Editor’s note: Jill Carroll, a freelance reporter for The Christian Science Monitor, was kidnapped in Baghdad on Jan. 7 and spent 82 days as a hostage. This is the final chapter of an 11-part series on her saga.
On April 2, a white Lufthansa 747 with the designation “Hamburg” written on its side taxied up to a gate at Boston’s Logan Airport. At 12:22 p.m., Jill Carroll stepped off the plane and onto U.S. soil.
As she passed through customs, agents and other officials on duty crowded around for a chance to see her.
Whisked into a waiting car, she was driven to the Christian Science Monitor’s headquarters in Boston’s Back Bay, a police escort around her and news helicopters overhead.
Carroll was traveling light. She’d left a big yellow bag of clothes and toiletries from her 82 days of captivity in the Green Zone in Baghdad. She’d decompressed there for a day after her release, talking to members of the U.S. Embassy’s Hostage Working Group, before traveling on an aircraft carrying American casualties to Ramstein Air Force Base in Landstuhl, Germany.
In Boston, her car went straight into the underground garage of the Christian Science church headquarters. In a preplanned bit of evasion, she was led through basement corridors under the complex to a loading dock on a nearby side street. She then jumped into a blue van – easily missing the media horde camped outside the Monitor building.
The van went only a few blocks, to a nearby church-owned townhouse. There, Carroll’s father Jim, mother Mary Beth and twin sister Katie crowded around an open window, yelling her nickname, “Zippy!”
Carroll met them coming down the hallway in a whole-family embrace. She wept and said, “I’m sorry.” She was home.
Nearly five months on, what’s to be learned from Jill Carroll’s kidnapping and release?
Monitor editors and correspondents were heartened by the global condemnation of the kidnapping, especially from Muslim religious leaders and even militant groups, such as Hamas. They remain proud of the media campaign they helped mount, from the solicitation of statements on Carroll’s behalf to the public service announcements that ran in the Iraqi media. They believe it was targeted to the right audience – the Middle East and well-placed. They know the kidnappers saw some of it.
It’s presumptuous to say it led directly to her release, but “I do think that changed the mental climate,” says Richard Bergenheim, editor of the Monitor.
Another obvious conclusion is that Iraq has become a very dangerous place for the news media. Nearly 100 journalists, including interpreters and assistants, have died there since April 2003.
Since Carroll’s kidnapping, the Monitor has upgraded its security measures in Baghdad both because of what had happened to her and because of the worsening situation on the ground. Editors won’t detail those measures, so as not to undermine their effectiveness. The paper has kept a British security firm on retainer for consultation.
As for Carroll herself, she says that her experience taught her about priorities. Throughout her 82-day ordeal, she missed her family and her friends. Work and success didn’t seem so important anymore. “I never once wished I’d filed one more story,” she says.
But she doesn’t regret going to Iraq in the first place. She was doing what she had always wanted to do foreign reporting. Since her release, she has returned to Egypt, and is glad of it. She experienced again the distinctive culture of the Islamic world in a peaceful context.
“What happened to me is not the whole Middle East,” she says.
Carroll is no longer a freelancer. To provide financial support in anticipation of her eventual release, the Monitor quietly made Carroll a full-time employee a week after she was abducted.
This fall, she’s been accepted into a journalism fellowship program at a major university. After that, she plans to return to writing from overseas.
Why was she released? Probably no one really knows except for her kidnappers. Maybe the public pressure worked. Maybe private whispers via Western and Middle Eastern intelligence convinced influential Sunnis that harming Carroll wasn’t in their best interest.
Maybe as the political situation changed, so did the priorities of her kidnappers. Maybe the kidnappers just got what they wanted publicity or the release of women from Abu Ghraib prison.
Or, maybe Carroll herself the smart, young American who spoke Arabic helped alter her captors’ plans.
“One of the most effective weapons against terrorism is the truth. The truth was that Jill Carroll was not the enemy of her captors. Her father spoke that truth, and the rest of the world repeated it,” says Christopher Voss, special agent with the FBI’s Crisis Negotiation Unit in Quantico, Va.
As far as the Monitor and Carroll’s family can determine, no ransom changed hands to win her release.
Earlier this month, the U.S. military announced it had captured four of Carroll’s suspected kidnappers, after raiding a total of four locations in Baghdad, Abu Ghraib, and a village west of Fallujah.
U.S. sources in Baghdad have told Monitor staff writer Scott Peterson that the man Carroll knew as “Abu Ahmed” (a.k.a. Sheikh Sadoun, say U.S. military sources) was arrested by U.S. Marines on May 19. The others in custody are guards, not the top figures in the group.
Members of murdered translator Alan Enwiya’s immediate family have left Iraq, where they felt endangered. They are applying for U.S. government permission to join their extended family in the U.S.
Carroll never met the man who shot Enwiya. She was told that Enwiya’s killer died a few weeks later during an insurgent military operation.
Driver Adnan Abbas, having survived the abduction, was initially a suspect. He passed a polygraph test, and was cleared by Iraqi police. He, his wife, and four children (including a newborn) have also moved to another country. Their future remains uncertain, but their ambition is to live and work in the U.S.
The Monitor has established two funds to help these families start new lives. Among the donations received so far: The $800 cash the mujahedeen gave Carroll just prior to her release. She plans to sell the gold necklace and donate those funds, as well.
After Jill Carroll was released, the Monitor invited readers to send in questions about her experience. Hundreds of people responded. Here are a selection of questions and excerpts from Jill’s answers.
