Roger Carstens on finding the key to the cell

Roger D. Carstens (00:00) In that 30 to 90-second hug, when someone comes home, it makes all the pain of that job worth it. And then an hour later, you're driving back to the State Department and you're already working your next case. Adam Cooper (00:19) Welcome to The Mediator's Studio, a podcast about peacemakers, bringing you stories from behind the scenes. I'm your host, Adam Cooper. I'm at the Oslo Forum, where some of the world's leading figures in peace-making have come to discuss resolving conflicts from Iran, Sudan, Myanmar, and Ukraine. My guest today is a distinguished senior fellow in the McCain Institute's Freedom for the Political Prisoners Initiative. Between 2020 and 2025, he served as the United States Special Presidential Envoy for Hostage Affairs under Presidents Trump and Biden, bringing home over 65 Americans from captivity abroad. Prior to that, he was Deputy Assistant Secretary of State in the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labour, focusing on issues in the Middle East and South America. He has also served in the US Army. Roger Carstens, welcome to The Mediator's Studio. Roger D. Carstens (01:19) I am so grateful to be here. Thank you for having me. Adam Cooper (01:27) Let's start with your journey into conflict negotiation and mediation. You were drawn into the world of conflict resolution from an early age when you first learned of the Cambodian genocide committed by the Khmer Rouge in the 1970s. Take me back to that time. Where were you? What resonated with the young Roger Carstens? Roger D. Carstens (01:48) I think it has an overwhelming impact that lasted my entire life. And I can remember in 1975 in Spokane, Washington, laying on the carpet of my house in the morning reading the Spokesman-Review, and in the evening reading the Spokesman-Chronicle, reading Newsweek and Time, the only 2 periodicals really that our house had back then. And I was just horrified that a government, the Khmer Rouge in this case, could do such evil and visit that much horror upon its own population. And I used to sit there wondering, like, how does this stop? You know, who stops this evil? And what can my role be in trying to stop it? Adam Cooper (02:25) So let's talk a little bit then about your early career, which was in the U.S. Army Special Forces. I've been doing mediation almost 20 years now. Safe to say there's not that many people with your background in our field. For someone who's working to reduce conflicts, how did that experience shape your character? Roger D. Carstens (02:43) Well, you know, it probably still goes back to 1975. You know, I think when I started to try to answer the question, who stops evil and how does it get stopped? Well, I didn't know much about the United Nations. I didn't really quite understand the role of media. I didn't really understand or know of NGOs, non-profits that could address this. And so, growing up on a diet of John Wayne movies, you know, I did know— I did know one thing, that the United States Army Participated in saving a lot of people when they pushed the Nazis out of Europe. And I thought you know what, maybe the U.S. Army has the wherewithal to address problems of evil. So, I made a beeline to the United States Military Academy at West Point, maybe one of the few people that went there because I had a bent on human rights. But after 4 years at West Point, I went into the Army, went into the Rangers. From the Rangers, I went to combat for the first time during the parachute invasion of Panama. And then from that time, I transferred into Special Forces, whose motto is De Oppresso Liber, to free the oppressed. Roger D. Carstens (03:41) And for the next roughly 16 years, I spent my time as a Special Forces officer, and I really tried to ply that trade, you know, trying to find ways to stop evil. I think at an early age, I knew I didn't want a destination job. Instead, I wanted a mission, and that mission was to take care of people who are most vulnerable and see if I can alleviate the pain and suffering that they're going through. Adam Cooper (04:03) Well, let's talk about the different ways in which you've done that over the years and your role as the US Special Presidential Envoy for Hostage Affairs. You took up the post in 2020, year 4 of President Trump's first term, and it soon became apparent that US citizens held in Russia were going to be a big part of your portfolio. Take me to the moment when you first realized that this enormous, highly sensitive task had landed on your desk? Roger D. Carstens (04:31) You know, it was early on. I'd taken the job and Paul Whelan, who'd already been held in Russia since 2018, had yet to have been declared an arbitrary detainee, a wrongful detainee by the US government, because sometimes it takes a while for the government to wrap their arms around a case and go through the forensics to determine whether someone seems innocent or not. So, Paul had already been arrested for over 2 years, and that was the first case that officially became a wrongful detainee during my tenure. And so, when that case popped, you know, we did 2 things. Number one, we pulled everyone together and tried to determine what's our best starting point to try to get Paul Whelan back. And number two, we decided that we needed to go talk to Paul Whelan's sister. We decided that the families of these detainees are important. They need more information. They need to get love and care from the United States government. So, within short order, within probably about a week of Paul's declaration as being a wrongful detainee, I found myself visiting Paul's sister in Massachusetts, spending 4 hours with her, and then shortly thereafter getting together in a secure facility in the basement of the State Department with people from the Pentagon, the CIA, the State Department, the White House. Roger D. Carstens (05:40) The job that I had was informed by our failure in Syria from 2012 to 2015, when Americans were held by ISIS and the United States government didn't really have a way of reaching out to them. We had a policy where we don't talk to terrorists. And we wouldn't really talk to the family members. You can picture your loved ones held in Syria, and you call the U.S. government