Sean left strict orders: if he was kidnapped, I was to be kept away from the region
Being muzzled is a very frustrating experience for a journalist. When the story broke last week that Sean Langan had been kidnapped in a remote region of Pakistan — he was released on 21 June after a long and tortuous negotiation — I got a stream of email messages from mutual friends saying, ‘Did you know about this?’ I wanted to respond by saying, ‘Of course I f***ing did.’ For the three months of Sean’s incarceration I had barely been able to think of anything else.
On reflection, though, it was a perfectly reasonable question. If I had known about it, why hadn’t I told them? More importantly, why hadn’t I written about it? Surely, if your best friend is kidnapped, the first thing you do is kick up an almighty stink in the media in the hope of putting pressure on the powers that be to secure his release?
Sean, too, was thinking this. Shortly after he was kidnapped, one of his captors gave him a transistor radio and he had it permanently tuned to the World Service, hoping to hear news of his own abduction. After six weeks had passed, and he still hadn’t heard his name mentioned, he began to despair. If his absence had gone completely unnoticed, he reasoned, his Muslim kidnappers would feel much less inhibited about cutting his head off.
In fact, his absence had not gone unnoticed. He was in the region to make a documentary about the Taleban and he had put a security protocol in place whereby he would telephone someone at Renegade Pictures, the independent production company he was working for, at regular intervals. After two weeks had elapsed and he still hadn’t been in contact, the company’s chief executive, Alan Hayling, employed local journalists in Afghanistan to track him down. As the days passed, it became increasingly clear that something had ‘gone wrong’ — no one dared use the word ‘kidnapped’ in case saying it out loud would make it more likely to be true. Eventually, one of Sean’s captors telephoned the son of his interpreter, who was imprisoned alongside him, to ask why no one had been in touch to inquire about his father’s whereabouts. It was a bizarre phone call -— should we have looked under ‘Kidnappers’ in the Islamabad Yellow Pages? — but it confirmed our worst fears.
My first impulse was to fly to Kabul and assemble a crack team of ex-special forces operatives to launch a rescue mission — and I was willing to remortgage my house to pay for it. I pressed my case with Sean’s family — ‘You need someone on the ground’ — but my efforts were not helped by the fact that Sean had left strict instructions that in the event of his being kidnapped I was not to set foot in the region. ‘If he starts throwing his weight around, I’ll be killed for sure,’ Sean said.
When that plan was quashed, my next ation was to alert the media. I had sed this with Sean before he left and we oked about what picture of him I should give to the BBC, given that it would be displayed in the top right-hand corner of all their news reports. But Alan Hayling, who at this point was spending every waking minute trying to work out how best to secure Sean’s release, counselled against this. His argument was that the moment the story became public, the group holding Sean would come under pressure from more powerful forces in the region not to release him without receiving something in return, such as the release of Taleban prisoners held in Afghanistan. Not only that, but the British, Afghan and Pakistani intelligence services would stick their oars in, not to mention the CIA, and that, in turn, would complicate the negotiations and make it harder to reach an agreement. Of course, all these people probably knew precisely what was going on already, but provided it was all happening beneath the radar they were less likely to get involved.
I do not doubt that Alan was right — every decision he made was right, in fact, and Sean has him to thank for his release, along with Kevin Sutcliffe and Dorothy Byrne at Channel 4 who had commissioned the documentary — but it was incredibly frustrating. Whenever I am told to leave it to the experts my instinctive reaction is to do the opposite, but in this case the stakes were too high. I realised that the most prudent course was to do nothing — a tough thing to accept when your best friend’s life is hanging by a thread. I am just glad Sean was released unharmed. If he had been killed, I would have spent the rest of my life wondering if there was something I could have done to help him.
Toby Young is associate editor of The Spectator.
Previous page
