
Number one, the deals never get better over time.
They never get better over time. We tell us those stories we create narratives spins. Whatever it is, they never get better over time. That’s number one.
Number two? Time is the worst for the prisoners and the hostages.
Now we all know that now, for a fact, because of the hostages in Gaza.
But it was true about Russia, it was true about Venezuela Trevor Reed. By the time he came back he was coughing blood in in a Russian prison. We thought it was active tuberculosis infection which is treatable here, but not in Russia, in a prison, in the middle of a pandemic that might be deadly. So there’s urgency in this. It’s disease, it’s violent incident or a breakdown and suicide attempt.
All three have happened in my life and my experience to prisoners. So there is that urgency that comes to it. So these are the two countries. So so it’s just an example of how we knew that the deals are not going to get better before we could squeeze the Russians out of Victor. But to get Paul Whelan and Trevor Reed at that point we couldn’t. and we had. That’s when we came into that — that’s for our own moral conversations, saying, Okay, we could have gotten without Bout. But now we can’t. And we had to face reality just like we’re facing now in Gaza like. There’s no better deal than what is on the table, and the cost is tremendous.
But the lives of the innocent people is worth it. And then the decision within, whether to release Victor Bout at the end of day was, of course, the Department of Justice and White House decision, and their calculations in in my mind at least the way I explained it to myself, the guy has served 14 years in American prison.
There were some questioning by the judge who sentenced him. She didn’t like the minimum mandatory sentence that she was provided with, that she had to give because he was — there was a version of this that he was actually leaving the business when he was caught. He was caught in a sting operation by the U.S.
But having even pushing all that aside. I know it sounds like I’m drawing at straws in order to justify something, because sometimes it feels that way — because it is the case, being very honest — having spent 14 years in American prison, even if he wants to go back into business, everybody in the business assumes he’s an American asset.
And eventually I believe that that was the assessment of the US. Government, and said he actually poses no danger to us.
Because even if he wanted to, he needs to cross a line of credibility. I’ve been 14 years in American custody. Everybody in this world is a very paranoid world. He must have shared information with the Americans. They might have implanted him with something. So that’s the way I think about it.
BRIAN FINLAY: So I want to talk to you about the strategy that goes into these rescues, Mickey, because what comes across so well in this book is that there’s no standardized plan that you follow. Every one of these is a bespoke operation for you.
And you talk about fringe diplomacy. You talk about kind of the art of staying in the shadows and keeping it — keeping these individual negotiations as far undercover as you possibly can for as long as you possibly can.
But then there are times when you have to engage Denis Rodman and borrow on his relationship with Kim Jong-Un to try to rescue someone, right? So can you talk a little bit about, you know, how the strategy comes together, and particularly the public versus private. When do you know when to pull the levers?
MICKEY BERGMAN: And that is something again, with an example to make it very tangible. We call this part the theory of return, and that is the script or the story that we are able to tell ourselves when we take a new case of the shortest pathway of how a hostage comes home.
It’s called the ‘theory of return,’ and I’ll give an example on Gaza of how it happened. October 7th. We get approached, I got phone calls from about 67 different families at that time when he started in trying to help, and the theory of return in Gaza was very based on 3 different assumptions. Basic assumptions number one. Israel and Hamas do not communicate directly, it has to be mediated, and it can’t even be in proximity.
Talks like you and I sit here. Hamas is over here. Israel is on the other side. It’s much more remote than that number 2.
And there are four countries in the region that can influence Hamas. None of them can control Hamas Hamas is a very proud, independent program. Okay? But four countries can influence them. Iran, Turkey, Egypt, Qatar.
Okay. None of these countries have an interest particularly interest in helping Israel. But at least two of them have a very vested interest in working with the United States.
Therefore, the theory of return. October 8th was, we need to make this an American priority at the Presidential level. It needs to be an American story, an American priority.
So once that’s the case, the mediators — and for me it was the Qataris, because they’re such a solid partners of ours over the years — can go to Hamas and solicit proposals of how to resolve the hostage situation. And if those proposals are even half decent — and they’re they’re never good but they’re at least half feasible — then the American administration can help the Israeli Government feel as comfortable as it needs to be in order to sign and implement the deal. That’s the theory of return.
