How Snatching American Citizens Turned Into a Tool of Hostile Governments

As the Trump administration exited the White House, its national security team left behind some 30 baseball-style cards for the incoming Biden staff, monuments to an ancient practice that had somehow become a grave 21st-century challenge. Each bore the photo of an American held hostage abroad.

Since then, the problem has metastasized into what the Biden administration calls a national emergency. The risk of Americans being held on spurious charges by a foreign government is now so widespread that the State Department warns U.S. citizens against traveling to countries accounting for nearly a quarter of the world’s population. In diplomatic parlance, those nine nations are classified “D" for the risk of detention.

Classification D is America’s gathering new reality: an increasingly piratical global system where the taking and trading of foreign citizens—once the preserve of guerrilla bands or fundamentalist insurgencies—has become a tactic deployed by nuclear states.

The Biden administration has brought at least 45 Americans home—mostly via prisoner trades such as last week’s that returned 10 Americans from Venezuela. And yet it says around 30 U.S. citizens are still unjustly detained abroad, an estimate that doesn’t account for the eight still presumably held in Gaza after Hamas’s attack on Israel in October.

The tally does encompass Americans grabbed in countries ranging from Syria and Afghanistan to China—and our colleague, Evan Gershkovich, a Wall Street Journal reporter arrested in Russia in March on an espionage charge that he, his government and employer all strongly deny.

Shortly before he vanished into Moscow’s Lefortovo prison, Gershkovich had been proposing we join him to report on the ease with which Russia’s police state can sweep up Americans and trade them as hostages. “Totally undercovered," he said.

The 32-year-old reporter had all-too-presciently picked up on how the U.S. and its rivals now conduct their affairs in a language of prisoner trading. Since 2020, federal law obliges the executive branch to designate which U.S. citizens abroad are “wrongfully detained" and make efforts to free them. Usually, that means bartering over human lives.

China, Russia and other governments often balk at the “wrongfully detained" label, as Americans would too if foreign diplomats weighed in to declare U.S. court verdicts invalid.

Whatever the case, Washington’s rivals have found a remarkably efficient way to reduce America’s international reach.

U.S. corporations that once imagined their futures in mainland China have largely stopped sending executives to the world’s second-largest economy, for fear they’ll get stuck there. American athletes and chess grandmasters whose predecessors competed in Moscow through some of the Cold War’s tensest moments stepped back from that peacemaking tradition after Russia arrested basketball gold medalist Brittney Griner on drug charges. Following Gershkovich’s arrest, even Western news agencies that based foreign correspondents in Moscow under Joseph Stalin pulled out. In a remarkable restriction on American travel freedoms, the U.S. currently bans its passport holders from entering North Korea, to avoid handing supreme leader Kim Jong Un another human pawn.

U.S. officials privately categorize these nations as “abductor states" and fear their numbers will grow until Washington can find some way to deter a ploy that seems to work.

“I sat in there for years thinking, how does the U.S. solve this issue?" said Trevor Reed, a former Marine who spent almost three years in Russian prisons on charges the U.S. government said were bogus, before being traded last year for a Russian pilot convicted of drug smuggling. “There have to be costs. And the costs the U.S. has been trying to impose are either ineffective or not the right ones."

After the arrest of our colleague in March, we spent the year speaking to former detainees and their family members, policy makers and hostage negotiators from the U.S., Europe, Turkey, Egypt, Israel and Qatar, trying to wrestle with how their governments should navigate this new age of abduction. The same questions hung over the Journal: How to report on a global crisis that had swept into our newsroom?

We haven’t been able to reach Gershkovich, who has now spent 271 days in the same prison where Stalin once tortured and executed dissidents. But we believe he would have wanted the Journal to investigate the opaque structures and individuals that carried out his wrongful arrest and now hold his fate in their hands. He is our closest connection to the small but growing list of other unjustly jailed Americans, isolated from a world being made smaller by their imprisonment.

