Rescue, ransom, escape or death are the only four outcomes for hostages

Contributed

Robert Hall and partner Marites Flor in 2014. Flor describes their time in captivity, and their hope of either being rescued or of fellow captive John Ridsdel's connections coming up with a ransom.

For 266 hellish nights in the clutches of the Abu Sayyaf Group, Robert Hall held out hope that Canadian soldiers were coming to the rescue.

Hall, 66, had an engineer’s mind. He was a problem-solver. He understood this was a problem for the best of the best.

The Canadians would sweep into the Philippine jungle after dark, Hall assured his fiancée and fellow captive Marites Flor. And when they come for one, they will come for all — Hall, Flor, fellow Canadian John Ridsdel and Norwegian hostage Kjartan Sekkingstad. They all had to be alert. Always. Tonight. Tomorrow.

“Every single night, Robert told me, ‘Tess, stay close. Be prepared. We have to be ready for the special forces,’” says Flor, who was dumped from a Jeep and staggered to freedom 10 days after Hall was executed in June.

Military rescues rarely work — hostages often get killed. Canadian forces cannot act independently in sovereign nations. The killing of Osama bin Laden at Zero Dark Thirty is a Hollywood rarity — and one fraught with problems.

But Hall had reason to believe: his was a family of Canadian military pedigree, from an uncle on the beaches of Normandy to a son who had served in Afghanistan.

Hall would never live to learn the heartbreaking truth: Joint Task Force 2, the jewel of Canada’s special ops command, was in the Philippines, Torstar News Service can confirm. But not in a position to strike.

A team arrived within days of the abductions, according to highly placed sources close to JTF2. They spent the next nine months on the ground without ever growing into a full-strength assault team.

The Canadian soldiers were kept on a short leash, never given the green light to team up with their Philippine special forces counterparts. And a Canadian-led rescue was never in the cards.

JTF2 teams have deployed without action before: in Africa seven years ago for kidnapped Canadian diplomats Robert Fowler and Louis Guay, and in Afghanistan for abducted CBC reporter Mellissa Fung. In those cases the hostages came home alive through negotiation.

This time, two Canadians were slain.

Torstar News Service

Canadian special forces have been trained in hostage rescue. But JTF2 has never been given the opportunity to put those skills to the test.

And JTF2, which lists hostage rescue among its core competencies, remains a unit never once given the opportunity to put these skills to the test.

Rescue, Ransom, Escape or Death. These are the only four outcomes for hostages.

An arm reaches down, lifting you from your prisoner’s pit. That was Fung’s way out of Afghanistan when her freedom was brokered in a trade. A door bursts open in Iraq, revealing a team of British Royal Marine Commandos. That’s how Canadians Harmeet Singh Sooden and James Loney would end their 118 days of captivity in Iraq a decade ago. A lonely stretch of road in Somalia brings deliverance. That was how freelance journalist Amanda Lindhout stumbled to freedom.

Almost all Canadian hostages are eventually freed, one way or another. Colin Rutherford of Toronto endured five years before his release in January. Only a handful of people know why the Taliban released him, and how Ottawa and the Qatari government were involved.

The only other way the nightmare ends is in a scene that has become too common worldwide since 9/11. Hostages forced to kneel in orange jumpsuits as their executioners power up the camera. Even then, the kidnappers win. Perhaps not with a bag of cash or a prisoner swap, but with an ad campaign that goes viral the moment they upload their terrorist snuff film to YouTube.

For Ridsdel, hope of a different kind prevailed — not a military rescue but faith that well-heeled friends or business associates with deep pockets would come through, buying everyone’s freedom.

Just as Hall’s military connections buoyed his confidence, Ridsdel’s longtime association with the Calgary-based mining firm TVI Pacific Inc. gave him a sense that powerful wheels were in motion. The company had done well in the Philippines, milling substantial amounts of gold, silver, copper and zinc from the Canatuan mine, among others.

Says Flor, of Ridsdel’s hope: “John told me he had friends who can help, friends who can raise money.”

Kidnap and ransom is far from unheard of in the mining business — and TVI, initially at least, was working to help Ridsdel. The company engaged the services of a London-based global risk consultancy, NYA International.

Private firms like NYA are global experts at quietly negotiating freedom for their clients. But after an initial flurry of assurances and more than two months of preliminary dialogue, TVI abruptly informed the family in December 2015 that they could do no more.

