PART ONE

At dawn on October 1, 2022, Osman Khan was roused from his cell inside Venezuela’s notorious subterranean prison known as the House of Dreams.

Khan was a fresh-faced Floridian, all of 24 and barely out of college. Nine months before, he had made the fateful mistake of crossing the border into Venezuela to meet his girlfriend’s family, only to find himself in the clutches of one of the dictatorship’s dreaded security services. For weeks, his interrogators subjected him to torture of all kinds: waterboarding, electric shocks, beatings, stress positions, extreme confinement, and forced injections, which his family says induced grand mal seizures. One of his torturers went by the nickname the Piranha. Khan was incarcerated in a pariah state beset by gangs, rampant corruption, and humanitarian crises—a country that considered his homeland a mortal enemy.

“It was hell,” recalled his sister Jasmin, who, while finishing her master’s at Georgetown, was putting in long hours as Khan’s advocate in Washington. His incarceration had enveloped the close-knit family. “My mom is the strongest person ever,” said Jasmin, “but it definitely broke her. She was telling me, ‘If something happens to me, it’s your job to get your brother out.’ She was thinking of committing suicide.” Khan had already tried to take his own life, but his captors had intervened.

The Venezuelans alleged that Khan was not what he claimed to be: a lovestruck young man who had innocently entered their nation. Instead, they maintained, he was a CIA assassin dispatched to kill President Nicolás Maduro, who in 2013, after the death of his predecessor, Hugo Chávez, had wrested control of the beleaguered oil-rich nation, going on to establish a ruthless far-left dictatorship. As evidence, Khan’s minders produced a Google Map printout of Miraflores, Venezuela’s White House, which they claimed to have found among his possessions.

“The only thing Osman could assassinate is a hamburger,” recounted Matthew Heath, a 42-year-old retired Marine from Tennessee who had been in custody for more than a year by the time Khan appeared. “Casa de Los Sueños is a funny name because it sounds like day care,” Heath observed. “Oh, the House of Dreams, I’ll drop the kids off. But only a terrorist or a hardened criminal would have any kind of preparation to be in a place like that.”

Heath, with his Southern twang, slicked-back white hair, and translucent blue eyes, formed an unlikely bond with Khan, a Cuban Pakistani American, whom Heath treated like a kid brother, sharing food and clothing. Heath also shared something just as valuable: lessons he had learned in Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape (SERE) school.

Heath was no ordinary grunt. Having received specialized training and taken part in sensitive military missions, he had become a habitual headache for his captors. He acted irrationally and unpredictably, defying orders and going out of his way to keep his jailers confused and irritated—all in a bid to improve his conditions. “I’m gonna do whatever I can to ruin the day for the guys working at the prison,” he told me. He advised Khan to resist on his own terms, tapping into his inner reserves of defiance. Heath characterized his own methodology this way: “I went with the North Korea option. I would be randomly and extremely violent. At any provocation, I made a big deal out of it. If they tried to mess with me, it’s going to end up with me probably in the infirmary.”

That’s exactly where Heath landed after staging what he later termed a mock suicide in late June 2022, slicing a forearm so that it bled enough to terrify his jailers but not enough to kill him. He wound up in a military hospital while Khan remained behind in the House of Dreams where he, in turn, paid forward Heath’s kindness and shared the gospel of resistance with a more recent American arrival, a lawyer named Eyvin Hernandez.

Hernandez’s imprisonment was not only cruel and unusual, but also deeply ironic. Incarcerated by a far-left government, the 45-year-old from South Central had spent years representing the poor and working class as an LA County public defender. In his spare time, he was an avid bachata dancer and a rabid Raiders fan. Yet his Venezuelan guards, for all their socialist swagger, refused to regard the Salvadoran-born American as anything but a subversive. In March 2022, they picked him up near the Colombian border—where, his family said, the unmarried man had been helping a female friend sort out her immigration paperwork—and then deposited him at the House of Dreams. He was charged with conspiracy to commit terrorism.