and say, look, my brother was just taken, or my son was just taken by ISIS. Who can I talk to? And then getting passed around from different offices in the State Department, different offices in the Pentagon. And when you finally talk to someone in authority, they would say, I'm sorry, but that's classified. I can't discuss it. And so, in the wake of that failure, President Obama did a hostage policy review that took a look at U.S. hostage policy from 0 to 100, and we determined that we needed to start doing things differently. And one of them was working with the families and taking care of them. And so, upon taking the job, I figured, you know, we need to partner with the families. We're going to partner and get your loved one home. Adam Cooper (06:44) Let's stay with the theme of families, but talk about the case of Brittney Griner who was an American basketball star, had been imprisoned in Russia on what was widely seen as dubious drugs charges. That ended up in a swap with a so-called merchant of death, Viktor Bout, a notorious Russian arms dealer who was arrested in Thailand in 2008, transferred to the US where he was sentenced to 25 years in prison on terrorism charges. We'll get into the kind of mechanics of that swap in a bit, but let's just stay with the theme of families and what you got out of that and talk to me about the time you spent with Brittney's family. Roger D. Carstens (07:23) With Brittney, the Russians pretty much gave us a wink and a nod that, hey, we caught this basketball player. She's going to be worth something to all of us, and we're going to squeeze you on Brittney Griner. So, we pretty much knew right from the get-go from the Russians that they were going to leverage Brittney against us. So, within short order, Brittney became one of my cases. And I was talking to Brittney's wife, Cherelle, talking to her legal team, talking to her athletic team, and really just trying to do what we do with anyone. I think we came under some criticism saying that the United States government moved heaven and earth for a basketball player but not everyone else. And absolutely not true. You know, we did with Brittney Griner what we did with everyone else, and that is we surged on the family, in this case Cherelle, embraced her, and tried to give her as much information that we could. We would declassify information so that we could brief her. And we wanted to bring her along on this because the family members, you know, at times they'll even come up with a way to get their loved one out because they're thinking about it constantly. Roger D. Carstens (08:22) And I think the creativity and the passion of the family members combined with the ability of the U.S. government to try to get something done, that's a powerful combination. And so we worked hand in glove with Cherelle and Brittney's team over the course of those many months to bring Brittney home. Adam Cooper (08:37) And tell me about how you try to map out a deal, because you sat there with the families, you've shared what you can with them, but then they want you to do something with that kind of emotional need to have their loved ones back home. And then it's your job to try to work out, well, what are the terms of that deal? So walk me through that process. Roger D. Carstens (08:56) You know, we tell them right up front that this is going to be a long, hard slog and it's not going to happen overnight. So, we say buckle in and we're all going to have to be tough here. And the family members always rise to the occasion. But they only do that if they believe you're working your tail off to get the job done. If they think you're half-stepping and not getting it done, they'll turn up the heat. And in fact, I would appreciate it if they would, because they have to hold us accountable. But I think in Brittney's case, you know, we'd already done a swap for Trevor Reed. We traded Konstantin Yaroshenko in April of that same year, 2022. Roger D. Carstens (09:28) And we were trying to struggle about how to get Brittney and Paul Whelan back. And we had back and forths with the Russians, mainly the FSB, their intelligence services, and we just weren't getting anywhere. And notably, in June of that year, Secretary of State Tony Blinken actually went public and said, we're frustrated. We're trying to get a deal with the Russians, but the Russians aren't being very helpful. They're not necessarily being good-faith negotiators. And the Russians were stunned because we had never done that before. Now they do it. And they always threatened that if we do it, they're going to crash the channel and stop talking to us. But it was the first time that we'd ever done that, and I think that had positive impact. And yet, months after that, we were still struck and struggling trying to get a 2-for-2 swap— that would bring Brittney and Paul Whelan back for 2 people that the Russians might want. And in going back and forth, I would say if I were to truncate it and just say, we'll get into the mechanics later, it really came down to the Russians saying, we are only going to give you one option. Roger D. Carstens (10:27) It's going to be Brittney Griner for Viktor Bout, not Paul Whelan for Viktor Bout, not Brittney Griner for someone else. It's going to be one option: Brittney for Viktor Bout. Take it or leave it. And the president decided that, you know, we don't want to mess this up, because this negotiation could go on for another 6 months to a year. Let's take the win and then redouble our efforts to bring Paul Whelan home after Brittney comes back to the United States. Adam Cooper (10:51) I can imagine when the Russians first conveyed that, that it's going to be received differently in different parts of the U.S. government because everyone's got a stake in this. You've got the Justice Department, the State Department, your office in the White House, and that inter-agency negotiation, I imagine, is a huge part of the job. So just talk me through how you tried to - if you came up with a course of action that you believed was the right trade, that you would convince those who would be sceptical of it, who were saying, how— why on earth should we release the merchant of death? Roger D. Carstens (11:28) It's a long fight. I tell people that I've been to 