2. A Brief Examination of U.S. Hostage Policy: 1960’s–Today

It is important, when examining PPD-30 and the reorganization of the hostage recovery enterprise, to understand when and how the United States first dealt with hostage-taking events and how U.S. hostage policy developed. Many of the United States’ early experiences with terrorism involved hostage-taking, including the kidnapping of diplomats and the hijacking of aircraft with U.S. citizens aboard. In the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, the Nixon administration grappled with kidnappings of U.S. diplomats in Latin America. During these early terrorist kidnappings, the United States took the stance that host governments were responsible for the protection of the diplomats within their country and that, should U.S. diplomats be kidnapped, those host governments were responsible for their safe return.¹ This, in practice, meant tacit—and sometimes actual—U.S. support for host government concessions to kidnappers, including the release of prisoners and the payment of ransoms, providing it would secure the release of U.S. officials.²

As the tactic spread and kidnappings and hijackings became a recurring phenomenon, the U.S. stance on conceding to terrorist demands began to harden. This was especially the case as demands were leveraged directly against the United States, as opposed to the host government. In 1971, during a hostage crisis in which four U.S. airmen were kidnapped in Turkey,³ U.S. officials privately signaled the Nixon administration’s emerging no-concessions policy when a $400,000 ransom was demanded from the United States as a means to resolve the crisis. In a since declassified State Department cable to the U.S. Embassy in Ankara, the U.S. stance was described by Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs Joseph Sisco as “opposed as a matter of principle to the payment of ransom” because doing so “would be an open invitation to others in other countries to take similar action.”⁴ In more detailed guidance that followed two days later, the connection between the U.S. government’s thinking on the no-concessions policy and the increase of kidnappings was drawn out. The decision not to pay the ransom demanded by the terrorists was described as “quite literally … an agonizing question for the highest levels of this Government” but that “painful experience over the years convinces us that payment of ransom to kidnappers would only encourage terrorist groups to kidnap Americans all over the world.”⁵

This unofficial internal U.S. government discussion regarding concessions became a public stance during the 1973 kidnapping of two U.S. diplomats in Khartoum, Sudan by Black September terrorists. The year prior, after Black September’s hostage taking and execution of Israeli athletes during the Olympic Games in Munich, the Nixon administration’s perspective on conceding to terrorist demands changed and administration officials circulated an unofficial no-concessions policy.⁶ In the Sudan case, Black September demanded the release of a number of prisoners in Israel, Germany, and the United States—among them was Sirhan Sirhan, Sen. Robert Kennedy’s assassin. When asked during a press conference if he was willing to concede to this demand, President Nixon answered, “As far as the United States as a government giving in to blackmail demands, we cannot do so and we will not do so.”⁷ When the leadership of Black September learned of the president’s statement, they executed a Belgian official and both American hostages.⁸

The United States was again confronted with hostage-taking in 1979 when 52 Americans were taken captive as Iranian students overran the U.S. embassy in Tehran. The ensuing crisis consumed the remainder of the Carter administration, and the public perception of his inability to resolve the hostage-taking contributed greatly to his loss in the 1980 presidential election to Ronald Regan.⁹ Recognizing the important and disruptive impact of hostage-taking, in 1981, President Reagan¹⁰ signed the International Convention Against the Taking of Hostages, adopted by the United Nations in December 1979.¹¹

In 1984, as the Reagan administration completed its first directive comprehensively addressing terrorism,¹² National Security Decision Directorate 138: Combating Terrorism, Reagan also sent four bills to Congress to “support a more systematic and strengthened effort to combat international terrorism.”¹³ In recognition of the threat of hostage-taking to U.S. citizens, two of these bills focused on hostage taking and aircraft hijacking. President Reagan described the bill providing federal jurisdiction over kidnapping, the Act for the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Hostage-Taking, as essential for demonstrating that the United States “is serious about its efforts to deal with international terrorism.”¹⁴

