Sean Langan: Kidnapped by the Taliban | P3 Surviving Captivity

It was deadly for civilians, journalists, and aid workers alike.

“In between September 11, 2001, and 2008, the Middle East and South Asia became a graveyard”

for Westerners who'd ventured into conflict zones. Many of them tried to help, trying to tell the truth, trying to rebuild what war had destroyed. The documentary filmmaker and journalist Sean Langen wasn't naive. As a filmmaker who'd spent years covering these regions, he knew exactly what could happen

to Westerners in the hands of terrorist organisations. He'd seen the headlines, he'd watched the news reports, he knew the names. A start of a Daniel Pearl in February of 2002, the Wall Street Journal reporter was in Pakistan chasing a story about a terrorist when he was kidnapped in Karachi. He thought he was going to interview an Islamic scholar.

Instead, he was taken by militants, connected to Al Qaeda. Weeks later, a video emerged showing his beheading.

He was one of the first times the world witnessed this particular brand of horror.

Then came Nick Berg in May of 2004.

“A 26-year-old telecommunications contractor from Pennsylvania who'd gone to Iraq looking for”

work. He was kidnapped, held in an orange jumpsuit, and beheaded on camera by Al Zakawi's group. The video was posted online, the message was clear. This is what happens to Americans in Iraq. That same year in September, Kenneth Bigley, a British civil engineer working on reconstruction

projects in Baghdad, was kidnapped along with two American colleagues. Both Americans were beheaded within days while Bigley was held longer, appearing in videos chained in a cage, pleading for his life, begging then Prime Minister Tony Blair to save him. His family mounted desperate appeals, Muslim leaders called for his release, but none of

that mattered.

In October of 2004, E2 was killed, and his body never recovered.

Just weeks after Bigley's murder came Margaret Hassan, an Irish born aid worker who'd lived in Iraq for 30 years. Mary, to an Iraqi spoke for an Arabic.

“She dedicated her life to helping Iraqi civilians, working with care international bringing”

medicine to children rebuilding hospitals. She was beloved by the Iraqi people. Hundreds of them took to the streets demanding her release, even prominent in surgeon groups condemned her kidnapping. But it didn't save her.

She appeared in videos, tearfully pleading, saying that these might be her last hours. She begged not to die like Mr. Bigley. However in November of 2004, she was murdered. This wasn't some distant abstract threat. This was a reality for people going into these places.

Sean knew all of this. He was a journalist, and now he finds himself in the same situation. Oping desperately for a different outcome. On the sky, I'm looking at the moon in the sky. The shooting calm as it surprised but I can't sleep.

Chapter 5 Escape is not an option. In our previous episode, Sean and his fixer had been placed in a room and were told that they were not allowed to leave. They weren't being held captive. It was all just precaution to ensure they hadn't been followed.

However Sean's fixer was nervous. Not a great sign. But he himself was remaining positive and doing his best to convince himself and his fixer was fine. However, that facade would come crashing down when the commander of the group comes into

the room. Now the commander, he had to charm with the devil because he would be very charming but he was like a sociopath, I've discovered. He came in the next evening, like your Avangular Uncle, a Christmas bringing lots of Christmas gifts and he had a big box and he sat me down and he put his arm around me

to look what I brought you and he was brought me out of the box, like big family side shampoo, you know, made me pack this time, big family side chocolates and coffees and you be looking at this. I've also got this and I'm thinking, how long are my hair for this post-grid interview but that shampoo is like a giant family pack and I'll be very slow.

Why is it what the size of those people and they're like pulling bags of, and in the

and pans it to my fixer who's reading this scroll, you know, it's like ancient Greece. He's reading the scroll, his face just was drained of blood and white as he's reading but the meanwhile the commander said, "Don't worry about him, I've also got you toffee from Iran, I like the Iranian toffee's apparently, fuck knows why." And I'm like, "Jesus, what's happening?"

And then finally I have to show you all these wonderful gifts, what a nice man was, he just

guess I was just right, read that and you got some questions to answer and walk down and I turned to my fixer and I'm like, "What's the same, you read it out, it's an official Taliban headed no paper by order of the Amir Sarashikani, you're here by charge with working for foreign enemy governments and I go fuck, we've been kidnapped and my fixer's looking me like I still don't get it because we've been accused about that or being charged with

being spies, working for foreign enemy governments, and he looked at me, I hit me like we've been kidnapped, he said, "Sure, you know, we're dead." And we went into a tailspin of panic and adrenaline, which lasted two days when you're trying

to figure out how to escape, who fucked you over, was it the Mueller, how do you get out

of there and you're running around in circles, like balloons filled with gas, bouncing

“around the room, not sleeping, pacing around the room, and I remember my fixer for two”

days, not sleeping. And you're not really thinking properly because you're physically literally the walls are closing on a new, but metaphorically as well, you know, my fixer wife had given birth two days before this trip, so you've got these pressures like, "Oh my God, my newborn son, even name him, you know, my fix name is Sammy, I was avoiding saying his name, but my fixer

afghan would be my trusted friend and fixer."

