Hostage diplomacy with the Kremlin

Hosted by Christina Ruffini and Sir Richard Dearlove

Guest

Cameron Hume

Cameron Hume is a former American Ambassador who worked on the team that traveled to Moscow to directly deal with the Kremlin on behalf of detained Americans, including WNBA player Brittney Griner.

Episode Summary

When WNBA basketball star Brittney Griner was jailed and sent to a penal colony in Moscow last year, the US government got to work on securing her release. But, a few days after she was detained by Russian authorities, Putin invaded Ukraine. Suddenly, it became complicated for the Americans to talk to the Russians in an official capacity. But luckily for Griner, they weren’t the only ones on the case. One Decision sits down with former American Ambassador Cameron Hume, who worked on the small team that traveled to Moscow to directly deal with the Kremlin themselves, on behalf of Griner’s and other detained Americans’ families.

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Transcript

INTRODUCTION

Mcfarlane: You're listening to One Decision, the show that looks at the choices made that have international impact. I'm your host, Julia McFarlane. And today with my cohost, former chief of MI6, Sir Richard Dearlove, we're talking to one of the key players behind the recent prisoner swap between the United States and the Russian Federation. Brittney Griner is an American professional basketball player. She plays for the Arizona Phoenix Mercury team, and in 2021, became a two time Olympic gold medalist. During the WNBA basketball off season, she took a trip to Moscow to play in the Russian Premier League. On the February 17, she was detained, arrested on charges of smuggling after Russian customs officials found vape cartridges containing cannabis oil in her luggage. She sat trial in the summer and was sentenced to nine years in prison. The US was outraged, and the Biden administration quickly came under pressure to secure her release. On the December 8, the Russians and Americans announced that Griner would be released from prison and sent back to the States in exchange for an infamous arms dealer, Viktor Bout, who was held in a federal prison in Illinois. You may have heard this news, which made global headlines in the run up to Christmas. But you likely will not have heard of the small team of former American ambassadors who were working behind the scenes and off the books to negotiate this exchange at a time when the US and Russia were suddenly and mutually thrust into each other's diplomatic wilderness following Putin's invasion of Ukraine. Ambassador Cameron Hume is a longtime US diplomat. He served as ambassador to Indonesia, Algeria, and South Africa. Along with fellow ex-Ambo and the former New Mexico governor Bill Richardson, he worked back channels with Moscow on behalf of Griner's family. What are the benefits of having private citizens negotiating with the Kremlin instead of officials from the State Department? Why can't the US government secure the release of their own citizens without outside help? And what are the ethics of prisoner exchanges when they involve the release of dangerous criminals like Viktor Bout whose freedom is likely to lead to the death of innocent civilians in time to come? We put these questions to Ambassador Hume, sat down with us earlier this year to explain to us what exactly the steps were that led to Griner's release. You had a behind the scenes front row view of that situation. Take us through how you experienced that story from your side, away from the headlines as it were.

INTERVIEW

Hume: Okay, with pleasure. I work with Bill Richardson, a former secretary of energy and governor of New Mexico, who's made a vocation of trying to get prisoners released who're held in unfair conditions abroad in other countries. And he's had success, whether it be Russia, Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, a number of places. So, and he works only for the families. If the families ask, will you please help? He does it. And he is not paid by the government, he raises money privately. So he had been asked by the Reed and Whelan families. These were two individuals who were previously convicted on other charges in Russia. And so we prepared to go out. We had a prior agreement that we would meet with Sergei Lavrov, the foreign minister, whom Richardson and I as well have known for thirty years. And so we went to Moscow really without more than that, wondering, could we prod and find a pathway forward that would secure the release of Mr. Reed and Mr. Whelan?

