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The gist is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Fiscally responsible financial geniuses. Monetary magicians. These are things people say about drivers who switch their car insurance to Progressive and save hundreds. Visit progressive.com to see if you could save Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Potential savings will vary. Not available in all states or situations.
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Ever notice how ads always pop up at the worst moments when the killer's identity is about to be revealed during that perfect meditation flow on Amazon Music, we believe in keeping you in the moment. That's why we've got millions of ad free podcast episodes so you can stay completely immersed in every story, every reveal, every breath. Download the Amazon Music app and start listening to your favorite podcasts. Ad free included with Prime Foreign
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It's Monday, March 16, 2026. From Peach Fish Productions, it's the Gist. I'm Mike Pesca and Senate Republicans will be voting on Donald Trump's SAVE act this week. The SAVE act, the act that could save America if the underlying assertions behind it weren't pretty much total lies, but also if it did what the Republicans say it's going to do. And here's the third if if it passes, which there is no chance of. So this act, opposed by all Democrats, is one of those laws that needs 60 votes to pass. It's only at most going to get the 53 who are Republicans. And some Republicans aren't even in favor of this. The Republicans who are no longer playing the game of pretending that foreign citizens are stealing our elections. So it's not going to pass. So why worry? And here's the answer. This is a answer. This is an answer you'll hear in a lot of places among people who have dedicated audiences, audiences who look to these people to cut through the BS and give them the truth about the stakes. This is an assault on our democracy. Requiring people to show a passport or a birth certificate, which many people don't have, is a naked play to force from the electorate Democratic voters. This will disproportionately hurt the old, the poor, the people without ready access to their birth certificates, let alone people who don't have passports. These are the Democratic voters. Here's the thing. I wish I could say that I think people would like me more if I said that. Here's the thing. I don't think most of those assertions are true. Let's just take as a given that the people who are behind the SAVE act are disingenuous, because there really is no evidence that there's any degree of voter fraud or Noncitizens voting. I think massive studies have shown a couple dozen people per election cycle. So this is all a ploy. And the ploy is messaging. So we don't really have to worry, I think, about, about the actual effects of the bill because they won't have actual effects because it won't pass. But also, and I ask you now to join me in a different type of cognition, the actual effects of the bill are not well thought out. Since it's only messaging, all that matters is the message. Noncitizens are voting. That is not true. That's where it ends. Might it be that the people who are behind this unserious bill didn't take seriously what the bill might do? Now many analysts are telling you what the bill is going to do is discriminate against people that Republicans don't like. Because why else would Republicans get behind such a cynical bill? And I'm telling you why. It's just the messaging, the actual effect, which will never even matter because it will never even pass the actual effect. I do not think if it somehow passed would help the Republicans like they say it's going to help them. Who doesn't have a birth certificate? I don't mean, hey, who out there doesn't even have a birth certificate? I mean they, there are people who don't know where it is or lost it or, you know, the big flood is 67. These people are the poor. And normally in politics we say with the poor. Well, those are Democratic voters. But look at the vote in 2024among people with less than $50,000 in income, Donald Trump got half the vote. Kamala Harris, 48. If we bump it up to not the poor, but even the middle class, Trump did even better. Under 100,000, Trump 51%, Harris 47%. Also, rural voters tend not to have birth certificates readily available. Certainly not passports, but no birth certificates. Higher educated voters definitely do have access to these things. And those are the people. They're not the country club Republicans of old, as you know, they're Democrats. So we fight on these assumptions based on 10 or 20 or some, some cases just 6 year old assumptions that aren't true. Now the reason they're not true, and if you're asking yourself, well, well, why would the Republicans commit to a position that doesn't actually help them? Because they're not committing to a position, they're committing to a message. And is the message a good one for them? I don't think so. Donald Trump thinks it is. He's much more committed to the idea that noncitizens are voting. Without that idea, he probably wouldn't have been elected again. If we just looked at the results of the 2020 election as a outright loss as opposed to a stolen election, the Republican Party would have moved on. Then there is the thing I probably boringly to