Prisoner Deals Stoke Fears of Perverse ‘Incentive’ to Grab Americans

[Pelican Press 0]

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Prisoner Deals Stoke Fears of Perverse ‘Incentive’ to Grab Americans

Behind the jubilation over the latest release of Americans unjustly imprisoned abroad are growing concerns that a new era of ******** diplomacy has emerged, with U.S. adversaries concluding that it pays to arrest innocent Americans and trade them for convicted smugglers, hackers, spies — and even killers.

While loath to criticize any specific swap, current and former U.S. officials worry that strongmen like President Vladimir V. ****** of Russia are exploiting America’s willingness to horse-trade for its citizens. Among those returned to Moscow on Thursday in a deal involving 24 prisoners and seven nations was a Russian ********* serving a life sentence in Germany for gunning down a Kremlin ****** in a Berlin park.

“I worry about the incentive this gives nations to abduct Americans,” said Adam Hickey, a former deputy assistant attorney general in the national security division of the U.S. Justice Department. Speaking of the trend toward ******** trades generally, he added: “I don’t see how this doesn’t lead to an escalation or increase” in the practice by foreign governments.

But practical alternatives are hard to come by, Mr. Hickey and other experts concede.

In response to Thursday’s deal, former President Donald J. Trump suggested that President Biden had set a “

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” by paying too high a price to Mr. ******.

Yet Mr. Trump offered no evidence that he could have struck a better deal, apart from a false claim that he had given up “NOTHING” as president to win the release of Americans imprisoned abroad. In fact, Mr. Trump

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, including Iran and the Afghan Taliban, on at least four occasions.

In a ****** statement, Speaker Mike Johnson and the Senate ********* leader, Mitch McConnell, called for “serious action to deter further ********-taking by Russia, Iran, and other states hostile to the ******* States.” The two Republicans offered no specifics about what steps should be taken, however.

Some national security experts even muse about whether the U.S. government should declare that it will not bargain for the release of anyone who disregards warnings against visiting Russia, Iran, North Korea and other high-risk countries.

One Biden administration official who has participated in prisoner-swap negotiations, and who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters, said it was hard to imagine an ********* president adopting such a position.

To the contrary, Mr. Biden has now presided over several such exchanges, vowing that he will never abandon helpless Americans. In late 2022, he approved a deal with Russia that swapped the notorious Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout for the basketball star Brittney Griner.

Mr. Biden also struck a deal with the Kremlin in April 2022, sending home an imprisoned Russian ***** trafficker in return for a U.S. Marine arrested in Moscow. And he traded multiple prisoners with Iran last fall.

In every case, U.S. officials said the released Americans had been imprisoned on fabricated charges or given sentences wildly disproportionate to any actual *******, as in the case of Ms. Griner, who was sentenced to 9 years in prison for possessing trace amounts of cannabis oil.

Officials and experts agree that these recent cases reflect what Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken in February called a “rising trend” in which ********* enemies are “wrongfully detaining people, often as political pawns.”

Mr. Blinken warned Mr. Biden of the problem in the opening weeks of his presidency, according to the Biden administration official. In July 2022, Mr. Biden declared ********-taking and “wrongful detention” to be a national emergency.

The State Department considers wrongful detention to include groundless arrests, unfair trials and egregious sentencing. That designation sends cases to the U.S. envoy for ******** affairs, Roger D. Carstens.

********** groups and foreign governments have snatched Americans with ransoms in mind at least since the 1793

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, when the U.S. paid for the return of more than 100 citizens held in North *******.

In 1979, Iranian revolutionaries imprisoned more than 50 U.S. Embassy workers, demanding the release of frozen Iranian assets. In the 1980s, Lebanese militants kidnapped dozens of Americans in Beirut to deter U.S. military action against Hezbollah. And in the past two decades, Al Qaeda and the Islamic State kidnapped numerous Americans, often executing them after the U.S. government refused to negotiate.

But in roughly the past 10 years, as foreign ********** threats have receded, the imprisonment of Americans by hostile governments on false or inflated legal charges has risen sharply, according to Danielle Gilbert, an assistant professor at Northwestern University who studies so-called ******** diplomacy.

Ms. Gilbert said that the practice appeared to gain momentum under President Barack Obama, who approved a prisoner swap with Tehran as part of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, and dramatically accelerated under Mr. Trump.

Beginning with Mr. Trump and continuing into Mr. Biden’s term, such cases have increasingly become public dramas. Families of prisoners, now often counseled by public-relations or diplomatic professionals such as Bill Richardson, often ******* traditional advice to lie low while government officials quietly do their work. Instead, they now enlist celebrities and the media to help pressure U.S. officials to “do whatever it takes,” as they often say. In a public statement after the release this week of the former security consultant Paul Whelan, jailed in Russia since 2018, his family noted that “it was media attention that helped to finally create critical mass and awareness within the U.S. government.”

Some worry the attention could benefit the bad guys. In their statement on Thursday, Mr. Johnson and Mr. McConnell warned that, absent strong new deterrent action, “the costs of ******** diplomacy will continue to rise” and that “trading hardened Russian ********** for innocent Americans does little to discourage ******’s reprehensible behavior.”

Thursday’s deal took many months to orchestrate in part because senior ******* officials had similar concerns about freeing Vadim Krasikov, the convicted ********* whose release Mr. ****** had long demanded.

********** Mihr, an official with Amnesty International in Germany, said the deal had left a “bitter taste” because it sent a convicted ********* home to Russia in exchange for political dissidents and journalists. The Russian government, Mr. Mihr warned in a statement reported by Agence France-Presse, “could feel emboldened to carry out further political arrests and human rights violations with no ***** of the consequences.”

U.S. officials say they share such concerns. Briefing reporters on Thursday, Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser, called it “a question that we grapple with every time that we look at the hard decisions involved in one of these exchanges. It is difficult to send back a convicted ********* to secure the release of an innocent *********.”

But Mr. Sullivan said the evidence was not “clear cut” that “a lot more people get taken because we do these exchanges.”

And despite occasional blowback from the likes of Mr. Trump, Ms. Gilbert noted that such deals have proven to be politically popular. Both Mr. Trump and Mr. Biden have benefited from heartwarming Oval Office meetings with freed prisoners and their families, and dramatic accounts of how their leadership sealed the deals.

Still, U.S. officials are mindful of the long-term risks and have explored deterrents such as punitive sanctions on governments and officials connected with the practice. But the two worst offenders, Russia and Iran, are already under heavy U.S. sanctions, and it is unclear whether more penalties would work.

In February, Mr. Blinken gave a speech to spotlight a coalition of dozens of nations vowing to raise “the financial and reputational costs of arbitrary detention, and strengthening global pressure against it.” But the effort ******** vaguely defined.

Mr. Hickey, the former federal prosecutor, called for dramatic action, proposing that “at some point, the U.S. government has to say, ‘There are places in the world as an ********* you can’t go — and if you do, we can’t help you.’” But even he said exceptions should be made for some essential activities, including the journalism of the Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, who was freed on Thursday after his conviction on false espionage charges.

That idea faces other problems, including that many thousands of dual nationals live in places like Russia, China and Iran, and are often among those detained.

Ryan Fayhee, another former federal prosecutor, who has also worked with the families of several wrongfully detained Americans, said it was a “vast oversimplification for people to say that we can’t rescue Americans wrongly detained abroad because it will incentivize further ******** taking.”

But, he added, the rising practice of prisoner trades must come with greater public education about travel risks and some effective way of punishing “any country that wants to conduct its foreign policy through ******** taking.”

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