Two years later, after a review of the U.S. government’s counterterrorism policies and programs by a task force led by then-Vice President George H. W. Bush, the Reagan administration released National Security Decision Directive 207 (NSDD 207): The National Program for Combatting Terrorism.¹⁵ In stark contrast to previously released U.S. policy on terrorism and hostage-taking, NSDD 207 unequivocally stated that the United States would “pay no ransoms, nor permit releases of prisoners, or agree to other conditions that could serve to encourage additional terrorism.”¹⁶ “The policy,” the document states, “is based upon the conviction that to accede to terrorist demands places more American citizens at risk. This no-concessions policy is the best way of protecting the greatest number of people and ensuring their safety.”¹⁷ The Reagan administration thus codified the shift in the United States’s unofficial policy from tacit approval of concessions towards a no-concessions policy that occurred during the Nixon administration.

NSDD 207 affirmed the importance of recovering U.S. citizens held hostage, stating that “every available resource will be used to gain the safe return of American citizens who are held hostage by terrorists.”¹⁸ While much of the document remains classified, an unclassified version indicates that it also sought to “expand the State Department’s outreach to hostage families.”¹⁹ At the same time, however, U.S. government action on behalf of U.S. citizens, as opposed to government officials or military service members, was uneven. Hijackings, like that of TWA Flight 847²⁰ or the cruise ship Achille Lauro,²¹ would garner presidential attention, as would dramatic events like the long running Iranian hostage crisis²² or kidnappings associated with other national security crises, such as the abductions of Americans in Lebanon.²³ In less dramatic situations, where American citizens who were not officials or members of the military were kidnapped, the U.S. government “sometimes declined to review” the cases.²⁴

Throughout the majority of the Clinton administration, there was little change in U.S. hostage policy. Hostage-takings were replaced by terrorist attacks on U.S. soil as the preeminent concern for the President, ²⁵ whose counterterrorism efforts early in the administration were focused on disrupting attacks within the U.S. and extraditing those who conducted those attacks and fled overseas. While hostage-taking was not a central issue, the Clinton administration’s counterterrorism policy, codified in PPD-39, ²⁶ reaffirmed the no-concessions policy adopted by previous administrations. Late in the Clinton administration’s tenure, however, Americans were kidnapped by militant groups in both the Philippines and Ecuador, prompting the administration to initiate a review of U.S. hostage policy that continued into the Bush administration.²⁷

In February 2002, as the U.S. government grappled with the abduction of Daniel Pearl by Pakistani terrorists, the Bush administration,²⁸ led by the Deputy National Security Adviser for Combatting Terrorism General (Ret.) Wayne Downing, published the first presidential directive to focus specifically on hostage-taking—National Security Policy Directive 12 (NSPD 12): United States Citizens Taken Hostage Abroad.²⁹ While NSPD 12 remains classified, a New York Times article citing unnamed administration officials described the examination of U.S. hostage policy as resulting in an effort to review “every kidnapping of an American overseas for possible action.”³⁰ Administration officials described a broader response to hostage incidents than the United States had previously undertaken. “The new policy,” said one official, “ensures that the government will no longer ignore cases simply because a private citizen is involved, or because the kidnapping seems to be motivated primarily by money rather than political goals.”³¹ The policy also indicated that the families of hostages and companies who employed them could be “entitled to basic administrative support” from U.S. embassies in the countries they were kidnapped, as well as support from the U.S. government in communication and advice about negotiation strategies.³² In 2008, NSPD 12 was updated with the addition of an annex and appendix, and disseminated to help the U.S. government’s departments and agencies better prevent, prepare for, and respond to hostage-takings and other isolating events.³³ The 2008 update was designed to integrate “existing [personnel recovery] mechanisms”³⁴ across the interagency and to bring together technical information and intelligence that could “assist in the recovery of Americans missing overseas.”³⁵ Its goal was to give “every federal department the same vision, goals, and framework with regard to the safe return of our people.”³⁶

NSPD 12 was important for a few reasons. First, as an administration directive separate from the National Strategy for Counterterrorism, NSPD 12 dealt with the issue aside from other counterterrorism responses, something that had not occurred in other administrations. Second, it focused on emphasizing the recovery of U.S. citizens held abroad beyond U.S. government officials and military service members. Third and finally, NSPD 12 and its 2008 updates attempted to generate a framework to pull the different agencies and departments of the U.S. government together for a whole-of-government response to hostage-taking events.

