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In November of 2014, the Obama administration ordered a “comprehensive review of the U.S. Government policy on overseas terrorist-related hostage cases.”¹ The review came in the wake of several tragedies resulting in Americans held overseas by terrorist groups. In the summer of 2014, American journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff and humanitarian aid worker Peter Kassig were brutally murdered by the Islamic State (ISIS) in Iraq and Syria. In 2013, photojournalist Luke Somers was killed with South African Pierre Korkie in Yemen during a failed rescue attempt to free them from al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP).² While the review was ongoing, further tragedy struck. In January 2015, American hostage Warren Weinstein was accidentally killed along with an Italian hostage, Giovanni Lo Porto, in an airstrike against the Haqqani network in Pakistan.³ A few months later, American humanitarian aid worker Kayla Mueller, also held by ISIS, was killed while she was held by her captors.⁴

The U.S. government’s hostage policy review, led by Lieutenant General Bennet Sacolick of the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), conducted extensive interviews with former hostages and families of hostages who provided “courageous and generous contributions…and reinforced the critical importance of a comprehensive, coordinated, and coherent approach to hostage recovery efforts.”⁵ The poor experiences of the families of the ISIS hostages and their interactions with the U.S. government⁶ brought light to the need for a “specific emphasis on examining family engagement” as a part of the review of U.S. hostage policy.⁷

At the same time, the challenges to trying to recover the ISIS hostages held in Syria, the failed rescue of Luke Summers, and the death of Warren Weinstein highlighted issues beyond family engagement and signaled a need for the U.S. government to take a broader view of the changes that were needed in order to improve its ability to respond to hostage-taking events. In addition to engagement with family members, the review focused on coordination within the U.S. government, engagement with external stakeholders, intelligence sharing and collection, and broader U.S. hostage policy.⁸

In 2019 and 2020, the James W. Foley Legacy Foundation (JWFLF) published its assessment of the efficacy of the 2015 U.S. Hostage Policy Review and the implementation of Presidential Policy Directive 30 (PPD-30) and Executive Order (EO) 13698.⁹ This report is an extension of that work, continuing to examine the way that the U.S. government creates and implements policy in support of U.S. nationals, and their families, who are taken hostage or unlawfully or wrongfully detained abroad.

The report is divided into six sections including this introduction. The second section provides a brief history of U.S. hostage policy. The third section explains the method and limitations of the survey conducted as part of this report. The fourth section discusses results from the survey regarding perceptions of the U.S. hostage recovery enterprise. The fifth section discusses concerns raised by former hostages and detainees along with their families, advocates, U.S. government officials, and senior military officials. The sixth section provides concluding remarks. Appendix A provides a list of requests for support made by participants. Appendix B and Appendix C provide further detail on the survey responses for hostage case and wrongful detainee case participants respectively.