BAMAKO, Mali — The cash filled three
suitcases: 5 million euros.
The German official charged with
delivering this cargo arrived here
aboard a nearly empty military plane
and was whisked away to a secret
meeting with the president of Mali, who
had offered Europe a face-saving
solution to a vexing problem.
Officially, Germany had budgeted the
money as humanitarian aid for the
poor, landlocked nation of Mali.
In truth, all sides understood that the
cash was bound for an obscure group of
Islamic extremists who were holding 32
European hostages, according to six
senior diplomats directly involved in
the exchange.
The suitcases were loaded onto pickup
trucks and driven hundreds of miles
north into the Sahara, where the
bearded fighters, who would soon
become an official arm of Al Qaeda,
counted the money on a blanket thrown
on the sand. The 2003 episode was a
learning experience for both sides.
Eleven years later, the handoff in
Bamako has become a well-rehearsed
ritual, one of dozens of such
transactions repeated all over the
world.
Kidnapping Europeans for ransom has
become a global business for Al Qaeda,
bankrolling its operations across the
globe.
While European governments deny
paying ransoms, an investigation by
The New York Times found that Al
Qaeda and its direct affiliates have
taken in at least $125 million in
revenue from kidnappings since 2008,
of which $66 million was paid just last
year.
In news releases and statements, the
United States Treasury Department has
cited ransom amounts that, taken
together, put the total at around $165
million over the same period.
These payments were made almost
exclusively by European governments,
who funneled the money through a
network of proxies, sometimes masking
it as development aid, according to
interviews conducted for this article
with former hostages, negotiators,
diplomats and government officials in
10 countries in Europe, Africa and the
Middle East. The inner workings of the
kidnapping business were also revealed
in thousands of pages of internal Qaeda
documents found by this reporter while
on assignment for The Associated Press
in northern Mali last year.
In its early years, Al Qaeda received
most of its money from deep-pocketed
donors, but counterterrorism officials
now believe the group finances the bulk
of its recruitment, training and arms
purchases from ransoms paid to free
Europeans.
Put more bluntly, Europe has become
an inadvertent underwriter of Al
Qaeda.
The foreign ministries of Austria,
France, Germany, Italy and Switzerland
denied in emails or telephone
interviews that they had paid the
terrorists. “The French authorities have
repeatedly stated that France does not
pay ransoms,” said Vincent Floreani,
deputy director of communication for
France’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Several senior diplomats involved in
past negotiations have described the
decision to pay ransom for their
countries’ citizens as an agonizing
calculation: Accede to the terrorists’
demand, or allow innocent people to be
killed, often in a gruesome, public way?
Yet the fact that Europe and its
intermediaries continue to pay has set
off a vicious cycle.
“Kidnapping for ransom has become
today’s most significant source of
terrorist financing,” said David S.
Cohen, the Treasury Department’s
under secretary for terrorism and
financial intelligence, in a 2012 speech.
“Each transaction encourages another
transaction.”
And business is booming: While in 2003
the kidnappers received around
$200,000 per hostage, now they are
netting up to $10 million, money that
the second in command of Al Qaeda’s
central leadership recently described as
accounting for as much as half of his
operating revenue.
“Kidnapping hostages is an easy spoil,”
wrote Nasser al-Wuhayshi, the leader of
Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula,
“which I may describe as a profitable
trade and a precious treasure.”
The stream of income generated is so
significant that internal documents
show that as long as five years ago, Al
Qaeda’s central command in Pakistan
was overseeing negotiations for
hostages grabbed as far afield as Africa.
Moreover, the accounts of survivors
held thousands of miles apart show that
the three main affiliates of the terrorist
group — Al Qaeda in the Islamic
Maghreb, in northern Africa; Al Qaeda
in the Arabian Peninsula, in Yemen;
and the Shabab, in Somalia — are
coordinating their efforts and abiding
by a common kidnapping protocol.
To minimize the risk to their fighters,
the terror affiliates have outsourced the
seizing of hostages to criminal groups
who work on commission. Negotiators
take a reported 10 percent of the
ransom, creating an incentive on both
sides of the Mediterranean to increase
the overall payout, according to former
hostages and senior counterterrorism
officials.
Their business plan includes a step-by-
step process for negotiating, starting
with long periods of silence aimed at
creating panic back home. Hostages are
then shown on videos begging their
government to negotiate.