Among them: Austin Tice, a freelance journalist from Texas, detained by Syria’s government since 2012; Kai Li, a Long Island businessman held by China since 2016; Paul Whelan, a former Marine and corporate security executive from Michigan, arrested, like Gershkovich, by the Kremlin’s spy agencies, in 2018. Their faces stare out from placards brought to the White House gates by relatives in a growing “Bring Our Families Home" campaign.

For years, one team of White House officials after the next has grappled with the problem of mostly ordinary travelers who stumbled into America’s geopolitical disputes.

On one end of the government are Justice Department officials. Determined to uphold the tradition of an independent judicial system, they recoil at the principle that Vladimir Putin should be able to kidnap his way into obtaining presidential clemency for Russians convicted of serious crimes in America.

On the other end are the U.S. diplomats who are tasked with bringing innocent Americans home. Why, they wonder, does a superpower with nearly two million people in its prisons and jails not have more stock to trade?

The disconnect favors autocracies. Several U.S. officials, frustrated by the asymmetry between Washington and the police states that can easily grab its citizens without worrying about the pieties of Western-style rule of law, reached for the same metaphor to explain the imbalance: America is playing checkers, they told us, and its rivals are playing chess.

The Biden administration, which spent months debating how to bring home Americans while deterring others from being taken, has attempted a pairing of concessions and threats. It has openly and explicitly acknowledged its willingness to make prisoner trades—a signal its predecessors were reluctant to send—while pledging tougher sanctions for offenders.

Prisoner exchanges have reunited dozens of Americans with their families, including Griner, swapped in last year’s Cold War-style airport runway swap for Viktor Bout, an arms trafficker nicknamed “Merchant of Death."

Those deals have also provoked grave debates within and outside the U.S. government over whether, with each concession, the White House is putting a target on the backs of Americans abroad. Repeatedly, longtime national security officials told us that while they understand why Griner had to be freed, the lopsided trade may have encouraged Russia to seize more Americans, Gershkovich included.

The unacceptable alternative, the administration argues, would be to leave an innocent citizen in prison, on the unproven theory that by doing so, Washington deters its rivals: “When it comes to getting Americans out of jail and back home, and unjustly detained anywhere in the world, I’m happy to take any criticism that comes my way for that," Secretary of State Antony Blinken told reporters ahead of a deal with Iran to release five Americans in exchange for the U.S. freeing Iranian prisoners and agreeing to unfreeze $6 billion in oil revenue. “I view it as job one to do everything I can to bring Americans home."

In the Qatari capital this July, U.S. officials held their first hostage exercise on foreign soil, modeling with their Qatari counterparts an abduction of four aid workers by a terrorist group.

Less than three months later, Hamas burst into southern Israel in a surprise attack that took more than 200 citizens of dozens of countries hostage, including around 12 Americans, an international kidnapping far beyond the U.S. government’s imagined scenario.

The difference between what America’s hostage specialists had anticipated and the crisis they soon faced isn’t remotely unique to Gaza—it stretches back years, across agencies and throughout presidential administrations.

In 2015, families frustrated with the way their government managed Islamic State’s abductions of American aid workers and journalists helped persuade President Barack Obama to establish a Special Presidential Envoy for Hostage Affairs and built up a multiagency bureaucracy to handle the crisis.

Within a year, this new interlocking government machinery, built in response to stateless jihadists, had to regear itself to a very different problem. In March 2016 North Korea sentenced Otto Warmbier, a University of Virginia student to a hard labor camp for stealing a poster. Later, China stopped two American siblings from leaving the country until their estranged father, a former bank executive, returned to China to face fraud charges.

In each case, the U.S. determined the detentions were unjust—an adversary attempting to extract a concession or strike a blow against Washington.

The new institutions set up to manage this spate of cases proved an imperfect fit. Many foreign governments recoiled at meeting a special presidential envoy with the word “hostage" in his title, as accepting a meeting appeared tantamount to a public confession of kidnapping.