you, especially if you want one of those this is democracy on the line Typ podcasts since the Civil Rights act, mostly Republicans trying to undo some Civil Rights act laws and trying to take away some ability to vote. This is always sold as a very, very dire thing and done for all the worst reasons and how badly it will hurt our democracy. And the Brennan center always has some position papers telling you that, but it never really quite hurts as much because the Brennan center and all their aligned groups have those position papers. Democrats are great at messaging. They should be great at messaging. They're trying to take away, therefore more people vote. Therefore counter mobilization swamps the efforts to take away the vote. Look, the biggest one was the undoing of certain provisions of the Voting Rights act. And this was supposed to be a racist play to get fewer black people to vote, especially in the states of the former Confederacy. So we should be able to look at the data and see how that works. See that fewer black people were voting. Only more black people are voting. More black people are voting as a percentage of the electorate. The there are some ways you could count it to say, yeah, but even more white people are voting. The best piece of evidence is that from when the Supreme Court undid that section of the Voting Rights act to the next election, there was a percentage wise increase in white voting versus black voting. But I want you to know that this occurred during the presidential election when Barack Obama stopped running for president. So yes, it is true, percentage wise, the percentage of the white vote ticked up ever so slightly when Barack Obama wasn't on the ballot. And by the way, Donald Trump was. From what I hear, he does something to excite a certain kind of white voter. But after that, the black vote went up. The black vote in the south, in the former Confederacy is higher than it was when there was a Voting Rights Act. I'm not saying that all is sanguine. And don't worry, I am saying. Well, I know what I should be saying. They're trying to steal our democracy. What I am saying is don't worry, it's not going to pass. And if you want to think about it afterwards, they haven't, they haven't thought it out. They've just thought out the messaging. And my message is there's another thing that is far from the end of the world or democracy or the ability of Democrats to win, which by the way, Kalshee says they have a 50% chance of doing, not just in the House, but in the Senate. On the show today, the most exciting interview, interesting interview you're going to hear all day and maybe even into tomorrow. Mickey Bergman negotiates to get hostages, to get political prisoners from the worst countries of the world back to America. You will not want to miss our interview with Global Reaches. Mickey Bergman, What does it really mean to have a good life in our politics, our work, our relationships? If you care about social justice, science or the search for meaning, you'll find courageous, practical conversations. No Small Endeavor the Signal Award winning and Ambie award in nominated podcast produced by our friends at Great Feeling Studio. We've talked about no Small Endeavor in the past. Host Lee C. Camp leads thought provoking conversations with artists, philosophers, politicians and beyond. Where do politics and justice meet? The pursuit of the common good? Find out with no Small Endeavor available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen. Mickey Bergman is the CEO of a company, an organization called Global Reach. Now Global Reach, you hear that? I don't know. What are they? AI what are they? Import, export? No, they are, I will say, a unique organization and what they do is negotiate and intervene to try to extricate political prisoners and hostages from evil regimes or whoever might take a hostage. They will only take as clients a family member of the hostage and they work on behalf of that family member, not the United States government, not any other government across the world. They have been unbelievably successful. They don't always get mentioned in the news reports after a Brittney Griner or a Paul Whelan or, or a Trevor Reid is in the news. But they are there and I'm pleased to talk to Mickey right now. Hi, welcome to the gist.
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B
Thank you so much. I'm excited to be here. Let me just add, we also do this without any cost for the families. Very important for us.
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A
Who funds you?
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B
We have, we fundraise and we have a. Our funder co founder with me and funder of the main donor of the organization. His name is Steve Menzies. He's a businessman from Omaha, runs an insurance company or a whole family of them. And he has been unbelievable not only in supporting financially but intellectually building up this enterprise, participating with us with some of the rescues that we've done, Venezuela and Russia and we're extremely lucky for that. We have other donors, smaller donors, and we're trying to cultivate a little bit more just to. To have a little bit more of diversity, but that's how we get our money.
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A
I want to talk who's. I want to talk hows. But just give me preci of your track record of having done this.