Although the kidnappers threaten to kill
their victims, a review of the known
cases revealed that only a small
percentage of hostages held by Qaeda
affiliates have been executed in the
past five years, a marked turnaround
from a decade ago, when videos
showing beheadings of foreigners held
by the group’s franchise in Iraq would
regularly turn up online. Now the
group has realized it can advance the
cause of jihad by keeping hostages alive
and trading them for prisoners and
suitcases of cash.
Only a handful of countries have
resisted paying, led by the United States
and Britain. Although both these
countries have negotiated with
extremist groups — evidenced most
recently by the United States’ trade of
Taliban prisoners for Sgt. Bowe
Bergdahl — they have drawn the line
when it comes to ransoms.
It is a decision that has had dire
consequences. While dozens of
Europeans have been released
unharmed, few American or British
nationals have gotten out alive. A lucky
few ran away or were rescued by
special forces. The rest were executed
or are being held indefinitely.
“The Europeans have a lot to answer
for,” said Vicki Huddleston, the former
United States deputy assistant secretary
of defense for African affairs, who was
the ambassador to Mali in 2003 when
Germany paid the first ransom. “It’s a
completely two-faced policy. They pay
ransoms and then deny any was paid.”
She added, “The danger of this is not
just that it grows the terrorist
movement, but it makes all of our
citizens vulnerable.”

These ragtags are enemies of common man

A Letter Under a Rock
On Feb. 23, 2003, a group of four Swiss
tourists, including two 19-year-old
women, woke up in their sleeping bags
in southern Algeria to the shouts of
armed men. The men told the young
women to cover their hair with towels,
then commandeered their camper van
and took off with them.
Over the coming weeks, another seven
tour groups traveling in the same
corner of the desert vanished.
European governments scrambled to
find their missing citizens.
Weeks passed before a German
reconnaissance plane sent to scan the
desert floor returned with images of
their abandoned vehicles. More weeks
passed before a scout sent on foot
spotted something white through his
binoculars.
It was a letter left under a rock.
In messy handwriting, it laid out the
demands of a little-known jihadist
group calling itself the Salafist Group
for Preaching and Combat.
Armed with a few hunting rifles and
old AK-47s, the kidnappers succeeded in
sweeping up dozens of tourists over
several consecutive weeks, mostly from
Germany, but also from Austria, the
Netherlands, Sweden and Switzerland.
Though they planned the first few
ambushes, they appear to have grabbed
others by chance, like a pair of hapless
26-year-olds from Innsbruck, Austria,
who were spotted because of the
campfire they had lit to cook spaghetti.
Beyond the initial grab, the kidnappers
did not seem to have a plan. The only
food they had was the canned goods the
tourists had brought with them. The
only fuel was what was in each gas
tank. They abandoned the cars one by
one as they ran out of fuel, forcing
their hostages to continue on foot. A 47-year-old Swedish hostage, Harald
Ickler, remembers being so hungry that
when he found a few leftover Danish
butter cookie crumbs, he carefully
scooped them into the palm of his hand
and then let them melt in his mouth.
“Once they had us, they didn’t seem to
know what to do with us,” said Reto
Walther of Untersiggenthal,
Switzerland, who was in one of the first
groups to be grabbed. “They were
improvising.”
Despite the operation’s amateur nature,
the jihadists had hit a soft spot. Almost
none of the hostages had resisted,
simply putting up their hands when
they saw the gunmen. And although the
Europeans outnumbered their captors,
the hostages never tried to run away
during what turned into a six-month
captivity for some of them, and
described the foreboding desert
surrounding them as an “open-air
prison.”
Crucially, although the European
nations had firepower superior to that
of the scrappy mujahedeen, they
deemed a rescue mission too
dangerous.
The jihadists asked for weapons. Then
for impossible-to-meet political
demands, like the removal of the
Algerian government. When a 45-year-
old German woman died of
dehydration, panicked European
officials began considering a ransom
concealed as an aid payment as the
least-bad option.
“The Americans told us over and over
not to pay a ransom. And we said to
them: ‘We don’t want to pay. But we
can’t lose our people,’” said a European
ambassador posted in Algeria at the
time, who was one of six senior
Western officials with direct knowledge
of the 2003 kidnapping who confirmed
details for this article. All spoke on the
condition of anonymity because the
information remains classified.
“It was a very difficult situation,” he
said, “but in the end we are talking
about human life.”
‘Not Just Normal Criminals’
The exploits of the band of fighters in
the Sahara did not go unnoticed.
