- 3 months ago
Mickey Bergman is a negotiator involved in political prisoner negotiations for Americans wrongfully detained abroad. Over the past decade, he has helped secure the release of high-profile detainees such as Trevor Reed, Brittney Griner, and Danny Fenster.
The last few years have seen major armed conflicts driving a rise in hostage-taking by both state and non-state actors. Americans are increasingly detained as political leverage, and traditional diplomacy often stalls.
Operating outside government, Bergman travels into hostile territories to negotiate directly with the captors. He aims to bring Americans home through "fringe diplomacy," in which emotional intelligence outweighs firepower and success can mean trading a basketball star for a convicted arms dealer.
For more:
"In The Shadows": https://www.amazon.com/Shadows-High-Stakes-Negotiations-Americans-Captured/dp/1546004750
Global Reach: https://www.reach.global/
The last few years have seen major armed conflicts driving a rise in hostage-taking by both state and non-state actors. Americans are increasingly detained as political leverage, and traditional diplomacy often stalls.
Operating outside government, Bergman travels into hostile territories to negotiate directly with the captors. He aims to bring Americans home through "fringe diplomacy," in which emotional intelligence outweighs firepower and success can mean trading a basketball star for a convicted arms dealer.
For more:
"In The Shadows": https://www.amazon.com/Shadows-High-Stakes-Negotiations-Americans-Captured/dp/1546004750
Global Reach: https://www.reach.global/
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TechTranscript
00:00My name is Miki Bergman.
00:02I've spent over 17 years negotiating with some of the world's most hostile regimes
00:07on behalf of families in the United States.
00:10This is everything I'm authorized to tell you.
00:15Hostage situations are actually not as rare as people think they are.
00:19At any given point, there are between 50 and 70 Americans that are wrongfully detained or taken hostage.
00:25There are typically tens or even hundreds more that are in gray situations.
00:31Time is the worst enemy for the prisoners themselves.
00:35At any given point, a disease or a violent act in the prison can take place.
00:41And I've been in this long enough to have experienced those.
00:50The Russians are extremely sophisticated.
00:54And it feels every time I meet with them on a negotiation mission,
01:00I step up and I come with a plan and I deliver the plan.
01:03And sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.
01:05But I always leave with a feeling, boy, they knew exactly what I was going to do.
01:11They had several steps ahead of me on the play.
01:15And they were moving at their pace in the direction that they wanted.
01:20In terms of the negotiations and diplomacy, they're old school.
01:25We would step into a meeting and they would know who we are, what we said before,
01:31what our tactics are, and they'll be prepared with what they want.
01:36When we first reached out to the Russians when Paul Whelan was taken.
01:40And we came up with the idea, we wanted to say, hey, before we talk about releases,
01:45let's talk about a humanitarian gesture.
01:48Get him a medical exam out of the prison.
01:53We thought we're brilliant with this idea, baby step.
01:56And the ambassador looked at us like, well, it's funny you're coming complaining about the humanitarian
02:01and lack of medical treatment of your guy when we have this Russian prisoner.
02:07In this case, it was a guy named Konstantin Yoroshenko, held in Connecticut.
02:10And he's been begging to see a dentist and he hasn't been able to see one for all this time.
02:17And I was like, oh, look, we would be happy to look into it.
02:21And maybe by proving to you that we can get him the attention, you can also do that.
02:27And the ambassador would say, well, we believe in reciprocity.
02:30But he had printed in advance all of the details of Konstantin Yoroshenko
02:36and the letters that he asked the U.S. government for the dentist.
02:39He didn't ask for it in the meaning to be printed.
02:42He had it printed before.
02:44I knew he was leading that conversation.
02:47He had it played out.
02:49And that was my first encounter with him.
02:52And I've learned from that.
02:59One of the hardest things in these negotiations is to really assess who it is that you're meeting with.
03:07It's easier when it's a leader because there's a lot of material out there.
03:11It's harder when it's a staffer or a mid-level official.
03:17Part of it takes time.
03:19It's repeat meetings.
03:20It's repeat engagements.
03:21Governor Bill Richardson of New Mexico used to joke around that he loves working with dictatorships for two reasons.
03:28One, you only need to convince one person.
03:31You don't need like a democracy.
03:32You have to run it by parliament and all that.
