Together Vr

[Cecelia Seiner]

My dad, Joe Sexton, began his career as a sportswriter at the City Sun in Brooklyn, New York. One of his earliest stories was about the Rikers Island Olympics. He later covered a young Mike Tyson; he sat ringside, and had the blood on his clothes to prove it. When he made it to the sports desk at The New York Times, he spent years terrorizing the Mets and their ownership for crimes of mediocrity and incompetence.

On a spring day, Joe and I sat on the porch of our house in Brooklyn, ignoring my concerns and discussing our respective reporting projects instead. I googled directions to a shop on Coney Island Avenue that sold burner phones in case my neophyte dad needed them on his journey. A few days later, Joe was on a plane to Libya and I was on my way to Washington, D.C., for the HBO project.

There would be four of us working together, and though we would arrive in Libya with the help and blessing of the Red Crescent, an aid organization, our safety briefings made plain the risks we faced. We were given tracking devices in case we went missing. We were told to make photocopies of our passports and put them in the soles of our shoes. An action plan was created, to be set in motion by people back in the U.S. if we went silent for 24 hours.

The team behind the HBO documentary hoped we could put the people at the center of this complex story back into the frame. Earning and protecting the trust of subjects is a great privilege of the work of a documentary storyteller, and on this project I came to know a rich and varied cast from around the globe: American hostages and their families; academics and analysts who covered the crisis; Iranians who either supported or opposed the revolution; journalists who met Khomeini during his brief time in France, before his triumphant return home, or who captured events in Tehran at great personal risk.

I followed my own advice with Libya, trying before I arrived to imagine what reporting there would be like. I foresaw secretive conversations with friends and relatives of jailed migrants in dusty streets outside detention facilities. Maybe there would be a way to talk to prisoners through barred windows. Notes might be exchanged.

I felt naive, then, when two members of our team returned to the Royal Gardens after venturing out to Al Mabani. Their driver had refused to even slow down while passing by the jail, so fearful was he of being stopped at gunpoint.

Needless to say, the landscape of the city was less than ideal for the kind of street reporting I knew. To merely venture out, by foot or by car, was to risk being confronted by the armed men stationed at a convoluted pattern of checkpoints throughout Tripoli. And then there was the matter of our security team. Though they had been assigned to us with the help of the Red Crescent, a little googling showed that the firm they worked for seemed to be run by a former Libyan military official accused of war crimes. Were they actually government minders monitoring our doings? Militia members themselves? Did it matter?

It soon became clear that our security guys were reporting back to their bosses, whoever they were, at least some of what we were up to. At one point, we got a visit from an American expatriate who said she worked for the security outfit. She warned us that what we were doing was dangerous and demanded we apprise her of any further proposed reporting efforts outside the confines of the hotel.

A freshly wrapped body lay on a gurney in the middle of the main room. In a side room, a worker ran water from a hose over another body. Behind a set of curtains was a wall of refrigerated chambers that could hold perhaps two dozen corpses. It was impossibly hot and completely quiet.

In 2016, Baquer traveled to Tehran based on a promise that he would be permitted to visit his son in prison. Instead he was taken hostage by the IRGC as soon as he got off the plane. Both he and his son were held on spurious charges of collaborating with a hostile government. Trials to convict IRGC hostages are little more than cynical nods at justice: Often there are no witnesses, no time allowed to build a defense, no opportunity to dispute the charges before a judge.

The takedown was efficiently executed: Several cars moving in tandem. Men with automatic weapons. Commands hollered in Arabic for us to keep our heads down. It was close to 8 p.m. on May 23, a Sunday evening, about a day and a half from our scheduled departure from Tripoli.

Hours earlier, after visiting the morgue, our reporting trip had taken another surprising turn: We were informed that the Libyan Coast Guard might allow us aboard one of its patrol boats. That would mean actually getting out on the Mediterranean, perhaps even witnessing a roundup of migrants trying to reach Europe. In recent years, the Coast Guard had been accused of firing on or capsizing migrant rafts. People pulled aboard Libyan vessels reported being beaten and terrorized.