A year later, in 2004, a Qaeda operative,
Abdelaziz al-Muqrin, published a how-
to guide to kidnapping, in which he
highlighted the successful ransom
negotiation of “our brothers in
Algeria.” Yet at the same time, he also
praised the execution of the Wall Street
Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, who was
grabbed in Pakistan in 2002 and
beheaded nine days later by Khalid
Shaikh Mohammed, a senior Qaeda
member believed to be one of the
architects of the Sept. 11 attacks.
Within a few years, there was a split
within Al Qaeda, with the group’s
affiliate in Iraq grabbing foreigners
specifically to kill them.
In Algeria, the kidnappers of the
European tourists followed a different
path.
They used the €5 million as the seed
money for their movement, recruiting
and training fighters who staged a
series of devastating attacks. They grew
into a regional force and were accepted
as an official branch of the Qaeda
network, which baptized them Al Qaeda
in the Islamic Maghreb. As kidnapping
revenue became their main lifeline,
they honed and perfected the process.
By Feb. 2, 2011, when their lookouts in
southern Algeria spotted a 53-year-old
Italian tourist, Mariasandra Mariani,
admiring the rolling dunes through a
pair of binoculars, they were running a
sleek operation.
Her tour guide was the first to spot
them, and screamed at her to run. As
their cars sped toward her, she sprinted
to her nearby desert bungalow and
locked herself inside. She could do
nothing but sit frozen on the mattress
as they broke down the door. They
threw her in a waiting car, handcuffing
her to the dashboard. Before they sped
off, they made sure to place a rolled-up
blanket next to her, so that the jihadist
sitting next to her would not
accidentally make contact with a
woman.
“Who are you?” she asked them.
“We are Al Qaeda,” they replied.
If previous kidnapping missions did not
seem to have a thought-out plan, the
gunmen who seized Ms. Mariani drove
for days on what appeared to be a
clearly delineated route. Whenever they
were low on fuel, they would make
their way to a spot that to her looked
no different in the otherwise identical
lunar landscape.
Under a thorn bush, they would find a
drum full of gasoline. Or a stack of tires
to replace a punctured one. They never
ran out of food.
Ms. Mariani would later learn they had
an infrastructure of supplies buried in
the sand and marked with GPS
coordinates.
One afternoon they stopped just above
the lip of a dune. The fighters got down
and unfastened a shovel. Then she
heard the sound of a car engine.
Suddenly a pickup truck roared out.
They had buried an entire vehicle in
the mountain of sand.
“It was then that I realized, these aren’t
just normal criminals,” Ms. Mariani
said.
The Sounds of Silence
Weeks passed before Ms. Mariani’s
captors announced that they were going
to allow her to make a phone call. They
drove for hours until they reached a
plateau, a flat white pan of dirt.
Years earlier, their strategy for
broadcasting their demands had been
to leave a letter under a rock. Now they
had satellite phones and a list of
numbers. They handed her a script and
dialed the number for Al Jazeera.
“My name is Mariasandra Mariani. I
am the Italian who was kidnapped,” she
said. “I am still being detained by Al
Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb.”
The Italian government scrambled to
create a crisis unit, including a 24-hour
hotline for the kidnappers.
During her 14-month captivity,
whenever the kidnappers felt that
attention had flagged, they erected a
tent in the desert and forced Ms.
Mariani to record a video message,
showing her surrounded by her armed
captors.
A total of 11 former hostages grabbed
by Qaeda units in Algeria, Mali, Niger,
Syria and Yemen who agreed to be
interviewed for this article reported a
similar set of steps in the negotiations,
beginning with an imposed period of
silence. Video messages and telephone
calls were infrequent, often months
apart. The silence appeared purposeful,
intended to terrorize the families of the
captives, who in turn pressured their
respective governments.
In the Italian village of San Casciano in
Val di Pesa, Ms. Mariani’s 80-year-old
mother stopped sleeping in her
bedroom, moving permanently to the
couch in front of the television. Her
aging father would burst into tears for
no reason. In France, the frantic
brother of a hostage held for a year in
Syria developed an ulcer.
All over Europe, families rallied,
pressuring governments to pay. Ms.
Mariani was ultimately released, along
with two Spanish hostages, for a
ransom that a negotiator involved in
her case said was close to €8 million.
Qaeda Supervision
The bulk of the kidnappings-for-ransom
carried out in Al Qaeda’s name have
occurred in Africa, and more recently
in Syria and Yemen. These regions are
thousands of miles from the terror
network’s central command in Pakistan.
Yet audio messages released by the
group, as well as confidential letters
between commanders, indicate the
organization’s senior leaders are
directly involved in the negotiations.
As early as 2008, a commander holding
two Canadian diplomats angered his
leaders by negotiating a ransom on his
own.
