Envoy for hostage affairs describes efforts to free Americans detained abroad
Roger Carstens:
To just answer directly, they're always very fragile. There comes a time when — even though we try to give families a sense of what's happening during the discussions, there comes a time when we tell the families like, we just can't talk about it anymore, because it seems to get to that point where everything hangs on a thread and that, if there's one leak, if there's one false tweet, the other side may actually decide to collapse the negotiation.
On this one, we had some details to work out. A lot of good work was done by the United States, particularly by the White House and the people at the State Department and Western Hemisphere Affairs. But I think we got to the point where we just had to fine-tune a few things.
And, as a result, on the 20th, we spent about four or five hours on a very hot airplane tarmac. You can picture six airplanes with their engines continually running, no one shut down for six hours, and just going back and forth between this — these very loud planes with that heat coming off the tarmac, trying to ensure that everything was wrapped up, so that we could begin the switch between the Americans that they were holding and the person that we were holding.
But at the end of the day, we were able to pull it all off, and I think a lot of people put the work into it. And, if I may, it's not just the people who negotiated at the White House or the State Department, but there are congressmen, senators, nonprofits, individuals like Mickey Bergman of the Richardson foundation, Jonathan Franks, Eric Lebson, congressmen, senators, their staffs, allies of the United States that all put themselves into this.
But, at the end of the day, the people that, to my mind, bear the most weight on their back, the families. They're the ones that push us, hold us accountable, sometimes come up with a winning strategy, and they're all doing that to keep their loved ones — bring their loved ones back.
And I would even say the people that are in these prisons, they remain strong and they pretty much never lose faith in their country. They know that we're going to come and get them one day.
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