Paying Ransoms, Europe Bankrolls Qaeda Terror
BAMAKO, Mali — The cash filled three suitcases: 5 million euros.
The
German official charged with delivering this cargo arrived here aboard a
nearly empty military plane and was whisked away to a secret meeting
with the president of Mali, who had offered Europe a face-saving
solution to a vexing problem.
Officially, Germany had budgeted the money as humanitarian aid for the poor, landlocked nation of Mali.
In
truth, all sides understood that the cash was bound for an obscure
group of Islamic extremists who were holding 32 European hostages,
according to six senior diplomats directly involved in the exchange.
The
suitcases were loaded onto pickup trucks and driven hundreds of miles
north into the Sahara, where the bearded fighters, who would soon become
an official arm of Al Qaeda, counted the money on a blanket thrown on
the sand. The 2003 episode was a learning experience for both sides.
Eleven years later, the handoff in Bamako has become a well-rehearsed
ritual, one of dozens of such transactions repeated all over the world.
Kidnapping Europeans for ransom has become a global business for Al Qaeda, bankrolling its operations across the globe.
While
European governments deny paying ransoms, an investigation by The New
York Times found that Al Qaeda and its direct affiliates have taken in
at least $125 million in revenue from kidnappings since 2008, of which
$66 million was paid just last year.
In
news releases and statements, the United States Treasury Department has
cited ransom amounts that, taken together, put the total at around $165
million over the same period.
These
payments were made almost exclusively by European governments, who
funneled the money through a network of proxies, sometimes masking it as
development aid, according to interviews conducted for this article
with former hostages, negotiators, diplomats and government officials in
10 countries in Europe, Africa and the Middle East. The inner workings
of the kidnapping business were also revealed in thousands of pages of
internal Qaeda documents found by this reporter while on assignment for
The Associated Press in northern Mali last year.
In
its early years, Al Qaeda received most of its money from deep-pocketed
donors, but counterterrorism officials now believe the group finances
the bulk of its recruitment, training and arms purchases from ransoms
paid to free Europeans.
Put more bluntly, Europe has become an inadvertent underwriter of Al Qaeda.
The
foreign ministries of Austria, France, Germany, Italy and Switzerland
denied in emails or telephone interviews that they had paid the
terrorists. “The French authorities have repeatedly stated that France
does not pay ransoms,” said Vincent Floreani, deputy director of
communication for France’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Several
senior diplomats involved in past negotiations have described the
decision to pay ransom for their countries’ citizens as an agonizing
calculation: Accede to the terrorists’ demand, or allow innocent people
to be killed, often in a gruesome, public way?
Yet the fact that Europe and its intermediaries continue to pay has set off a vicious cycle.
“Kidnapping
for ransom has become today’s most significant source of terrorist
financing,” said David S. Cohen, the Treasury Department’s under
secretary for terrorism and financial intelligence, in a 2012 speech.
“Each transaction encourages another transaction.”
And
business is booming: While in 2003 the kidnappers received around
$200,000 per hostage, now they are netting up to $10 million, money that
the second in command of Al Qaeda’s central leadership recently
described as accounting for as much as half of his operating revenue.
“Kidnapping
hostages is an easy spoil,” wrote Nasser al-Wuhayshi, the leader of Al
Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, “which I may describe as a profitable
trade and a precious treasure.”
The
stream of income generated is so significant that internal documents
show that as long as five years ago, Al Qaeda’s central command in
Pakistan was overseeing negotiations for hostages grabbed as far afield
as Africa. Moreover, the accounts of survivors held thousands of miles
apart show that the three main affiliates of the terrorist group — Al
Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, in northern Africa; Al Qaeda in the
Arabian Peninsula, in Yemen; and the Shabab, in Somalia — are
coordinating their efforts and abiding by a common kidnapping protocol.
To
minimize the risk to their fighters, the terror affiliates have
outsourced the seizing of hostages to criminal groups who work on
commission. Negotiators take a reported 10 percent of the ransom,
creating an incentive on both sides of the Mediterranean to increase the
overall payout, according to former hostages and senior
counterterrorism officials.
Their
business plan includes a step-by-step process for negotiating, starting
with long periods of silence aimed at creating panic back home.
Hostages are then shown on videos begging their government to negotiate.
Although
the kidnappers threaten to kill their victims, a review of the known
cases revealed that only a small percentage of hostages held by Qaeda
affiliates have been executed in the past five years, a marked
turnaround from a decade ago, when videos showing beheadings of
foreigners held by the group’s franchise in Iraq would regularly turn up
online. Now the group has realized it can advance the cause of jihad by
keeping hostages alive and trading them for prisoners and suitcases of
cash.