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B
Well, I've been doing this for almost 20 years. At the end of this year, it will be 20 years. So. And I've been doing this. I started in 2006, kind of by accident, doing this with the former governor of New Mexico, Bill Richardson, when we went to Sudan and had a case there. And then I kind of was blown away by the possibility. So I started teeing up for him other cases, including one in Gaza, which was an Israeli soldier named Gilad Shalit. That was the first case that I led in these negotiations. And slowly but surely, it started taking over my life until it became everything that I do. So that's a little bit of my background into this, but just to put a little bit of numbers. So overall, we're looking at more than 100 families that saw their loved ones come. Come home over the years, but only in 2025, which was just last year, was a record year for us for many reasons, but we had 17 families that worked with us that have now been reunited with their loved ones. I know it sounds only 17. It's a huge number, and in our field, and there's a lot of reasons. It's not just because we were so brilliant. We also have an administration that we were able to work with that made it a priority, and the results follow.
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A
Yeah. Is it always a good number that you could boast those numbers, or does it indicate that more hostages are being taken?
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B
Yeah, it's both, to be honest. It's one of the reasons why the numbers are high is because we have a lot of Americans being taken, but we also had years of high numbers of American being taken and very few coming back. So we're excited that we have that number. And to be honest, I think that overall, the numbers have been going down a little bit just because of the returns that we've seen, but also, hopefully, because of some of the more mitigation and deterrence efforts that are being taken now, where our government used to be very weak at, and now they're getting a little bit better, and we still have a long way to do on deterrence. But, you know, our job is to. One of our jobs is to try and get ourselves out of a job and not have any Americans Left, unfortunately, that's probably not going to happen. But if we can bring it down to a low number, that would be fantastic.
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A
I know different regimes kidnap or wouldn't be kidnapping. It would be charging as political prisoners for different reasons. Let's take one, let's talk Russia. There you intervened on behalf of the families of Paul Whelan, Brittney Griner, Trevor Reid. This was even politicized in the United States. How do you go about trying to extract Paul Wheelin, for instance?
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B
Yeah, so. So one of the things that is important to understand, because we're non government, we don't have the authority of the government at all. So we have to figure out how we get leverage, how we influence somebody else's thinking and behavior. In fact, that's how we define negotiations. Not as the deal, not as the give and take or the transaction that takes place, but actually our ability to influence somebody else's behavior.
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A
Right. So you're saying the deal, what you do, isn't dependent on the terms that are written down or agreed to. It's the influence and it's the psychology involved.
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B
Correct. So we use emotional intelligence. That's our secret sauce. And we analyze, we spend a lot of time analyzing not only what Russia wants, but what individuals in Russia want and who are the interlocutors that we should talk to and how they get evaluated within their own system and what it is that they have and what relationship we can have with them. And the relationship is something that gets built over years in advance. And we also do the same with our own government because there are times that we will need to convince them to do things that they don't always want to do. So, for example, you mentioned Paul Whelan gets taken. He was one of the, the early ones within this round of Americans being taken in Russia in the last decade or so. And we engaged his family, his sister Elizabeth reached out. We tried to jump in with this. We started engaging with the Russians directly and we started just doing little building trust exercises. We knew that Paul William needed some. We wanted him to have a medical test outside of the prison just to see, you know, well, being the Russians came prepared for that in our conversations with them. Well, they say, well, funny you're asking us about Paul Whelan because we have this guy in the United States, Konstantin Yeroshenko, he's a pilot and he hasn't seen a dentist since he came in 11 years ago into the United States. He was extradited from, from West Africa and his teeth are rotten and he needs Help. And so we ended up going all the way to the, to the Department of Justice, to the, to the Attorney General and asked if they will allow us to send a dentist in just to prove concept. Because for us, hey, sending a dentist to see a Russian prisoner, not a big price to pay. But if that proves the concept that then Paul Whelan gets a medical exam, that's a great thing. And so we did it. And this was Attorney General Bill Barr at the time, and he said, absolutely. And he allowed the dentist to go in, and Paul Willand received his medical exam as well. And so we saw that there is this reciprocity dynamic that we're able to create with the Russians and the pandemic. The COVID just started, and we just kind of jumped into it and said, hey, guys, let's cut it to the chase. We want Paul winning back what it's going to take. And they basically initially said, well, you know, Konstantin Roshenko, if somehow he returns to Russia, we will reciprocate. It's not an exchange, but it will be. We believe in reciprocity. And we tried to take it to the White House. The White House didn't want to do it initially. And here comes.
