Correction: Aljoud is not the real family name of a Syrian journalist who had been held by the Islamic State terrorist group and said American officials did not pursue information he gave them about Americans being held by the group. The surname of Louai Abo Aljoud is an assumed one that he has been using for several years to protect family members still in Syria. This article referred imprecisely to the journalist; a correction was delayed to verify Abo Aljoud’s information.
GAZIANTEP, Turkey -- For a fleeting moment last year, Louai Abo Aljoud, a Syrian journalist, made eye contact with the American hostages being held by the Islamic State.
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One of dozens of prisoners inside a former potato chip factory in northern Syria, Abo Aljoud was taken out of his cell one day and assigned to deliver meals to fellow inmates. It was when he opened the slot to cell No. 2 that he first saw them -- the gaunt, frightened faces of James Foley, Steven Sotloff and Peter Kassig.
Abo Aljoud, 23, a freelance cameraman, said he resolved not only to save himself but also to help the other inmates if he could. He memorized the prison's floor plan and studied its location in Aleppo. When he became one of the lucky few to be released in May, he pressed to meet with U.S. officials in neighboring Turkey.
"I thought that I had truly important information that could be used to save these people," he said. "But I was deeply disappointed."
A State Department employee and a contractor were eventually sent to meet him at a restaurant, but both were assigned to deal with civil society in Syria, not hostages.
Abo Aljoud grew frustrated, insisting that he could pinpoint the location of the prison on a map. Instead, he said, he received only vague assurances that the employees would pass on the details he had shared and his contact information to the relevant investigators.
"It's my impression that they were more interested in gathering intelligence, in general, than in saving these people," he said. "I could have shown them the location on Google Maps, but they weren't interested." Although the hostages had been moved by the time he met with the U.S. officials this spring, the militants have been known to recycle prison locations.
The United States says it does all it can through diplomacy, intelligence gathering and even military action, such as a failed commando raid in Syria in July, to try to free hostages. It reached out to more than two dozen countries to seek help in rescuing the Americans held in Syria, a National Security Council spokesman, Alistair Baskey, said in an emailed statement Friday.
Abo Aljoud offers a counterpoint to the official government position: one that does not contradict all of Washington's assertions but indicates systemic gaps in its efforts to free captives.
The New York Times has previously reported that many European countries have funneled ransoms to terrorists to rescue their citizens, a tactic the United States has steadfastly refused to pursue, arguing that it encourages more kidnappings.
But interviews with family members of the hostages, former FBI officials, freed prisoners and Syrians claiming to be go-betweens for the Islamic State suggest that this policy also has made the government reluctant to engage with people who claim to have valuable information about the hostages or suggestions for possible ways to free them.
The challenge of dealing with hostages has grown more acute and complicated over the past year with the rise of the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, which has beheaded hostages from nations that have refused to pay ransoms.
In the decade before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the FBI brought most American hostages home safely by engaging directly with the kidnappers. But after al-Qaida struck, the approach changed as jihadists transformed kidnappings into a lucrative business that raised hundreds of millions of dollars in ransoms. The United States refused to pay and increasingly refused to consider even talking to the kidnappers, directly or indirectly, critics say.
Former FBI officials say the post-9/11 approach led to lost opportunities and, perhaps, lives.
"The policy of no concession has always been there, but we used to interpret it in a much more flexible way," said Gary Noesner, who retired in 2003 as chief of the FBI's Crisis Negotiation Unit. "The problem in my mind is that we have devalued negotiation as a tool."
In one instance a few months before Foley was beheaded in August, a rebel fighter said he had taken an Islamic State sheik to Gaziantep, Turkey, about 35 miles north of the Syrian border, where a delegation of U.S. officials was meeting. The sheik had a letter from the group stating that he was authorized to negotiate, but the officials declined to talk with him.
"They said: 'We don't meet with terrorists. How dare you bring a terrorist to see us?' And the meeting was canceled," said the rebel fighter, who requested anonymity because the Islamic State had not authorized him to speak to reporters. "ISIS knew that the Americans were not going to negotiate a ransom. That is why they began slaughtering them."
Government officials said there was no blanket policy that would prevent investigators from speaking to people with credible information about or access to hostages. A senior FBI official said Abo Aljoud's information would have been "of relatively little value" because it was four months old by the time he could have reported the prison location.
"There is no such directive against engaging intermediaries if they are credible and seem to have a legitimate ability to influence the captors," a senior Obama administration official said Friday.
Relatives of the victims, as well as retired law enforcement officials who oversaw hostage negotiations under previous administrations, say the post-9/11 policy has meant not just that the government will not pay cash to kidnappers but also that it will not participate in any negotiations.
Critics argue that this runs counter to long-standing instructions in the FBI's operations manual, which provides guidance on how agents can help families pay private ransoms.
They say, moreover, that the way the policy is currently applied is at odds with a classified 2002 presidential directive that allows the government to pay ransoms in special cases, so long as the money is used as a lure to catch the perpetrators, according to two officials who were involved in drafting the order.
"When you say that you will not make concessions to terrorists," Noesner said, "there are some people who now believe this means we should not even talk to the kidnappers."
FBI spokesman Christos Sinos said in an email that the agency's approach to hostage negotiations abroad had been governed since 2002 by the presidential directive. But because the directive is classified, he could not confirm details, including whether ransoms were allowed in some cases.
As four Americans languished in the Islamic State's network of jails in Syria, at least 15 hostages held alongside them were released. All but one were European, and they were freed after aggressive negotiations by their governments, employers and families, including the payment of ransoms.
Diane Foley, James Foley's mother, said that on three occasions, a National Security Council official told her family members that they could be prosecuted if they paid a ransom. The family decided to begin fundraising anyway, relying in part on the advice of Charles Regini, a 21-year veteran of the FBI who is now a director at Unity Resources Group, the security company that led the search for Foley.
As a former FBI hostage negotiator, Regini knew the agency had helped families arrange ransoms in the past. He also shared a little-known fact: The classified presidential directive that lays out how the government should deal with kidnappings includes an exception to the ban on paying ransoms.
The provision, he said, allows the government to use a ransom as a lure to trap the kidnappers, with the goal of recovering the money. Regini said this could give the Obama administration leeway in interpreting the policy.
"It's the will of senior leaders: They can leverage a number of options at their disposal, and one of the options is paying a ransom, whether it's paid by the family or paid by the government," Regini said. "It's not about whether or not they had the capability. It's about not having the will."
Information for this article was contributed by Eric Schmitt and Michael S. Schmidt of The New York Times.
A Section on 12/28/2014