Only
a handful of countries have resisted paying, led by the United States
and Britain. Although both these countries have negotiated with
extremist groups — evidenced most recently by the United States’ trade
of Taliban prisoners for Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl — they have drawn the line
when it comes to ransoms.
It
is a decision that has had dire consequences. While dozens of Europeans
have been released unharmed, few American or British nationals have
gotten out alive. A lucky few ran away or were rescued by special
forces. The rest were executed or are being held indefinitely.
“The
Europeans have a lot to answer for,” said Vicki Huddleston, the former
United States deputy assistant secretary of defense for African affairs,
who was the ambassador to Mali in 2003 when Germany paid the first
ransom. “It’s a completely two-faced policy. They pay ransoms and then
deny any was paid.” She added, “The danger of this is not just that it
grows the terrorist movement, but it makes all of our citizens
vulnerable.”
On
Feb. 23, 2003, a group of four Swiss tourists, including two
19-year-old women, woke up in their sleeping bags in southern Algeria to
the shouts of armed men. The men told the young women to cover their
hair with towels, then commandeered their camper van and took off with
them.
Over
the coming weeks, another seven tour groups traveling in the same
corner of the desert vanished. European governments scrambled to find
their missing citizens.
Weeks
passed before a German reconnaissance plane sent to scan the desert
floor returned with images of their abandoned vehicles. More weeks
passed before a scout sent on foot spotted something white through his
binoculars.
It was a letter left under a rock.
In
messy handwriting, it laid out the demands of a little-known jihadist
group calling itself the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat.
Armed
with a few hunting rifles and old AK-47s, the kidnappers succeeded in
sweeping up dozens of tourists over several consecutive weeks, mostly
from Germany, but also from Austria, the Netherlands, Sweden and
Switzerland. Though they planned the first few ambushes, they appear to
have grabbed others by chance, like a pair of hapless 26-year-olds from
Innsbruck, Austria, who were spotted because of the campfire they had
lit to cook spaghetti.
Beyond
the initial grab, the kidnappers did not seem to have a plan. The only
food they had was the canned goods the tourists had brought with them.
The only fuel was what was in each gas tank. They abandoned the cars one
by one as they ran out of fuel, forcing their hostages to continue on
foot.
A
47-year-old Swedish hostage, Harald Ickler, remembers being so hungry
that when he found a few leftover Danish butter cookie crumbs, he
carefully scooped them into the palm of his hand and then let them melt
in his mouth.
2010-13
$40.4 million
A state-controlled French company
4 French nationals
2010-11
$17.7 million
A state-controlled French company
1 French national, 1 from Togo and 1 from Madagascar
2009
$12.4 million
Switzerland
2 Swiss nationals and 1 German
2011-12
$10.8 million
Could not be determined
1 Italian and 2 Spaniards
2009-10
$5.9 million
Spain
3 Spaniards
2008
$3.2 million
Austria
2 Austrians
2008-9
$1.1 million
Could not be determined
2 Canadians
$5.1 million has been paid to the Shabab.
2011-13
$5.1 million
Spain
2 Spaniards
$29.9 million has been paid to Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.
2012-13
$20.4 million
Qatar and Oman
2 Finnish nationals, 1 Austrian and 1 Swiss national
2011
$9.5 million
Could not be determined
3 French nationals
Note: Ransom amounts have been converted
into U.S. dollars using the currency exchange rate from the year of the
payment in cases where the payment was made in euros. The ransom amounts
were then adjusted for inflation so that they are in 2014 dollars.
“Once
they had us, they didn’t seem to know what to do with us,” said Reto
Walther of Untersiggenthal, Switzerland, who was in one of the first
groups to be grabbed. “They were improvising.”
Despite
the operation’s amateur nature, the jihadists had hit a soft spot.
Almost none of the hostages had resisted, simply putting up their hands
when they saw the gunmen. And although the Europeans outnumbered their
captors, the hostages never tried to run away during what turned into a
six-month captivity for some of them, and described the foreboding
desert surrounding them as an “open-air prison.”
Crucially,
although the European nations had firepower superior to that of the
scrappy mujahedeen, they deemed a rescue mission too dangerous.
The
jihadists asked for weapons. Then for impossible-to-meet political
demands, like the removal of the Algerian government. When a 45-year-old
German woman died of dehydration, panicked European officials began
considering a ransom concealed as an aid payment as the least-bad
option.