03:34And second, they stick around for a long time.
03:37And negotiations, I believe, rely a lot on personality.
03:40I try to avoid reading what other people say about an individual.
03:45I try to listen to primary material, speeches, interviews.
03:51Sometimes the content matters less than the tone and the things you can pick up on somebody's personality.
03:57I know I can't bluff.
03:59I know I can't lie.
04:00I use it to my advantage.
04:01I actually lead with my vulnerability.
04:03I don't need to go and sit in front of somebody, a leader or somebody, and say,
04:08Oh, no, but I'm genuine.
04:09It comes very clearly through the stories you share and the way you speak.
04:14I would never go and sit in front of a captor and say,
04:20The man you're holding is innocent.
04:23So I show a lot of respect to the judicial system,
04:26and I try to find ways in which I want to bring the person home and what are the conditions for it.
04:31I'm not there to win a punching game.
04:34I'm there to get somebody home.
04:37It is never a one-time game.
04:40It's always a repeat game.
04:42You would think, Oh, yeah, I got the person out.
04:45That's it. I'm done.
04:46But tomorrow there'll be another one.
04:48Or next year there'll be another one.
04:50And so it's always important in every negotiation, even if you can squeeze more,
04:55to be very reasonable to the extent that you know that your counterpart appreciates it.
05:00Because they know when you have leverage and you know when they do.
05:04And if you maximize on your negotiations at a certain moment, guess what?
05:09Next time, when you don't have the leverage, they will squeeze the living hell out of you.
05:14Being a bully works really well with bullies,
05:17which is why President Trump is doing relatively well with the bullies of the world.
05:22He knows how to communicate, he knows how to talk, and he gets what he wants.
05:26Now you can agree, disagree if what he wants is what is needed, but that's besides the point.
05:30This is not political.
05:31It's just a negotiation style.
05:33The Biden administration worked really well with our allies who are not bullies,
05:37but did poorly with the bullies of the world.
05:40There are many types of hostage negotiators.
05:49There are the government officials who negotiate on behalf of the governments,
05:54and there are what we refer to as third parties, which includes myself.
05:58I do not receive funds from the U.S. government.
06:00We actually do not receive funds from any government, even foreign government.
06:05We work on behalf of the families of those who are being taken.
06:09We work at their request only.
06:11We raise our money from donations from private people and businesses in the United States.
06:17Sometimes when Americans are taken, at the beginning nobody knows who has them and why.
06:23And you need to activate a network in order to figure out how to locate them.
06:28Because we're private, we're able to throw in quick money in order to buy data services,
06:35to help triangulate and find somebody, and then we share that with the authorities so they know.
06:40Because the fastest we know who has somebody, the fastest we can come up with how they can come back home.
06:46When we actually negotiate with captors when we're in these countries,
06:49in most of those countries, civil society is not independent.
06:53So it's hard for them to comprehend the fact that we indeed don't work for the government.
06:59We don't pay ransom.
07:01That's illegal in the United States, and we don't do anything that breaks the law in the United States.
07:07When the governments deal with these things, you know, there's a saying,
07:12we never make concessions.
07:13Well, we make concessions.
07:15Let's grow up.
07:17There are calculated concessions, and we can take them back after we get our people home as well.
07:22Because the people that you make the deal with are not exactly reputable people most of the time.
07:27In the case of the release of Americans out of Iran, there was a big part of it that was very criticized a few years ago,
07:34that there was a huge amount of money off Iranian frozen assets that were held in South Korea that were unfrozen following that deal.
07:44It became a political punching bag in the United States.
07:47Look at that.
07:48You bought their freedom.
07:50Easy to punch politically.
07:52But A, for people who understand the details behind it, the money was not American money.
07:58It wasn't American taxpayers' money.
08:00It's Iranian money that was frozen under American orders in South Korea.
08:05More than that, it was money that the South Koreans were not going to be able to keep holding because it didn't fit within their legal system as well.
08:14The Iranians sued on this, and we knew that it was going to be released.
08:18You can argue that the United States actually used money that was going to be released anyway as leverage in order to get Americans home.
08:26Money is very fungible.
08:28There will be an American that needs to come home, and that American will end up coming home, and it will appear that nothing was given in return,
08:36but the host country gets an aid package a few months later that helps them.