A videotaped interview of her complete answers can be found at .
Cecil E. Perfoy, of Maui, Hawaii, asks:
When released from Iraq, you had stated that you had been well treated by your captors. After your trip to Germany and return to the U.S., you then indicated that you were not treated well. For a seasoned correspondent, which answer was truthful?
Jill Carroll: Well, obviously, the latter. I wasn’t well treated. But keep in mind, I wasn’t doing this as a reporter. I was a hostage. … I had been attacked, essentially.
The reason why I said in the beginning that I was well treated … (was that) those were the exact words I was told to say by the insurgents who captured me. They said if I ever said anything more, or anything different from that, essentially they would come kill me. … So, when I got out, I was still absolutely terrified.
People seem to think that when you’re free, suddenly you’re just back to who you were and that you’re feeling safe and everything’s great again. Not at all, this kind of thing just shakes your sense of security to the absolute core for a long, long time. … After a few days, in your mind, you start to get a little better sense of yourself.
Also, being out of Iraq, and being in Germany and back in the U.S., … I began to feel a little safer about saying things, and not sticking to the script that I had been given by the captors to say. But I was afraid they would come get me again. I did whatever I had to do to keep that from happening.
Sean Smith, from Gettysburg, Pa., asks:
What do you think is the most important … insight from this event?
Carroll: The biggest insight was just into how these kinds of insurgents work, and who they really are. Before, to a lot of us (journalists), they were just sort of, like, shadows behind a curtain. … We didn’t really know who they were, or why they were doing what they were doing, how they think about things, how they feel about things.
Once we understand that, we can probably address the issues as to why they are doing it. That, I think is actually really valuable. For me, … the biggest insight (was) into who they really are.
Sandy Simon, from Ann Arbor, Mich., asks:
Many people all over the world were deeply troubled by your kidnapping and thought of you daily, prayed for you, and took you into their hearts. It must be a bit dizzying to emerge from captivity and realize that you are now a member of so many diverse and unknown families, unknown to you. How do you handle this?
Carroll: It was definitely a shock. … I have been overwhelmed. There have been a lot of cards and packages and things sent to me from all over that are really thoughtful. I have a quilt that this group put together and each patch of the quilt was signed by a former POW or a former member of the armed forces from World War II and Vietnam.
And I feel pretty guilty because I feel like I don’t deserve that. I didn’t do anything great, and being kidnapped is not worthy of praise. … But I think people are responding to the ideals that The Christian Science Monitor puts out there and less to me personally. I think that they are responding more to those ideals of truth and honesty, and the pursuit of information and pursuit of intellectual research.
George Pence, from Whispering Pines, N.C., asks:
For most of us who lived through 9/11, and are now observing Islamic cultures from afar, we are having a very difficult time establishing a bridge between who they are and who we are. We witness a seemingly endless number of suicide attacks. … Why should we see them as anything other than monsters?
Carroll: Painting any group of people with a broad brush, saying everyone is all evil or all good, is never accurate and is never helpful. That is … why I think reporting in the Middle East is an important thing to do, actually, because there are as many kinds of Islam as there are Muslims, which is 1 billion.
I have had many friends who were Muslims who are angry, embarrassed. There are a lot more factors coming into play. Factors like frustration, lack of jobs, lack of representative government. … I know people who are really angry about things, but they don’t pick up a gun and then go kill somebody because of it.
So, I think we can no more say that Muslims are monsters because some people are murderers than you could say that all Americans are like Al Capone because Al Capone killed people. …
It’s a complicated issue. It’s a complicated place. The only way to really address this, to understand better, is to be better informed citizens. Read the newspaper every day.
Sabrina, from Columbus, Ohio, asks:
From your experiences abroad, what insight can you give to other young journalists who want to make the jump freelancing overseas and other conflict-ridden regions?
Carroll: Freelancing is not for the faint of heart, and not just because it’s dangerous. Financially, it is really difficult to do. … It’s really competitive. …
If you are trying to do it for money or adventure, those are for the wrong reasons. If you are trying to do it because it is exciting to be in a war, then that’s a wrong reason. You should be going there because you feel journalism is a duty and a noble cause, and that the only way … to perform that duty is by going to a place that needs understanding.
We can go in there, and by living there and being among people and talking to people every day, (we) understand them more as individuals, not as a group. You do it because you really love what you are doing, and you feel you have a broader purpose.
I. Macias Jr., from San Antonio, asks:
Because of your well-known support of everything Muslim, many of your fellow Americans, including myself, believe your capture … was, in fact, conducted and staged with your cooperation, and that you are a traitor to your country as well as to your family and friends. What is your response to those allegations?
Carroll: Well, of course, it’s absurd that I would arrange for this to happen. Alan was my friend, and like a brother to me. I don’t know how anyone could ever think that anyone would ever wish to torture their family and their friends like this. …
Just because I lived in the Middle East and care about understanding the Middle East and helping Americans understand the Middle East in the fairest, most objective way possible, I don’t see how that makes me a traitor. In fact, I do it because as citizens of a democracy it is our duty to be well informed. And we can only express our wishes through our representatives of government properly and effectively … if we are properly informed. …
I’m there because I believe so much in our country’s need to have good, fair, truthful information so (citizens) can make their own decisions about what we want our policies to be and who we are as a country.
It’s really easy to say you’re patriotic by doing what’s easy.