As important as NSPD 12 was, it did not completely address issues surrounding the response to hostage-taking. For instance, one issue revolved around the classification of the document. The sensitivity of the recovery mechanisms discussed in NSPD 12 necessitated a high level of classification. In an interview for this report, one former U.S. government official described it as a read-only document with a limited distribution.³⁷ This limited distribution throughout the U.S. government worked at odds with the goal of creating a whole-of-government response. Additionally, the policy’s classification impacted its goal of engaging with and supporting hostage families. While NSPD 12 expanded the U.S. government’s focus to the kidnappings of U.S. citizens and provided expanded support to hostage families, its level of classification made it difficult for U.S. officials to meaningfully engage with hostage families and third parties working on their behalf to discuss plans and strategies to recover their loved ones or share the status of each case. The policy’s classification also prevented U.S. government officials from detailing the U.S. policy toward hostage-taking for both hostage families and U.S. allies, which ultimately created confusion about what U.S. policy actually said. ³⁸

NSPD 12 also fell short on coordinating the interagency efforts to respond to hostage taking events. The 2008 update was designed to create a framework for dealing with hostage-recovery for the interagency and to strengthen existing response mechanisms with the goal of “integrating capabilities into a unified national [recovery] response.”³⁹ Despite this goal, the directive to examine and update existing responses effectively allowed U.S. departments and agencies to approach their own hostage related equities independently and did nothing to better synchronize the interagency response. In the words of the Obama administration’s 2014 Report on Hostage Policy, NSPD 12 “created no mechanism to coordinate a whole-of-government approach to recover hostages.”⁴⁰

U.S. hostage policy before PPD-30 closely linked responses to hostage-taking events with the overall counterterrorism policy of each presidential administration. As discussed above, it was not until the Bush administration’s NSPD 12 that responses to hostage-takings were discussed outside counterterrorism policy. Because of these linkages, responding to hostage-taking incidents was primarily done by U.S. government entities that also had counterterrorism responsibilities. Few organizations focused specifically—or tangentially—on hostage-taking. This meant that while people across the U.S. government would work toward the resolution of a hostage-taking event should a crisis arise, they did so as part of their daily duties and responsibilities, not as a hostage-taking subject matter expert. In short, while many people worked on counterterrorism issues for the U.S. government, it had little in the way of dedicated expertise to respond to hostage-taking events.⁴¹

Agencies that played a role in resolving a hostage-taking incident were spread across the U.S. government’s interagency, and there were few connections bringing them together in support of hostage recovery. Due to the lack of another coordinating body, it fell to the National Security Council to synchronize the U.S. government’s response to hostage-taking events. This seems to have been effective when hostage-takings were large enough in scale or the victims were able to capture the attention of U.S. officials and the U.S. government. When American citizens were kidnapped in smaller, less dramatic events, however, coordination at the National Security Council level was less effective, especially when other major events pulled policy focus away. For instance, shortly after beginning a tour at the National Security Council as the director of strategy and military affairs in late 2001, Admiral, then-Captain, William McRaven discovered that despite Americans Martin and Gracia Burnham having been kidnapped by Abu Sayyaf militants in the Philippines six months prior, relatively little had been done to work toward their release.⁴² While the National Security Council’s Hostage Coordination Group was responsible for coordinating interagency responses to hostage-takings, the reality of the pressures of the global war on terrorism meant that prior to McRaven’s arrival in the office reenergizing the effort, little focus had been given to the Burnhams’ case.⁴³ Prior to PPD-30, without a coordinating body other than the National Security Council, hostage responses continued to be uneven, conductive, and personality-driven.⁴⁴