Mcfarlane: Trevor Reed and Paul Whelan are two Americans who both served in the marines. In 2018, Paul Whelan was detained by Russian police when he was in Moscow for a friend's wedding. The Russians claimed he had on his possession a computer flash drive that contained sensitive information. Whelan claims he had been given it by a friend and that it was his understanding the drive contained wedding pictures. He was convicted of spying in 2020 in a trial held behind closed doors, and has been serving time in a former World War II Russian gulag doing hard labor. Trevor Reed, another former marine, was arrested in 2019 after getting involved in a drunken altercation with Russian police officers. However, he was freed last year after a prisoner exchange with a Russian pilot who was sentenced to twenty years in a US jail for drug smuggling back in 2011.

Hume: We had several conversations, but the main one was with the foreign minister Sergei Lavrov, in which I would say this subject, the point was made, but most of the conversation was about other things. You should know that there was an agreement, continues on, that these would only be discussed through the official channel. We're, of course, not bound by that, but it meant that an actual, will you do this and I'll do that, would have to be solidified through an official channel. So we were trying to clarify what would the situation be. And it was evident very quickly that Reed could be released for an individual who had been convicted twelve years earlier, thirteen years earlier, for conspiring to fly cocaine into the United States. We had worked on this case for two or three years. Governor Richardson had actually paid for the Russian prisoner to get dental care, because the Russians complained he wasn't getting good enough dental care, and as a gesture of goodwill, the governor took care of that. So it looked as if a Reed for this pilot would work. We did not raise Brittney Griner, we had heard something, but we had not been contacted by her family. And so we came back to Washington. The governor spoke to people at the White House indicating what he thought would be possible. Nothing happened. Two weeks later, the governor called the White House and he said, you know, actually I work for the families, I really have to tell the family what we think is possible. And they said, oh my god, don't do that. And so the governor agreed to hold fire for a couple of days while they then put the question before the president. Then two days later, the president announced there would be a swap of prisoners. That is Reed for, I think his name is Yaroshenko, up in Danbury. Mr. Whelan, we were told had been told it was too hard a case. And it was around that time that the governor was asked by Brittney Griner's family to be involved. So that was sort of the launch. Right? And time went on, and with the events you indicated, I think the lawyers for the NBA, the Basketball Association, everything, felt you had to let the Russian justice system take its course. So when that was nearing an end, we arranged for another trip to go out to Moscow to, again, talk with Minister Lavrov, which we did. And it was basically the same scenario. We talked, both sides acknowledged, oh, there's an official channel, but yet there were signals given that clarified what the Russian government might do in response to an American effort, and we brought that back. Now, what I'd just say as somebody who's been involved in diplomacy for a long time, what was striking to me is that with all of these problems in the world, particularly the situation in Ukraine, Secretary of State Blinken had purposely not met with his counterpart since the beginning of the invasion of Ukraine. And in fact, he announced he didn't wanna meet with his counterpart. And I would just say, as sort of an old dog in this game, I think if you have problems with people and you're a diplomat, you're supposed to meet with them. And that doesn't convey that you're weak, soft, or anything else. It conveys you want to explore how you deal with the problem rather than ignore how you deal with the problem. So I think it was in that kind of space that the governor was able to get a little more clarity, and I think in a way that helped push forward what became the December swap.

Mcfarlane: That's really interesting. That's a sort of necessary evil of diplomacy. And of course, for any administration, particularly one that is very sensitive to optics, there is this temptation to boycott hostile regimes and unsavory characters. But the truth of the matter is, when you're a diplomat, that is your job. It is your job to talk to all sorts of people and to try and resolve these issues. I mean, do you think that is a weakness or was that a mistake of the Biden administration? I mean, on one hand, it allows an opening up of a path for nonofficial lines of communication, such as with Bill Richardson, who seems to be a very, very interesting character. The New York Times profiled him recently and painted him as this man who is behind the scenes very enigmatic. He's the MVP of hostage negotiations. He's got a reputation as someone who's able to broker deals and deal with strongmen when governments, with all of their tools at their disposal, are unable to do so?

