‘A Rope And A Prayer’

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New York Times journalist David Rohde and his wife, Kristen Mulvihill, speak with anchor Jeb Sharp about their new book, “A Rope and a A Prayer: A Kidnapping from Two Sides.
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Jeb Sharp: In November 2008, New York Times journalist, David Rohde, was in Afghanistan covering the war.  He set out with two Afghan colleagues to interview a Taliban commander.  That interview never happened.  Instead, militants kidnapped Rohde and his colleagues, and then held them deep inside Pakistan’s tribal areas for seven months. Rohde’s wife, Kristen Mulvihill, then the photography director at Cosmopolitan magazine directed the efforts to gain her husband’s release.  The two tell their story in A Rope and a Prayer: A Kidnapping from Two Sides. On the day he was abducted Rohde said his captors moved quickly to cross the Afghan-Pakistan border.

David Rohde: What surprised me first of all was when we crossed into Pakistan, all of the government checkpoints had been abandoned by government forces, and instead they were manned by young Taliban militants with Kalashnikovs.  And anyone who didn’t have the right password you know was unable to move.  And it was essentially a Taliban mini-state.  The regime the U.S. fought at the top of the 2001 had simply moved a few miles over the border into Pakistan. And then the second thing, living with my guards and there was other young militants that came by, you know they live in this alternate reality.  They believe that this is a religious war that’s being waged against Islam.  They believe American troops are forcibly converting Afghans and Pakistanis to Christianity. I spent several weeks with one young man who was being trained to be a suicide bomber.  He viewed all Westerners as sort of the Hedonists who only cared about the pleasures of this world.  And he thought that a neck tie was a secret symbol of Christianity.

Sharp: And you kept trying to connect with them, to bridge this cultural divide as you called it, every day, and yet in some ways you can’t get beyond those differences.  I mean why didn’t you connect do you think?

Rohde: With him I remember, and it’s fascinating to kind of have the incredibly front row seat on a suicide bomber…and I asked him you know, do you really want to die?  What about your parents and your family?  And all these young men are inculcated with this belief that this world does not matter; you know, all that matters is heaven; the only relationship that matters is your relationship with God.  And he really believed it.  It’s a clever sort of form of indoctrination. One of the things that Saudi Arabia has found when they’re trying to de-radicalize a militant is that they put them and the force them to live with their families.  And the time with family tends to de-radicalize these young men who have been brainwashed.  It makes them in a sense care about this world.

Sharp: And Kristen, while this is all going on, you’re in the midst of juggling intense negotiations on the phone to Kabul, the state department.  You keep working at Cosmopolitan.  I mean this must have been so strange.  That work involved as you say picture shoots of bachelors in boxer shorts, and photo shoots of the Gossip Girls at studios in New York City.  How did you reconcile the two worlds you were living in?

Kristen Mulvihill: In a way like having the Cosmopolitan job to go to every day gave me a sense of normalcy and sometimes comic relief to be honest.  But you know, every day at noon I would receive a phone call from our security team with an update on David’s case, if they’d heard any word from the captors or from David. What was most frustrating with the kidnapping was that you couldn’t use logic or rationale thought to negotiate with the Taliban.  And we had so many cooks in our kitchen.  We had the FBI.  We had a security team.  So there’s just a lot of different entities involved each with the goal of getting David out, but with different agendas too…you know, not setting precedence, things like that.

Sharp: And Kristen, ultimately you hired a private intelligence contractor to work for David’s release.  How did you come to that place?

Mulvihill: We did.  Early on the captors were calling the Kabul bureau of the New York Times and reporters were taking calls from a [inaudible 3:55], David’s kidnapper.  The Times is fantastic in terms of gathering information about the kidnapper, talking to them on the phone, but it didn’t really push negotiations forward.  So I felt I really wanted someone on the phone who would not be opposed to discussing monetary offers if that was what it was going to take to get David released.

Sharp: Kristen, well, actually both of you, help us with this question of the money.  There’s been a lot of speculation whether or not money changed hands, and that guards were bribed to allow David to escape.  And you declare that was not the case.  What happened with money and how do you know that guards weren’t bribed?

Rohde: There was an effort by some of these contractors to try to find our location in Pakistan.  They were paying Afghan informants in the border areas who said they knew where we were.  The information being produced by these paid informants was completely wrong.

Mulvihill: I would’ve loved it if it had been so simple you know, to just bribe these guards.  But that didn’t happen.

Sharp: David, tell us briefly about the night you escaped.  You intentionally kept the guards up late playing a board game.  They fell asleep.  You woke your colleague, Tahir Ludin, you threw a rope over the wall of the compound, then what happened?

Rohde: Tahir wanted to walk to Afghanistan.  I thought we should try and go to this Pakistani base.  We eventually went to the Pakistani base.  We were nearly shot by the guards there.  We spent about 10 minutes standing in the street with our hands up.  We kept begging them to take us inside. Then they had us lie down on the ground.  Then finally had us take off our shirts to show we didn’t have suicide bombs on.  And we were finally let onto the base.  And this very brave and young, I want to emphasize my kidnappers in the Taliban are extremists, they don’t represent most Afghans and most Pakistanis, so this very brave and moderate young Pakistani army officer let me call home. And I called home and actually an answering machine picked up.  And finally an unfamiliar voice picked up the phone when I kept saying it’s David, I’ve escaped…and it was my mother-in-law.  And she did an extraordinary job of getting all the information correct about which base we were on, what town we were in.  And then Kristen was able to get us off that base.

Sharp: You guys have written this book and in some way kind of tied up the thing in a package, but take yourselves back.  What was it like to come together again and to merge together and piece together what had happened to you both.

Mulvihill: I just realized in the course of writing the book what a desperate situation we were in in terms of trying to get him out.  And if he hadn’t you know, taken matters into his own hands and had the courage to walk over that wall, I think he’d still be there.

Sharp: Thank you both so much.

Mulvihill: Thank you.

Rohde: Thank you.

Sharp: New York Times correspondent, David Rohde, and his wife, photography editor, Kristen Mulvilhill.  Their book is called A Rope and a Prayer: A Kidnapping from Two Sides.

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• Held by the Taliban