Washington itself struggled to impose clear rules to determine whether an American was effectively a hostage or arrested in good faith on suspicion of committing actual crimes. In July 2019, Swedish police arrested the rapper known as A$AP Rocky on assault charges. Even though the White House had no reason to suspect political motives, the case captured the attention of President Trump, who dispatched his presidential hostage envoy, Robert O’Brien, to Stockholm, former administration officials said. A Swedish court ordered the rapper to pay about $1,300 in damages.

Still, for families and diplomats struggling for answers, there was now a door to knock on: “There is a set of officials, in an office in the State Department, whose job it is to deal with these issues," said Vina Nadjibulla, a senior research fellow for the Soufan Center who has written about hostage diplomacy and whose Canadian ex-husband Michael Kovrig became a symbol of the crisis during his nearly three years in a Beijing prison. “No other country has that. And that is a huge improvement."

In 2020, the U.S. passed the Levinson Act, obliging the State Department to use consistent criteria to decide who qualifies as “wrongfully detained," a designation that paves the ground for U.S. diplomats to then negotiate their release. Did the U.S. government have information suggesting their innocence? Was the person imprisoned mainly because they are American? Was their arrest an attempt to force a concession from Washington? The new Biden administration asked every embassy in the world to review which U.S. citizens imprisoned by their host governments might meet those marks.

Pause to consider what a breakdown in global trust that 160-plus nation audit signaled. Rather than defer to due process of other nations, America was erecting something like a shadow appeals court, in which the State Department, often without access to much underlying evidence, would determine which faraway verdicts seemed valid and which merited an intervention by the U.S. government.

This new system soon encountered a case study in its own shortcomings. In August 2021, police in Moscow’s airport arrested American Marc Fogel—a history teacher at the high school where U.S. Moscow embassy staff sent their children—for possessing less than an ounce of medically prescribed marijuana. Six months later, Griner, the basketball Olympian, was detained at the same airport for flying in with vape cartridges containing minor amounts of prescription hashish oil.

Griner’s subsequent charge of drug possession sparked nationwide outrage. Her talent agency secured regular contact with the White House. She was quickly added onto the wrongfully detained list. Fogel, currently serving 14 years in a maximum-security penal colony, hasn’t made the cut.

The State Department doesn’t comment on individual cases. Publicly explaining a decision to designate one American as wrongfully detained and not another could hypothetically prove incriminating or unhelpful for the one left behind, U.S. officials argue. Griner’s arrest came days before Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, as Russian police singled out Americans for scrutiny. Still, Fogel’s defenders find it hard to believe that Griner’s fame, connections and potency as a political symbol weren’t the determining factor.

“Because he is a teacher, and not a star, he is a victim of the arbitrary nature of the wrongful-detention designation," Anne Fogel said of her brother. “This Christmas we are going to put on a brave face. Support my 94-year-old mother, soon to be 95. And support my sister-in-law and my nephews who are in their 20s and had their lives ripped out from under them."

Three months after Gershkovich was detained, Putin’s security agencies turned their attention to another American journalist in Russia. This time—like a lot of Americans imprisoned abroad—she was holding two passports.

Alsu Kurmasheva had flown home to visit her ailing mother in the southern Russian city of Kazan when she was arrested then later charged with failing to register as a foreign agent and spreading false news about the military. The charges, which she denies, carry up to five and 10 years’ imprisonment respectively. The mother of two adolescent girls shares a four-person cell with sometimes five other inmates, the air so cold that the ink in her pen freezes as she writes home, her family says.

Born in Russia and a U.S. citizen since 2014, Kurmasheva personifies another pressure point for the U.S. and open societies trying to deter foreign abduction. To Washington, Kurmasheva is a U.S. citizen, and the State Department is reviewing whether to designate her as wrongfully held. But in the glass cage where she is tried, she is treated by law as Russian—and no U.S. diplomat has been allowed to visit her in jail. The Kremlin didn’t reply to requests for comment.