Hume: Okay. There are two things I'd address in what you mentioned. One, I don't see any point in blaming the Biden administration on this. I think that there's been a general habit of American diplomacy, which has been strengthened to become more dominant in the last thirty years, that if we don't like what somebody's doing, we will name them and shame them. And we will then assume that's all we have to do, and we'll go out and have lunch. And I think that this naming and shaming, idea of I won't deal with you because you've behaved poorly, you can't resolve complicated conflicts just sitting on your laurels and saying I'm morally superior. I think that the end of the Cold War brought in a habit of superiority that we drifted in that direction. So I think that's a societal challenge that obviously the Biden administration also has to deal with, but it's not like they invented it. And I think some others may have been more so. Bill Richardson, you know, I worked with lots and lots of people, and they can talk to people and put people at ease, particularly people who are from very different cultures and whom Americans would consider to be crackpots. So I think what that comes from is an ability, I respect you for the purposes of the conversation we're having. It doesn't mean I respect you and praise everything you ever did, but we're at ease talking to each other. And I'm not gonna be judgmental while I'm talking to you. We're just trying to have a conversation. And Bill Richardson has that gift, which I think you can't go to school and get it. You either have it or you don't. And Bill Richardson has that, and that's why he's able to get clarity often when officials' representatives fail.

Mcfarlane: Richard, in your long and storied career, have you ever had to sit down and deal face to face with crackpots, and what would your experience of that be?

Dearlove: Well, my answer is pretty clear. I agree 100% with Cameron. I believe in talking to people with whom you might have the most difficult relationship, you might even regard them as the enemy, rather than someone with whom you don't want to, as it were, be associated. And unfortunately, I can't go into too much detail about my past, but I've had many, many experiences of having to talk to people when the government maybe didn't want to appear to be talking to certain individuals or certain regimes. So this is a little bit different from Bill Richardson and Cameron's experience, but they send off someone who they don't have to admit went to meet another regime or another group of people. So I've experiences and have dealt with some really unsavory individuals. I would include in that list, but I'm not going to go into detail, even the Khmer Rouge. And you can't get, as it were, more extreme than that. It's about human exchange. It's about trying to establish an area where you might have some degree of common understanding and some ability to, as it were, make progress probably on a very specific issue. But I mean, one thing I would quite like to ask Cameron, because he mentioned Sergei Lavrov. I mean, those of us who've known of Lavrov, I don't know him personally, but known of him for a long period of time. And he was a highly respected diplomat, and a person who was widely admired for his, let's say, his diplomatic skill. But recently on Ukraine, it seems to me that he's completely trashed his reputation because of some of the things he said. Maybe he's had no choice in that matter. But I certainly regard Lavrov very differently from the way that I did when he was perm rep in New York and then the Russian foreign minister. And he was someone actually, who commanded quite a lot of international respect, which I think has somewhat evaporated.

Hume: Picking up on what Richard said, I think, yeah, the Ukraine events are not the ideal situation for showcasing Sergei's skills. And I don't know what else I could say about that, but he himself, for a Secretary of State to not want to even get body language or two words from Sergei Lavrov about the situation in Moscow, in the Kremlin, in the people who were close to Putin during a time of war strike, was striking to me. I would want those little tiny windows into that reality, given the stakes.

Dearlove: I'm fascinated by the Viktor Bout, Griner exchange. I mean, obviously, I was pretty familiar with Bout and knew quite a lot about him. I mean, it seems, in retrospect, that the Russians may be set out deliberately to find someone who they could, as it were, set up in order to get someone like Bout out of detention in the United States. But the problem as I see it is once you've made an exchange like that, you create a situation which is potentially escalatory, and, you know, there will be more innocent Americans put in the very difficult position who will go into detention.

Hume: I think in the case with Bout, yeah, he worked for the FSB, the Moscow's overseas intelligence arm, or worked with them. There are hundreds of thousands of Americans rattling around the world every day. Somebody's always likely to be carrying a vape cartridge someplace they're not supposed to. I don't think they caught and then said, now what do we do? I don't think that they said, let's catch Griner. Although, maybe I'm wrong. I think in terms of releasing Bout, you know, okay, we picked him up in Thailand, brought him back, convicted him.