5 or 6 wars, but the most combat I've ever seen is wearing a suit and tie in Washington, D.C., trying to negotiate with the inter-agency. And it's for the right reasons. You know, you want the U.S. Department of Justice to not want to do this. You want the CIA to be sceptical. You want the White House to convene and listen. So everyone's doing their jobs. But I would say the first time I brought up a trade with Viktor Bout or Konstantin Yaroshenko was during the Trump administration, and people's heads exploded. You know, I'd go into a room with like 20 people, and literally 19 of them were like, what are you doing? Sending knives with their eyes as they were looking at me. And I was the one guy that had to argue that this was a possibility. And at that time, I wasn't sure even I believed it. Roger D. Carstens (12:12) But there had to be one person in that room that was willing to throw something like that on the table. And so it takes a long time. You know, you're conducting a 360 negotiation. And when people want to know, like, hey, what was it like talking to Maduro or Ali Mamlouk or, you know, the Iranians? I'm like, man, that's the easy stuff. The hardest stuff is the 360-degree negotiation, getting everyone in the U.S. government aligned. and willing to put forth a proposal, because by the time you finally get to your opponent, whether it be a dictator or an intelligence service, that's actually easy. Adam Cooper (12:45) So you've had the inter-agency fight, the President's made a call, but nothing's certain until the actual swap takes place. So let's talk about that. Happens in April 2022. Just bring me into the moment. Tell me how it played out. Roger D. Carstens (13:00) Yeah, so that was the one, the first one, that was the Trevor Reed swap, and Brittney, of course, came a few months later. But that was the first time we'd swapped anything with the Russians, and no one had really done anything like that, period, in a bazillion years. And so, you know, the plane landed, and I figured, well, we just got to play heads-up ball, as they say. We got to adapt. And the Russian plane landed first, and this was in Turkey, and they took us to a secure part of the tarmac and our plane pulled up second, maybe about 20 minutes after the Russian plane. And I just said, look, stay in the plane. Roger D. Carstens (13:30) Let me get off the plane and figure out how we're going to do this. So I jumped off. I went into the middle ground between the 2 aircrafts, the Russian aircraft and mine, and I met my counterpart, an esteemed colonel from the FSB who does their hostage stuff. And I jumped out and I walked up. He had a translator with him. And I said, look, Colonel, I have an issue in that I have to sign a piece of paper and hand it to Konstantin Yaroshenko to make this deal complete. But I can't do that unless I physically see Trevor Reed. So I'm going to propose something. How about you let me come on your plane? I'll see Trevor. I'll say hi. I'll explain what's about to happen. Then you can come on my plane. You can see Konstantin Yaroshenko. You can get comfortable with that. And then you and I will go to the centre. We'll talk and tell war stories together, and we'll let our staffs do the actual swap. Roger D. Carstens (14:21) Then we'll shake hands and go. And he readily agreed. And so I popped onto his plane. I saw Trevor Reed. I said, Trevor, I'm Ambassador Roger Carstens on behalf of President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken. I'm here to bring you home. And then I said, in the next 90 seconds, here's what's going to happen. And then we quickly went over to my plane, and the colonel, my counterpart, jumped on the plane, talked to Konstantin Yaroshenko, gave him the Russian version thereof. Roger D. Carstens (14:47) And then sure enough, we went to the centre while the swap was conducted. And I guess in a way we established some sort of precedent that we used again when I saw him many months later when we were doing the Brittney Griner exchange. Adam Cooper (14:59) So it plays out in a similar way for Brittney Griner's release. What was it like meeting Viktor Bout? Roger D. Carstens (15:06) He was interesting. We flew off from Washington, D.C. with Viktor Bout in the plane. And, you know, I'm kind of the mission commander when the plane lifts off. So, you know, I do what anyone would. I walked around, See if the marshals are doing OK, check on my team, talk to the air staff that's there. And I eventually came upon Viktor Bout. And I said, Mr. Bout, do you know what's happening today? And in perfect English, he goes, yeah, I think I'm being traded for a basketball player. I said, that's absolutely right. And I said, let's just review the scheme of manoeuvre. I'll tell you what's going to happen. We're going to fly here. We'll refuel. We'll fly to Abu Dhabi. We'll conduct an exchange, blah, blah, blah, blah. Roger D. Carstens (15:42) And at the very end, I couldn't help myself. I mean, he was in great physical condition. I said, forgive me for asking, but what do you do to work out? I mean, you look great. And he leans close to me, and in a low voice, he goes, intermittent fasting. So we went on to have probably about a 15-minute discussion about our workout routines. And at the very end, my number 2 there said, oh my goodness, we just got workout and leadership advice from Victor Bout. Adam Cooper (16:17) One of your tools as a hostage mediator is to sometimes enlarge the scope of negotiations beyond the direct and immediate issues, to try to bring pressures to bear that can shift the discussion. Sometimes it's called enlarging the pie that's being divided. Give me an actual example of that in the Russia-US context. Roger D. Carstens (16:38) We'd been working on something like this in Venezuela, like about 2 years earlier, where we thought, if we can't get an American for a Venezuelan, what if we bring the Iranians and Russians into the deal to enlarge the problem? And enlarging the problem, I think that way of looking at it like that came from President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1958, when he kind of coined that term. But in this case, the Russians did not want anyone in a US prison. And we showed them a list of the prisoners that we had, and the