The Hostage Negotiator
What Is It Like To Be Someone Else?
Dear Friends,
I’m sharing a piece that’s basically a write-up of a long interview. This is related to the ‘Travel’ writing I’ve been doing on this site — these are meant to be an immersion in someone else’s life.
Best,
Sam
THE HOSTAGE NEGOTIATOR
Alana is from Broadway royalty. She’s had an incredibly charmed life — good family, good schools, directs musicals, made Forbes’ 30 Under 30. She had a friend who was an Afghan conductor, and in the late summer of 2021 was trying, without success, to get her and her family out of Afghanistan.
In the middle of her futile endeavors, she saw an interview on CNN with Idris, an Afghan-American, who was running an organization getting people out. He seemed to know what he was doing, so she called a friend working at CNN and asked him to put her in touch with Idris — and then, on the phone, Idris said that, to be honest with her, there were so many names that he couldn’t really prioritize her conductor, but if she came down to D.C. and volunteered at the organization with him then there would be a much better chance of getting the conductor’s family out.
So Alana postponed rehearsals for her musical, took a train down to D.C. Idris met her downstairs, which impressed her — she was just one volunteer; she had some idea of how busy he must be — and then what really got to her was seeing him in action, there was a room full of volunteers and he was indisputably in charge, on about four phones at the same time, somehow simultaneously low-key and also a torrent of activity.
She was immediately put in charge of putting together lists for convoys trying to reach Hamid Karzai Airport in Kabul. Idris told her to work very fast — everybody was scrambling to get onto flights — but also to not make any mistakes, since one mistake in a document number might prevent someone from boarding a flight. “And I was like, great,” Alana says in her shrewd, low-key way. It was difficult, excruciating work. The first convoy she was given one of the ones that didn’t get through. They kept being stopped at different checkpoints and eventually, due to bomb threats, Idris turned them around and sent them home, which was just as well — they were due to arrive at Karzai around the time that an ISIS suicide bombing struck one of the gates to the airport.
Alana had started off, she said, with tunnel vision for the family she was trying to get out, but then within a few hours it was like “what about this family and what about that family?” She went the next three days without sleep. There was a table with Oreos and Doritos on it and that was what they ate. There was a clock in the room with Kabul time on it, and that, combined with the sleep deprivation, made her feel like she was actually in Afghanistan. “I tripped in and out of being there, which was nuts,” she says. She talks about a moment when someone in the office shouted that a new Taliban regulation proscribed that anyone caught texting with an American would have their hands cut off — and, when she heard that, she instantaneously flung her phone across the floor. She was texting at that moment with an Afghan boy in one of the convoys; somehow, in her state of sleep deprivation and shock, his hands had fused with her hands.
They were working to the last minute on August 31st, and then Idris and another of the leaders called everyone together and said “It’s over.” The U.S. had pulled out of Afghanistan; it wasn’t legal for the organization to continue to continue its activities. All the volunteers could go home. “What do you mean, it’s over?” Alana shouted to somebody next to her. But, as Idris thanked the volunteers, another of the leaders sidled up to Alana and whispered, “It’s not over.” They just had to scale way down and work in secret, but they would continue the evacuations — and Alana was one of the people they wanted to work with them.
They moved the operation to hotel rooms and worked through the fall. Idris had his team on the ground in Afghanistan — mostly his extended family, who were doing the actual evacuations — and then there were his brothers, working out of D.C., and an assortment of Americans, many of them veterans of the Afghanistan War. The real challenge was chartering flights to get people out and then trying to find a third country to take the refugees — often to have the third countries back out at the last minute. Alana still had her shows in motion, but, essentially, she had switched over completely to the evacuation work. She had always been competent and the work seemed to exercise both her intelligence and her drive to do good. “Once you start you can’t really stop, which is both a good thing and a bad thing,” she says. “Nothing mattered except getting people out. It was wild to me the way a switch flipped in my brain. I would get emails from very important theater people and just be like meh.”
In October, as it got harder and harder to evacuate people, she found herself in the position of drawing up the manifest for a flight that the organization had chartered, deciding who would be on it and who wouldn’t. “It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do, figuring out who has highest risk,” she says. “This baby vs this women’s rights activist — deciding who lives and who maybe dies. Right now there are people who are living in the U.S. because I put them on a list and people who are in Kabul because I didn’t put them on a list — and my training is in musical theater.