Repeated requests for information to TVI went unanswered.

The Ridsdel family was left alone to sort through the complexities of ransom demands.

As the first ultimatum neared — April 25, 3 p.m. in the Philippines, 3 a.m. here — the captors called Ridsdel’s family. It was one last chance to deliver the ransom money. It was one last chance to say goodbye.

“They let me speak with him, which I am thankful for no matter how awful it was,” Ridsdel’s daughter told Torstar. She asked that her name not be printed due to privacy concerns. “He was so brave and telling us never to blame ourselves, that he knew we tried everything we could, to have wonderful lives.” Ridsdel also told his daughter, “tell the Canadian government they suck.”

But he said in his last words that Abu Sayyaf Group deserved all the blame.

And then they dragged him away.

The Holiday Oceanview Marina was widely regarded as the safest of harbours in the region by the yachting community. Affordable yet secure, with full-time guards. Well north of where groups like Abu Sayyaf were known to roam. Well south of the monsoon zone.

Or so everyone thought until Sept. 21, 2015, when a raiding party of 10 gunmen arrived by boat and silently split in two. Moving down each of the marina’s two gangways, the gunmen targeted the first boats they saw with cabin lights aglow.

“We had already turned out the lights and gone to bed. But after a while Robert was restless, tossing and turning. He said, ‘I can’t sleep … you want popcorn?” says Flor.

Flor laughed and said, sure, go for it. So Hall got up, switched on the light — the beacon the gunmen were looking for. “One minute later, we heard strange noises on deck. We heard voices. Robert opened the door. I saw four or five faces looking in. I saw guns.”

There were more than a dozen others on nearby boats that night, but they were battened down against the rain, lights out. Some slept through the entire 15-minute drama until they were awakened for a head count shortly after the kidnappers fled.

From their boat, Australians Garry and Wendy Goldsworthy witnessed the abduction of Ridsdel and the marina’s Norwegian manager, Kjartan Sekkingstad. Wendy woke first and opened the hatch.

Seeing a group of men with guns, she hesitated, then retreated but they could look out through the porthole at the boat beside them. They saw “Kaz and Steve” —Japanese-American Kazuko Shibata-Tripp and her husband, American Steve Tripp — fighting for their lives.

“Kaz put up a hell of a fight. She got a hard knock with the gun. She screamed out for help,” Garry Goldsworthy told Torstar. “That’s when we saw John and Kjartan come on the scene. They probably thought the same thing we did — this was a domestic of some sort. The gunmen left Kaz and Steve alone and they surrounded John and Kjartan instead. It happened so quickly. It was over before you could even process what was happening.”

Three days and nights on the water, most of it spent beneath a black tarp to evade aerial surveillance — that’s how the Abu Sayyaf Group stored the hostages as they raced 500 kilometres to the island of Jolo.

The gunmen hadn’t yet taken stock of nationalities, they didn’t know who they had taken. Only that there was value, human cargo worth the taking.

Life under Abu Sayyaf settled into a pattern that Flor describes as frantic, fearful and exhausting. She describes months of uncertainty during which the captives were subjected to punishing treks through the jungle, on the run from Philippine soldiers.

“Sometimes we walked by day, sometimes by night,” says Flor. “We just kept moving. I counted 200 moves up till April and after that I stopped counting.”

Yachts are seen at the marina of the Holiday Oceanview resort in Samal island, southern Philippines. (STR)

Flor, now 39 — friends and family call her Tess — is still on the mend, mentally and physically. But over the last few months she shared her story in a series of interviews, emails and texts from her family’s home.

She described hearing near-daily mortar fire in the distance and nine times, Flor says, the gunfire drew so near that panic set in.

“We talked a lot about escape. About taking advantage of the craziness, when the army was attacking,” Flor remembers. “But we also were thinking, every time it happened, that maybe this is the rescue.”

In Robert Hall’s last public message, in May, he pleaded to the camera for a saviour. Gaunt and ragged, his hair long after eight months in the jungle, Hall appeared to have abandoned all hope that __canada would save him.

Instead, he appealed directly to newly elected President Rodrigo Duterte in a video posted online. “I came into your beautiful country in good faith and in peace and here I am,” Hall said. “We have a hundred people heavily armed around us all the time that dictate to us and talk to us like children. We’ve been humiliated in every way possible. One of us has already been murdered.