Fixers, we used that phrase, it's not for all the three, my fixers, my companion, but

my producer, my translator, and you can't operate as a foreign journalist in these parts of the world without someone by your side, and they're more important in my as an executive producer or director producer, you know. The two men are now trapped in a room having been told essentially that they've been handed a death sentence, one that will likely see them suffer the same fate for so many before

them.

“Of course, the first thing that comes to mind in that sort of situation is can we escape?”

We're really stressed out and you're thinking about escape, you don't know escape, you're not possible, but if very quickly it dawns a new constant noise and you're in the mountain, so when you have gunfire and artillery fire, it's not heavy artillery, it rebounds is to reverb on the echo in the mountains, it's a really disturbing sound, and it was a pretty constant fire, and that's the Taliban al-Qaeda training camps, and we realise

we're surrounded by, and we've seen the checkpoints on the road up there before we were blindfolded near the house, as I was describing, I was driving through a mark and it's just covered in fighters, I mean it like hundreds, milling, and they had checkpoints and the locals wouldn't be friendly either, so you're very aware that there's even if you've got out of that farmhouse that compound which had armed men in, you'd be immediately, you

know, looking at me, you know, I can't take the language, hopeless situation, so I pretty much realised escape wasn't an option. Okay, so it's time to get a little bit nerdy and sciencey here, because what happens to the body in times of high stress, even impending death, is fascinating.

“When you're in extreme danger, when your life is genuinely threatened, your brain doesn't”

function the way it normally does, the prefrontal cortex, the part of your brain responsible for rational thought, planning, language, decision making, essentially shuts down, it goes offline, and there's a reason for that, it's too slow. When you're facing a life or death threat, your brain can't afford the luxury of careful reasoning it, can't waste precious milliseconds weighing options considering consequences

forming coherent sentences, those higher cognitive functions take time and energy that you simply don't have, so your brain makes a choice. If larger system was stress hormones, like dopamine, cortisol, and those chemicals that

But here's where things get even stranger and remarkable. When you're in a life-threatening situation, your brain doesn't just shut down the prefrontal cortex, and hand control over to the armic dollar, which is part of the limbic system, it's the emotional processing center of the brain, so when we talk about flight or flight. It also does something fascinating with memory retrieval.

The same stress hormones, the cortisol, the adrenaline that impair your ability to think rationally can actually enhance certain types of memory retrieval, particularly in these cases, memories related to survival. The brain essentially goes into search mode, it's scanning your entire memory bank for anything, anything at all that might be relevant.

Prior experiences with danger, information you've learned about similar situations, stories you've heard, articles you may be read.

“It doesn't matter if you consciously remember them or not, under extreme stress your”

brain can pull up, semantic memories, factual knowledge, learned information that might give you an age. It's exactly what Sean says was happening to him. Very quickly, other things started happening, I had total recall of my entire life, you know that said the drowning man sees their life flash before them.

I saw my entire life, but it didn't flash because I wasn't drowning, so I could pause,

because I just had to give myself a prompt, like I gave my first day kindergarten, infant

school. And I would see myself there, see what I was wearing. Now it was a great pleasure actually seeing your whole life later on, less so, it's like screws, Christmas Carol, you see the ghost of Christmas past, because I saw the

“first arm at my girlfriend who became my wife.”

What she was wearing? You know, I saw my best friend who I became a journalist, his first day at school when he came into my school and I saw him. You realise everything in your life, what you think is forgotten is still there in this memory. I sat down and named every teacher I'd ever had from the age of five, if you're asking

now, I'll get two names, and that is the brain knowing that fucking body is fucked, dying. I don't know what it needs, I'll just give it everything. After six, becoming the grey man. And one of those things the brain gave him was the memory of a book he'd read, called Bravo to Zero, which is a true story of a British special forces soldier who was taken

hostage. As well as another article he'd read about these types of situations, and how they talk about you needing to become what they call the grey man.

And I remember going back to my first film about western backpackers kidnapped, the tourist

at Norwegian tourist was beheaded, and the reason I read the FBI reports was he'd been quite confrontational with the captors during the captivity, and it accused them of being on his family. So when it came to deciding who, which of these backpackers they'd be head to send a message,

“they chose this guy being a bit difficult, and that's why they took up being the grey man”

to not stand out. The other thing I read somewhere that was priceless helped me was it's much harder to kill a fellow human being than a label, much easier to kill labels than a fellow human being. So step one for any hostage is to press upon your captors to your fellow human being, not just a foreigner, non-believer, journalist's vibe.