“The
Americans told us over and over not to pay a ransom. And we said to
them: ‘We don’t want to pay. But we can’t lose our people,’” said a
European ambassador posted in Algeria at the time, who was one of six
senior Western officials with direct knowledge of the 2003 kidnapping
who confirmed details for this article. All spoke on the condition of
anonymity because the information remains classified.
“It was a very difficult situation,” he said, “but in the end we are talking about human life.”
The exploits of the band of fighters in the Sahara did not go unnoticed.
A
year later, in 2004, a Qaeda operative, Abdelaziz al-Muqrin, published a
how-to guide to kidnapping, in which he highlighted the successful
ransom negotiation of “our brothers in Algeria.” Yet at the same time,
he also praised the execution of the Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel
Pearl, who was grabbed in Pakistan in 2002 and beheaded nine days later
by Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, a senior Qaeda member believed to be one of
the architects of the Sept. 11 attacks.
Within
a few years, there was a split within Al Qaeda, with the group’s
affiliate in Iraq grabbing foreigners specifically to kill them.
In Algeria, the kidnappers of the European tourists followed a different path.
They
used the €5 million as the seed money for their movement, recruiting
and training fighters who staged a series of devastating attacks. They
grew into a regional force and were accepted as an official branch of
the Qaeda network, which baptized them Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb.
As kidnapping revenue became their main lifeline, they honed and
perfected the process.
By
Feb. 2, 2011, when their lookouts in southern Algeria spotted a
53-year-old Italian tourist, Mariasandra Mariani, admiring the rolling
dunes through a pair of binoculars, they were running a sleek operation.
Her
tour guide was the first to spot them, and screamed at her to run. As
their cars sped toward her, she sprinted to her nearby desert bungalow
and locked herself inside. She could do nothing but sit frozen on the
mattress as they broke down the door. They threw her in a waiting car,
handcuffing her to the dashboard. Before they sped off, they made sure
to place a rolled-up blanket next to her, so that the jihadist sitting
next to her would not accidentally make contact with a woman.
“Who are you?” she asked them.
“We are Al Qaeda,” they replied.
If
previous kidnapping missions did not seem to have a thought-out plan,
the gunmen who seized Ms. Mariani drove for days on what appeared to be a
clearly delineated route. Whenever they were low on fuel, they would
make their way to a spot that to her looked no different in the
otherwise identical lunar landscape.
Under
a thorn bush, they would find a drum full of gasoline. Or a stack of
tires to replace a punctured one. They never ran out of food.
Ms. Mariani would later learn they had an infrastructure of supplies buried in the sand and marked with GPS coordinates.
One
afternoon they stopped just above the lip of a dune. The fighters got
down and unfastened a shovel. Then she heard the sound of a car engine.
Suddenly a pickup truck roared out. They had buried an entire vehicle in
the mountain of sand.
“It was then that I realized, these aren’t just normal criminals,” Ms. Mariani said.
Weeks
passed before Ms. Mariani’s captors announced that they were going to
allow her to make a phone call. They drove for hours until they reached a
plateau, a flat white pan of dirt.
Years
earlier, their strategy for broadcasting their demands had been to
leave a letter under a rock. Now they had satellite phones and a list of
numbers. They handed her a script and dialed the number for Al Jazeera.
“My
name is Mariasandra Mariani. I am the Italian who was kidnapped,” she
said. “I am still being detained by Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb.”
The Italian government scrambled to create a crisis unit, including a 24-hour hotline for the kidnappers.
During
her 14-month captivity, whenever the kidnappers felt that attention had
flagged, they erected a tent in the desert and forced Ms. Mariani to
record a video message, showing her surrounded by her armed captors.
A
total of 11 former hostages grabbed by Qaeda units in Algeria, Mali,
Niger, Syria and Yemen who agreed to be interviewed for this article
reported a similar set of steps in the negotiations, beginning with an
imposed period of silence. Video messages and telephone calls were
infrequent, often months apart. The silence appeared purposeful,
intended to terrorize the families of the captives, who in turn
pressured their respective governments.
In
the Italian village of San Casciano in Val di Pesa, Ms. Mariani’s
80-year-old mother stopped sleeping in her bedroom, moving permanently
to the couch in front of the television. Her aging father would burst
into tears for no reason. In France, the frantic brother of a hostage
held for a year in Syria developed an ulcer.
All
over Europe, families rallied, pressuring governments to pay. Ms.
Mariani was ultimately released, along with two Spanish hostages, for a
ransom that a negotiator involved in her case said was close to €8
million.
The
bulk of the kidnappings-for-ransom carried out in Al Qaeda’s name have
occurred in Africa, and more recently in Syria and Yemen. These regions
are thousands of miles from the terror network’s central command in
Pakistan.
