Inside the White House, it is known as “the tragic summer of 2014.” Islamic State forces were rampaging across Iraq and Syria, erasing borders and massacring opponents and minority groups.
President Barack Obama and his national security team knew they had to stop the advance, and they knew that any military action would put at risk the lives of at least four Americans being held by the group in Syria. One after another the American hostages — James Foley, Steven Sotloff and Peter Kassig — were murdered. The fourth, Kayla Mueller, was killed in 2015.
In the tense months before and after their deaths, Lisa Monaco, the senior counterterrorism adviser to the president, was meeting with the grief-stricken families.
“They told me about their frustration and their disappointment; their confusion about how the government was handling finding and recovering their loved ones,” Monaco said.
For Monaco, those meetings became the basis for a White House-directed effort to change the way the United States works to bring home American hostages and, just as importantly, how they work with families.
Today, family members of those taken captive and their advocates point to improvements.
“There’s greater coordination within the government and a greater willingness to share information,” said Rachel Briggs, executive director of Hostage US, a nonprofit group that provides support to families and released hostages. “Is it much improved today from what it was? Absolutely. Is there a further distance to travel? Yes.”
The challenge for the White House is ensuring that hard-won lessons, many of which came at the expense of American hostages and their families, are passed along to the Trump administration, and that the government continues to make progress at the dauntingly complex task of hostage recovery.
Gauging improvements to a hostage recovery process that is, by necessity, cloaked in secrecy can be difficult. To oversee recovery efforts and communicate with families, the Obama administration created a single fusion cell that includes representatives of the FBI, the Pentagon, the State Department and the intelligence community.