Russians were not interested in any of them. But they did indicate an interest in an assassin that the Germans had caught in broad daylight, who killed a Chechen operative in a beer garden in southern Germany, and that the Germans had found guilty of that assassination and had sentenced him to life in prison, in a German prison. And the Russians said, we want this guy. And our initial response was, not our problem. And the Russians, over time, said, oh, yes, we're making this your problem. So right there, we had a physics problem. We had to somehow see if the Germans would be willing to, in a way, do something really politically horrible, and that is take a convicted assassin and allow the United States of America to use him as— you can almost say trade bait— on a deal to try to bring back Americans and others. Roger D. Carstens (17:53) And that, in a way, started enlarging the problem. We thought, if we don't have anyone that they need, Who do we have around the world that are in prisons that our allies might have that we could throw onto the table? It resulted in me and members of my team and other parts of the U.S. government flying all over the world to talk to governments about participating in what we were going to have. And that was a huge swap that eventually involved 7 countries and 24 people going in different directions. But eventually we were able to pull up a deal to where on one day, we swapped many people from many different countries and in return getting 3 American citizens, 1 green card holder, but also freeing numerous Russian political prisoners who then went on to try to restart their lives. Adam Cooper (18:42) Let's talk about another set of negotiations also at the highest level, which is your work connected to Venezuela. where you were a central US negotiator dealing directly and indirectly with the government of Nicolás Maduro. And when you took over the role, you inherited multiple American detention cases in Venezuela. And in March 2022, you were in a delegation of senior US officials who travelled to Caracas in efforts to release 2 Americans, Gustavo Cárdenas and Jorge Alberto Fernández. Tell me about that mission. Roger D. Carstens (19:18) Well, you know, it was actually our second meeting with Maduro. I'd met him by myself, I think in December of the previous year. And we'd already had meetings with Jorge Rodríguez, former vice president. At that time, he was the head of the National Assembly, a role he still holds. He's the brother of Delcy Rodríguez, who, when I was negotiating with the Venezuelans, was the vice president. Since, she's become the acting president of Venezuela. And so, you know, we'd had a chance to talk to President Maduro and I guess, let's say, members of his government that were active in this and started to come up with, maybe you could say, the gleanings of what a deal might look like. And in this particular meeting, we wanted to bring down a member from the White House and also the serving ambassador who, because we closed our embassy, held his embassy in Bogotá, Colombia. So you can picture the U.S. ambassador does not reside in Caracas; he resides in Bogotá. So we came in with 2 people, again, the ambassador and a member from the White House. And to my mind, I was trying to do what I talked about, that 360-degree negotiation. Roger D. Carstens (20:23) If I come up with a brilliant deal and we take it back to the White House, they may say no. So why not go ahead and bring the White House in early, let them get a sense of what's happening, see what's happening on the ground, And try to get their buy-in early, which was kind of our attempt to do so. And I think, yeah, like I said, it paid off on that occasion on getting 2 people out. Adam Cooper (20:43) And what was it actually like stepping into that meeting room with President Maduro? Because obviously, given the state of US-Venezuela relations, not exactly the best of friends. Did they receive you warmly? Was it a frosty environment? Everyone's got a sense that maybe there's some business to transact, but what was the mood in the room? Roger D. Carstens (21:03) The meeting started off a little on the frosty side. I mean, he had not met an American probably in about 4 and a half or 5 years, and I was the first one in the chute, the hopper, so to speak, to meet him. But I think by the end of the 90 minutes that we spent together, it was actually quite warm, and that, for a negotiator, that's not a bad place to be. And I think that what probably helped us is that he was used to and expecting someone to come in and lecture him. And to fight him anytime he said something, to say, well, actually, Mr. President, I disagree on that. And I think he was expecting some sort of verbal combat there. And instead, what I tried to do was, you know, really listen to him. You know, when he started talking, I paid attention. I made sure that he knew that he was being heard. You can do that without actually agreeing to what the other side is professing. In fact, you can even listen and say, allow me to gently push back. But I think the one thing that I found, in not only talking to Maduro and others, is that, you know, if you're going to go in there and lecture someone and remind them of the obvious, that their human rights record is poor, that that actually didn't happen as you described it in 2009, then you're going to fail your objective to get Americans out. Roger D. Carstens (22:15) My job is to bring Americans home. So what I did was I listened, fed it back to him, and at the very end, I said, you know, thank you for sharing that with me. Didn't agree with him, but I let him know that he'd been heard. And I think right at that moment, all the tension went out of the room. And what probably could have been a 45-minute meeting extended on another 45 minutes for 90 minutes, where we actually talked about how we could get our Americans home in a way that made sense for both sides. Adam Cooper (22:41) And eventually you managed to get 20 Americans out. So just walk me through the journey from that, those meetings where you're trying to empathize at a basic level, you're trying to hear what your counterpart is saying, make them feel respected in a sense, no matter what they've done in the past. And how do you get— take