“I was knocked down in the moment by how much power I had — I don’t mean that in a power hungry way, I mean that in a scary way. This is supposed to be the government’s job. You’re trained as a civilian to think that anything involving health and safety is something that government does, not me. But in the end, with the government falling a little short, it was about 40 volunteers from all walks of life — random civilians — making decisions about life and death.”
Throughout this, she and Idris were working very closely together. At one point they had shared a hotel room — sleeping in separate beds. “It was just oh I’m sleeping in the same hotel room as this grown man,” Alana says. But there had been a suggestion of something from the beginning, which, she says, didn’t come especially either from her or from Idris but felt like an inevitability. Early on, while they were waiting on a convoy en route to Kabul, he had asked if she wanted to go for a walk. For most of the walk, he was on his cell phone. “I remember being on the steps of the Washington Memorial thinking am I going to marry this guy and also thinking I have so many thoughts about democracy,” she says. “I remember sitting there, thinking I feel like I’m in a movie. I know that something significant is happening but I don’t know what yet.” When they returned to the office, everybody had felt like something had shifted — although, really, nothing happened — but a month or so later they were working late in one of the hotel rooms and another of the volunteers suddenly left for the night and “it was like: ok,” Alana says.
Within weeks of starting to date, they were flying around the world in the never-ending search for third countries to accept the chartered flights. They went to Dubai, the UK, Kyrgyzstan. They were inseparable and, somehow, were already sure that they were going to get married. “Why does anybody know? I just knew,” Alana says.
They were, in certain respects, very different from each other — Alana was from this musical theater background, Idris had grown up in a refugee camp in Pakistan. She was Jewish; he was Muslim. Their worlds hadn’t particularly crossed before, but Alana says, “Despite the fact that we came from very different lifestyles, our values were identical. The lifestyle in theater makes it seems like everything is life and death, although it’s not life and death. Finding someone who understands that and is willing to work with that is rare.”
***
As part of the work he was doing, Idris started to feel that it was necessary for him to go back to Afghanistan. Negotiations were underway for access to Karzai Airport, and Idris was in a unique position to serve in a bridge role between the U.S. and the Taliban in the complicated new landscape following the U.S.’ withdrawal. “There are very few people who are Afghan refugees, veterans, college educated, compassionate, speak six languages, and don’t care if they don’t sleep at night,” Alana says. The State Department was starting to recognize his value. And he was traveling with protection from the Taliban — with bodyguards and a formal invitation. The first time he went, she says, “it was boring, it was really boring.” He had meetings, he looked at some warehouses on behalf of the World Food Program. “I switched from being concerned to being proud,” she says.
In December, they went to London for a party with Tim Rice and a bunch of musical theater luminaries, which turned out, Alana said, to be an astonishingly bad party. “Truer words were never spoken,” Idris said. Then Idris flew to Kabul for his second trip to Afghanistan since the withdrawal. “Something about the second visit was unnerving to me — he was nervous, he wasn’t saying anything, but I could tell,” Alana says. “I remember saying to him please don’t die, sort of as a joke, making fun of my hysteria.”
The trip was eight days and for the first seven days everything was good. Idris called her and introduced her to his Taliban bodyguards. “I would call home and be like, mom, I just talked to the Taliban,” she says. Shortly before he had gone, Idris had seen Les Miserables for the first time and, Alana says, “just fell in love with it.” He would be driving through the streets of Kabul and sending videos of himself singing ‘Can You Hear The People Sing’ — which he found “pretty amusing,” Alana says. He sent her photos of the snow falling on the mountains — which meant that the snow had come early that year and meant that a lot of children would end up dying of hunger over the course of the winter.
On the eighth day, Idris and his brother Said, who had traveled with him, were summoned for an interview on the tenth floor of their hotel — a formality for all foreigners, they were told. Then they were brought to the General Directorate of Intelligence for a subsequent interview, and from there they were taken to cells in the basement, eight feet by eight feet, freezing cold, with no mattresses or blankets, and with a pool of water on the floor.