Yet
audio messages released by the group, as well as confidential letters
between commanders, indicate the organization’s senior leaders are
directly involved in the negotiations.
As early as 2008, a commander holding two Canadian diplomats angered his leaders by negotiating a ransom on his own.
In a letter discovered by this reporter
in buildings abandoned by the jihadists in Mali last year, Al Qaeda in
the Islamic Maghreb blamed the commander, Mokhtar Belmokhtar, for
securing only the “meager sum” of €700,000 — around $1 million — saying
the low amount was a result of his unwillingness to follow the
instructions of the group’s leadership in Pakistan.
In
his last broadcast before his death in 2011, Osama bin Laden spoke at
length about the case of four French citizens held by Al Qaeda in Mali,
making clear that he was keeping close tabs on individual kidnappings.
Hostages held as recently as last year in Yemen say it was clear the negotiations were being handled by a distant leadership.
Atte
and Leila Kaleva, a Finnish couple held for five months by Al Qaeda in
the Arabian Peninsula in 2013, deduced this from the voluminous
correspondence they saw being delivered to their captors.
“There
were lots of letters back and forth,” Mr. Kaleva said. “It was clear
that they had a hierarchy, and they were consulting their leaders about
what to do with us.”
In
the dozens of kidnappings that Al Qaeda has carried out, the threat of
execution has hung over each hostage, reinforced in videos showing the
victim next to armed and menacing jihadist guards.
In
fact, only a minority of hostages — 15 percent, according to an
analysis by The Times — have been executed or have died since 2008,
several of them in botched rescue operations.
The
potential income hostages represent has made them too valuable to the
movement. In a 2012 letter to his fellow jihadists in Africa, the man
who was once Bin Laden’s personal secretary, and who is now the second
in command of Al Qaeda, wrote that at least half of his budget in Yemen
was funded by ransoms.
“Thanks
to Allah, most of the battle costs, if not all, were paid from through
the spoils,” wrote Nasser al-Wuhayshi, the leader of Al Qaeda in the
Arabian Peninsula. “Almost half the spoils came from hostages.”
Mr.
Kaleva realized his captors did not intend to kill him when he became
ill with what he feared was a giardia infection, and his worried
kidnappers immediately brought him medicine.
When
Ms. Mariani fell ill from violent dysentery in the burning sands of the
Malian desert, a jihadist doctor hooked her up to an IV, nursing her
back to health.
Elsewhere in the Sahara, the jihadists trucked in specialized medication for a 62-year-old Frenchwoman who had breast cancer.
“It was clear to us,” Mr. Kaleva said, “that we are more valuable to them alive than dead.”
But hostages from countries that do not pay ransoms face a harsh fate.
In
2009, four tourists were returning to Niger from a music festival in
Mali when kidnappers overtook their cars, shooting out their tires. The
hostages included a German woman, a Swiss couple and a British man,
Edwin Dyer, 61.
From
the start of the negotiations, the British government made clear it
would not pay for Mr. Dyer’s release. Al Qaeda’s North African branch
issued a deadline, then a 15-day extension.
“The
British wanted me to send a message saying one last time that they
wouldn’t pay,” said a negotiator in Burkina Faso, who acted as the
go-between. “I warned them, ‘Don’t do this.’ They sent the message
anyway.”
Sometime
after, the public information office of Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb
published a communiqué: “On Sunday, May 31, 2009, at half past seven
p.m. local time, the British captive, Edwin Dyer, was killed,” it said.
“It seems Britain gives little importance to its citizens.”
The
Swiss and German nationals held alongside Mr. Dyer were released after a
reported ransom of €8 million was paid, according to one of the Swiss
negotiators who helped win their release. The same year, lawmakers in
Bern, the Swiss capital, voted on a national budget that “suddenly had
an extra line for humanitarian aid for Mali,” the official said.
Mr.
Dyer was a British citizen, but he had spent the last four decades of
his life in Austria, a country that pays ransoms. In his early 20s, he
settled in the mountain village of Attnang-Puchheim, a one-hour drive
from the home of an Austrian couple who were released in Mali a few
months before Mr. Dyer was killed. Austria paid €2 million to the
couple’s Qaeda captors, according to Ibrahim Ag Assaleh, a Malian
parliamentarian who negotiated their release.
In England, Mr. Dyer’s grieving brother, Hans, said his brother’s citizenship had cost him his life.
“A U.K. passport is essentially a death certificate,” he said.
Negotiators believe that the Qaeda branches have now determined which governments pay.
