Times Was Prepared to Pay Ransom for Rohde

By Jeff Stein | June 20, 2009 6:59 PM | | Comments (0)

The New York Times was prepared to pay Taliban kidnappers a $5 million ransom to free its reporter David S. Rohde, who escaped Friday after seven months of captivity, according to a source with direct knowledge of the case.

Over months of secret contacts with Rohde's captors preceding his escape, The New York Times accepted the prospect of paying the ransom to free Rohde, said the source, who was involved in the hunt for Rohde. The source insisted on anonymity because of the sensitivity of the case.

Bill Keller, the executive editor of the Times, refused to comment Saturday on the circumstances that led to Rohde's release, but said, "We paid no ransom."


"We're just not going to talk about who did what, or who advised what," Keller said in an e-mail.

"The one thing people who have endured these things agree on is that whatever you say about your strategy or tactics or thinking is likely to end up in the playbook for the next kidnapping," Keller added.

The New York Times reported Saturday that Rohde and a local reporter, Tahir Ludin, escaped from captivity in the North Waziristan region of Pakistan by scaling a wall Friday night.

The two and a driver, Asadullah Mangal, were abducted on Nov. 10, 2008 while en route to an interview with a Taliban commander. The driver did not escape with the two men, according to the Times.

"Mr. Rohde told his wife, Kristen Mulvihill, that Mr. Ludin joined him in climbing over the wall of a compound where they were being held in the North Waziristan region of Pakistan," the Times reported. 

"They made their way to a nearby Pakistani Frontier Corps base and on Saturday they were flown to the American military base in Bagram, Afghanistan," the Times reported.

Mulvihill was quoted by the Times saying, "They just walked over the wall of the compound."

Rohde refused to leave the country until he obtained a U.S. visa for Ludin, the source said.

The Times' insurance company, AIG, hired a Virginia-based security company, Triple Canopy, whose executives are mostly ex-Special Forces personnel, to locate and open negotiations with Rohde's captors.

Triple Canopy in turn employed a subsidiary specializing in hostage negotiations - Clayton Consultants of Herndon, Va. - to help free Rohde.

Eventually the consultants identified the kidnapper as Sirajuddin Haqqani, the son of Jalaluddin Haqqani, who U.S. officials consider an architect of the Taliban resurgence against U.S. forces in Afghanistan. In March 2009, the State Department posted a $5 million reward for information leading to Sirahuddin's capture. 

The AIG consultants advised Times executives to be prepared to pay a $5 million ransom for Rohde, the source said.

Times management agreed, the source said, but not without vociferous opposition among some newsroom executives who opposed paying ransom, saying it would endanger the lives of all its foreign correspondents.

Talks with Haqqani intermediaries went nowhere, and in the spring, Triple Canopy developed plans for a rescue, even going so far as to deploy former U.S. commandos to the region. 

"The plan to was to bribe the guards," said the source, who was not privy to how the plan was executed, if at all. The source questioned the reported circumstances of the escape, however, saying the details "sounded fishy."

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Tags: abduction, Afghanistan, AIG, CIA, Clayton_Consulatnts, counterrerrorism, David_Rohde, FBI, kidnapping, New_York_Times, Pakistan, ransom, Sirajuddin_Haqqani, Tahir_Ludin, Triple_Canopy

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