Alana found it suspicious that Idris hadn’t called her — he was supposed to have caught his flight and to be in Dubai. Then she checked the location tracker she had on her cell phone and saw that his pin was at the GDI in Kabul. Alana still had a limited knowledge about Afghanistan, but she knew that that couldn’t be good. She contacted the leaders in their organization and everybody sprang into action. “There’s a fear in these types of situations that a person could be executed quickly, that they could deny having any knowledge of what happened, and what we were able to do was to say we know that you have him,” she says.
There was a lot of confusion in the first seventeen days of Idris and Said’s captivity, Alana says. There was no word from him during that time. She thought to herself, “What can I do?” and she decided that it might be somehow useful to be in Dubai. She didn’t have it in her to read books or watch movies. She went on “super-long walks around Dubai” and she went deep into online rabbit holes on hostage crisis and detainee crises. “My MO was I don’t know enough to interfere,” she says. But then she got the number of the organization’s State Department liaison, and “that’s when things changed in my world,” she says. “By the end of that 17 days I was like, no, waiting and trusting isn’t enough.”
From that point, Alana became more and more involved in coordinating between the State Department and the organization and in communicating with Idris in his cell. She got a text message from an Afghan number she did not know, saying, in all caps, “HI HOW ARE YOU I LOVE YOU VERY MUCH.”
That, she says, is one of the more hysterical things about Afghans, that every conversation — no matter how intense the crisis going on — must begin with ‘hi, how are you?’ “I was like ‘how are you?’” she recalls, almost exploding, but, obviously, she says, “That was everything.”
Not long after that, she got a call from another unknown Afghan number. This was a cousin in Afghanistan. Idris was on the line but she couldn’t hear him; he had called the cousin and had the cousin patch through to Alana. It was a difficult way to have a conversation, but it confirmed that Idris was alive.
It turned out Idris and Said had bribed a guard to smuggle in a phone in for them. Once they were able to communicate, it seemed as if their release would happen relatively swiftly. It was clear that they weren’t spies, which was the initial charge, but then, as time went on, the Taliban seemed to get the idea of using them as pawns in some sort of political exchange.
As the situation dragged, Idris took to hunger strikes to attempt to improve his conditions. The guards beat him up and tortured him to try to make him eat. The prison’s commander swore on the Koran that he would be released soon — which prompted Idris to give up the hunger strike; only for the commander to go back on his word and for Idris to start the hunger strike all over again.
In February, a deal was worked out between the Taliban and the State Department, but this time it was the State Department that pulled out on it — worried that the photo op the Taliban was asking for would help to legitimize the regime just at a moment when the Taliban was eliminating education for girls above sixth grade. Alana and the organization got the State Department’s position but felt that if they didn’t act Idris and Said would die. They wrote a scathing press release saying “President Biden Scuttles Deal To Release Navy Veteran.” Alana was in touch with Jake Tapper, and Tapper was ready to go with the story. It was a complicated process. There were other hostages at the GDI, and Alana had to work with an experienced crisis negotiator to talk about exactly how she could phrase things so as not to jeopardize them. Over the howls of protest from their contacts at the State Department, they had decided to carry through with the press release and television appearance — setting the date for it at February 24, 2022.
That morning, Russia invaded Ukraine, and Alana got a text from Tapper saying that there just wouldn’t be room for her on the air. The plan for going public was aborted. Idris, to pressure the State Department, decided on a food-and-water strike, which, says Alana, was the lowest point in the entire ordeal. She is such a fluent speaker, and has told this story so many times by now, that she can rattle it off almost without emotion, but this part is difficult for her.
On February 28, she learned that he was on day five of the food-and-water strike. “The irony is that it was my birthday — and that’s what I thought about all day, that this is how it was going to end, because of dehydration,” she says. “I didn’t hear anything for 12 hours, I assumed he was dead — five days is as long as you can go without food and water. He called the next morning, had broken his strike. What he claimed was that he was trying to strike on the days leading up to my birthday so that he’d be out on my birthday.”
She rolls her eyes at this. It was an insane, absurd situation. By this time, Idris and Said’s parents had visited Kabul. They had met with the head of the GDI, they had said to him, basically, look, our sons are not spies, they are Muslim and they are Pashtun, and the head of the GDI had given his assurance that they would be released. The State Department had been wary of that agreement and had wanted something more definitive, and so Alana and Idris’ family were doing most of their fighting with the State Department— and also fighting Idris to talk him out of the hunger strikes. “We were saying to the State Department this is how it works,” Alana says. “An agreement like that is more ironclad for them than a document with bullet points.” And, on the phone with Idris, she was speaking in code with him (a code they’d lifted from Harry Potter books) in case the State Department was listening in to them. She laughs. Freshman year of college, she had considered going into International Relations and then decided to stay with musical theater. “So I’m in hostage negotiations with the Deputy Secretary of State. I was like, ‘I guess I’m getting my IR degree — I just didn’t expect it to come in this form,’” she says.