08:42Now, people can claim cynically and say, oh, look at that.
08:46That was the ransom for...
08:47It's like, yeah, but is it a ransom if it actually is paid to do good in the country and help a society?
09:00When an American gets taken for the family, this comes to them out of left field.
09:06Every single decision they make might be the decision that will get the freedom, gain the freedom of their loved one,
09:15or will cost them a month, a year, or their lives.
09:20And that burden is unbearable.
09:24We never proactively go to families.
09:27The first call that they make is either to the Department of State or to the congressional representative.
09:33The representatives at this point know enough, a lot of them know enough to say, okay, here are the entities in the government that you need to reach.
09:41There's a special presidential envoy and hostage affairs office at State Department, or there's a hostage recovery fusion cell at the FBI.
09:49But there's also people outside of government that you might want to start reaching out to.
09:56So the families approach us.
09:58Sometimes we're able to collaborate with the U.S. government.
10:01Sometimes we butt heads with them.
10:03A lot of Americans, when they hear those stories every now and then in the news,
10:07their assumption is that the Americans have done something wrong.
10:10And truth is, in some cases, they have done something wrong that puts them into the system.
10:17So they're getting arrested or they're getting held.
10:20They get treated differently because they're Americans.
10:23And so you will get on tiny little violations of something unintangible being drunk.
10:30For example, you end up with eight and a half years in prison.
10:33You know that that turned into a wrongful detention.
10:36Once we accept the case, we come up with a theory of return.
10:40The pathway, the quickest way we think somebody can come home.
10:44Building a strategy based on that theory of return and then engaging directly with the captors,
10:52creating the narrative in the U.S. media if needed,
10:55and engaging with the U.S. government in order to make sure that all the pieces come together
10:59that brings the American back home.
11:02The government's instinct is to tell a family,
11:06don't say anything, don't make a big splash over it,
11:09because that will just increase the price for your loved one.
11:14Ninety percent of the time it is not correct.
11:17By the time the captive government or the captors have the individual,
11:22they know exactly who they have,
11:24and they know exactly how important it can be or not be and how to play that.
11:27The media is a tool.
11:29The captors don't care about what the family says.
11:31They care what the U.S. government says.
11:33So all media engagement by families is directed at one audience,
11:38and that is the White House.
11:40And it's either direct or it's indirect by creating a grand swell of support publicly
11:46that will then shift the White House.
11:48A big part of our work is also to maintain and grow the relationships with our own government.
11:57And those relationships are always complex.
11:59A, they change in politics.
12:02It's the Republican administration, the Democratic administration,
12:05there's different approaches.
12:06The people change inside the administration all the time.
12:09When there is a potential deal on the table, and we know when there is because we work it,
12:14that's when you put the actual pressure and say, okay, decision time.
12:18There's an opportunity to bring somebody home.
12:20And sometimes we would go to our government and say, look, there is a deal.
12:25Now we're going to give you a month to do it,
12:28because, and you will take credit and we will sit in the back on this and not say anything.
12:34But if you don't do it in a month, remember, we don't work for you.
12:39We work for the family.
12:41And America will need to know that there is a very reasonable deal here that you refuse to do,
12:45and you're keeping an American in prison because of that.
12:48So that's kind of the calculations that go into the media exposure.
12:57What made Brittany Greiner's case unique was her stature.
13:02At that point when she was taken, she was the highest profile political prisoner slash hostage,
13:07however we want to call it, that has been taken.
13:10Even though I know the story publicly that has been out there is that she actually tried to smuggle drugs.
13:17She didn't.
13:18She did use drugs.
13:20She admitted to that.
13:21And so that was much more of an entrapment.
13:24The average time it takes for somebody to come home is about two and a half years.
13:29That's a very long time.
13:32We had some successes of much shorter time, and recently it's been getting shorter.
13:37But with Brittany, we knew that because of all this constituency and the war in Ukraine,
13:43that this might play out much, much faster.
13:46Brittany got a lot of hate.
13:48And balancing that was very difficult because we would get, you know, Governor Richardson was a public figure,
13:54and we will be in New York as it was publicly known that we're negotiating and working on this.
13:59And we would get people come to us, you know, make sure, forget about that basketball player.