And so that was why I immediately didn't think of a scape when the people of this house who was like a passion and family house, had been told we were foreigners, our beliefs and spires, like the movie, they kind of kicked open this wooden door, throat, not through, but just softed, tray of food on the ground.

And the first day I stood up, and again this is where when you ask him things I was being

clear, but in fact my 10, 15 years I'd picked up a lot of very useful experience, which all came to play, everything I'd learned, not even aware I was learning, how to behave, how to be polite among Muslim culture, Afghan culture, or just naturally I had it to hand, I was like on stage acting out before and so I stood up, I know the Afghans don't like that we can, so I wouldn't show fear about, stand up politely, say good morning, a salamala

come, peace be upon you, when they came in. And that was my way straight away to get through this was to try and not be killed and to bond with my cat.

him survive, there were other areas of his thoughts that he would need to shut off.

“Another of those was the obvious elephant in the room, the very real possibility that this”

could all end with him becoming yet another propaganda video on the internet, but he couldn't think about that, because as he says, it's not going to help you survive, and in fact that the few things happened, my fix went the other way, he had a mental breakdown, you sure will be killed, and he fell apart very quickly now, where that was ironically helped me, you know, if you're with mates for a young, for mates for a drunk or puking up or

using it actually so busy with you. Well, having my salamate fix that translates a good friend, have a mental and physical

breakdown, you know, he lost hope and faith and body went very quickly.

That helped me, I knew that helped me just become that fourth me to be the strong one and to keep him in shape and to force him to exercise and wash, and so that was actually a force and to help me because I didn't have time to think about my big beheaded or fear not seeing my kids. The other thing for enough, you put out your head like an execution of your children and

you become very good at caught rising emotions, so I wouldn't think about the possibility you'd be being beheaded. At the same time, I had two photos I've hidden from the Taliban, I kept hidden in my boots with my children. If I looked at my children, one minute, it filled me with hope.

If I carried on looking at broke me, like more than a minute, it would almost break me and I start crying like, what kind of kind of father am I, they're going to suffer if they're whole life. So, I realized a bit like the execution, I had to put that away out of my mind and I would take out my son's photo once or twice a week, look out for one minute, put back in the

shoe. But to get through this or deal, you couldn't think about what might happen in death, but you couldn't think about the good things too much in life, like your children because you don't want to think about if you work here or the suffering you'll cause them. One other thing that Sean would rely heavily on in captivity to keep him going was routine.

“We all know how important routine is now day-to-day lives for all of us, as soon as”

we're out of routine, we lose it, we fill off balance, disjointed, not quite ourselves. Well, of course, Sean was in a situation that was mentally taxing enough, and one of

the most important ways to try and stay on top of it was to create a new routine.

Because if you sit there in a self-scratching of the days, like in the movies, time can kill you. Of course, madness, because you don't know when you're going to survive, release, killed, not knowing, part of time, in a room that's dark after, there was a little bit of light with coming through the window above where they boarded it off, but by the afternoon

it'd be dark, and I'd read somewhere that if you break time down into routine, if you control things and it passes much quicker rather than if you're waiting to be killed. So I would get up in the morning, exercise, shower with a bucket shower, pray, think of my friends, and then excite them, plan, how to bond and routine, uh, tips you going. Out of his routine was in a scape every single morning, not a literal one, of course,

but a mental one. They would bring in tea, so I'd have green tea, I would sit the back of their cell, there was a small hole like, and if I crouched at the back of the room, I'd have my green tea and a cigarette, I could look out and there was an apricot tree, I could see the bush of an apricot tree, if I squinted, I could see beyond the fields, sometimes you see the

women working, the fields, and beyond that, the snow cap mountain of the Hindu Kush, and I would sit there through the routine, and I would escape every day I escaped into reverion and drift, let my mind drift off, escape from that confines of that cell, back to childhood memories, you know, I was blessed with lovely summer holidays as a child in Portugal, and

“I would drift, let my mind drift off to a happy place, but this is my safe place, and I think”

this is what the brain was doing, giving you a total week haul, it's to kind of comfort you with childhood memories, if you're lucky enough to have good childhood memories and love, and to find ways of surviving, but I would spend the morning thinking of my childhood summer holidays in Portugal, and that gave me the strength to come back into the room and deal

"Fuck it, they're filming me for them, as you had a video before", but you're now capable of dealing with anything because you've got the strength of drawing on it, then with

my loved ones cut off, I've never felt such a strong connection, I could feel them, see

what they were doing, and a lot of it's based on your sofa, you've got no outside stimulus, so if it's no social media, you're in darkness, and I was never bored, ironically, you know, I get bored quickly in London, no television, no books, and not bored, and you're having this meditative deep state intense now, knowing that you could be beheaded, having the sort of damages hanging over your head at any moment, you die, focuses the mind and

your emotions, so it was intense spiritual connection to family, loved ones, friends, and then through them, or through to life, you know, no life could end, gives you an incredibly exquisite, acute sensitivity to the pleasures of life, and my God, you know, when you feel