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A
Which White House? Biden? White House.
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B
This was actually. Trump won. Trump won. They just didn't want to do it. I think they were not used to that at that point. It was kind of early, and the pandemic was hitting and everybody was kind of crashing down. Mike, one of the criticisms that we have in our field is that when we do these deals. Oh, you do these deals. Then you incentivize taking more Americans. And it's a very rational argument, and one that is hard to argue against. The Russian cases gives me. They give me another argument back, because when the Russians saw that the Americans were not willing to negotiate over Paul Whelan, they took Trevor Reid and now they escalated.
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A
Right. So it's the exact opposite of an incentivization in this case.
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B
Now, look, I won't argue that. It's only that it's ambiguous. Some actors use it that way. And then we went on.
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A
Yeah, it's like classic moral hazard theory, Right. Sometimes you do incentivize, and sometimes you don't. And I know you've studied all that. And then there are ways to counter a negotiation that fails, and sometimes it's to escalate. Exactly. Yeah. And.
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B
And that's exactly right. And that's how it works. And the more people understand it that, look, yes, it's high level, high stakes international negotiations over hostages. But it really is an interaction between people, between individuals with egos and with psychology. And as long as you can spend time understanding how they see the world and how they see their role in it, you can come up with things to do. And so when they came up on Trevor Reid, that was already during the Biden administration. And we had conversations about 2, 4, 2. And I can tell you, I sat with the Russians the first time we talked about both Trevor Reid and Paul Whelan. And the Russians came prepared. They said, hey, we want Konstantin Yoroshenko and this guy Victor Bout. And our reaction was we started laughing and said, why are you laughing? I said, come on, give us something we can win with. Victor Bout is, is an arms dealer. We, we, we can't take it to the White House and win.
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A
Right. And notorious. He's not the, he's not a flyer, a cocaine trafficker who might have been who. I would say the reporting came out that he certainly had allegiances more than just to cocaine distributors. Right. He corrected. Yeah, he had allegiances to the Russian military. But Victor Battle, I mean, they made movies about him where Nick Cage played him as one of the most notorious international arms dealers.
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B
Yes. And so for us, we, again, it's not, I'm trying not to pass judgment on who the individuals, the bad people that they're saying, but I'm trying to pass, but I am doing an assessment of what it is I can win with. And at that point, there was no way I'm going to get the White House to say, yeah, Victor, Bart will return. And the Russians knew that too. And maybe the reaction of me and my colleague when we were there in that meeting and laughing made them say, well, you know, we have another guy is his name is Lesnev, he's, he's in North Carolina, he's a credit fraud guy. And said, well, that's something I can work with. You know, still a bad guy, but at least he's not responsible for death of Americans. And we took it to the White House and then this is the Biden White House. Again, nothing. They didn't want to do anything with it. And I remember we had a meeting at the National Security Council and we said, guys, it's not going to stop. It's the only way. I said, well, but these are bad guys. We're not ready to return bad guys in return for innocent people. And I tried to flip the script and I said, guys, are you willing to let innocent Americans rot in jail just because they're American because we're insisting on keeping bad guys in our prison. I. Let's do the deal. I believe that our agencies and the power of our government, we can still get back and punish those people. If the people we release, if they go back to bad ways, if we haven't had our hands over Yaroshchenko after 11 years of him spending time here, well, maybe we need to do some fixing in other agencies, but I do believe we do have that. I'm trying to focus on the innocent men and women that are spending the time. And by the way, the US Government did not go for the, for the agreement then. And then Brittney Griner was taken. And Putin knows us. He knows our community. He knows. He knows our society. He knows who the president was. This was President Biden. He knows who his constituencies are. Brittney Griner fit so many boxes for Putin. And as soon as she was taken, guess who was negotiating than. Biden was, right. He, he played us really well on this.