that relationship which you're building and translate that into the actual release of the hostages? Roger D. Carstens (23:05) Sometimes people want to work with people that they like. And so if I'm not objectionable to the person I'm talking to, you know, I'm already starting to win. And also, if I show myself to be reasonable, then they know that they can talk, to even include throwing out wild ideas, and we can bat them backwards and forwards. And in doing that, I think you end up building some trust. And I know that's hard for people to, like, really fathom, but, you know, because a lot of these people killed their way to the top, they stole elections, they're tough people. You wouldn't want them to maybe come to your Christmas party. At the same time, if you can build a trust-built relationship, that's built on mutual respect, that puts you in a place to start bringing Americans home. And I think what helped also is clear communication. You know, you'll find that the Venezuelans might do something and they're sending a message to the Americans. And the Americans will do something and they're sending a message to the Venezuelans. And early on, Jorge Rodríguez said, look, we can't stop our governments from sending messages, but how about before the message is sent or right after, Why don't we just talk to each other? Roger D. Carstens (24:09) And you could say, hey, Jorge, you'll know the United States of America did this. Here is exactly what we're trying to tell you that we're trying to communicate. And that saved us so much grief, so many misrepresentations. It just cut right to it. And we found that we were able to communicate rapidly, accurately, in a way that helped get us closer to our objective faster than we would have otherwise. Adam Cooper (24:33) It's a really interesting case that you make in favour of dialogue, even with those you disagree with, just as a way to try to understand each other better. But I'm trying to get more of a feel, Roger, of the nature of these negotiations and how— is it all taking place in kind of formal meeting rooms, they're floating ideas, or are you also trying to build the relationship in some other way? Take someone like Jorge Rodríguez, who's kind was clearly central to the negotiation. Roger D. Carstens (25:01) Some negotiations are conducted over rum and cigars over an extended period of time. You know, you might be there for 3 hours and you're talking about all sorts of things and then eventually getting to the hostages and then going back to talk about other things and then pouring another glass of rum and lighting another cigar. Other times you're meeting in a hotel room to have a cup of coffee with, you know, a Russian oligarch trying to like see if you can get a message conveyed to Putin in a way that bypasses a stumbling block, which at times might be the FSB, or sometimes it could be a little more formal. But I think what I tried to do was, no matter if they wanted to take it formally or not, I tried to meet them where they were. And you need to build relationships with people. And if you get the relationship right, you're going to get somewhere. Adam Cooper (25:45) And if that person wants to build a relationship in a smoky room over rum, then that's what you have to do. Roger D. Carstens (25:50) Then do it, yeah. Adam Cooper (25:51) I'd like to move on to your work on freeing hostages and wrongfully detained people in Syria. The position of Special Presidential Envoy for Hostage Affairs was created by President Obama in 2015 after several American hostages were killed in Syria. Talked about this a little earlier. And by the time you assumed this role in 2020, the war in Syria had been raging for almost a decade. In the December before, in 2019, Assad regime forces had launched a major offensive on Idlib province in the northwest, backed by Russia, Iran, Hezbollah, allied militias. Tens of thousands of opposition fighters had taken refuge there, but there were several million civilians also in the province for whom there were very grave concerns at the time. But after a summit between Presidents Putin and Erdoğan of Türkiye, a ceasefire signed in March 2020. And US sources suggest there was a long overdue opportunity for freeing Americans after a long period where so little had been achieved, frankly. Was that also your sense when you came into the post? Roger D. Carstens (27:07) I worked the Syria problem when I was country director for a non-profit, in, I think, 2017 to 2018. So I was pretty familiar with Syria. Austin Tice was a young man from Texas. He'd served in the Marine Corps to the young rank of captain, got out, was going to journalism school at Georgetown, and he wanted to be a journalist. And he was in Syria trying to report, starting off, you know, working at times sending things to The Washington Post. He was captured at a checkpoint, and it was kind of convoluted after that. Who caught him? Who held him? Roger D. Carstens (27:38) What happened to him? What were the terms? And really, after being caught and releasing one small video that lasted probably just less than a minute, we just didn't hear from Austin Tice again. And I had a chance to talk to his mother very early on in my job, the first week, and I took that home. I mean, she was in so much pain, and she'd been wrestling with this for so long. And so instead of looking at the geopolitical situation, because pretty much with all the people who take our citizens, U.S. citizens, there's not a good situation. It's all bad. And there might be like a ray of light here, or maybe a slight change in geopolitics, but at the end of the day, it sucks. So in this case, I wasn't worried about the geopolitics. I just thought, you know, how can I get to Damascus and talk to them? Because as you said, you got to talk to the other side. You can't send smoke signals or ignore it. Your hostages are just not going to show up. And so I think in short order, we found a way to wrangle an invitation to Damascus. Roger D. Carstens (28:33) President Trump approved it, and not there long after, we showed up in Damascus to talk to Ali Mamlouk about trying to find a way to bring our Americans home. Ali Mamlouk, at times you could say he was the number 2 or the number 3 or the number 4 in the