But for that we had to deploy a very public side of it, we needed to make it. It wasn’t enough that the President would call the Qataris and whisper in their ear, say, Hey, guys, it’s important to me. It needed to be very public, because the Qataris needed to go to Hamas and say, ‘We know you have a fight with Israel. We have a problem with the US. You need to help us solve that. How do you know that? Look at the President.’
And so there’s a very public thing. So that’s an example of how those get and get used. But the principle on this, because there’s always this balance when the family is confronted – and I wish it on nobody – but when you wake up in the morning, and you realize that your loved one is taken in the country far, far away, which you typically don’t know much about, the first instinct is for the government to tell you, ‘Don’t talk about it.’
And again, it’s not because they’re evil or anything like that. But they explain to you, ‘Don’t do that because it will increase the price.’
That’s not a valid argument in my mind, because by that time the captors, if not a day later or week later. They know exactly who they have. They know exactly what the price is. But when you don’t create public pressure, our government has more lead. The way of playing with it and figure out what to do. And sometimes it makes sense. Sometimes it doesn’t
So the first principle is to understand that as long as you believe that your government is doing what you believe is right to bring your loved ones, there’s no reason to go public.
But if you believe they’re they don’t, the only purpose for you to go on the media is to pressure your own government. And here goes the second part of it — The captors, whether it’s Putin, whether it’s Maduro in in in Venezuela, there is nothing that you, as a family will can say that will convince them to either release your loved ones or hurt them.
They simply don’t care what you have to say, because the reason your loved one is taken has nothing to do with your loved ones.
The reason is the US Government, and that they’re the target of this. So they’re expecting the family to go all nuts. So, in other words, you only have an audience of once of one when you hit this, and that is the US. Government.
So that’s within the dynamic. So when we work with families, we kind of, we dismiss the myth about keeping it quiet for the sake of the price. But we don’t encourage them to run to the media. The media needs to be very purposeful, and there needs to be a very specific objective. There’s the right timing for it. In the cases of Trevor Reed, for example, on Brittany Griner, even a meeting with the President.
You can argue and fight for a meeting with the President, but the medium of the President will be meaningless unless while you meet with the President, there is a decent proposal on the table, because if there isn’t a proposal, the President can’t do anything about it. So you hold, you build it up, you get ready, you get ready. But only once we know that there’s a proposal, there’s an option. There’s a decision by the President to make.
That’s when you push to meet with them.
BRIAN FINLAY: So for those of you online, you can submit questions to stimson.org/questions. I’m going to warn those of you in the room that I’m going to turn to you and solicit questions from this. But before I’m going to ask you one more question before I turn to these folks.
There are so many high-profile cases that are documented in this book, Mickey, from Brittany Griner to Trevor Reed. You’ve mentioned them. There’s one storyline that that you may not realize is a common thread
throughout this that clearly haunts you, and I suspect you wake up thinking about the case of Paul Whelan on a regular basis.
So tell us a little bit the story of where we are today with Paul. What are the conditions he is living in like? And are we any closer to getting Paul home?
MICKEY BERGMAN: So you’re right, Paul Whelan is haunting me because we have — we collectively as a country, and us as people who are advocating for him on behalf of his family — left him behind four times.
First, when the Russians wanted to do a one for one with Furoshenko and him during the Trump administration, and that didn’t go second time when they wanted to do a two for two with Paul, with Trevor Reed and him before the war in Ukraine, and we couldn’t get the Biden administration to pick it up and advance it.
Third time was when the war was starting, and we came back with two options of a one for one for Trevor Reed or two for two with Paul Whalen and Trevor Reed, and the only thing we were able to convince the White House to go for was the one for one for Trevor Reed. Paul was left.
And for the 3rd time, and then, of course, with Britney Griner. When we came back from Russia in September, before the Griner deal release. The Russians also offered us a two for two or one for one, and we refuse, we told them at that point, we’re not taking a one for one option back to the White House because we can’t let that happen again, and so we only came back with the two for two.