14:04Make sure you bring Paul Whelan home.
14:06And we're like, yeah, we're working on bringing them both home.
14:10Like, no, forget about it.
14:11Like, a lot of things that are very hard to hear.
14:13And you can imagine how hard it is for her family to hear as well.
14:17Brittany Griner, her agent, Lindsay Collis, they knew how to build up the constituency, the NBA, the WNBA,
14:24but they only unleashed them when the time was right, when there was a potential deal on the table.
14:30Brittany also elevated this whole field in a way that we never had before, in a way that there's public attention to it.
14:39And she continued to do that after she returned.
14:43And every time she would have an encounter, she knew she was going to meet the president in the White House correspondence dinner or anything else,
14:51she would send a note through her agent to me and say, hey, I think I'm going to have a pull aside with the president.
14:57Give me two talking points that can help a family in need right now.
15:03And we would come up with those, and she would deliver them.
15:06And I can tell you, at least in one case, she had made the president pay attention to a case that we couldn't get his attention on
15:14that resolved in the person coming home.
15:17When Brittany Griner came home and the deal was to release Victor Baut, who was an arms dealer, that was a tough one.
15:23From a justice perspective, an innocent basketball player for an arms dealer who's responsible for the death of a lot of people.
15:31It's not just.
15:33Before there was Brittany Griner and before there was Trevor Reed, there was only Paul Whelan.
15:37The Russians suggested to us at some point that they'll give us Paul Whelan back if Victor Baut comes home.
15:43Yeah, we can go to the White House and say, yeah, release Victor Baut for Paul Whelan, but we won't win on that one.
15:51We can't convince them.
15:52We can't convince ourselves.
15:54The deals never get better in time.
15:59They only get worse, or if we're lucky, they don't change.
16:03So, when Victor Baut was a non-starter for the United States in return for Paul Whelan, after a couple of years, guess what?
16:15We traded him for Brittany Griner.
16:18The deal got worse.
16:20Danny Fenster, he's a journalist from Detroit, and he was working in Myanmar.
16:29He was detained.
16:30They found that a publication that he used to work for has become illegal after the military takeover.
16:37He was held in Myanmar for a total of six months, from May until November when we went over and picked him up.
16:44The charges against him were not justified.
16:47That's not what we argued, you know, for his return.
16:51It was much more of a personal relationship that we built with the leader, with the general, between Governor Richardson and him,
16:59that ended up as a personal favor and a gesture to the governor to let him out.
17:03It took us two trips over there in the middle of the pandemic.
17:07Danny's arrest is a great example of how a lot of these cases happen with Americans being detained.
17:14It wasn't a targeted arrest.
17:16It wasn't an order by the leadership to arrest him.
17:19He wasn't anybody of importance.
17:21They found out that he used to work for this publication.
17:24They started finding things of him, criticizing the military.
17:27There was a lot of things under military rule that you can apply as violations of the law.
17:32And then, of course, added the fact that the United States government did not recognize the military government of Myanmar,
17:39and that was a way of forcing engagement.
17:42In trying to get Danny Fenster home, interestingly enough, one of the biggest obstacles for us was our interaction with our own government.
17:51We knew that the way to get Danny home is for us to go physically to Myanmar, meet with the leader, and convince him to let Danny go.
18:01And we worked really well with the State Department until we managed to get the invitation to go to Myanmar.
18:08And then the State Department turned on us, and they said, please don't go.
18:12We have good reasons to believe that it's going to be resolved.
18:15So, of course, we didn't go, because the last thing we want to do is trip over something that is ongoing,
18:21and we don't have security clearance, so, you know, it's fine for the government.
18:25We trust them if they tell us there's something going on.
18:27So, we did that. We waited.
18:29And so, eventually, we had a conversation between the governor, myself, and the Deputy Secretary of State at the time,
18:34where the governor reminded her, we're private citizens. We're going.
18:37And we held for two months for you, but you have it wrong.
18:41And she acknowledged that we could go, but she also made a request from us when we're there not to raise Danny Fenster.
18:48And to my surprise, Governor Richardson's response was, we will not raise Danny Fenster when we're there.
18:54And then he looked at me and he says, Mickey, remember, we don't work for the government.
19:00We work for the family. Go get me a mandate from the family to go on that trip.