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A
Now, it was alleged, and I don't know if this came from you or the family or maybe just people reading tea leaves or opportunists that the, that brought. Griner was prioritized over not only these other political prisoners who were taken earlier, but in the case of Wheel In, I think Trevor Reid did get into a scuffle. Wheel in was a Marine. Reid and Wheeling were both Marines who I think did really nothing wrong. And Griner, this is not her fault. Well, sorry, I want to say this correctly. Griner apparently did have some hashish or marijuana on her and shouldn't dispute that. But my point is that it was alleged that there was a political prioritization of Griner over Wheel in, and that was criticized by these people saying that. How much truth is there to that?
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B
Not so much, but there are angles to it. Let me try and explain. First of all, I have to, for Britney's sake and to make sure that justice is done for her. They found residue in her cartridges of stuff. She didn't bring stuff in it. She had to admit in Russia what she had to admit because prisoners, when they're taken, they need to do what they need to do to survive. But she was targeted. It was a clear target. It wasn't. I know people like to say, oh, you know, she brought drugs into Russia. It's like, no. And we're, we're dealing with other cases similar to that now, not only there in other places as well. It's complicated. But let me also interrupt.
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A
This is a tactic of the hostage or prisoner taking. They try to muddy the reputation by saying, for instance, we got a guy and he had a gun when in fact he was doing it around the world. Cruz and everyone who does that has a gun on him.
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B
That is correct. That's Chuck Zimmerman. And he's still being held. And he was sailing his ship in international waters. And everybody who sails a ship knows you have a pistol with you. It's a part of the procedure. And he announced it as soon as the Russians intercepted him in international water. And yet they made him an arms dealer or an arms smuggler.
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A
My point is, every time someone is taken, there's always some information put out that if you want to be motivated, you could say, well, he deserved it, or Ottawamb pull down a poster. Or this guy or Zimmerman had a pistol. Okay, I'm sorry.
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B
And look, and sometimes. Let me say that again. Sometimes the Americans and the clients that we have, they do something wrong. But look, Otto Warmbier, he got into a scuffle there. He was on a trip. He did pull that poster. Didn't deserve 15 years of hard labor. So once they're in the system for something, minute that you know, yeah, you get a fine, you move on. The word is that there's an American in the system now. Escalate. And so those things happen a lot. But back to your question on the thing. So on Paul, William, the prioritization of Brittney Griner. Look, Trevor Reid came back home before Brittney Grinder and Paul Williams stayed behind on that one. I was in Russia. It was the eve of the war in Ukraine when it started. I was there on February 25 negotiating with the Russians over this. And we came back from these negotiations with basically two options by the Russians. One was two for two. Whelan and Reed for Yaroshenko and bout. And the other one was, hey, since Trevor Reed is sick, it will be Trevor Reed for Yaroshenko, one for one and do that. And I carry a lot of guilt over this because I brought both of those options to the White House. And those in the White House, when they weighed it against each other, decided to try to start with one on one and see where that goes. And therefore, Paul Whelan was left behind. It was obviously was not my decision. I represented both families. But I can tell you that the next time we were in Russia in September after that, and there was Brittney Griner and Paul Whelan, and again, the Russians gave us two options. We told them, we're not going to take the one for one back to the White House. We're only going to take the two for two because I've learned my lesson on this. And when I brought it back to the White House, we only presented a 2 for 2 for this, and yet we have failed to execute on that one. And it was a Brittney Griner only deal. And it's not because, again, people can believe me or not believe me. And I don't know what was happening in the White House, but the people I was working with in the White House at the time, this is the Biden administration, I know they really wanted to bring both of them back. Something was not working in their communications with the Russians. Something that was working for us was not working for them. They believed that the Russians were playing us. We believe that the Russians actually wanted that deal to be held. And towards December, the White House concluded that they're only able to conclude the deal with British runners. So you bring back who you can, when you can, because you never know what happens next. So that's, that's the part in which the theory and the whispers about this are not correct about the prioritization of Brittney Griner. However, nobody can deny the fact that especially during the Biden administration, the key to getting a deal to be approved by the President was for the family to meet the President. President Biden is an empath. When he meets the families, he'll do what he needs to do in order to bring them home. But it was prevented from families to meet him for a really, really long time. Again, it's not because people are bad. It's, you know, their interests are very complicated. So in order to get the Trevor Reid deal to happen, for example, we brought the deal back at the end of February. Trevor Reid only came back at the end of April. So it's two additional months in prison because we couldn't get a conversation with the President. And we had to figure out, and this I did with a colleague of mine, John Franks, who represented the Reid family, figure out a way how to force a meeting for Biden with the parents of Trevor Reid. And as soon as that meeting happened, 15 days later, Trevor Reid was home. And so take that into account. Now think of Brittney Griner with all of her constituencies, with her prominence. We knew at any given point when Britney's wife Sherrelle wanted to see the President, she could. And so when we worked with her, we said, hold on, hold off, hold off on doing that because we don't want you to go and meet the President. When there's no offer on the table, we want it to count. And in September, when we came back from Russia and we knew that there is a deal on the table, we told her, go meet the president. And she did. And that took again, it took another two months for her to come home. But that's, that's, you know, that's the advantage of the prominence and, you know, whether it's the NBA constituency, whether it's the LGBT community, whether it's the African American community, all of those were playing in her favor.