Didn’t help us. It ended up being a one for one Britney Griner at the end in December, and Paul Whelan was left, so four times he was left behind. And look, the assumption here in Washington — and it might be correct — is that Putin, even if you give him what he wants in terms of a deal, and we more or less won’t know what he wants in terms of the people that he want and how he wants it structured, Putin does not want to do anything in an election season that will make President Biden look good. That’s the assumption.
Here, therefore, the assumption is that the window of opportunity will open after the elections, no matter who wins the elections. By the way, my argument is twofold — Number one, just because of what I said about the two cardinal truths, we don’t have the luxury of time on this one even if the assumption is correct. I can’t just sit back and say, ‘Okay, so we’ll wait 4 months until the elections.’ No, we have to work on it. We have to figure out if there’s still ways, and we have some creative and ways and things of, we think that might be possible before the elections that we need to to work on, and we’re working on on them as we speak.
And the second thing is that even if the assumption is correct, if we wait until November to start working on it, we would miss the window already, so we need to work on it now. We need to set up the parameters. So it is easy after the elections again, no matter who wins.
If it’s a continuation of the Biden administration, or if it’s a Donald Trump administration coming back in, it’s two different dynamics. But that transition time is still a really valid opportunity to, I believe, bring both Paul Whelan and Evan Gershkovich, and there are other Americans being held that are less famous there also. Alsu Kurmasheva is one of them. She’s a Radio Free Europe and a detainee in in Russia, and there’s others. We ourselves are working on 6 different cases at present, at present in Russia alone. Yeah.
BRIAN FINLAY: Let’s take some questions here from the audience. We’re going to start up at the front here with my colleague, Barbara Slavin. If you would just identify yourself and where you are from, and ask a question rather than make a statement, I think, make you would be very grateful, Barbara.
AUDIENCE QUESTION – BARBARA SLAVIN: I shall do that, Barbara Slavin, distinguished fellow at the Stimson center. I will just say long time admirer of Bill Richardson, who I knew and adored. He knows it.
Couple questions. How do you deter this practice, which has become a strategy for a number of countries around the world without preventing Americans, particularly journalists and others from traveling to these kinds of places when it’s often their work to go to those kinds of places? And I speak as someone who went to North Korea 3 times in Iran 9 times. And second question –
MICKEY BERGMAN: Please don’t become my clients.
BARBARA SLAVIN: I don’t want to, but a good friend of mine just got out recently. So yeah, and I had another. Never mind.
So how do you deter?
If you could talk a little bit about dealing with the Iranians, and what has become a hostage industry there, at least since 2014, if not earlier. And then the last question is, why won’t the Israelis take the ceasefire deal and let those poor people out? Why wouldn’t it take the ceasefire and get the hostages out? Why has Bibi been prolonging this war? Thanks.
BRIAN FINLAY: You’ve been pretty vocal on this deterrence issue, and you mentioned this in the book, and I’ve heard you say this in the past, Mickey, that you know the work doesn’t end when the hostage is released right, and you mentioned you alluded to it earlier that you know we need to put the work into, as Barbara said, you know, to set up the deterrent.
MICKEY BERGMAN: Three questions. Yes, all right. First, deterrence. It’s a hard question to answer partially well, first of all, because the answer is not easy. But there are answers for that, and I’ll try and touch one of them. But one of the reasons why it’s so hard for me to talk about it, because my job is to get them home.
My job is not to do the deterrence, because you can’t do both at the same time. So there needs to be different arms and different things. As I mentioned, I am engaged — I know it’s a lesser organization than Stimson — but CSIS has a commission that I’m one of the Commissioners on. It is a group of experts in counterterrorism and hostage diplomacy of sorts, if you can call it that, in trying to make recommendations of how to do deterrence, but one of the things I will tell you — Sanctions don’t work in these things.
If you talk about, you’re right. Look, there are countries that have like every now and then there’ll be a hostage there. That’s it’s not fine, but it happens, unfortunately, but then there are repeat offenders. People who actually look at it as statecraft. Iran, Russia, Venezuela until lately. Now they don’t have anybody. China.