19:06And I called Brian Fenster, who's Danny's brother, who was my point of contact with the family.
19:11And then I said, but Brian, if we have an opportunity to bring Danny home, we shouldn't leave him behind, right?
19:17And I was laughing and he was laughing. He's like, no, no, no.
19:20Please, Mickey, if you can bring him home, please don't leave him behind.
19:24I disconnected the phone. I had my mandate.
19:28If we had an opportunity to bring him home, we were to raise it and bring him home.
19:33And that's what we did.
19:40When Paul Whelan was taken, he was the first one in that new age of hostage diplomacy or prisoner diplomacy between the U.S. and Russia.
19:47Many things about his case were unclear.
19:50When we looked into it and when Elizabeth Whelan, Paul's sister, reached out and we talked about it to us, it was very clear.
19:57Especially when we engaged with the Russians. We knew exactly what the Russians wanted.
20:01If the captors are asking for something from the U.S. government, then it doesn't matter what the person did or did not do.
20:08They're a political prisoner at that point.
20:10With every single step forward on Paul Whelan, it felt like circumstances and the U.S. government decisions let him stay behind.
20:23When we first negotiated with the Russians, they asked for big talk about, we laughed that off.
20:28They then said, oh, Konstantin Yorashenko for Paul Whelan.
20:32Konstantin Yorashenko was a Russian drug pilot that was caught in West Africa and was extradited to the U.S.
20:38Sounds like not too much of a painful thing, but the U.S. government did not do it.
20:43Then they took Trevor Reed, the Russians. And then when we went to negotiate with them, Trevor Reed was sick.
20:49He was coughing blood. We thought it was an infection in a Russian prison during the pandemic.
20:54An infection is not necessarily a good thing. We came back from Russia with a proposal to do two for two.
21:00But the U.S. government decided to do only Trevor Reed for Konstantin Yorashenko.
21:05So the same guy that could have been released for Paul Whelan two years before was now being released for Trevor Reed and Paul Whelan stayed behind.
21:13And then we went back to Russia to negotiate on Paul Whelan and Brittany Griner.
21:17It was two for two from the Russians. Viktor Baut and Winnick for Griner and Paul Whelan.
21:26And we brought that back. And this time we didn't want to hear about a one for one because we couldn't let Paul Whelan stay behind again.
21:33And we conveyed that to the White House. Really, I believe they genuinely tried to do the two for two.
21:38Somehow they couldn't communicate on the formal channel with the Russians to get that done.
21:43And time was ticking. And they realized, well, we can get Brittany Griner for Viktor Baut and then we'll do Paul Whelan after.
21:54And so that's what they did. Not our choice, but that's what they did. And that was extremely painful for the Whelan family.
22:00It was extremely painful for Paul himself. And it took a long time after that in order to get the deal that actually brought him back home.
22:09The uniqueness of Paul was that he was left behind in my account at least four times.
22:14The deal that brought Paul Whelan back home was lots of moving parts, lots of exchanges.
22:19I know people like to criticize the work that we do and the deals that we make as saying, oh, if you negotiate, you incentivize taking more Americans.
22:26Well, Russia is a great example of when you refuse to negotiate, you also increase the motivation to take more Americans.
22:34There are about three to five new cases average every week that come to us with families asking for help.
22:46Doesn't mean that we take them, but we need to do our own due diligence because there's a lot of cases that there are Americans that have committed a crime
22:54and we're not in the business of getting criminals out of prison. We defined it as three different categories.
23:00The first one is an American that did nothing wrong but was entrapped in order to solicit something as a concession from the U.S. government.
23:10Number two are the cases of Americans that have done something wrong and the treatment of the American is different than any local doing the same crime.
23:19The third category is one in which Americans actually did something wrong in a country or that we cannot argue that they didn't.
23:27They're treated more or less equally to a local that would have done the same thing.
23:33However, their condition of their detainment and their physical well-being is at high risk.
23:40So these are not people who are wrongfully detained, but there are still people that we will try and help
23:45because their terms of being held are subhuman or far away from the U.S. standard of what an American should be treated like.
23:54It is true that we need to work on deterrence. It is true that we need to come up with the policies that will prevent or mitigate the risk of Americans being taken.
24:03But it is morally corrupt to try and do that deterrence on the backs of Americans that are being held already.