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A
Yeah.
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B
And so that helped shortcut some of those obstacles that we had.
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A
We'll be back with Mickey Bergman and a little more of his global reach in just a second. This 24, 7, 365 cycle of news might be burning out your soul. So here's a pick me up for your ears. Love letters from our friends at the Boston Globe. In Love Letters, host and longtime reporter Meredith Goldstein explores how real people navigate their lives in this crazy, cuckoo world. She tells stories like the husband who turned 40 and decided to build an adult sized ball pit for himself in his basement. And Meredith, as the good reporter, asks, how might that affect one's marriage and does that count as a midlife crisis? They have lessons for everyone and just make the world feel like a better place, a more human place. So find the Boston Globes love letters. Wherever you get your podcast, maybe you'll find you have a story to tell. We're back with Mickey Bergman. He's the CEO of Global Reach, and he's been telling us some of his tactics and who he's talked to to release Americans held overseas. So without your intervention or just your presence, if she' relle had, I'm going to said to herself, I'll do what I need to do. I'll go to the State Department, I'll go to my government. What might her path have looked like
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B
again? You never know. It's hypothetical. But sometimes, in this case, let's say Sherelle said, hey, I want to meet him now. I mean, they did have a phone call before, but we held a physical meeting. And she would go and she would meet, and she will get all the love and the care. And they said, look, we're really trying, but there's the Russians are not negotiating with us.
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A
Yeah. And then I think I meant something more like, what are the official apparatuses if absent Global Reach if you don't contract with Mickey Bergman?
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B
Yeah, well, Global Reach, not only Mickey Bergman, but yes, we have a team. But typically the US Government has a few entities that will respond to a family. The first one in this is the special Presidential Envoy on Hostage affairs in D.C. language, SPIHA. That's the acronym. He sits at the State Department, his office, he has staff, but he is the President's special envoy. And all he, that's, that's his job is to advocate for the release of Americans that are being held abroad. And the current spiha, his name is Adam Boller. He's a great guy who came in and entered with Trump in the second administration. Before him was Roger Carstens in the same job that served both Trump 1 and Biden administration. I think he was the only official at that level that actually did both administrations. So that's one entity. The second entity, if it's a hostage situation and not a political prisoner, is the hostage Recovery Fusion cell at the FBI. It's hosted at the FBI, but it's a multi agency. It has the dod, the Department of State, CIA, all of those FBI, everybody's in there. And their focus, their mandate is mainly on hostages or on governments that we don't recognize, recognize. So Iranians, Americans that are held in Iran, for example, right now, are also dealt by the Fusion cell at the FBI. And then at the National Security Council, there's a task force which is supposed to pull on the interagency in the US Government. They don't interact much with families, depends on the administration, but they pull together all the strategy and brief the President on the actions that are needed. So if you're a family and you wake up in the morning and you find out you get a phone call, your kid or your dad or your mother or your aunt, hey, they've been arrested. Typically you have no idea where they are, what happened. You're not a foreign policy wonk. And suddenly you're in the middle of this international crisis, geopolitical. Everybody's pushing you, everybody's asking you, so what the hell do I do? The first thing the families do, they typically call their congressmen because that's the quickest representation that they have access to. And then depending on those members of Congress, as you can imagine, most of them have never encountered anything like that in their lives. And so they try and defer them to the State Department. There is a whole process that goes on inside government until families actually find the right place and the right people to talk to. That's inside government, outside of government, and they hear that a lot. There's, of course, global reach. There is the Foley foundation, which we work very closely with. This is the Jim Foley Legacy foundation, established by his mother. Jim Foley unfortunately was executed by isis. And she decided to take that loss and that grief and do something about it and try and help others.