“This place is meant to break you psychologically and spiritually,” Hernandez said of his surroundings in a voice memo left on his brother’s phone—a message meant for President Joe Biden. “The uncertainty, the isolation, the daily human rights violations, are taking their toll and are having their intended effect on us. Two people have already tried to commit suicide and one is on the brink.” Imploring the leader of the free world to act, his message ended ominously: “If you don’t get us out soon, then there might not be anyone left to save.”

There are now nearly 40 Americans held in a half dozen countries, citizens US officials are working to free. They include well-known cases like the five American nationals believed to be alive in Gaza, as well as former Marine Paul Whelan and Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, both imprisoned in Russia on specious espionage charges. Other high-profile detainees have been successfully recovered. In December 2022, WNBA star Brittney Griner, having been sentenced to nine years in a Russian penal colony for possessing cannabis oil, was released in a trade for convicted arms trafficker Viktor Bout. Last September, five detainees, held on a variety of charges that the Biden administration labeled as spurious, were released from custody in Iran—in exchange for five Iranians held in the US and $6 billion in frozen funds, to which Tehran would be granted access for use in humanitarian efforts. (According to the State Department, the money, transferred to restricted accounts in Qatar, was effectively blocked from Iranian access after Hamas, an Iran-backed, US-designated terrorist group, went on its killing and kidnapping spree.)

For years I had followed the cases of Americans in peril, but from afar—first while working as a CIA lawyer and later as a journalist and filmmaker covering national security affairs. Still, the back-channel negotiations, the shape-shifting intermediaries, and the multipronged maneuvers to liberate US detainees were just not on my radar. That is, until August 2022, when I met Roger Carstens at a rooftop bar in Foggy Bottom.

I had known Carstens, 59, since the late aughts, when I was working in TV news and he was cooling his heels at a Washington think tank. Gregarious and good-looking, he had graduated from West Point in the fabled class of ’86; two of his fellow cadets, Mike Pompeo and Mark Esper, would later become Donald Trump’s secretaries of state and defense. (Pompeo also served a stint as CIA director.) Carstens, who bears a passing resemblance to Hugh Jackman, was class president at the US Military Academy—and a bit of a rebel.

“At West Point, I had the distinct honor of being a century man. I walked 158 punishment tours,” he says of the misconduct infractions that found him pacing the quadrangle for hours on weekends in dress uniform, carrying a rifle. Eventually he got with the program, rising through the ranks of Special Forces and making Zelig-like appearances in war zones on four continents. He then took a break to study the great books before returning to government as a deputy assistant secretary at the State Department.

To hear Carstens tell it, his career first took shape when, as an 11-year-old in Spokane, he read about the Cambodian genocide, learning how the world stood by as some 2 million perished in the Khmer Rouge’s killing fields. Raised in a Christian home where the Bible was a staple, he was determined to make a difference in the lives of the less fortunate. In time, he came to regard the US Army as “the most successful human rights organization in history when it comes to liberating vulnerable people.” It’s what took him to West Point and later to Special Forces, where the motto is De oppresso liber, “Free the oppressed.”

By the time we connected for drinks, Carstens had assumed a new title, special presidential envoy for hostage affairs (SPEHA), and an awesome responsibility: retrieving Americans who are wrongfully detained by nation-states or held hostage by terrorist groups or criminal syndicates. For decades, pearl-clutching policymakers have proclaimed that the United States does not negotiate with terrorists or hostage takers. But in his role, Carstens is uniquely empowered to bargain with and browbeat as many militants, despots, and assorted ne’er-do-wells as necessary. He now held a job that, in its way, embodied the last line of the soldier’s creed: “I will never leave a fallen comrade.”

Since 2020—under Trump and now Biden—Carstens has helped repatriate scores of citizens languishing abroad. His modus operandi is to engage with anyone and everyone—heads of state, spies, businessmen, clergy, activists, aid workers, even journalists—who might have a bead on, or the ability to influence, those holding Americans. He is at once patient and impatient, ready to make, rescind, or recalibrate offers and willing to chase leads and endure setbacks, until, at last, the smallest of openings results in a breakthrough.

