None of her immediate family wanted to meet one of the men who had helped take her son hostage and then posted a terrorist propaganda video of him being brutally beheaded. But Diane Foley felt compelled to talk to him.
Over the course of about 10 hours across two days at a federal courthouse in Alexandria, Va., she talked with Alexanda Kotey. She did not find the monster that people had warned her about. She discovered someone who minimized his role in her son’s torture and execution, but also cried when he spoke of his daughters.
“All of us are capable of incredible evil and also incredible good,” she said, “so it was interesting to see that confirmed.”
Foley’s conversation with Kotey starts “American Mother,” a memoir she co-wrote with novelist Colum McCann that Etruscan Press published on Monday. The 256-page account documents how Foley learned her son had been taken hostage by the Islamic State while covering the civil war in Syria as a freelance journalist and videographer and scrambled to save him during his 21 months in captivity. She details learning of her son’s execution after a video of it was posted online and how she has coped by diving into activism aimed at changing how the U.S. government handles negotiations for Americans who are taken hostage or wrongfully detained.
As Foley travels Europe and the United States on book tours, she tells would-be readers how her family struggled to navigate the disjointed and what she perceived to be deceptive efforts by the U.S. government to rescue her son. She praises the ways officials’ approach has improved since her son’s death and how it can get better as hostile countries turn to kidnapping Americans as a way to gain leverage over the United States.
“It’s a real threat to our national security,” Foley said. “We still have a lot of work in front of us.”
‘Nobody’s job’
In late 2012, Foley expected her son to come home from covering the civil war in Syria to spend time with family for Christmas at his parents’ home near Rochester, N.H. But on Thanksgiving, he was abducted by Islamic State militants. In her book, Foley describes receiving a phone call 21 months later on Aug. 19, 2014, from a news reporter who was sobbing on the other end. Over the next few minutes, she and her family learned of a video posted to social media that showed an ISIS militant brutally beheading her son.
As news crews swarmed the Foleys’ house and phone calls poured in, Foley grew angry.
“It was anger directed against the deranged ISIS fighters who had done this, of course, but also an anger towards our own U.S. government, whom I’d felt had patronized and deceived us all by abandoning our citizens when they claimed to have not,” she and McCann write.
For most of the 21 months of James’s captivity, the Foleys let U.S. officials take the lead in negotiating for his release, she told The Post. They kept telling Foley that “Jim was their highest priority … and he was coming home.” But in reality, they weren’t negotiating, even as other hostages were freed because their governments had worked with the captors to secure their return, she said.
Meanwhile, U.S. officials “not-so-subtly suggested” they could prosecute anyone who gave money for James Foley’s ransom for providing material support to terrorists, an implicit threat that prevented the Foleys from acting, according to the book. Foley realized only at the end of her son’s captivity that no one had ever been charged for paying a ransom to alleged terrorists and it was unlikely to happen in her son’s case.
Negotiating helped free James Foley when he was captured in 2011 by Moammar Gaddafi’s forces in Libya. During his 44 days in captivity there, an “ordinary” American citizen intervened on his behalf, resulting in his release, a case in point for how “dialogue is one of the greatest weapons we have” in hostage negotiations, Foley writes in her book.
When James Foley was kidnapped in Syria, militants had demanded the equivalent of $130 million and the release of all Muslim prisoners, but as hostages of other nationalities were negotiated for and released, the “going rate” seemed to be between $2 million and $5 million, according to the book. The Foleys started fundraising, collecting pledges for more than $1 million and communicating that to the captors. They heard nothing. Then she got the call that would lead to the realization that her son had been murdered. Foley concluded that by the time she decided to fundraise for the ransom, her son’s captors had already made a decision that they were going to use American and British hostages as propaganda.
In the book, Foley faults what she calls the U.S. government’s “misguided obstinacy” against negotiating, and says they were deceiving her into believing they were moving heaven and earth to get her son back.
“When Jim was taken, nobody helped — nobody,” Foley said. “It was nobody’s job to help.”
Days after video of James Foley’s execution was posted, the Obama administration defended its policy against paying ransom to hostage-takers, saying doing so would “put all Americans overseas at greater risk.”
‘Jim’s legacy’
After her son’s death, Foley embarked on a mission to change how the government handled citizen hostages, and she found that the White House was listening. She met with Obama administration officials in the months afterward, venting her frustration about U.S. hostage-taking policy and suggesting changes. In December 2014, then-President Barack Obama ordered the National Counterterrorism Center to do a full review of the policy, which would include interviews with victims’ families.
In 2015, Obama created a Hostage Recovery Fusion Cell to coordinate responses to hostage cases between the National Security Council, the State Department, intelligence agencies and other parts of the federal government. And just over a year after James Foley’s death, Obama created the position of special presidential envoy for hostage affairs to “engage at the highest levels of foreign governments to secure the safe return of U.S. hostages,” the White House said at the time.
“Our government finally saw the necessity of operating in a proactive, coordinated manner to bring American hostages home. Jim’s legacy, along with that of the other hostages, was beginning to reverberate,” Foley and McCann wrote in their book.
In the decade since, more than 100 U.S. nationals who were taken hostage or wrongfully detained have been freed through negotiation. Much of that success stems from the U.S. government getting more involved in negotiations instead of falling back on a blanket policy of not negotiating with terrorists, Foley said.
“So we’ve made leaps forward, and to me, that’s Jim’s legacy,” she added.
In a statement to The Post, a State Department spokesman said that James Foley’s killing spurred the Obama administration to reshape U.S. government policy, “placing a special emphasis on improving its ability to support the families of U.S. hostages.” Since then, officials have continuously reviewed that policy, all the while consulting with the Foleys and other families of former hostages and other Americans wrongfully detained abroad, according to the official.
In 2020, then-President Donald Trump signed the Robert Levinson Hostage Recovery and Hostage-Taking Accountability Act, which passed with bipartisan support to codify how the U.S. government handles international kidnapping and detention cases, the official said. In July 2022, President Biden signed an executive order to bolster the tools officials can use to “deter and disrupt” people from kidnapping and wrongfully detaining Americans, he added.
“President Biden and Secretary [of State Antony] Blinken are personally committed to securing the release of Americans who are wrongfully detained or held hostage overseas,” the officials said, adding that 45 Americans have been freed over the past three years.
In 2018, Foley told The Washington Post Magazine that she had grown tired of traveling and of reliving the horror of losing her son. She said she longed for a break.
Six years later, Foley said she didn’t get one and doesn’t plan to. She hopes her book raises money she can use to beef up her team at the James W. Foley Legacy Foundation and to fund research around hostage-taking that officials can use to craft better policy.
Nearly 12 years after her son was taken hostage and a decade after he was murdered, the foundation’s work is still needed and, Foley suspects, will be in the future, perhaps more than ever before. She cited Russia’s imprisonment of American basketball player Brittney Griner and Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich as examples — in both cases, the U.S. government determined that they were being “wrongfully detained,” or held “solely or substantially because he or she is a United States national.”
“It’s gaining traction with some new actors like [Russian President Vladimir] Putin, who is becoming very shrewd about intentionally targeting anyone who has any U.S. citizenship.”
Foley expects that trend to continue, in Russia and elsewhere.
“I’m afraid this issue has not gone away,” she said, “and if anything, it’s bigger than ever.”
