When James Foley’s
mysterious captors finally contacted his family and revealed their
demands in exchange for the American journalist’s release, they were so
absurd that the group didn’t appear to be serious about actually freeing
Foley, according to GlobalPost CEO Phil Balboni and a former U.S.
government official.
Foley had been kidnapped while working for GlobalPost in Syria in
November 2012, but word from his abductors didn’t come until a year
later when his family and news organization received an email “in very
serviceable English” demanding 100 million Euros ($132 million), said
Balboni.
“We never took that amount seriously,” Balboni told ABC News, who added
that from the beginning all information was shared with the FBI.
But Balboni said he was never really sure who they were dealing with
and “it was impossible to say who was in control during the negotiating
process.”
A former U.S. government official with direct knowledge of the American
hostages’ cases confirmed the amount – which is tens of millions more
than all of al Qaeda reportedly received
from all kidnappings last year -- and said the Islamic extremists also
demanded the release of high-profile Muslim prisoners in the U.S.
“They were not substantive demands,” the former official said. The group
of hostage-takers, who turned out to be from the Islamic State of Iraq
and Syria (ISIS), “wasn’t serious about negotiating for money… They knew their demands were unattainable.”
In the past, ISIS -- taking a cue from al Qaeda franchise AQIM in North
Africa -- has demanded far less money for European hostages who were
eventually released, with the dollar amounts between $2 million and $3
million, current and former officials have told ABC News.
Nicholas Henin, a French journalist who was held alongside Foley for
seven months and suffered several mock executions before he was freed in
April, said Foley was optimistic about his chances of being freed, even
though the United States by policy does not negotiate with terrorists.
“There are two kinds of countries in the world,” Henin said, those like
the U.S. and U.K. which do not negotiate with extremists, and those that
do. According to a New York Times report
in late July, several European governments have been effectively
bankrolling a number of terrorist groups by paying high-dollar ransoms
for their captured citizens, to the long-simmering frustration of their
American and British allies.
“Aside from state-sponsored terrorism, ransom payments are the greatest
source of terrorist funding today,” U.S. Treasury Under Secretary David
Cohen said in June, noting that al Qaeda-linked terror groups have collected “tens of millions of dollars in ransoms in the last several years.”
Speaker of the House John Boehner said that “knowing the United States
does not negotiate with terrorists” is one of the “greatest protections”
for Americans working and living abroad. At the time, Boehner was
criticizing President Obama for authorizing the exchange of five mid- to high-level Taliban figures for Taliban captive Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl in June.
In addition, Kelly Ayotte,
a Republican U.S. Senator from Foley’s home state in New Hampshire,
told ABC News that ISIS, in particular, could not be trusted anyway.
“If you’re dealing with a group that’s willing to act in the barbaric
way that ISIS has not only in the case of James Foley, but in the case
of what they’ve done to Christians, what they’ve done to women, and to
other Muslims in Iraq and in Syria, the brutality of it… how can you
have a negotiation with a terrorist group like that?” Ayotte said. “How
could you ever trust that that negotiation would lead [to] a result and
wouldn’t lead to more violence?”
Americans and Brits have been freed through ransom payments in the past,
however that is usually done through the intervention of a private or
third party. Speaking to the public earlier this week, Foley’s parents,
John and Diane, said they were considering fundraising to pay ransom
right up until their son was killed.
“We were making a video… it’s a video of all Jimmy’s experiences and all
of the many people whose lives he touched,” John Foley said. “And
that’s going to continue, despite his death.”
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