His big personality masks great faith. “I pray a lot for the families,” he confided. “I pray a lot for the people that are being held. I also pray for the people holding them. I’ll lift a dictator up in a second to God and say, ‘Lord, whatever this man is going through, please give him whatever he needs to release our citizens.’ ”

As special envoy, Carstens spends hours every day on family engagement—calls, emails, texts. These are not easy interactions since he is both the face of and the whipping boy for the government’s hostage-​related efforts. Things that may not be his fault are nevertheless his problem. “The bottom line for my office and this president and secretary of state,” he told me, “is that if you have a blue passport and you are wrongfully detained or held hostage, your country’s coming to get you.”

What had caught my attention at the bar, though, was a single data point he mentioned in passing. Nearly a quarter of his caseload, he said, involved Americans detained in one country, Venezuela. I knew that Maduro had turned the country into such an abject disaster that more than 6 million people had fled in recent years—with untold numbers streaming across the southern US border. But I found it simply baffling that Maduro—a bus driver turned strongman upon whom the US has placed a $15 million bounty—was holding more American captives than his worldlier and more practiced patrons in Havana, Moscow, and Tehran.

The more I learned, the more I wondered. How had Maduro’s House of Dreams become a place to warehouse human beings as political pawns? And why wasn’t it front-page news? I sought permission from the White House and State Department to embed with what they call the hostage enterprise.

For well over a year, I traveled to seven countries, observed negotiations firsthand, witnessed successful and unsuccessful recovery missions, interviewed dozens of officials as well as former hostages, their families, and those whose loved ones remain detained. This article (and a documentary in progress) amounts to an inside look at the US government’s commitment to freeing hostages, viewed through the prism of Venezuela, a nation whose vast oil reserves make it an outsize player on the regional and international stage.

I personally thought the job should have gone to a lawyer,” recounted Robert O’Brien, who held the SPEHA post before becoming Trump’s fourth and final national security adviser. “Someone with a high-stakes legal background and a lot of negotiating skills. But I saw Roger’s CV and I met him and was really impressed, and so I urged the president to immediately give him the title of ambassador.”

“Roger’s just done a hell of a job,” he said. “Our adversaries know that this is a guy who could roll up a newspaper and kill you with it. But at the same time, like most Green Berets I’ve met, he gets along with people, he’s a diplomat, he finds common ground. When you’re doing these negotiations, even if you’ve got a thug or a bad guy on the other side of the table, you’ve got to build rapport to get to the outcome you want. And Roger’s very good at doing that.”

Carstens is the highest-ranking Trump-appointed holdover. Hostage families—who kiddingly refer to him as Captain America—lobbied the incoming president to keep him. “If Biden is looking for an issue around which he can build a bipartisan bridge, I can think of none more appropriate than working together for the safe return of Americans held hostage abroad,” wrote Washington Post reporter Jason Rezaian, who himself was unjustly detained in Iran for 544 days. “Carstens is the right sort of mission-driven public servant to lead the effort. Countless initiatives are disrupted by the transition from one administration to the next. But with the lives of fellow Americans at stake, politics should not interfere.”

Critics have long argued that America should not make deals with tyrants and terrorists. Such engagement, they contend, promotes state-sponsored blackmail, helps legitimize malign regimes, and encourages more abductions. (Not so, according to recent patterns. Despite the deals the US has made to free hostages, Russia alone, to use grim diplomatic parlance, seems to aggressively “restock the pond” with Americans.) In fact, facilitating the release of US hostages is one of the rare foreign policy initiatives that enjoys widespread support among Republicans and Democrats. Consider this: A congressional resolution last June calling for the Russians to release Gershkovich passed 422 to 0.