government, depending on the mood and the shift. But I would say, for the most part, he was the number 2 or 3 in the government, in charge of all intelligence, and people would say is the man who kind of orchestrated or gave the orders that resulted in the deaths of well over 100,000 Syrians. Adam Cooper (29:02) So talk to me about how you managed to build that relationship and just communication channels in general between the US and the Assad regime. Because much as we want to kind of wish away those geopolitics, they're there. There's constraints that you're under. I imagine even getting to Damascus and the sign-off for that would not have been easy. So just, just Just bring me into the moment. You've worked super hard to get there, and then you get on the ground, and what happens next? Roger D. Carstens (29:31) Yeah, you know, we had a very frank discussion with Ali Mamlouk. Didn't last probably just about an hour long. And he said, you know, I want these 3 things. I said, I'm hoping to get this. And I think there was a back and forth. We all agreed to try to keep wrestling with this topic. And yet I think the Syrians were less inclined to give and meet and discuss unless the United States made these huge policy concessions, you know, like pulling all US troops out of Syria, removing all sanctions, all sanctions to include the ones imposed by our US Congress, reopening the US Embassy in Damascus. And at that point, Roger, then, then when you've done all 3 of those, then we're willing to discuss your interests. So not that we're willing to discuss Austin Tice, not that we're going to do this, that, the other. It's after we do everything, they're willing to talk. And I think in our mind, we feared that— and not that we were going to do all 3, but if we did all 3 of those things, huge gives, and we went to meet with the Syrians, we were pretty much concerned that they would say, OK, you've put your embassy back in Damascus, you've removed all U.S. troops, you removed every sanction. Now, who is this Austin Tice, and why do you think we have him? And we weren't willing to do that. Roger D. Carstens (30:45) We kind of got stuck in this place where they weren't willing to give an inch - maximalist demands. I think President Trump at the time was probably willing to do something, but he needed to have some sort of assurance that they were going to negotiate in good faith, and we just could never get there. Adam Cooper (31:00) So you're trying to work this at the highest level, meeting with someone like Ali Mamluk, and you've made clear in earlier interviews that it's important to kind of engage at that presidential level and senior figures in government. But you've also said that you need to know who has the key to the cell. And give me an example of how that's been relevant in Syria. Roger D. Carstens (31:24) I would say in Syria, you know, you could talk to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which is something I think we did in the past, and you're wasting your time. Now, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs might bring the topic up. They may send a letter to the United States. Saying that we want to work on some sort of swap or deal, but unless you talk to the people who actually have the power in this case, then you're wasting your time. And I think in Syria's case, it was the intelligence community led by Ali Mamluk. In Russia, it was not the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. We figured out it's going to be the FSB. But I'll tell you, in other places, it is the Ministry of Foreign Affairs because they're representing the judicial branch. So in every case, it's really one of the first questions you have to say, okay, let's say the Ministry of Foreign Affairs is reaching out to us, but do they hold the key to the jail cell, or is it judiciary, or is it directly from the president, like in Belarus, where Lukashenko truly had the keys to the jail cell, or is it someone else? Roger D. Carstens (32:23) And I think as soon as you've figured that out, you can target in on that person or that organization And you're going to save tons of time because truly, if you talk to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Syria during that period of time, you could easily waste a year, year and a half and never really quite figure out why the negotiation's not working. Adam Cooper (32:40) So you're trying to work out them, right? Who's relevant? They at the same time are trying to work out you. So I'm curious, how do you think some of your interlocutors, say in Syria, saw you and in particular your military background. Do you think that hurt you, that helped you, especially if they kind of maybe had a military or security background themselves? Roger D. Carstens (33:01) I would say in every case with the opponent, you know, the person that is holding the American, 100% of the time when I introduced myself as Ambassador Carstens, I would usually say, but to let you know, I'm a soldier at heart. Every time they would go, oh, thank god, we hate talking to diplomats. But again, these people didn't go to Harvard. They didn't go to the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. They didn't go to the Sorbonne. They pretty much, again, killed their way to the top, stole elections. They're tough people. They're successful. They're great negotiators. But when you show up and in your brain start going through a traditional Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy or Harvard negotiation, well, number one, it's not translating. It's like speaking ancient Greek to someone who speaks Latin. And number 2, you're at risk of having them run circles around you because they smell things in the room that you can't smell. Adam Cooper (33:54) I want to hear a little bit more about your improvisational skills in the field, because you've just talked about the danger in a way of hewing too much to a kind of rigid framework for negotiations. You got your agreed talking points, but what you're talking about is the ability to feel the room, feel your counterpart, feel a context when you're in the field. Did that ever get you in trouble? Roger D. Carstens (34:22) Never. And I would like to say it did one or two times because it would make for a better and more