“Alsu is the mother of two young children who miss her very much," said her American husband of 21 years, Pavel Butorin. “She is an American whose rights must be upheld."

At stake in this human tug of war is the U.S. ideal that citizens born abroad, or to foreign parents, are equally American. Federal law and Supreme Court precedent, built up over the late 20th century, recognizes Americans’ right to claim multiple citizenships.

But Iran, to pick one example, does not. There, the Classification D risk is so high that official guidance warns Iranian Americans not to visit the country of their ancestry ever, for any reason, and to make a will if they do. Tens of thousands disregard the warning annually.

Matthew Pottinger, a former deputy national security adviser, says he would regularly argue with Cui Tiankai, Beijing’s former ambassador to the U.S., over Beijing’s inclination to treat the American-born children of Chinese immigrants as Chinese nationals, including by denying them visits by U.S. diplomats, a right enshrined in a Sino-U.S. consular treaty.

“What they were saying is, in effect, American citizenship is a cute, quaint idea, but really ethnically Chinese people belong to Beijing," he said. “This is a fundamental challenge to the notion of American citizenship." China, for its part, says it applies laws equally regardless of nationality and opposes what it calls foreign interference in its legal affairs. It says many dual Chinese American citizens fly in on their Chinese passports, expecting both the privilege of visa-free entry and the protection of American power.

China has been holding numerous Chinese Americans in so-called exit bans in recent years, blocking them from leaving the country even though they aren’t charged with any crime. Californian Henry Cai fears he will soon enter his seventh year stuck in China, because of a debt dispute. He refers to himself as a “bargaining chip" in U.S.-China relations. U.S. advisory firms Kroll and Mintz Group, as well as Japanese financial firm Nomura, have all had executives or employees held in recent months. China’s Foreign Ministry didn’t respond to requests for comment, and the companies either declined to comment or didn’t reply.

Dual national families want to see Washington pay more attention to these cases. There are dozens of such U.S. citizens held in China and Russia alone, many of them not on the State Department’s wrongful detention list, but who are “picked on because of their ethnicity and used as easy pawns in this game," said Jon Huntsman Jr., the only American to have served as ambassador to both countries.

If recent history is any guide, there will be more to come.

Beijing and Moscow have both radically expanded their legal definitions of espionage in the past two years, widening the asymmetry with American jurisprudence. Foreigners conducting seemingly ordinary business activities in those countries could now potentially be charged with national security offenses that risk decadeslong prison sentences. In May, Chinese authorities sentenced 78-year-old U.S. citizen and Hong Kong permanent resident John Shing-wan Leung to life for an espionage conviction. Whelan is scheduled to be released in 2034. If Gershkovich’s case ends with a conviction—as has every Russian espionage trial since the Soviet Union fell—he faces up to 20 years in a penal colony.

By comparison, Chinese nationals, sometimes posing as tourists, have intruded into U.S. military bases, a missile range, a rocket launch site and other sensitive premises dozens of times in recent years, in what U.S. officials describe as a form of espionage. Under federal, state and local law, it is difficult to prosecute those cases as anything more than ordinary trespassing.

A Chinese woman was arrested in 2019 trying to sneak into Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate with four cellphones, a thumb drive containing malware, and a faraday pouch to shield one of the phones from incoming cellular signals. She was sentenced to eight months for unlawful entry and making false statements to the U.S. Secret Service.

“Unfortunately, we’re not meeting the challenge with dispatch, in terms of an internal strategy that would remind the world that if you take an American, there’s going to be hell to pay," said Huntsman, the ambassador. “We’re big, open, we’re transparent, we’re an easy target, and we’re very deliberative on the government side…and all these things argue against the swift recovery of Americans abroad."

Write to Drew Hinshaw at drew.hinshaw@wsj.com, Joe Parkinson at joe.parkinson@wsj.com and Aruna Viswanatha at aruna.viswanatha@wsj.com