24:14I think when people think about hostage negotiations, especially internationally, when you go into the countries that are holding Americans,
24:27there is an immediate reaction, oh, they're holding Americans already. Why are you going there? It's risky.
24:32And it's true and there is a risk to it. There are ways for us to mitigate that risk, but we only go to these countries at the invitation of leadership.
24:41And we work really hard to get that invitation. And for that government, the government that holds the Americans, that invites us to come over,
24:50we're actually an asset for them because these are governments that typically have either they don't communicate with the U.S. at all
24:56or the communications with the U.S. is very troubled. And we're a channel. So they're not incentivized to take us.
25:04We're completely at their mercy. We don't have security with us. But the motivation is one in which we're assets of them.
25:11If we turn into a liability, yes, it's much, much riskier. There are countries and situations where we would decide not to go.
25:19I can tell you that right now, for example, when we negotiate with the Russians or meet with the Russians, I prefer doing it in a third country.
25:27There are countries that I can't go because of my place of birth from Israel.
25:32But in general, I think it's not that it's not risky of us being detained. But if we're responsible, we can mitigate that risk to some extent.
25:44A lot of the countries that I travel to would be considered for most Americans as dangerous countries.
25:52Russia, especially since the war started, Venezuela, Myanmar, North Korea, all of these, Sudan.
26:03When I think of going on a mission, you have to assume that something bad might happen.
26:09And when you play that out in your head in advance and you say, OK, if something bad happens, the seconds before I either get arrested or my head gets cut off, do I know who's doing it and why?
26:24If I know the answer to those two questions of who and why, then I can mitigate the risk.
26:31If I don't know the answer, then I can't go.
26:35So there are places that I absolutely cannot go. I cannot go to Iran.
26:39Because in Iran, even if the president invites us, and we did get an invitation in the past to go, the president doesn't control the borders.
26:47There is a Revolutionary Guard that answers to somebody else.
26:50And so at the moment that something bad happens, you don't know who's doing it to you and why.
26:56And if you don't have an answer to those questions, you can't mitigate it.
27:01So when I negotiate with the Iranians, we do that in a third country.
27:05And I don't lie about my background.
27:08I don't necessarily go with a sign.
27:11Any leadership or any officers of a foreign country before they meet, they do their homework.
27:16So they know.
27:17And I do have some public profile of things.
27:24When I traveled to Pyongyang in North Korea, I had my friends ask me, like, aren't you scared?
27:31It's so risky.
27:32There's nothing you can do to .
27:33And I laughed.
27:34And I said, you know, actually, North Korea was one of the places that I actually felt most comfortable with traveling.
27:41Because in North Korea, they hated me because I was American, not because I was Israeli or Jewish.
27:52Our role ends when the person comes home.
27:56Often, I never meet the prisoner.
28:01I meet their families.
28:03I know their families.
28:04I stay in touch with their families.
28:05But the prisoner never knows who did what for them.
28:08They were in prison.
28:10There are elements that we don't do.
28:12For example, while the family is handling a case where the allowed one is home, there's multiple issues and things that they need to handle.
28:21Sometimes, the person being held is the one that was the provider for the family.
28:26They need psychological help.
28:28They need social help.
28:29They need financial.
28:31They need legal help.
28:32We partner with organizations like Hostage US.
28:35Then they also help the prisoner when they come home.
28:38There's a lot of elements of this work that is very emotionally taxing.
28:43There is an unpredictability in my travel.
28:46Early in the pandemic, before the vaccines, we had to go to Venezuela.
28:51We just had to because there was negotiations over there that we had to do.
28:55The pandemic added a risk factor for all of our prisoners over there.
29:00And my wife and I had a huge argument over this.
29:03Again, not vaccinated, we had our masks and everything, but she was right about the risk.
29:09So the unpredictability of the work, the danger that is involved in this, as you can imagine, takes a huge toll on the family.
29:18And I figured out all I can do with this is the best I can at every given moment.
29:23There are moments where my daughter asks me, why do I have to do this?
29:28But throughout her life and throughout her years from early, from very early age when I started talking to her about my work when she was four,
29:36she has met many of the families.
29:39She has met many of the prisoners that returned.
29:42And she understands.