In a letter discovered by this reporter
in buildings abandoned by the jihadists
in Mali last year, Al Qaeda in the
Islamic Maghreb blamed the
commander, Mokhtar Belmokhtar, for
securing only the “meager sum” of
€700,000 — around $1 million — saying
the low amount was a result of his
unwillingness to follow the instructions
of the group’s leadership in Pakistan.
In his last broadcast before his death in
2011, Osama bin Laden spoke at length
about the case of four French citizens
held by Al Qaeda in Mali, making clear
that he was keeping close tabs on
individual kidnappings.
Hostages held as recently as last year in
Yemen say it was clear the negotiations
were being handled by a distant
leadership.
Atte and Leila Kaleva, a Finnish couple
held for five months by Al Qaeda in the
Arabian Peninsula in 2013, deduced this
from the voluminous correspondence
they saw being delivered to their
captors.
“There were lots of letters back and
forth,” Mr. Kaleva said. “It was clear
that they had a hierarchy, and they
were consulting their leaders about
what to do with us.”
A Valuable Commodity
In the dozens of kidnappings that Al
Qaeda has carried out, the threat of
execution has hung over each hostage,
reinforced in videos showing the victim
next to armed and menacing jihadist
guards.
In fact, only a minority of hostages —
15 percent, according to an analysis by
The Times — have been executed or
have died since 2008, several of them in
botched rescue operations.
The potential income hostages
represent has made them too valuable
to the movement. In a 2012 letter to his
fellow jihadists in Africa, the man who
was once Bin Laden’s personal
secretary, and who is now the second in
command of Al Qaeda, wrote that at
least half of his budget in Yemen was
funded by ransoms.
“Thanks to Allah, most of the battle
costs, if not all, were paid from through
the spoils,” wrote Nasser al-Wuhayshi,
the leader of Al Qaeda in the Arabian
Peninsula. “Almost half the spoils came
from hostages.”
Mr. Kaleva realized his captors did not
intend to kill him when he became ill
with what he feared was a giardia
infection, and his worried kidnappers
immediately brought him medicine.
When Ms. Mariani fell ill from violent
dysentery in the burning sands of the
Malian desert, a jihadist doctor hooked
her up to an IV, nursing her back to
health.
Elsewhere in the Sahara, the jihadists
trucked in specialized medication for a
62-year-old Frenchwoman who had
breast cancer.
“It was clear to us,” Mr. Kaleva said,
“that we are more valuable to them
alive than dead.”
But hostages from countries that do not
pay ransoms face a harsh fate.
In 2009, four tourists were returning to
Niger from a music festival in Mali
when kidnappers overtook their cars,
shooting out their tires. The hostages
included a German woman, a Swiss
couple and a British man, Edwin Dyer,
61.
From the start of the negotiations, the
British government made clear it would
not pay for Mr. Dyer’s release. Al
Qaeda’s North African branch issued a
deadline, then a 15-day extension.
“The British wanted me to send a
message saying one last time that they
wouldn’t pay,” said a negotiator in
Burkina Faso, who acted as the go-
between. “I warned them, ‘Don’t do
this.’ They sent the message anyway.”
Sometime after, the public information
office of Al Qaeda in the Islamic
Maghreb published a communiqué: “On
Sunday, May 31, 2009, at half past seven
p.m. local time, the British captive,
Edwin Dyer, was killed,” it said. “It
seems Britain gives little importance to
its citizens.”
The Swiss and German nationals held
alongside Mr. Dyer were released after
a reported ransom of €8 million was
paid, according to one of the Swiss
negotiators who helped win their
release. The same year, lawmakers in
Bern, the Swiss capital, voted on a
national budget that “suddenly had an
extra line for humanitarian aid for
Mali,” the official said.
Mr. Dyer was a British citizen, but he
had spent the last four decades of his
life in Austria, a country that pays
ransoms. In his early 20s, he settled in
the mountain village of Attnang-
Puchheim, a one-hour drive from the
home of an Austrian couple who were
released in Mali a few months before
Mr. Dyer was killed. Austria paid €2
million to the couple’s Qaeda captors,
according to Ibrahim Ag Assaleh, a
Malian parliamentarian who negotiated
their release.
In England, Mr. Dyer’s grieving brother,
Hans, said his brother’s citizenship had
cost him his life.
“A U.K. passport is essentially a death
certificate,” he said.
Europe’s Outsize Role
Negotiators believe that the Qaeda
branches have now determined which
governments pay.
