When Jere Van Dyk participated in a recent White House conference on hostages, he didn’t say a lot.
Just the fact that he was there seemed to mean a lot. The Vancouver native was told that he symbolized hope.
The setting was a June conference hosted by President Barack Obama to discuss the complicated topic of Americans being held hostage overseas.
Participants included government and military officials; family members of people being held hostage; and people whose loved ones were killed in captivity.
Van Dyk offered the perspective of someone who survived 45 days as a hostage and lived to tell the tale.
Van Dyk was planning to write a book when he was taken hostage in 2008. He was hoping to use his connections with Afghan mujahedeen he’d covered in 1981 as they fought Soviet invaders to get an insider’s look at the border region of Afghanistan and Pakistan.
He wound up with a book he hadn’t expected — “Captive: My Time as a Prisoner of the Taliban.”
The 1964 graduate of Hudson’s Bay High School has maintained his contacts in the Middle East and continues to write, report and offer analysis and commentary.
The invitation, he said, was out of the blue. The email explained that the White House and government agencies were looking at a total reassessment of U.S. policy toward hostages, “and wanted to know if I, as a former hostage, was interested in taking part.”
Unlike many countries, the U.S. has held a firm line against negotiating with kidnappers — including terrorist groups — who hold Americans hostage.
The invitation was an opportunity to discuss his experiences, his thoughts on how his family was treated by government agencies and whether officials could have done more.
The conference opened with a session at the National Counterterrorism Center, where Van Dyk tried to learn more about his own release in 2008. As he wrote in his book, his journey to freedom started when he was blindfolded and pushed into the back seat of a car. After 16 hours of car rides alternating with hikes along rough trails, Van Dyk was talking to a pair of FBI agents. They didn’t offer any details about his release.
At the National Counterterrorism Center, an FBI official offered the same uninformative answer Van Dyk heard in 2008: “We brought all assets into play.”
During the discussion, Van Dyk sat at a table with Homeland Security Adviser Lisa Monaco and the family of Kayla Mueller, who was killed in February in Syria.
Another family represented Luke Somers, an American photojournalist who was killed when special-operations troops attempted to rescue him and a South African from al-Qaida captors in Yemen.
“They are devastated,” he said.
Other people feared they’ll never get their children back, Van Dyk said.
“The anger, the fury, the despair was extraordinary,” he said. “There was a mixture of sadness and pure emotion, and it drew us all closer together.”
One official had told a family that “If you try to ransom your son in any way, we will prosecute you,” Van Dyk related. “We found out that this person had been fired.
“Each person learned what the government was doing that they were not aware of,” he said. “It was supposed to last 90 minutes and we were there for four hours.”
Obama joins conversation
The next day, two bus loads of participants gathered in the White House. With President Obama sitting in this time, members of the group discussed family concerns vs. U.S. foreign policy. Other topics included when to — and when not to — consider using drones and military force.
Van Dyk said that his contribution to the conference was focused on the families.
“Both days, I kept quiet publicly, because of the manner in which I was released. Everybody was very gracious,” but Van Dyk said he had a tremendous sense of survivor’s guilt.
So Van Dyk was glad to hear how other participants viewed him.
“A woman with a missing daughter said, ‘I am glad you are here,’ ” Van Dyk said. “I represented hope.”
Some people would dismiss the two-day effort, Van Dyk said.
“Some will say it’s an attempt to mollify people and not really a change: What can you do? People are dead. Other people are (hostages) and how do you get them out?”
Van Dyk does see an outcome, however.
“I’d call it a bureaucratic SWAT team,” he said, with representatives from the FBI, CIA, Defense Department, Secret Service, Homeland Security, White House and other agencies coordinating their efforts.
“There have been turf wars, people competing for power, and that was central to 9/11,” he said. “They want to try ameliorate that, because they see (hostage-taking) as something that will continue.”
In addition to working together, “They want to work with us,” Van Dyk said, referring to hostages’ families.
“I can explain to the government what some of these people are feeling, and also be a bit of a bridge between the two.”
‘We became a family’
A friend of Van Dyk’s had a similar experience in 2008. New York Times correspondent David Rohde was abducted by the Taliban in 2008 and held for seven months until he escaped. Rohde and his wife, Kristen Mulvihill, wrote a book — “A Rope and a Prayer” — that showed the two sides of their ordeal. While Rohde was being held captive, Mulvihill had to maintain the appearance of her normal life as photo editor for Cosmopolitan magazine. A Washington Post book review showed just how far from normal things were for her: When her phone rang, it might be the Taliban … and they might be calling collect. Another part of “A Rope and a Prayer” that caught the reviewer’s eye featured her double life.
In the morning, Mulvihill might be dealing with shadowy figures from the world of “spooks.” And in the afternoon, Mulvihill wrote in the book, it was time to go to work on a photo essay on a guy’s butt.
“I do want to underscore that we were one of the lucky few,” Mulvihill stressed in an email. “I wouldn’t want the apparent absurdity of our past situation to diminish the tragic plight of other more recent families who have endured much worse.”
Van Dyk made a deep bond with those families during the conference, he said. After the formal sessions with government officials, Van Dyk and other “civilians” would gather at their hotel and just talk.
“We became a family, and for the first time seven years, I felt warmth,” he said.
One of the people he met was Paula Somers, a Washington resident whose son, Luke, was killed in the December raid in Yemen.
Somers, who lives in Gig Harbor, said that she went to the conference mostly to listen.
What did she hear?
“I guess it made it clearer that the government will at least talk to the kidnapper now,” she said.
“Some countries do pay ransom, some do help negotiate with a third party. We didn’t realize that,” she said.
The Somers family never was contacted by her son’s captors, she said. And, the family was advised to not make a public plea to the kidnappers.
“We were told to be silent the entire time and not to do that,” she said.
Somers has heard the argument that paying a ransom would only put a price tag on future American hostages.
Yet, Somers has seen other nations pay ransom for their captive countrymen. “I don’t see those countries being especially targeted. I don’t know; maybe America is a different story,” she said.