Mcfarlane: But he's been in US prisons for twelve, thirteen years. The announcement that Griner was to be released was not well received at the justice department because it was tied to the release of Viktor Bout, and that was reported in the Washington Post. Apparently, a lot of officials in the justice department were very against the trading of Bout before his scheduled release, which was scheduled in 2029. There is a danger, isn't there, in releasing convicts. And how do you weigh up the ethics of that? And particularly when you have someone like a dangerous arms trafficker, FSB agent, whose release could very likely lead to the loss of civilian life.

Hume: Okay. I take it as a fact of life that the Justice Department never wants to release a prisoner, any prisoner.

Mcfarlane: That's a good point. Yeah. And...

Hume: And in a case like this, you described the situation accurately. There was a brief outcry, and I think two days later they got over it. That's not to dismiss the risks in trading. But I think in a case like this, the harm to how we view ourselves as a humane society, to allow a woman who was fundamentally innocent and a patriot who won gold medals for this country to rot in a prison colony for nine years so that Viktor Bout could serve the last six years of his twenty year sentence in American prison. That strikes me as a little...

Dearlove: That's not a balance of values I would accept, although I acknowledge there's a price. But just picking up on something that Cameron said earlier, I mean, I guess I'm a bit cynical. I do think that Griner would have been targeted by the FSB, because of her prominence as a sportswoman of global reputation. And I think that my view of these affairs in Russia is these things in Russia do not happen by accident. They happen by design.

Mcfarlane: No. No. No. Fair enough. Well, I think that sort of leads us to this very thorny issue, which is hostage diplomacy. And I was struck by something that the former foreign secretary here in the UK said about a year ago. He was foreign secretary during a large period of the Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe detention in Iran. And he was very involved in discussions and negotiations with the Iranians on possible prisoner exchanges and things like that. And while he did praise the British government for working to secure her release, when she was released last year, I believe, he's been previously very against prisoner swaps and hostage diplomacy because of, he says, the precedents that it can set. And a couple years ago, he said on British television that Zarif and the Iranian government, they knew that Nazanin was innocent and that the foreign ministry really wanted actually to get the Nazanin issue, as he called it, off their hands. But it was the hardliners and the IRGC who said no. Now, it's a different case because there was a £400,000,000 debt to the Iranians for tanks and jets that had not been delivered decades and decades ago. And that was wrapped up in the detention of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe and other British Iranian dual nationals. What do you make of hostage diplomacy? Because his argument was, look, if you kowtow to what the enemy regime demands in exchange for your citizen to be released, you are only confirming that the method of kidnapping citizens in order to extort governments to your own ends is a method that works, and would only encourage them to do the same with other future nationals in the future?

Hume: Yeah. I mean, it's a really tough question. I certainly personally think the idea of doing these negotiations sort of openly in public with leaks to the press and everything is sordid and counterproductive. And so the struggle that you point out over the British researcher who was held in Tehran, I think, yes, having that kind of negotiation carried out in public creates sort of, feeds that appetite. But if you're able to get to a point that you know what a deal would look like and can execute it quickly, I think the risk profile changes somewhat. And that's where I think somebody like Bill Richardson, because he doesn't work for the government, in going out and trying to have these conversations. So that in the case of Mr. Reed, Joe Biden could make a decision. I think that's a plus. But it's a yes. It's a difficult calculus. It's an uncomfortable calculus.

Mcfarlane: Cameron, you made a comment about negotiations in the public being a bit sordid, and that was one thing I wanted to ask you about, about the difference between making a situation public and putting pressure on both governments or staying in the dark. I mean, obviously, there isn't one cookie cutter sort of method that works in all situations, all situations are difficult. But what are the pros and cons of public negotiations versus backdoor diplomacy?