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A
Diane Foley, she's been on the show. She's excellent.
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B
She's fantastic. And then Hostage us, which is another ngo, which again, we actually financially support them. They don't do the negotiations, but they take care of families during the crisis and after somebody comes home. And that is something that we, you know, we don't do the post captivity work. So we call, collaborate with them. And then there's a really, there's other organizations, there are other entities, there are individuals, whether it's pro bono lawyers, stuff like that. And unfortunately, Mike, there are also people who try and go after the families and say, pay me money and I'll help you.
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A
Right.
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B
And we try to avoid working with anybody who is charging families because we believe that there's enough goodwill out there to do this work for free. And the families, think about it, if it's your loved ones, you would do anything. You will mortgage your house in order to, for the chance of getting them home. And you don't know anybody that comes to you, whether that route will be the route that will save your loved one's life or will cost them a year, a month, or their lives. And it's. The burden is, is, is unbearable.
- [36:14]
A
Does the fact that there is the necessity for a service such as yours indicate that SPIA is in some ways inadequate? And let me just amend that question by saying one, I know you work with them and have high emotional intelligence, so I doubt you're going to say inadequate, but you could look at it like, and let's put aside the FBI portion of it, because as you say, that's only hostages. So what we're talking about with Russia or Myanmar or state actors taking political prisoners wouldn't even apply. So you could look at it like this is a traumatic experience. We wouldn't say the presence of the Red Cross shames the inadequacy of, of United States services. On the other hand, I've done, I've done interviews about this and I've looked into this. And it does seem that a lot depends on the priorities of that administration. And whoever is in charge of that department or how that department is oriented is often from administration to administration, really quite different.
- [37:17]
B
Yeah. So I will certainly not say inadequate, as you predicted. But I genuinely speaking the people who are working both at SPIA and at the Fusion Cell and at the White House on These things. There are people who are dedicating their time, their lives and their careers to bringing people home. I view it. It's not about their efficiency. It's much more about complementarity. And I'll explain what I mean with this one. There are things when I have it relatively easy, yes, I'm not government and I don't have the authority of government, but I only have one interest when I'm working on behalf of the families, and that is bring their loved one back home. If you're a government official and you're part of a system, speed, they have one objective, but all the policy, the advisors, the people who are around it, every bilateral relationship like that has multiple of interests. And some of them are contradictory, and some of them, yeah, you're arguing for one life and they're arguing for hundreds of lives in a different scenario on this. So the complexity that government officials are dealing with is much more complicated than the one that we do. And that's something that we're lucky about. But let me give you a very tangible example of this. We now have multiple Americans in Russia still held. We have six clients that are currently held over there. Let's say the Russians and the Americans, as they do, say, oh, we're going to go and meet, you know, whether it's Special Envoy Witkoff and Kirill Dmitriev. We're going to meet and only talk about the prisoners. But there are U.S. government officials and Russian officials when they get into the room to sit and talk about the prisoners before they say one word, the weight of the war in Ukraine, the weight of international stability now, the weight of the war in Iran, the activities, the US Actions on Venezuela, all of this puts so much weight and complexities into that conversation that makes it almost impossible for these individuals to deal with the prisoners in insulation.
- [39:27]
A
The State Department's brief is every matter affecting diplomacy.
- [39:32]
B
Correct.