There’s it’s — that’s a practice. And so those are the places that you want to focus on and think about. And if you look at the map, the repeat offenders are typically the ones the countries that are most sanctioned by the US.
One might wonder whether the existence of thousands and tens of thousands of sanctions of the country makes hostage diplomacy a way of communication to them. Now, if you’re thinking about it as a way of communication and not just a blunt practice, now you have a different analysis of how you actually can solve cases and bring them, because what are they trying to communicate with each of these cases?
What are the issues? What is the issue they’re trying to draw you to a conversation with, and I can tell you with the Russians, it’s very much there. They’re so smart, so calculated. We were joking around before that, that with the with the Russians, they’re old-school diplomats, they they communicate with you, with signals, and with actions in a way that assumes that we are competent enough to understand it and to receive it because they are, and sometimes we’re missing it.
And so there’s that understanding that sanctions don’t work, however, and there are things that could be done, especially when somebody, after somebody comes home that I think need to be done in terms of accountability for the people who have wronged Americans, individuals, and I’m talking about the possibility of if there is a certain judge or a prison guard, or even a Minister of justice that was responsible for wronging an American. There should be no reason why that person cannot be indicted in the US. Now. It’s not that they’re accepting US jurisdiction.
But it’s a different kind of story when somebody’s indicted for wronging American — and I’m not saying made up, but a real one — when you actually start putting red notices.
So they individually cannot go with their families on vacation anymore. They’re afraid of being extracted. And if this is a national security crisis which I think it is, you find opportunity — maybe one, maybe two, not everywhere, because it’s complicated.
If you can grab one of them, extract them and bring them to justice, now you’re talking deterrence, but it’s high risk.
And it means it has to rise to a level of national security crisis which again, this administration identified it as such. So I think these are some of the measures. There’s many others that mean that. So that’s on the on the deterrence. I hope it was good enough to to give a nugget there on what is possible. But there’s enough people with experience in this country to come up with these. And, by the way, there’s a positive deterrence, which I am a big fan of is when every time you do a deal to bring somebody home, you accompany it as one of the conditions is in a bilateral procedure of how to prevent these from happening going forward.
So you actually incorporate in the deal. It’s not going to stop things, but it might be a way of just putting a little bit of a dent in it.
And the Iranians, it’s fascinating to me, being Israeli and being former officer in the, in the in the IDF and the level of communications that I have with the Iranians on a very personal level, and trying to deal deal with bringing back people. This has been a practice in Iran for long, long time and sometimes it’s American, sometimes it’s dual citizens. So there are Americans, Iranians, as we saw in the last return. It’s always extremely complicated. The Iranians always want to feel like they’re coming as equals into the negotiations. It’s such an important principle for them in this, and being treated out of in respect from that matter.
Before we did the Xiyue Wang and Michael White released from Iran during the Trump administration, it was the Iranian regime that came out. The Foreign Minister came out with this idea of a global exchange, and the reason for the global exchange because there were more there. There were several Americans held in Iran, but there were more Iranians held elsewhere in the world that they wanted out. So they wanted to do it in a global way. Of course, that fell — that was a non-starter for a Trump administration, not because he didn’t want the Americans home, but because that concept of dealing and giving that price publicly was not something he was going to go for. So we had to break it down and say, ‘Hey, let’s start one by one, and so we did Xiyue Wang first, and we figured out how to do it with the Trump administration on this
And the symmetry on this on the Iranian side – when we released Xiyue Wang for a medical researcher named Suleimani, who was detained in Atlanta. It was, you know, academic for academic. That was the kind of the principle behind it. But Suleimani here he was not Victor Bout, he was a researcher that was coming to the United States with a valid visa. His visitor’s visa was revoked while it was he was on a plane on the way here by the President, and therefore he landed and was arrested because he didn’t have a valid visa.
Yes, so we are one of the things that is important here. Maybe I should have talked about before, that unfortunately for us, the world is more complicated than good and evil, and our enemies are not on all evil. Even the people who are responsible for terrible things, they don’t wake up in the morning saying ‘I’m evil, let’s see what evil I can do today.’
There’s a certain narrative. There’s a certain way that they see their role in the world that explains why they do what they do, and we can spend time empathizing with that without justifying it without absolving them of that of that responsibility. But it’s important to get that, because the same way. We’re also not all good.