Hume: Okay. First of all, I think that for families, for concerned citizens, being public and giving your voice to the matter is almost always a good thing. So I don't have a problem with that. I think for a government, when a government finds that a prisoner issue becomes a big, enduring, ongoing political thing, like the hostages, the American embassy hostages in Tehran forty years ago, then it becomes really difficult to handle. So, I mean, those are sort of the two poles. You know, you're asking a different question of efficacy, and in that, I think that it would be best to have conversations that are not immediately public, that you separate the, of course, the release of information can create pressure on governments. I honestly, I think there are many cases where governments are inactive, or they don't wanna do the tough work. Last year, we went out to Myanmar, primarily because there was an American journalist, Danny Fenster, had been imprisoned there. And the State Department didn't want Bill Richardson to go, but they said, look, we don't want you to go. We think that something is in courts, that, you know, you'll be released. So Richardson postponed for a couple of months, and the same thing happened. He postponed, he got it a third time, and he said, we still don't want you to go. We think there's a good chance, blah blah blah. And we went, and Richardson raised the case privately with the head of the junta, who said, I don't know. Could you come back in a week? So we flew back in a week, and we picked up the prisoner. Had this been left to the US government, they'd be sitting there reading their intel reports, wondering what to do about it. So I think there's a role for sort of uppity people sometimes to jar loose a possibility, but I think it's very difficult work. There's no guarantee of success. It's just sometimes having some public concern that prods the government or puts other information on the table can be helpful in, that's stated plainly, I mean, saving people's lives, getting them out of prison.

Mcfarlane: Yeah. It's interesting that you bring up the Biden administration being a bit stiff with Richardson. And it was interesting because I think they've certainly publicly been keen to distance themselves from him. Ned Price, the State Department spokesman, he recently said that the Biden administration was concerned that private citizens trying to broker deals, freelance diplomacy, I think he described it. They can't speak for the government. And he went so far as to say it was likely to hinder efforts to free American hostages. It's interesting because partly I did wonder if individuals like Bill Richardson, if perhaps governments are quite happy to sort of publicly boycott their counterparts in, say, Russia, like Tony Blinken. But because they know that there are individuals like Richardson who are able to talk to these unsavory characters without having, you know, the unpleasant, unsavory associations by doing so?

Hume: You know, honestly, if people had followed Mr. Price's, if Bill had followed Mr. Price's advice, Danny Fenster would be in jail out there. And he claimed afterwards the State Department was working tirelessly to get Mr. Fenster released. That's just untrue. They were reading their intel reports and assuming that it would happen miraculously. So, you know, I'm not trying to pick on the guy, but he has a different set of facts I don't really recognize. And does the senior levels of the state department, are they happy when they say, no, don't go out there and try and rescue an American citizen. And Richardson goes out and he rescues an American citizen, and then they have to sort of swim in his wake claiming credit that their people were working tirelessly. Yeah. It's a little uncomfortable, I think. But that's the, you know, in the Fenster case, those certainly were the facts.

Mcfarlane: I wanted to ask you about the case of Paul Whelan. And Richard, I'd love to hear your take on this as well. And Paul Whelan, you mentioned earlier in our conversation that you were involved in trying to broker his release. Now he's still held in Russia. It's a really curious case, and one that I suspect involves quite a lot more context that's probably not available in the public domain. For our listeners, he's a former US marine. He has multiple citizenships between the US, Canada, Ireland, and the UK. And what happened with him was he was seized by FSB officers back in late 2018 when he was in Moscow for a wedding, I believe. And the Russians accused him of being a senior spy who had been caught red handed with a computer flash drive, which contained classified information. Now, Whelan claims the drive was given to him by a friend and that he thought it contained holiday photos. There was a trial that was subsequently held behind closed doors. And long story short, he's now serving a sixteen year sentence at another penal colony in Russia. What do you make of the Paul Whelan situation? Obviously, it's an ongoing case, and so you've got to be careful with what you say. But, I mean, the Russians, it's interesting because they've previously tried to get the Americans to release a pretty fearsome sounding convicted assassin in exchange for Whelan. And their argument was that Whelan was a senior spy, a colonel effectively, and that thereby his release demanded an equivalent exchange. And the man that they chose, this assassin, is a chap called Vadim Krasikov, who is, I believe, currently serving life in Germany because he assassinated a Chechen Georgian back during the Russian Georgian war. And there were reports that the White House were under the impression that Krasikov was way too much of a security risk to release in any kind of prisoner exchanges.