“We hope that you can work on our behalf as soon as possible to get us out of here. Please, the sooner the better. We’re three-quarters dead right now.”

And as the second beheading deadline approached, Hall pondered every option, even suicide, telling Flor he wanted to rob Abu Sayyaf of the ability to haunt the Internet with videotaped murder.

Sekkingstad and Flor persuaded Hall to stay with them. But then the deadline came, and they came for Hall. Flor remembers the taunting glee of her captors as she and Hall clung in a final embrace before he was pulled away.

But in those final weeks, Flor and Hall were able to scrounge together pen and paper. Hall drafted a two-sided farewell that was folded to a tiny nub, wrapped in a scrap of plastic and later smuggled to freedom with Flor.

The note passed to the Canadian Embassy in Manila, then to Vancouver and into the hands of the grateful Halls.

Barely 10 days later, Flor was awakened and pulled away into the darkness. They walked. One hour. Two hours. “I was ready to die,” she says. “But if I was going to die, I wanted to be shot. I didn’t want beheading.”

They waited on a dirt road and soon Flor saw a light in the distance. A Jeep. She was bundled in and whisked away. Just before daybreak, the vehicle stopped long enough to push Flor out and quickly sped away. She stood there dazed. Alone. Free.

Back in Manila, she spent days downloading her story at the headquarters of the Philippine National Police. The Canadian Embassy arranged for rooms at a luxury hotel where Flor and her parents were able to wind down.

Over the next two days, two RCMP investigators and one Norwegian detective methodically took Flor’s story. Canadian Ambassador Neil Reeder dropped by to pay his respects.

For the Ridsdel and Hall families the kidnapping was long but the end came quickly.

Celebrations of life were held for Ridsdel in the Philippines and Canada. His ashes were spread in both places too, on the water, where he most loved to be.

When the deadline for Hall passed, his relatives waited by their computers and phones, “praying for a miracle,” says Hall’s cousin Debbie Brock.

Once Hall’s death was confirmed, Brock went to her parents’ house in Calgary. They are both 88, and like so many others, utterly devastated and exhausted that all these months had come to this. “It was really the first time we all got together over this whole ordeal and there was hugging and crying and ranting,” says Brock, a 62-year-old retired designer.

“Somebody brought a bottle of good scotch, which was Bob’s drink, and we had a toast to him.”

Maybe there was no way to save them. Maybe the ransom demands were too great, the possibility of rescue too remote.

One highly placed Canadian military source likened the challenge of retrieving four hostages on the move through a remote island jungle to “winning an Olympic gold medal hockey final.” So easily imagined. So hard to achieve.

Everyone agrees on the horror of it all. But many of the relatives of the Philippine victims still want answers.

“The silence is excruciating,” says Hall’s sister Bonice Thomas. “Was there a rescue ever on the table? Did the Philippine military have options that Canada refused? Why is the family not allowed to know?”

Torstar was able to put the question of rescue directly to the prime minister Friday, when Justin Trudeau visited the editorial board. His single-sentence response: “I’m not going to comment on operational details and those are definitely operational details.”

In response Torstar questions about preparation for rescues, Canadian Forces spokesperson Maj. Alexandre Cadieux replied: “Canadian Armed Forces has the mandate to have forces ready for a range of possible eventualities and employ military resources at the request of the government to protect Canada and Canadians from threats to the national interest at home and abroad. It is our mandate to be ready.”

However, the Ridsdel and Hall tragedy is just the latest kidnapping case that should trigger a long overdue review of Ottawa’s hostage-response protocols. The families of hostages deserve greater respect and treatment.

Gaps highlighted years ago under previous governments endure to this day. Over the course of this series, Torstar interviewed more than 50 former hostages, family members, security officials past and present, inside the government and out, many with years of hostage investigations under their belt.

Their cumulative verdict: Ottawa, we have a problem.

In response to Torstar’s questions, Trudeau opened the door to change. “You can be assured that we are looking very, very carefully at what we can learn from this situation and how we can do better,” he said.

Trudeau then abandoned the talking points, reflecting on his telephone calls to the Halls and Ridsdels in the aftermath of their deaths.

“The conversations I had with those two families, after they had lost their loved ones in such a horrific way, stand out in my mind as one of the more difficult moments I’ve had to go through, not just in this job, but in my life.”