believable conversation. But really, you know, we prepared and we called it the mathematics, you know, the science of negotiation. You prepare, you overprepare, you war game. You try to think of everything, you find out everything you can about your opposition. But I found that once you walked into the room, it's better to flip a switch and almost go 100% intuition. You know, if you're sitting there trying to fit the discussion into your framework, or you're trying to remember your White House-approved talking points, you're already, in a way, at a disadvantage. The other side, as I said, they smell fear. They know when you're lying. If you think that you're going to fool them and say, I can do this for you, but that's not been approved by the White House, they know it. They just feel it. And so it's better to go in and meet them where they are. But this to me denies Aristotle's notion of non-contradiction, where you can't be 2 things at once. And I thought, you absolutely can be 2 things at once. Roger D. Carstens (35:20) You know, in this case, you have to be rational and irrational at the same time. It's physics, it's metaphysics, it's art and it's science, it's being and becoming all at the same time. And what you're trying to do is bringing these unity of opposites together by preparing as best you possibly can. But once you walk into the negotiating room, you really need to prepare to just, you know, feel the room and make it happen. Adam Cooper (35:50) Let's move on to Iran. I want to take you back to 2020 when you assume office and inherit several Americans who were already imprisoned in Iran. One of your key challenges is to sustain indirect negotiations with the Iranians in the absence of diplomatic ties and against that long history of acrimony. You've said elsewhere that dealing with Iran was one of the most challenging experiences for you as a negotiator. And one of the major deals in your Iran mediations came in September 2023 with the release of 5 Americans and 5 Iranians held in the US. Plus, crucially, the transfer of some $6 billion worth of Iranian oil reserves frozen in South Korea. Walk us through how you found a way to a deal. Roger D. Carstens (36:37) You know, this one, I can't really take too much credit. And we say in our field, like, I don't care who comes up with a plan. I don't care who negotiates, and I don't care who gets the credit. And if you start with that attitude and you realize that negotiating for hostages is a team sport, and every time we get one person back, there were probably 100 to maybe 1,000 people that played a role. And if one person would not have been in that chain, you would not have succeeded. And in the Iran case, I struggled to get permission to reach out to the IRGC. We talked about— Adam Cooper (37:09) This is the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps. Roger D. Carstens (37:11) Yes. Forgive me, yes. I think in the past you could say that the MOIS, their intelligence branch, they had the keys to the jail cell. But by, I think, the time I took the job, we quickly determined that it was the IRGC that was actually holding these Americans and playing the senior role here. And yet I could not get permission to talk to the IRGC. And that's fine. There are reasons why we don't. And yet in the Biden administration, when we finally started to reach out to the Iranians to talk about the nuclear deal, I went to see the lead negotiator, Rob Malley. And I said, Rob, You know, you're going to Vienna to negotiate the nuke deal. Please, the hostages, critically important. And in my mind, I was probably going to join him in Vienna when he went there to start working on getting our people back. And I would say, by the time I talked to Rob 2 or 3 times, I knew I didn't have to. Rob, and not just Rob, but his whole team that were working this issue, they cared deeply about this. When they started meeting with the— I would say they didn't meet directly with Iranians in most cases. Roger D. Carstens (38:10) It was a different type of negotiation where they'd say, get in the same hotel room, but other mediators were there. Roger D. Carstens (38:17) And so Rob Malley would come back and say, hey, here's where we are on the hostage issue. And I think he did a very good job of progressing it. But we got to the point where the nuke deal was going to falter, and we wanted to make sure the hostage deal didn't falter. And I would say this is one of those lessons learned where people often will say, hey, let's tie a hostage deal into this major policy thing. And I'm like, I'm usually a little more cautious. I say, look, picture that the policy deal is a ship, and the hostages might be a barge or a raft that's tied to the ship in some fashion. If the ship sinks, your raft goes down to the bottom of the ocean with the ship. If the ship starts sinking, but you're able to detach or cut the rope, That's a good place. And in some places, you don't even want to be anywhere near the ship. And so when people want to attach something to a major policy thing, be thoughtful. And in this case, we had kind of that rope that would allow us to detach if the ship started sinking. Roger D. Carstens (39:18) And sure enough, the nuke deal started to falter, but we were still able, through Rob and his successor, to keep this ball in play. And we were able to finally get a deal that made sense to everyone. Roger D. Carstens (39:30) And the one thing I love pointing out is that I might drive into Washington, D.C., listening to a conservative radio talk show, and the host might say, oh my goodness, we gave the Iranians $6.5 billion for their terror machine. And in reality, the Iranians got nothing. You know, what we did was we took $6.5 billion of money in a South Korean bank, changed it from won into euros, put it in a bank that's in Qatar, where it's monitored by the Qataris and the U.S. Department of Treasury. Roger D. Carstens (39:59) And so if the Iranians wanted to spend it on COVID vaccines, baby formula, horse feed, have at it. We're going to help you spend it because that's important stuff. It's humanitarian. But if you're not going to do that, then the money's going to stay right here. And as of this day, not $1 was ever spent. Adam Cooper (40:25) I want to try to conclude