Hume: Your facts are pretty good. I think the one thing I'd emphasize is that he's a prisoner of the German government because he assassinated someone on the streets of Berlin, and they have an understandable attachment to not releasing an assassin, like two years after he killed somebody on the streets of their capital city. I would also point out in the Whelan case, and the way that it's packaged, that Mr. Putin began his career working for their overseas intelligence network. And the FSB is the sort of descendant organization for which Mr. Putin worked. And Russia is going through a time of some challenge because of the stresses caused primarily by its invasion of Ukraine. And I think that that leads to both personal history connection to the FSB and the question that there are stresses on the system, stresses that the FSB would be a reliable ally of Mr. Putin in dealing with, that mean that the FSB is perhaps the main player in Mr. Whelan's case. And that this is something they don't want to give up unless they get something that shows, if you work for us and assassinated somebody on the streets of Berlin, we'll get you out. That's what I think is driving Mr. Whelan's case, which is unfortunate, and had his case been dealt with with greater expedition two years ago, maybe there'd be a different scenario. But that's the challenge.

THE RELEASE OF TAYLOR DUDLEY

Mcfarlane: After we recorded this interview, news broke that Taylor Dudley, a 35 year old navy veteran, had been released by the Russian authorities. He'd been held there for almost a year since spring 2022, shortly after Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine. He'd apparently been on holiday, but somehow ended up in Kaliningrad, a Russian exclave on the Baltic Sea that lies sandwiched between Lithuania and Poland. I'd wondered if Cameron's team had had a hand in his release, so I called him up to ask about it. Cameron, we had to get you on the phone again because there was an update since we had our conversation recently. I mean, one of the things we talked about was the fact that Putin's war made it very difficult for the US to continue dialogues with the Russians after Putin had crossed that Rubicon invading Ukraine last year. Taylor Dudley was a bit of a diplomatic casualty of that. He was taken into captivity just a couple months after that invasion. Tell me what you can of how his release was negotiated because from what I understand, there was no prisoner exchange involved in his release. Right?

Hume: That's correct. Governor Richardson was asked by the family to become involved. And, in the case of Mr. Dudley, you never know exactly all the details of what might have happened in a faraway country months ago, but as presented to us, he had made a friendship with a woman while he was traveling in Western Europe. She invited him to join her at a music festival or some kind of event in Kaliningrad, and he went to Kaliningrad. And there, he was arrested for what? I don't know. Was this a trap that was laid for him, or was it just as likely or maybe more likely simply two young people meeting, then agreeing to meet again, and then going their own ways? I don't know. But anyway, when the case came to the governor's attention, he was in jail in Kaliningrad. And this was around September, the governor spoke with a contact of his in Russia, an oligarch who agreed to try and work this simply through the Russian justice system. He secured an attorney for Mr. Dudley. And over a course of the following three or four months, it worked through the Russian system and they agreed to release him. And the attorney then, knowing that this was going to happen, the governor went to the Polish border with Kaliningrad to meet Mr. Dudley and to escort him home. The Russian lawyer accompanied Mr. Dudley to the border, and there they met. So in this case, there are two things that make it different, or three things. No exchange. This was helping someone get released through the Russian criminal justice system. I'm not sure what he was arrested for. I think it may have been being there without a visa, something like that. He didn't assault anyone or cause a problem. So there was no overt government engagement on the US side. I believe a consular officer from the embassy in Warsaw went to the border post with Governor Richardson, but the US government was not responsible for this release. It was something that was worked through the Russian system by a friend of Governor Richardson's. I would point out that had the US government said, oh, this is someone who's unfairly imprisoned, then you make it all different. Then you're saying, I'm attacking the Russian criminal justice system in order to shame you so that you release Mr. Dudley. The governor didn't do that. He put a different method saying, okay, you're the criminal justice system. We think a mistake might be made here. Let's see if we could explain that and get the release. So this was done without naming and shaming. This was simply humanitarian, aiming to secure justice for Mr. Dudley.