We play in that game in really complicated ways. An example of that Alex Saab, who was released in return for all the Americans that were in Venezuela. He’s a Colombian, Lebanese national, but was Maduro’s
right-hand man on finances. So he was the one in charge of how to bypass all the sanctions.
He never set foot in the United States.
We got Cape Verde to detain him when his plane landed here to refuel, and then, after a year and a half of a legal struggle between the court in Cape Verde and ECOWAS court in West Africa, were able to extradite him here, based on 9 indictments in the United States. 8 of them were dropped while he was on a plane, on the way back.
So we didn’t take him because he wronged Americans. We took him because of what was in his head. Venezuelans looked at it and said., ‘Guys, you’re doing hostage diplomacy. You took him hostage,’ and somebody can argue that there’s something in it. I mean, it’s not that Alex Saab’s a good guy.
He stole a lot of money that went to humanitarian aid that worked for Venezuelans, but he didn’t violate any — he didn’t wrong in any Americans in this process. So I don’t know.
BRIAN FINLAY: I’m going to make you pause, though, while I got Barbara. She’s a trained journalist, and she has time, Barbara, by merging three questions. We’re going to get to that. But I want to just collect maybe one or two other questions down here at the front, ma’am. If there are any other questions. Thank you.
AUDIENCE QUESTION: I was wondering, based on your huge professional experience, which was the most challenging negotiation case for you?
AUDIENCE QUESTION: How do you think the presence of active conflict in the country shifts the negotiation strategy you approach it with?
BRIAN FINLAY: Let’s go with those, and you can close here with answering Barbara’s question.
MICKEY BERGMAN: Well, it’s going to be help me to get into. It’s because the hardest case for me, personally — there’s the hardest case in terms of the negotiations, skills, and stuff like that.
But the hardest case for me personally has been Gaza since October 7th for several reasons. Some of them are objective, some of them are personal. The objective ones — the number, the sheer number of hostages that were taken, and the kind of hostages — kids, civilians, and women all that complexity. Number 2, it happened, and the solution of which had to happen in the time of war, which goes into the into the last question as well.
And then I had my persona parts of this. That my family is there, my mother, 70 six-year-old lives in Israel. My brother, his wife, and his 3 kids have been displaced internally in Israel without their home. Since then, for 9 months.
I am Israeli. These are my people, so emotionally, you can’t detach yourself the way you detach from other cases.
And this was a month after Governor Richardson died. I didn’t have him. It’s not that I never led delegations before I did without him, but he was in existence. So for all of that and for all these reasons this made it extremely difficult, emotionally and personally. and for this
I described a little bit what what we did with this, but one of the hardest elements of it, and that goes to actually helps me link to Barbara’s question —
We were extremely successful in the first 54 days. In my theory of return, it worked. And 109 hostages came home.
And we have failed since. And the linchpin of the failure is not in convincing Hamas to reduce the cost because I know that’s not going to happen. I’ve done the calculator deal. Describe it in the book, too. I know how there’s a difference in the way Hamas looks at negotiations than Israelis do, but the failure was to convince the Israeli Prime Minister to go forward and to find the right incentives and the right levers to get him to do it.
And being Israeli myself, it tears my heart every day at how I’m failing these families, because I can’t come up with the one thing that will change Bibi’s mind on this and, Barbara, the reason why I think it doesn’t put it very simply. And and it’s I’m saying it with a lot of sadness. The Israeli Prime Minister believes that as long as there is hostages there’s justification for the war.
As long as there is a war there’s no elections in Israel, and currently he electorally, is not electable in Israel, but he thinks he can recover, and he can recover if he does a press conference here with Brian, and he puts Sinwar’s head on the table.
He thinks that’s how he recovers two problems with that — for me personally – one, to get to Sinwar’s head, you go through the bodies of every single hostage. And number two, even that’s not going to recover him in in the polls, because that’s not the reason why these Israelis are don’t like him right now. But he’s locked in this. So we need to figure out another method, another lever of how to do it. One of the things in my mind, and I’m trying to advocate for that as much as I can, because I think it’s doable.