What she also didn’t expect was how her engagement was going to happen. On one of their calls, Idris said, “Do you want to marry me?” And she’d said yes, but also said, “You’re on a smuggled phone in Taliban captivity. This is not how I pictured it.”
***
After three months, the logjam finally broke. The State Department was going to send a senior official for a photo-op but at the last minute changed it and sent the CIA station chief for Kabul. Alana doesn’t quite understand what happened — why that was a good enough deal for the Taliban — but she wasn’t complaining. Idris and Said got on the same plane with the station chief, flew to Qatar and then to the U.S. Said had had a heart attack while in captivity and needed medical attention, but Idris really was doing amazingly well. He was lined up to give a TED Talk and, ironically, this — as much as anything from the captivity — makes Alana upset.
Just after the talk, an online troll had questioned some of Idris’ claims and they’d had to painstakingly document his captivity for TED’s benefit. “Of all the things that the Taliban did, for a reputable Western institution to say we don’t believe you, that was so painful,” Alana says. “And that has happened again and again. People saying that he was in cahoots with the Taliban or don’t believe that he helped all the people that he did.”
In the whole long interview, this, actually, is the most emotional Alana gets. I’ve known her for months but never really had a great sense of her personality. She had been in the background of what we were focusing on. We’d been paying more attention to Idris and to his family. It had seemed just kind of interesting that he had a white American girlfriend who was also a Broadway director. I’d traveled with them back to Idris’ family home just after Idris’ release and shared a certain wry complicity with her as she was made to eat freshly-slaughtered lamb for Eid, as she was dolled up to look like a traditional Afghan woman. She had been quiet and a little mischievous. I didn’t have a real sense of what her personality was — which was this tireless commitment to what she believed in; and a sense of affront for any injustice.
I didn’t have a sense, also, for how the relationship between her and Idris really functioned. In the interview, she says that the sense of common purpose started it and the hostage situation soldered it into place.
“You could not pay me or Idris any amount of money to relive those 105 days, but our experience as a couple is entirely shaped by them,” she says. “We’re so uniquely strong and together because of that. And the trust that comes with that.
“You skip a lot of steps in a relationship when find yourself in a situation like that, we’re uniquely partnered because of that. I mean, the first time I met his parents was when we lived together in Qatar for two weeks during the hostage negotiations. That really ripped off the Band-Aid. Now, Idris and I can’t be away from each other for very long — there’s a paranoia about safety. It’s not clinginess, it’s that we’ve been in a situation where that happens and it was the worst, so our minds go to the worst. It’s trauma, but, weirdly, I like what that does for the relationship.”
At the moment it’s sort of a difficult time. The red tape has been accumulating. “Idris was so effective for so long, but he’s dealing with so many roadblocks in Afghanistan,” Alana says. The mission has been slowing down. He’s gotten some bad press — which Alana is livid about. He seems a bit more adrift at the moment than I’ve ever seen him. And his experience probably is affecting him more than he would admit to. “Idris is the toughest guy I know and he has been through so many difficult things over the course of his life,” Alana says. “Someone who has gone through everything he has gone through in the past year certainly has trauma — and he is so averse to seeking help. For a while those things masked themselves. He would complain about headaches, eventually I found a scab on his head and said ‘what is that?’ and he said that when he was tortured he hit his head against the side of a wall so we ended up going to the neurologist and the ER.” Every so often, she says, he screams in his sleep — usually, it’s a dream of being in captivity.
For her, the whole experience gave her love. It didn’t exactly change her career trajectory. She loved theater; didn’t want to leave theater. It wasn’t like it convinced her to go into non-profit work or else to go back to school and get an IR degree. But it make her, she says, a different person. “It’s very easy to think, oh, I don’t have the training to do X, I’m not equipped to do Y,” she says. “But what I learned is that if human beings want something badly enough, they can figure it out.”
All names have been changed for this essay.