by reflecting on some of the lessons from your long career. And let's pick up on that point that you made just now about the pros and cons of tying deals on hostages to broader processes, because I can imagine there's a debate there to be had in that it can put hostage deals at jeopardy if that ship, as you put, as you called it, sinks that a hostage deal is tied to. But equally, there's sometimes the hope amongst mediators that, well, if we manage to do this prisoner exchange, then that's going to help to build trust and confidence, which might help to deal with other thorny political issues. Roger D. Carstens (41:08) Yeah. Adam Cooper (41:09) How would you reflect on that debate? What can we learn from your career? Roger D. Carstens (41:12) Your point is well taken, and that is that if you can succeed in the hostage space, then you're starting to build trust, you're already starting to show the other side that you can get something done. And I would dare say that any progress that we made— and the progress went up and down in Venezuela— but any progress we made in Venezuela over the years started because we succeeded on the hostage front. And I think you can go to a few other places and say, oh, well, the United States finally built a relationship with this opposing team. And a lot of times, if you were to peel back the onion, You'll find that we had a successful hostage agreement that kind of opened that door a little bit to allow the diplomats to get in and start talking about the bigger issues. Adam Cooper (41:54) I'd also like to ask about the role of women in this. And you talked earlier about hundreds playing a role, and yours is maybe kind of an orchestra conductor of sorts. But there's a lot of people who are around you in your own team, across the U.S. government, and outside of government as well. So, and the world of hostage releases can seem quite male-dominated, I think, from the outside. So could you say something about the role of women during your 5-year tenure in office? Roger D. Carstens (42:21) Oh yeah, I would say, and I've told her this face-to-face and I've bragged about her, but if I did not have as my number 2, Carolee Walker, who's my chief of staff, we would've probably brought back almost no one. She was there on day 1 that I showed up. She got there 2 and a half months prior to the office. And together, we decided to build an office that at that time had 3 people and could only function within a 24-hour cycle to an office of 30 people, with people on full-time loan from the intelligence community, the military community, and other places, where we had broke the office of these 30 people into family engagement, external affairs, negotiators, the case officers. That allowed us to now start looking out 6 months to 9 months down the road and really start to professionalize the entire effort that we were charged with doing. That would not have happened without Carolee Walker. But additionally, there are negotiations like the ones in Venezuela. The majority of the negotiations that I had the opportunity to conduct on behalf of the United States of America, I did so with a female member of my team right there with me. Adam Cooper (43:29) Final question for you, Roger. We did a lot of research looking at your career before this interview, and one of the things which really resonated with me is something you said, which is the success for you— if you can get someone released— is them falling into the arms of a loved one, successfully reintegrating into a new life. And I can imagine it must be, of course, incredibly emotional for the family when that happens. But how about for you? When is the moment where you have felt most moved, where you've thought, this has been years of work, and you witness that and it touches you? Roger D. Carstens (44:08) That's it. I mean, that, you know, the job was not fun. It was brutal. I didn't enjoy the work. And yet when you see that reunion take place, it makes it— even if it's only that reunion, you sit like, might watch a 30-second or 90-second hug, It makes it all worthwhile. When you watch, say, a hostage fall into the arms of their spouse, their loved one, it's so intimate that you feel like you can't watch it. You almost feel like, this is such a private moment, I have to avert my eyes, but you can't. It's so compelling. It's like this huge magnet, and you watch. You feel embarrassed to watch because it's so personal, but in that 30- to 90-second hug, when someone comes home, especially when I think of one man who was held for 8 years in a prison in Iran, it makes all the pain of that job worth it. And then an hour later, you're driving back in a car back to the State Department, and you're already working your next case. Adam Cooper (45:05) Really? I'd be crying in the car park. Roger D. Carstens (45:08) Oh, I cry all the time when I, when I tell these stories. In fact, if you were to ask me to tell a few more stories, I'd probably be breaking down and sobbing right now, but I tell you, the amount of emotions that, that this business can pull from you, it's right there. Adam Cooper (45:22) Roger, there we must end. Thank you so much for being my guest in The Mediator's Studio. Roger D. Carstens (45:27) I really appreciate it. Thank you. Adam Cooper (45:34) That's it for this edition of The Mediator's Studio. To get more episodes as they come out, please subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. We always love to hear from you. So if Roger's work in hostage negotiation, or the lessons from his long experience have resonated with you, please get in touch via the listener survey in the show notes on our website. Or do drop me a message on X @AdamTalksPeace. The Mediator's Studio is an Oslo Forum podcast brought to you by the Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue and the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Our managing editor is Christina Buchhold, and the producer is Chris Gunness. The output editor is Ly Buiduong. Research for this episode was by Oscar Eschenbrenner and Agnieszka Manka. Thank you to Ranwa El-Kikhia for the edits and her support. Hope you'll join me for the next edition. Until then, from Losby Gods in Norway, this is Adam Cooper saying goodbye and thank you for listening.