29:44A big part of this work is the conversations and dialogue and communications with the family of the captors.
29:51And the same way that I deploy empathy towards the captors or our own government or the different stakeholders in the negotiation,
29:59I deploy empathy with the families.
30:03In fact, for me personally, that's my motivation.
30:07So after a family call or before a mission, you know what the stakes are.
30:12I need an outlet.
30:14And I found, and this is just of recent years, I found that running really helps me.
30:21That helps me regulate my emotions in this a lot.
30:25There's a joke, you know, when people see a comment on people who are running long distances,
30:29they say, oh, you know, they must be running from something.
30:32It's like, that's exactly right.
30:34I know that negotiations are a repeat game.
30:43And I know that my relationships, in order for me to be successful, I need to maintain those relationships.
30:48So I'm very careful in how I speak about people.
30:50I'm genuine because, again, I can't bluff.
30:53I don't have a lying face.
30:55Of late, we have seen that the taking of Americans by foreign governments is less played in the legal part of it.
31:04They used to have a case against them.
31:06It used to be important to present, this person did X, and put a trial.
31:10Of late, we're even skipping that.
31:13People are just being detained.
31:14There's no charges really pending trial, all these things, because it's so clearly now a transactional thing.
31:22But that correlates with the way the United States government is also dealing with it.
31:26If we're a transactional government, the response to us will be transactional as well.
31:31So I do think this is going to continue.
31:34I hope it's going to start winding down in numbers.
31:38And I think that the massive return that we've seen since January of Americans, I think it will continue throughout this year.
31:45And I hope that we will also see a decrease in the number of Americans that are being taken.
31:51I think hostage taking or political prisoner taking, wrongfully detained taking, it runs certain waves in certain countries.
31:59Historically speaking, it's been a tool of diplomacy by certain countries for decades.
32:06Iran has always been using that as a diplomatic tool for them.
32:11But there was a period around 2013 and 2015 when hostage taking became headlines in the United States because of ISIS.
32:21Because they took Americans, there were no negotiations over there.
32:24Since then we have seen, since the demise of ISIS or their downfall for at least for now, hopefully forever, we've seen much more of state-sponsored hostage taking, which is political prisoners and wrongfully detained.
32:39And we have repeat offenders, states that have become regular at doing it.
32:45Iran, historically.
32:47Russia, increasingly.
32:48China.
32:49And in each of them, it's different reasons.
32:51With China, it's a lot of exit bans and a lot of dual citizens, even though according to Chinese law, they're not dual citizens because as soon as they become American, they forfeit the citizenship.
33:02But these are repeat offenders that we have and the dynamics with them.
33:06With Russia, it's a part of the war and it's a part of the exchanges of agents.
33:11With Venezuela, it's a part of the lack of bilateral negotiations and relationship that they want to work through.
33:16And that's a way to motivate the Americans to engage.
33:19But there are other countries that it just happens randomly.
33:23North Korea, by the way, is an example of a country that used to be a repeat offender.
33:28But since Otto Wombeer and the results of Otto Wombeer when he came back in his death, they decided they don't want to play in this anymore.
33:37They realized it doesn't work out for them very well.
33:40Of late, most commonly, we see a lot of the exchanges.
33:45You can't get there without the personal gestures, without the personal relationships.
33:51The photo ops play a big role.
33:54The legitimacy that comes through those photo ops.
33:58So if Governor Richards and I traveled to Myanmar and had pictures with the leader and the leader used it domestically for...
34:07So look at that.
34:08International leaders, we're not a government.
34:11We don't legitimize or don't legitimize people.
34:14If that's what he needed out of it, I'll be paying that price any day if I save an American life with it.
34:21I'm okay with that.
34:22My conscience is very clear with that.
34:24Once somebody is back home, where we fail is to debrief with that person, learn about everybody who has wronged that person,
34:34from the prison guards to the judges to the people in charge of the justice thing,
34:40and find ways to impose costs on those in a way to mitigate the risk that even if an American is taken,
34:50the guards will treat them differently because there's a risk to them personally.
34:55Technology and social media and the ability to consume information is both...
35:01It's a tool.
35:02It's both for positive, but it's also negative with the way the captors are using it to demonize the person that they have.
35:10I can tell you a funny story that during the pandemic we couldn't travel so much.