“it, you can't really explain it now, but it's like, I think, it's like the secret of life”

when your granny tells you it's a child to eat up your best for because there's people less fortunate, and people in Hungary, you don't get it, when you're living there with your life and risk and the door could be kicked over and you could be beaten up, oh my God,

the pleasures of life and how lucky we are, it would start never lost, you cry with the

intent, how wonderful this world is, and on top of this morning routine, he also had one in the evening with his two small children back home. I would every night, I knew the time in London, so when it was 5 p.m. in London, it was about 9 p.m. there, I knew it was my kids' bath time, there were 3 and 4, so I would close my eyes, kneel by the bed, and so I pitched myself, and I could see my children washing, and within seconds I could feel their skin beneath

the hand, and I could heal them, so every night I bathed my children, and I could feel them, and I would be in my arms, and it was this real, but it was other moments where I would see

“a friend, I hadn't thought of for a while, but I remember seeing a female friend's face”

light lit up by a candle. Months off my release, this woman said to me, I said, I was weird, I was thinking about you, because when I was at the Lord's in France, was that shrine that holy shrine people go to pray, because I lit a candle for you, and that came up quite a lot where I was

thinking of someone who was thinking of me, because I knew I'd been kidnapped, so I've never

to contrary, counterintuitively, but it makes sense when I was gone through it. In that moment of darkness and captivity and waiting to be headed, I've never felt so alive and so in love with life and my loved ones, and so connected. What was happening back home? Did you ever, did you get a sense? I mean, you had a radio, did you have a here or anything about your own situation on that radio? Yeah, it's a strange. So I knew, so my fixer was being, at the beginning,

we were listening, why aren't we in the news? I mean, it was newsworthy, which was kidnapped,

“and it was driving us nuts, because it was a fear, wasn't you want to be on the news?”

No, it's a fear that no one's talking about it. If you were a kid now, and they hadn't, and so wouldn't even be looking for us, they call it a news blackout. In the 1960s, 70s, 80s, kidnappers was always on the news. Slowly, they realised in the West, that gives oxygen, the kidnappers, terrorists movements around the world, want that. So not giving them that. That was part of that thing. So a news blackout became the new, all TV agencies, governments now,

someone's kidnapped, they have a news blackout. So in fact, there was no news, but I figured that out there must be a news blackout, because the running joke was, how many journalists do you have to know before you could get you know, I knew what before I turned it. It's where a small traveling bunch of go around the world's horses. And I was like, "Pack it now." I mean, if I don't make the news, they're not doing their job. So there was a news blackout. Later on, I found out, of course,

you know, the government's doing its thing channel 4. I'd written a security protocol before you go off towards those in a very dangerous situations. You write that if the worst comes to worth, here are people I'd like you to call my family. But I'd mentioned some journalists and Afghans, could you call who, in fact, proved quite instrumental, managed to make contact with the

So it's a lot happening. And then also, I found out the British special forces were planning a

“rescue mission. I was actually training for it in Hellman, the SBS Special Boat Service. My ex-wife”

was getting involved, because there was a split between the foreign office governments and journalists. No trust each other. The governments, like, give us all the information. You know,

China for saying no, because their fear is they might want to kill terrorists as a priority,

not rescue. And obviously, the grants and payments, yes, so the western official position is

“we don't pay. We don't negotiate with terrorists. It's long been the official”

starts of the United States and the United Kingdom, the logic is simple, pay ransoms and you fund

terrorism, make concessions and you create an incentive for more kidnappings. But not every

country follows that policy, by the US and UK held firm other western nations, France, Spain, Germany, Italy, took a different approach. They did negotiate. They did pay ransoms and often,

“their citizens would come home. The consequences of these different policies became brutally”

clear with ISIS. Between 2013 and 14, the group captured around 20 western hostages. European governments reportedly paid millions in ransoms. Many of those hostages were released. American hostages like journalists James Foley and British hostages like AID worker David Haines, were not. They were executed. Of course, it's impossible to say where the negotiations would have saved them, ISIS have propaganda goals beyond money. But the pattern was stark.

Countries that engaged got their people back more often than not. Countries that refused, often didn't. For sure, Langen, being held by the Hacani network in 2008, the stakes were just as high. He was British. And back home, the question wasn't theoretical. It was life or death. The government's stance was still the same. We don't negotiate. However, luckily, for him, the company he was working for at the time

were prepared to negotiate. Although, it didn't exactly go very smoothly. Iraq says the AK47 points here. I mean, he says don't these foreign fuckers get it. We kill people. Next time. On what I survived. (gentle music)