- [39:33]
A
Your brief is that person. Yeah.
- [39:35]
B
Correct. So, but even if they intend to just talk about that person, it still weighs in and it enters the conversation. Now, when I go and we go sit with the Russians to talk about this is, yeah, they tell us about Ukraine, they tell us about all the grievances. We're the source of all evil. We'll hear that. That's fine. These are individuals that we develop good relationship with them. We like them on an individual level. Of course, they're friends from that perspective. Doesn't mean that we justify or agree with what they're doing. But they will tell us all. They will hear all the grievances and Then we say, that's great, but we only have the mandate to talk about one thing. And so after days of these kind of conversations, we're able to insulate the issue, refine what it will actually look like to make a deal like that, and then try and mediate and bring it from our informal conversations into the formal official channel in order to see if we can get them to connect and then do it. Which is also why in most cases the government is the one that does the last yard of this, bring it into the end zone. If we're looking at football analogy here and we're standing, and we're standing behind and we're very happy to have the government do that last part and get all the attention because this is never a one time game, it's always a repeat game. We're going to have another round and we need to maintain our relationships with both sides for this.
- [41:00]
A
So when you're negotiating with the Russians, is it the case that, that it's the same person you talk to often? Sir Guy, how are you? But when you're negotiating with the Burmese, the Myanmarians, who don't take as many prisoners, you have to kind of invent the process from scratch?
- [41:17]
B
Well, there is a, first of all, there's a joke that the late Governor Richardson used to say that he likes to work with dictators because they stick for a while. They don't get placed in elections. Yeah. They don't get replaced at elections in the four years. And also that they're the single decision maker. You only need to convince one person not to the parliament. And it is true. Both. Look, the Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has served. I think he's the longest serving diplomat on the face of this planet. It means he's very smart, he has a good sense of smell. And one of the things, he has schooled me so many times because I think I'm ahead of the game when I meet with him and I realized he already played me too. You know, they're chess players. They're, you know, there are a few
- [42:02]
A
steps saying that is engaging in some sort of 3D chess. But anyway, sorry, it always is.
- [42:08]
B
We, we, you know, we, we have this joke. Like Americans, we like to play checkers. The Russians play chess and the Chinese play mahjong. But, but when it comes, even when it comes to North Korea or Myanmar and the North Koreans, since Otto Warmbier, when I was there negotiating, like they haven't engaged in this kind of activity, every now and then they will have an American that forces itself himself into their border. And they will hold for a few weeks, maybe a month, and then release because Otto Warbir was traumatizing for them. But both the North Koreans and Myanmar, even in Myanmar after the coup, the military took over. The individuals that were in the government there that we had to deal with when we were negotiating the release of Danny Fenster In 2021, they're individuals that I've met before because they were still working in the system before. And we met them, some of the ministers, some of the parliament members. So we still had a little bit of that relationship to build on and to build from, even though the head of the military government at that time we've never met before. So we had to study him and go from scratch. But to answer your question on this one, often in North Korea, for example, the, the ambassador, the last ambassador to the United nations was a young foreign service officer, North Korean. When Governor Richardson went to visit as a young Congressman in the 90s, he was the one that was his case officer when he arrived. And they developed in this and the relationships built. But we do spend a lot of time on engagement. We spend a lot of time on these. Yeah.
- [43:49]
A
So what's coming through is this is very much based on people. You're trying to advocate for a person. The person who is the president of the United States has an enormous amount of discretion. Even the people who you're negotiating with can be the same people over and over. And tomorrow when we come back, we're going to speak with Mickey Moore about who he is as a person. How does someone get into this line of work? What skills does he have? And that's tomorrow on THE gist. That's it for today's show. The GIST is produced by Cory Wara with video help from Jeff Craig. Ben Astaire is our booking producer. Kathleen Sykes runs the GIST list. To subscribe, go to Mike pesca.substack.com it's all behind the paywall today. Do you want to hear about the first win farms during the Trump administration or you'll never believe what living substances the California city named City of Trees is cutting down that's on the just list. Mike pesca.substack.com Michelle Pesca oversees it all. Improve. Thanks for listening.