35:15So unless it was essential negotiations that we had with Venezuela, we would do a lot in alternative matters.
35:22So they would text a lot.
35:24And that's when I realized, because negotiating over text is very different than in person,
35:30you can't do complex and nuanced questions.
35:32You have to break everything down to tiny little pieces.
35:35And that's when I learned the power, and I know this will sound weird and funny, the power of emojis.
35:41Because tone doesn't go through text.
35:44But if you couple it with emoji, you can create a layer, an emotional layer to it,
35:51so the person receiving can understand better the tone in which you're saying something.
35:56And I can tell you that the Venezuelans are really good at that.
36:01So we have a whole back and forth on WhatsApp negotiations during the pandemic with a lot of emojis.
36:07Smiley face, flower, sun, like all these different things, which is just somebody will need to write a book at some point.
36:13But there is never, and I don't think there will be ever, replacement as good as in person.
36:26I was born in Israel.
36:27My accent doesn't lie.
36:30I tried to hide it for 25 years.
36:32Couldn't.
36:33I came to the United States.
36:34I did my undergrad at UCLA.
36:36I did my graduate degree at Georgetown University School of Foreign Service.
36:39And I always thought that my career would be foreign policy, probably Israeli-Arab conflict.
36:45But my first job out of Georgetown was with the Clinton Global Initiative.
36:50And part of my job was to talk to heads of corporations and foundations because the former president,
36:58he wanted everybody to make a personal commitment to solving one of the world's challenges.
37:03Part of my job was to call those people and solicit those commitments.
37:07And I figured out, well, if I'm asking all these people to make commitments, I should make one myself.
37:13There was a genocide taking place in Sudan.
37:16And so I committed that after the inaugural conference of the Clinton Global Initiative in 2005,
37:22I will travel myself to Chad and go to the border between Chad and Sudan, interview some refugees for two weeks,
37:28and then come back and raise money for whatever I found that they need most.
37:33And so I sit at my office on a Wednesday, and I get a phone call.
37:37And on the other side, there's this, like, rough voice.
37:40And he's like, is this Mickey Bergman?
37:42I said, yes.
37:43I said, this is Governor Bill Richardson of New Mexico.
37:45I need you to pack your stuff and get your ass to Santa Fe.
37:48You're coming with me to Khartoum.
37:50And I had exactly 48 hours to try and figure out whether this is an opportunity of a lifetime
37:56or the stupidest mistake I do before my head gets separated from my body.
38:01I was not yet an American citizen.
38:02I was an Israeli former officer, Sudan and Israel at war.
38:08So going there is a risk.
38:10And the consensus was that I'm going to fly to Santa Fe, have lunch with the governor,
38:16and then talk to him and explain to him that I don't want to risk the mission, explain the background,
38:23and then bow out nicely from the trip.
38:26And he just, he looked at me, he's like, no, no, no, Mickey.
38:30I told the Sudanese that I know you.
38:32I vouch for you.
38:33I told them that I know you for six years.
38:35If they have a problem with you, they have a problem with me, and we're all leaving.
38:38They're not separating us.
38:39Do you know what I'm famous for?
38:41I said, what is that, governor?
38:43He says, I get people out of jail.
38:46So worse comes to worse, you spend a couple of months in a Sudanese prison.
38:50Think what it will do to your career.
38:52And that trip blew my mind.
38:54I thought I would do Middle East in my life, but the world was much bigger and exciting.
39:00And the Clinton Global Initiative also showed me that it's not only governments who can do this work,
39:04but businesses can do it, and individuals, and private sector.
39:07Because of my upbringing, and because I served for six years in the Israeli Defense Force,
39:12I understand the sense of loss, I understand the ramifications of violence.
39:17I'm one of those who came out of the military service in combat with a very, very clear conviction
39:25that violence never solves our problems.
39:47I was accused of violence and safety.
39:51And because of the military service, I don't want to give up things.
39:56I drink away from other groups.
39:57I don't want to take off things without any actors in criticizing theika lands or Ferrhoyue in the States of the Guard.
40:00And the guests who do this work will not only understand theian, there.
40:03I don't really quote somebody in the country where they're我想—
40:04numbers of people who tend to figure the world intohanded direct organizations where they feel some 좋아요
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