We were excited that our efforts might end on a fruitful note and proposed to our security team that we go to a restaurant for a celebratory dinner. There was a good Turkish place across town. Ian stayed behind at the Royal Gardens; his teenage son needed help with his homework over Zoom.

Standing, then forced to sit, it was hard to cope with the expectation of being hit. Instinctively I braced myself, my head turned sideways to soften a blow. Our captors shouted at us in Arabic, turning a gorgeous language hideous. There were bits of broken, angry English, too.

Were we being held by the government? A militia? Even knowing that there might not be much of a distinction, the latter still felt more frightening. If militias were involved, I feared that people back home learning of our abduction might be a more remote possibility, and that our status as Americans might matter less to our captors.

After hours of silence there was a commotion, and once again we were on the move. Yanked to our feet, we heard guns being fiddled with and slung about. We were pushed outside. It was a hard, enraging thing to walk blindfolded. I held a hand out to steady myself against a possible fall and was shoved in the back of the head. It was hardly grave in comparison with what might happen, but it made me furious. Crazy as it sounds, I thought, Go ahead, shoot me, beat me, whatever, but do not fucking push me when I cannot see.

I was pushed to the ground and wound up on my ass. There was a mash of bellowing and then, once again, silence. I could tell through the blindfold that wherever we were, the lights had just been turned out. To my right I sensed another person. I could hear breathing. I guessed it was Pierre.

For the time being, I told no one else what had happened. In times of emergency, my consciousness switches to a kind of third-person observer, similar to how many of us experience dreams. I can step outside myself to see the larger narrative. Maybe this tendency lets me remain calm rather than deteriorating into tears. In this case, given my work on the series and everything I was learning about hostage taking, it also allowed me to keep perspective, to remind myself of the spectrum of precedent for this sort of incident.

Without my glasses, it was hard to take in the details of our cramped quarters, but I did my best. We had been sitting on a thin and ratty foam pad. There was a high, narrow window that sunlight streamed through at an angle. Ants were everywhere. A blue metal door held a slat that slid open from the outside. There was a toilet, and two heavy wool blankets were heaped in a corner.

Shame soon became the dominant sensation, a lacerating inclination to blame myself for what was happening. Had coming to Libya been in any way sensible? Was launching drones above Tripoli or filming inside a morgue anything but provocative and reckless? The shame went beyond my own lack of care and formidable arrogance. Locked up, unable to see very well, startled by the simplest sounds, I assigned legitimacy to our captors: They were right to have taken us. We deserved it. I suspect those practiced in the art of detention know that captives often feel this way and exploit it.

Seated before my inquisitor, I fancied that I might at least get my glasses. I think he only showed me my passport, then sent me back to the cell. Night crept in; the lights went out. Human voices rose up now and again, but it was hard to say if these were people inside the facility or beyond its walls, and whether they were groaning or praying.

As the hours with Babak passed, I discovered that, for the family of a missing or detained person, the worst fears come from a lack of information. Knowing nothing definitive, you can only imagine the conditions your loved one is in, and you worry about their emotional state and the motives of their captors. Not being able to do anything, and having to rely on governments to make the difficult calculus of how to maximize the odds of bringing a person home unharmed, was as maddening as it was terrifying.

The prospect of long-term imprisonment began to sink in. Given the dysfunction in Libya, we could become trophy captives, stuck here for months or even years. Pierre and I discussed what that sort of future might hold. Then we heard a faint tapping on the other side of the wall. We tapped back. We took the crude exchange to be evidence that Ian, Mea, or both were being held close by. Our spirits lifted slightly.

A few minutes before, I was present when Babak met with Roger Carstens. The men had been in correspondence for years, and rather than stiffly shaking hands, they embraced. Then the men left me outside while they went to discuss sensitive matters.

For the first time, I felt myself freaking out. But then my rational brain kicked in again. Make a call, send an email, make sure lunch was ordered, do something. Leaving the buzzing white noise of the cicadas outside, I hopped in a van with some colleagues and headed to the Capitol for more meetings.

My stepmother had mentioned at one point that Joe would be without access to his medication. I thought about the hostages from 1979, the fear that formed in the silence of their personal silos, the embassy staffer who lived without his glasses for 444 days. My voice wobbled as I fought back tears.

c80f0f1006