This construct, where the National Security Council managed the response to hostage-takings, created challenges for continuity and maintaining expertise in the response to these events. Hostage-taking by terrorist groups tends to be a cyclical concern, rather than a consistently high threat.⁴⁵ Turnover in the National Security Council and changes in administrations cycled U.S. officials with experience responding to these events in and out of government. During the George W. Bush administration, for instance, U.S. officials gained experience in responding to these complicated and challenging events as they grappled with a surge in kidnappings in Iraq.⁴⁶ Between 2003 and 2007, more than 43 U.S. citizens were kidnapped in Iraq, 14 of whom were executed,⁴⁷ including Nicholas Berg whose execution was video-taped and distributed widely on the internet.⁴⁸ This experience with hostage-taking, in many ways, provided a glimpse of the challenges the U.S. government would face with the ISIS kidnappings in Syria. However, because coordination of the interagency was done at the National Security Council, when the Obama administration began to contend with the challenges of attempting to recover hostages from a terrorist organization holding them deep in denied terrain, they did so without much of the expertise gained from the U.S. government’s last significant hostage crisis 10 years before.

The Obama administration’s 2015 review of U.S. hostage policy grappled with many of these issues. How could the U.S. government better coordinate responses to hostage-takings? How should it place more priority on these often long, drawn out, and deeply personal crises? What should the U.S. government do to organize in such a way that expertise was maintained in response to an issue that waxed and waned? How could the United States do better to engage with and support the families of hostages held overseas?

The outputs of the 2015 review, PPD-30 and EO 13698, restructured the U.S. hostage recovery enterprise, overhauling it to create entities with specific charters to oversee these complex issues. First, in order to increase the priority given to hostage cases, PPD-30 established the Hostage Response Group, a sub-deputies’ group at the National Security Council.⁴⁹ As a sub-deputies’ group, the Hostage Response Group was elevated above the Hostage Coordination Group used in the Bush administration. The Hostage Response Group is chaired by the special assistant to the president and senior director for counterterrorism in the National Security Council, and is primarily responsible for coordinating, developing, and implementing U.S. hostage policy, strategies, and activities at the National Security Council level. In addition, the Hostage Response Group provides policy guidance to the HRFC and prioritizes hostage related issues at the highest levels of the U.S. government.⁵⁰

In order to ensure the U.S. government had a dedicated organization to coordinate the response to hostage-takings and to maintain continuity in its ability to manage these crises, the policy created the HRFC. The HRFC, as the entity charged with coordinating the U.S. government’s recovery efforts and family engagement, consists of an intelligence section, an operational section to coordinate interagency action, a family engagement team, an external engagement component, and a legal team.⁵¹ In addition, the directive also created the office of the Special Presidential Envoy for Hostage Affairs (SPEHA) within the State Department to coordinate diplomatic efforts (Please see “Understanding of U.S. Official and Departmental Roles” in Section 4 for further discussion).

The Obama administration’s changes to the hostage recovery enterprise were maintained by the Trump administration, which sought continuity in the approach to recovering American hostages.⁵² Furthermore, in December 2020, Congress passed—and President Trump signed—the Robert Levinson Hostage Recovery and Hostage-Taking Accountability Act which, among other things, codified the establishment of the HRFC and Hostage Response Group into U.S. law.⁵³

While PPD-30 and the structural changes followed by the issuance of EO 13698 are important steps towards “ensur[ing] that the government was well organized to take rapid, coordinated action in response to a hostage-taking event,”⁵⁴ the continued, adaptive nature of hostage-taking requires that U.S. policy on hostage-taking continuously evolve. JWFLF’s annual nongovernmental assessment of U.S. hostage policy and family engagement is intended to provide insights to the U.S. government as well as inform discussions on hostage and unlawful or wrongful detention related issues as they continue to evolve in the current geopolitical landscape.