Of the 53 hostages known to have been
taken by Qaeda’s official branches in
the past five years, a third were
French. And small nations like Austria,
Spain and Switzerland, which do not
have large expatriate communities in
the countries where the kidnappings
occur, account for over 20 percent of
the victims.
By contrast, only three Americans are
known to have been kidnapped by Al
Qaeda or its direct affiliates,
representing just 5 percent of the total.
“For me, it’s obvious that Al Qaeda is
targeting them by nationality,” said
Jean-Paul Rouiller, the director of the
Geneva Center for Training and
Analysis of Terrorism, who helped set
up Switzerland’s counterterrorism
program. “Hostages are an investment,
and you are not going to invest unless
you are pretty sure of a payout.”
Mr. Cohen, the United States under
secretary for terrorism and financial
intelligence, said information gathered
by the Treasury Department suggested
that Al Qaeda may no longer want to
kidnap Americans, a tectonic shift from
a decade ago.
“We know that hostage takers looking
for ransoms distinguish between those
governments that pay ransoms and
those that do not, and make a point of
not taking hostages from those
countries that do not pay,” he said in a
2012 speech to the Chatham House
think tank in London. “And recent
kidnapping-for-ransom trends appear to
indicate that hostage takers prefer not
to take U.S. or U.K. hostages, almost
certainly because they understand that
they will not receive ransoms.”
Western countries have signed
numerous agreements calling for an
end to ransom paying, including as
recently as last year at a G8 summit,
where some of the biggest ransom
payers in Europe signed a declaration
agreeing to stamp out the practice. Yet
according to hostages released this year
and veteran negotiators, governments
in Europe — especially France, Spain
and Switzerland — continue to be
responsible for some of the largest
payments, including a ransom of €30
million — about $40 million — paid last
fall to free four Frenchmen held in
Mali.
A presidential adviser in Burkina Faso
who has helped secure the release of
several of the Westerners held in the
Sahara said he routinely dealt with
aggressive Western diplomats who
demanded the release of Qaeda fighters
held in local prisons in an effort to win
the release of their hostages, often one
of the additional demands kidnappers
make.
“You would not believe the pressure
that the West brings to bear on African
countries,” he said. “It’s you, the West,
who is their lifeblood,” he said. “It’s
you who finances them.”
The suitcases of cash are now no longer
dropped off in the capital of the
respective country, he said.
The official, who spoke on the condition
of anonymity for security reasons, went
on to describe how the money was
transferred. European governments
send an escort, he said, who travels
with the money several hundred miles
into the desert until the last safe
outpost, usually leaving from
Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina
Faso, or Niamey in Niger. The
negotiator and his driver then continue
driving all day, and sometimes all night,
traversing a roller coaster of undulating
dunes.
Once the negotiator arrives at the
meeting point, he waits until his
satellite phone beeps with a text
message. In the message is a pair of
GPS coordinates.
He drives another five to six hours until
he reaches the new address in the sand
and waits for the next text, containing
another set of coordinates. The process
is repeated a minimum of three times
before the jihadists finally show
themselves.
The money is counted on a blanket on
which the fighters sit cross-legged, their
guns at their sides, the official said. The
millions are then divided into stashes,
wrapped in plastic and buried in holes
hundreds of miles apart, a detail he was
able to glean after repeated meetings
with the terrorist cell. They mark the
location on their GPS, keeping track of
it just as they track their buried cars
and fuel drums.
The money is written off by European
governments as an aid payment, or else
delivered through intermediaries, like
the French nuclear giant Areva, a state-
controlled company that a senior
negotiator said paid €12.5 million in
2011 and €30 million in 2013 to free five
French citizens. (A spokesman for
Areva denied in an email that a ransom
had been paid.)
In Yemen, the intermediaries are Oman
and Qatar, which pay the ransoms on
behalf of European governments,
including more than $20 million for two
groups of hostages released in the past
year, according to European and
Yemeni officials.
Almost a year into her captivity in
2012, Mariasandra Mariani thought she
could not take it anymore. Her captors
were holding her in a landscape of
black granite in northern Mali, which
amplified the suffocating heat. When
the wind blew, it felt as if someone
were holding a blow dryer inches from
her skin. She spent all day next to a
bucket of water, sponging herself to try
to keep cool.
She told her guard that her modest
family, which grows olives in the hills
above Florence, did not have the
money, and that her government
refused to pay ransoms. Her captor
reassured her.
“Your governments always say they
don’t pay,” he told Ms. Mariani. “When
you go back, I want you to tell your
people that your government does pay.
They always pay.”

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