Mcfarlane: I mean, that's interesting because on this particular case, you have a young, I believe he's a former Navy veteran. And so he has a military background as does Paul Whelan. But of course it's impossible to know for sure, but from what we do know, going off those details of the circumstances surrounding his detention, what seems to have been the case was he was a private US citizen who was in Poland and met someone who could be a honey trap for all we know, lured him into Kaliningrad, which is this fascinating place, it's Russian territory, to go to this music festival. Perhaps he was just detained because as you hint, he maybe did not have the correct paperwork to be on Russian territory without a visa, without any kind of documentation that you need. And so perhaps he wasn't of huge political interest to the Russians in the way that Paul Whelan was. Perhaps Taylor Dudley's case was a little more straightforward to negotiate his release if as you say, you approach it the right way. I mean, this guy was still in jail for almost a year for the most of 2022. That can't have been an easy or pleasant experience for him. And so it is a serious amount of time in captivity. But I mean, the fact that his release was secured, that, you know, it's another string to Governor Richardson's bow. He's able to show and to demonstrate that actually you can work with the Russians if you handle them a certain delicate way.

Hume: In this case, one of the things that's different is, I don't know the Whelan case, obviously, the Russian intelligence services have a real interest in it. There was no evidence that they were any particular interest in this case at all. I think had we made a determination he was wrongly imprisoned and made a big public kerfuffle about it, I'm pretty sure we would have gotten their attention. But we don't know.

Mcfarlane: Have you been placed in any kind of awkwardness or any kind of difficult position having talked to some of these, you know, interesting unorthodox characters. You mentioned that Governor Richardson had solicited the help from a Russian oligarch when it comes to the case of Taylor Dudley. No one comes asking for their IOUs, do they?

Hume: No. No. I think, you know, his modus operandi is to identify an approach that emphasizes the fact that the release would be a humanitarian action and that we have a shared humanity. As an example, he went to Myanmar, Burma, fifteen, sixteen months ago. And so we met with the government. The US government told him, well, we can't stop your going, but don't meet with the government. Okay, if you meet with them, don't talk about Danny Fenster. And basically, the reaction was, okay, I heard you. And he only raised Danny Fenster in a private conversation. In other words, two people plus an interpreter. There weren't a bunch of people hanging around. And he was told he could come back, but not in less than a week. And they confirmed first what their decision was. So we then went back a week later and picked up Mr. Fenster. And I can tell you, we didn't let the US government know what we were doing in that time because they had told us, don't you do this. But when we brought Mr. Fenster back, you can bet they were at the airport to show their solidarity and to claim all of the credit for the fine work they had done, which is okay. Who cares? Right?

Mcfarlane: Was there no mea culpa from the US government? I mean, if you had done what they had told you, presumably, Mr. Fenster would not be sitting at home right now.

Hume: Well, or he wouldn't have been home for Christmas last year, although he's Jewish. So for Hanukkah last year. Yeah. I don't, I mean, there's no odds on getting in an argument really over stuff like that. And, even with US government, there are people who wanted us to raise it, and there were people who didn't want us to raise it because they didn't want anyone to talk to the people in Myanmar. We, at the time, we had an ambassador there, and he really didn't meet people. Now we don't have an ambassador. We have a chargé who I assume doesn't get to meet people either. So how do you do the work? Or maybe you don't do it. Anyway, we found a path we could make an effort. And so we made the effort, and we came up lucky.

Mcfarlane: That's it for this week's episode of One Decision. We drop new episodes every Thursday. Like and subscribe so you never miss an episode. Drop us a line. Tell us your thoughts. What decisions have impacted you and where you live. You can write to us. Our email is 1decision@1decisionpodcast.com. From me and the team, thank you for listening, and see you next time.