Of
the 53 hostages known to have been taken by Qaeda’s official branches
in the past five years, a third were French. And small nations like
Austria, Spain and Switzerland, which do not have large expatriate
communities in the countries where the kidnappings occur, account for
over 20 percent of the victims.
By
contrast, only three Americans are known to have been kidnapped by Al
Qaeda or its direct affiliates, representing just 5 percent of the
total.
“For
me, it’s obvious that Al Qaeda is targeting them by nationality,” said
Jean-Paul Rouiller, the director of the Geneva Center for Training and
Analysis of Terrorism, who helped set up Switzerland’s counterterrorism
program. “Hostages are an investment, and you are not going to invest
unless you are pretty sure of a payout.”
Mr.
Cohen, the United States under secretary for terrorism and financial
intelligence, said information gathered by the Treasury Department
suggested that Al Qaeda may no longer want to kidnap Americans, a
tectonic shift from a decade ago.
“We
know that hostage takers looking for ransoms distinguish between those
governments that pay ransoms and those that do not, and make a point of
not taking hostages from those countries that do not pay,” he said in a
2012 speech to the Chatham House think tank in London. “And recent
kidnapping-for-ransom trends appear to indicate that hostage takers
prefer not to take U.S. or U.K. hostages, almost certainly because they
understand that they will not receive ransoms.”
Western
countries have signed numerous agreements calling for an end to ransom
paying, including as recently as last year at a G8 summit, where some of
the biggest ransom payers in Europe signed a declaration agreeing to
stamp out the practice. Yet according to hostages released this year and
veteran negotiators, governments in Europe — especially France, Spain
and Switzerland — continue to be responsible for some of the largest
payments, including a ransom of €30 million — about $40 million — paid
last fall to free four Frenchmen held in Mali.
A
presidential adviser in Burkina Faso who has helped secure the release
of several of the Westerners held in the Sahara said he routinely dealt
with aggressive Western diplomats who demanded the release of Qaeda
fighters held in local prisons in an effort to win the release of their
hostages, often one of the additional demands kidnappers make.
“You
would not believe the pressure that the West brings to bear on African
countries,” he said. “It’s you, the West, who is their lifeblood,” he
said. “It’s you who finances them.”
The suitcases of cash are now no longer dropped off in the capital of the respective country, he said.
The
official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for security reasons,
went on to describe how the money was transferred. European governments
send an escort, he said, who travels with the money several hundred
miles into the desert until the last safe outpost, usually leaving from
Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso, or Niamey in Niger. The
negotiator and his driver then continue driving all day, and sometimes
all night, traversing a roller coaster of undulating dunes.
Once
the negotiator arrives at the meeting point, he waits until his
satellite phone beeps with a text message. In the message is a pair of
GPS coordinates.
He
drives another five to six hours until he reaches the new address in
the sand and waits for the next text, containing another set of
coordinates. The process is repeated a minimum of three times before the
jihadists finally show themselves.
The
money is counted on a blanket on which the fighters sit cross-legged,
their guns at their sides, the official said. The millions are then
divided into stashes, wrapped in plastic and buried in holes hundreds of
miles apart, a detail he was able to glean after repeated meetings with
the terrorist cell. They mark the location on their GPS, keeping track
of it just as they track their buried cars and fuel drums.
The
money is written off by European governments as an aid payment, or else
delivered through intermediaries, like the French nuclear giant Areva, a
state-controlled company that a senior negotiator said paid €12.5
million in 2011 and €30 million in 2013 to free five French citizens. (A
spokesman for Areva denied in an email that a ransom had been paid.)
In
Yemen, the intermediaries are Oman and Qatar, which pay the ransoms on
behalf of European governments, including more than $20 million for two
groups of hostages released in the past year, according to European and
Yemeni officials.
Almost
a year into her captivity in 2012, Mariasandra Mariani thought she
could not take it anymore. Her captors were holding her in a landscape
of black granite in northern Mali, which amplified the suffocating heat.
When the wind blew, it felt as if someone were holding a blow dryer
inches from her skin. She spent all day next to a bucket of water,
sponging herself to try to keep cool.
She
told her guard that her modest family, which grows olives in the hills
above Florence, did not have the money, and that her government refused
to pay ransoms. Her captor reassured her.
“Your
governments always say they don’t pay,” he told Ms. Mariani. “When you
go back, I want you to tell your people that your government does pay.
They always pay.”
Robert F. Worth and Eric Schmitt contributed reporting from Washington. Sheelagh McNeill in New York contributed research.
A version of this article appears in print on July 30, 2014, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Paying Ransoms, Europe Bankrolls Qaeda Terror.
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