In 2008, American journalist Jere Van Dyk was kidnapped and held
for 45 days. At the time, he had no idea who his kidnappers were.
They demanded a ransom and the release of three of their comrades
from Guantanamo, yet they hinted at their ties to Pakistan and to
the Haqqani network, a uniquely powerful group that now holds the
balance of power in large parts of Afghanistan and the tribal areas
of Pakistan. After his release, Van Dyk wrote a book about his
capture and what it took to survive in this most hostile of
circumstances. Yet he never answered the fundamental questions that
his kidnapping raised: Why was he taken? Why was he released? And
who saved his life? Every kidnapping is a labyrinth in which the
certainties of good and bad, light and dark are merged in the quiet
dialogues and secret handshakes that accompany a release or a
brutal fatality. In The Trade, Jere Van Dyk uses the sinuous path
of his own kidnapping to explain the recent rise in the taking of
Western hostages across the greater Middle East. He discovers that
he was probably not taken by the anonymous "Taliban," as he
thought, but by the very people who helped arrange his trip and
then bargained for his release. It was not a matter of chance: CBS,
Van Dyk's employer at the time, launched a secret rescue and, he
learned later, paid an undisclosed ransom to a tribal chief who
controlled the area in which he was kidnapped and who delivered him
and his guide safely to a US Army base. In 2013, Van Dyk returned
to the Middle East to unravel the links among jihadist groups,
specifically that of the Haqqani network. His investigation finally
paid off in 2015, when Van Dyk was taken to a discreet room in a
guesthouse in Islamabad where he met Ibrahim Haqqani, part of the
leadership of the Haqqani network who has been seen by very few
outsiders since 9/11. There, Van Dyk learned of the Haqqanis' links
to Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, the ISI, and the CIA and their
involvement in the kidnapping of Bowe Bergdahl and many others.
Back in the United States, Van Dyk saw the other side of the
kidnapping labyrinth as he became involved with other former
hostages and the families of recent kidnapping victims murdered by
the Islamic State. Van Dyk's investigation shows how America's
foreign policy strategy, the terrible cynicism of the kidnappers,
and a world of shadowy interlocutors who play both sides of many
bargains combine to create a brutal business out of the exchange of
individual human lives for vast sums of money.
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