“He’s bigger and messier than I thought he would be,” McCann added. “I like those complications, and I think we especially don’t want to talk about those complications.”
For McCann, the most impressive moment of the encounters came at the end of the third and final meeting, when Foley reached out to shake Kotey’s hand. To McCann’s surprise, Kotey grabbed her hand — a gesture that would be prohibited under some interpretations of Islamic law. When McCann later asked Kotey about the exchange, Kotey replied that Foley was “like a mother to all of us,” thus allowing the contact under a family exemption.
“He held a woman’s hand,” McCann said, “but he recognized her as a mother.”
In the end, Foley’s anger was directed more at his own country than at Kotey. When James Foley was held hostage, he said he was often left in the dark by a government that maintains a strict policy of not talking to terrorists. Foley said he spent years shuttling between agencies, and even threatened with prosecution should his family try to pay his son’s ransom. “I was angry at the way our country treated me, the way they treated Jim’s condition,” he said.
Through his foundation, Foley urged President Obama to reform the United States’ international hostage policy. It was partly at his urging that Obama eventually formed hostage response teams at the FBI and National Security Council, and created the position of a hostage coordinator to support the families. “He’s pure guts,” said broadcast journalist Judy Woodruff, who has interviewed Foley several times. “He was able to look powerful government officials in the face and say, ‘This is what we have to do.'”
More recently, Foley has been among those who have successfully argued for the passage of Levinson’s law through Congress, which further bolstered resources to return the hostages.
“What we refer to as the hostage recovery enterprise probably wouldn’t exist without Diane Foley,” said Roger Carstens, the president’s special envoy at the State Department for hostage matters. Carstens believes even the Biden administration’s negotiation process in the release is secure last year of six Americans wrongfully imprisoned in Venezuela can be directly traced to his advocacy. “He created the machinery that makes it possible to bring people like them home,” he said.
