Foreign Office Dealing With State-Level Hostages Needs to Beware of ‘Playground Bully,’ UK MPs Told

But MPs also warned of the danger of causing 'entrenchment'

Alireza Akbari, Iran's former deputy defence minister, speaks during an interview with Khabaronline in Tehran, Iran, in this undated picture obtained on Jan. 12, 2023. Khabaronline/WANA/Handout via Reuters

An experienced hostage negotiator has told a committee of MPs “state-level hostage situations” such as the case of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe often revolve around the importance of the Foreign Office recognising they are dealing with a “playground bully.”

Last month Iran executed Alireza Akbari, a former deputy defence minister in Iran who was also a British national, despite an appeal by Foreign Secretary James Cleverly. Akbari was convicted of spying for MI6, an allegation which he and his family had insisted was false.

After Akbari’s death the chair of the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee, Alicia Kearns, accused the Iranians of trying to “weaponise” dual nationals.

The Foreign Affairs Committee is investigating the Foreign Office’s response to “state-level hostage situations” and on Tuesday, two of the world’s leading experts, Phil Harper, an experienced hostage negotiator and CEO of Sheep One Hundred, and Mickey Bergman, executive director of the New Mexico-based non-for-profit Richardson Center for Global Engagement were invited to testify before Kearns’s committee.

Royston Smith, a Conservative MP, asked whether the government extending diplomatic protection to Zaghari-Ratcliffe had been a “useful tool.”

Dealing With ‘a Single Person With an Ego’

Harper said he did not think it was of “any use at all” and he said: “We need to remember that a lot of regimes, in that case obviously Iran, are actually led by a single person. We talk about a government, but there is invariably a single person with an ego that we’re actually having to deal with.”

He added: “It’s important that we don’t suddenly suggest we’re going to be a bit clever about this, when we’re talking to the perhaps the biggest playground bully there is. Because [they will say], ‘You can do what you like, but I have still got your citizen and I still want this.’”

Smith said he wondered if it was done for the “domestic audience” rather than “shifting the deal” at all on the ground.

Harper said it was often all about the “optics,” or political perception, and he referred to the recent deal agreed by U.S. President Joe Biden to swap basketball player Brittney Griner for Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout.

“We have somebody released for a relatively minor offence, for cannabis oil, for an arms dealer. What else was happening around that? The optics were really poor,” Harper added.

He said Germany tends to take a very tough line on hostage negotiations, which was backed up by public opinion.

“The German public don’t actually want you to help somebody that shouldn’t have been a tourist in Mali or wherever. Don’t expend too much on them. From a common sense point of view they shouldn’t have been there in the first place,” Harper added.

Danny Fenster posing for a photo in Yangon, Myanmar, in 2020. family courtesy photo via AP

Bergman said his organisation had dealt with a number of “state-level hostage” situations in recent years, and he highlighted the case of Danny Fenster, a U.S. journalist and managing editor of Frontier Myanmar, an English-language news website.

Fenster was arrested in May 2011, held for 176 days and then released on “humanitarian grounds” just three days after being sentenced to 11 years in prison for “unlawful association” and “encouraging dissent against the military.”

‘Short-Lived Window’ of Opportunity

Bergman said there were usually two “windows” of opportunity for obtaining the release of a U.S. or British national in a country like Burma, Iran, or North Korea.

Bergman said, “The first window is typically a short-lived window in which there is an opportunity quietly to get in to the captors, and to figure out how to get them out, with the understanding that they are actually better off without this being escalated.”

But he said: “That window is short. Unfortunately, governments don’t act as quickly and by the time the government makes a determination that this is a wrongful or rightful detention, that window has passed.”

Bergman said the individual is then usually indicted and the government in question begins “digging in.”

He said, “The second window then opens and it’s a longer process to look at.”

Bergman said one case where they managed to get someone out during the “first window” was Fernando Espinoza, a U.S. teacher and former submariner, who was released in Libya in December 2021 after just six weeks.

Greenpeace activists, demanding the release of the so-called Arctic 30, protest in front of the Russian embassy in Paris, on Sep. 27, 2013. Thomas SamsonAFP/Getty Images

Both men agreed that diplomacy was key and there was a danger that in raising the profile of a case or becoming too aggressive, Britain or the United States could trigger “entrenchment” in the hostage-taking country.

Harper said, “It is important that any publicity actually looks at the risk of increased or decreased entrenchment.”

He pointed out the case of the so-called Arctic 30, a group of Greenpeace activists who were detained by Russia in the Arctic Circle in 2013.

“They didn’t actually want to keep the 30, they actually wanted to be able to give them back, and they looked for a face-saving way of dealing with it. If we then protested ... they may not have come back,” said Harper.

He was also asked about the U.S. Special Presidential Envoy for Hostage Affairs, Roger Carstens, who was appointed in 2020.

Harper said, “I think it’s not helpful in a state detention to turn up as the special envoy for hostage taking.”

He said it suggested they wanted to give the country in question a “bloody nose.”

Harper said a British family whose loved one was held in Mali had asked him why the UK did not have such a special envoy, and he said if the Foreign Office were to create such a role, he would prefer the title “special ambassador for British citizens held or missing abroad.”