After 9 months of President Biden trying really hard to get a deal for the rest of the hostages and not being able to convince Bibi Netanyahu to get into it — I should say, by the way, because it is public, the only the supreme responsibility for the fact that we have all of this is Hamas — this I have to say, because people then accuse me of being Hamas sympathizer, which I’m not.
After 9 months of trying and failing and getting the rest of them back home. And President Biden has a responsibility and an opportunity to get a deal, a humanitarian, a indirect deal that will that will bring back the Americans not to spite Israel. Not to spite Bb, but actually to prove that it’s possible, and, in my book, the biggest leverage we can have to force Bib into the deal, because that’s something that will be very hard for Bibi to digest for his public that the American President brought Israeli hostages back home — because the Americans are also Israelis — brought home without him.
So that’s it. And I don’t know that I have an amazing answer for you on the active conflict, and how it implemented again from the example of Gaza, and that you can see how it makes things much more complicated because one side in this case. The Israelis, for example, believe that the military pressure is going to decrease the price of the hostage deal which it does not, and it does not because it miscalculates the way Hamas looks at it.
In fact, it does the opposite. The more pieces of Gaza that the IDF took, the more actions will be required by Hamas of Israel in order to get to the hostage deal. So we’re actually increased the price when we’re looking just at the transaction. So that’s just one of those examples of the dynamics.
BRIAN FINLAY: Mickey, before we close, I’m going to encourage people to please go online and buy this book. It’s such a great read. But I want to ask you one final exit question — irrespective of one’s political persuasion in this country, Bill Richardson was by any measure a great American and a unique American. The guy you call ‘Guv’ was your mentor and your partner in crime. Can this mission continue without him? What happens now?
MICKEY BERGMAN: First of all, I think the most accurate description that I have of Governor Richardson, who I worked with for 17 years, is that he was my six-year-old father, because he was definitely a father figure for me. There’s no doubt — my dad passed away. Richardson met him. He passed away about 14 years ago.
So he was a father figure for me, but he was at the same time this juvenile six-year-old that I had to deal with in my life. I loved him dearly, for this Steve is laughing because he knows this is an accurate description of him.
The mission continues. Now the Richardson Center itself is in the process of closing up, and it will close up in the end of the year. We just have some grant obligations that we need to do. But during the pandemic, especially when we couldn’t have the commercial flights available to us, an American businessman named Steve Menzies stepped in and he lent us his plane to do some of those missions. His condition was that he’s joining us in them as well, and Steve is a fantastic guy.
One of the things in this kind of work — for those of you who ever went to a driving range to play golf and hit one time and connected the ball, and you heard that click, and it blew out there. And now for the rest of your life, you’re chasing that hit. That’s what happens in this business. That’s what happened to me in the 1st time I went with Richardson, and I chased that for the rest of my life. That’s what happened, I think, to Steve, too, get hooked by the fact that you helped somebody. It’s not impacting millions of people. It’s not impacting thousands of people, but the impact on the individual families that you get to know is completely addictive. And so when the Governor passed away, Steve and I actually at the Governor’s funeral.
We got together, and said we have the resources. Now, how do we build? We can’t replace Governor Richardson. But how do we build this and make it even better. And so we established Global Reach. You can find us online at reach.global. We are better resourced than we ever did. The Richardson Center for Global Engagement was me, Gov. Richardson, Steve Ross, and Cameron Yun, former ambassador. That was us doing everything at a less than a million dollar budget a year that we had to raise. We now have better resources. We have better capacities, but instead of replacing Governor Richardson — because there is no replacement — we have built an Advisory board. It’s a collection of people — bipartisan, former political leaders, former diplomats, some business people who are willing to lend themselves. We still have the staff, but if they’re relevant to a single country, we call on them and they come and help us and play the Richardson role within that.
And so this is in the making. We’ve had already some good successes, including the return of Americans from Venezuela, the the work in Gaza and elsewhere. But that’s the work, and it continues
BRIAN FINLAY: Global Reach is the organization. In The Shadows is the book. Mickey Bergman, thanks for doing this.