In 2021, Biden, who prides himself on trying to reach across the aisle, kept Trump’s envoy on the payroll. And his administration has reaped the benefits, obtaining some 45 releases. (Despite Trump’s criticism of the Griner deal as “a one-sided disaster” and a “stupid and unpatriotic embarrassment for the USA,” he has boasted on Truth Social: “I brought 58 HOSTAGES home from many different countries, including North Korea, and I never paid anything. They all understood they MUST LET THESE PEOPLE COME HOME!”)

“Roger simply is unstoppable,” said Secretary of State Antony Blinken as we sat in the opulent Treaty Room at the State Department, surrounded by portraits of his predecessors. “I’ve rarely, if ever, worked with someone who is so absolutely determined every single morning he wakes up to bring another American home—and who does it with extraordinary energy, extraordinary creativity, always looking for another angle, another idea, something that might work, but also just with incredible humanity. He’s fundamentally motivated by the human dimension of this. And you can feel that.”

It was not always so. The SPEHA position was borne of the tragedy of incremental decisions across successive administrations. In March 2007, Robert Levinson, a retired FBI special agent, traveled to Iran’s Kish Island, where he somehow became wrapped up in an unsanctioned operation that was linked back to a CIA official who was allegedly fired over the incident. (A CIA spokesperson declined to comment on the matter.) The details remain murky, but Levinson was abducted, and by the time his death was made public 13 years after his disappearance, he was believed to have been the longest-held hostage in American history.

His family was livid at what they perceived as a decade’s worth of gaslighting by US officials, who seemed as eager to bury the reasons for his presence in Iran as they were to hide the lack of tools, or resolve, that might have made a rescue or a trade possible. “My dad went over there for his country and his country failed him,” his daughter, Sarah Levinson Moriarty​​, insisted. “And the people who sent him lied instead of saving him. Because of infighting and lies they told to protect themselves, we couldn’t get him home. It was the first of a series of systemic failures.”

By 2015, those failures were too manifest to ignore. Three US citizens—James Foley, Steven Sotloff, and Peter Kassig—had been executed, on camera, by members of the Islamic State. Others, including Kayla Mueller, Warren Weinstein, and Luke Somers, perished in captivity. “When you have an outcome that involves Americans being horrifically beheaded, then you know something has to change,” recalled Josh Geltzer, who helped overhaul the system on President Barack Obama’s watch. He is now the National Security Council legal adviser and deputy White House counsel. The Obama-era review gave rise to the Levinson Act, ratified during the waning months of the Trump administration, which created a hostage-recovery unit in the White House that Geltzer has chaired; a “fusion cell” that sits at FBI headquarters; and Carstens’s shop, based at the State Department.

“The Levinson Act gave families a guidebook,” Levinson’s daughter said, adding, with a tinge of dark humor, “It might well have been called ‘So your loved one’s been taken hostage.’ ” The law, which sets forth criteria for designating someone a wrongful detainee, has proven critical, especially at a time when American power overseas is increasingly being challenged. Over the past decade, according to the James W. Foley Legacy Foundation​​, there has been a 175 percent increase in the number of US nationals detained unjustly. The length of their captivity, on average, has increased by 60 percent. And that was before Hamas grabbed Americans and took them to Gaza.

On a bright fall morning in Miami, a phalanx of officials fanned out across a private aviation facility on the north side of the city’s bustling airport. They were an eclectic bunch whose roles sound like they were written for a TV procedural: a SERE psychologist, flight medics, and hostage recovery specialists. Also on hand was an FBI special agent who had flown in with papers freshly inked by the president. At the helm, dressed in khakis and a white button-down, stood Carstens.

Earlier that morning, with little notice, seven Americans were told they were going home. “My last day in Venezuela was surreal—like out of a movie,” said Heath, recounting how he had learned he was being set free. “I was woken up by my primary torturer,” who gave him the news. “A diplomat with a pistol, which is insane to me.”

Across town, as Khan would tell family, he was handcuffed, hooded, and hustled into a blacked-out van surrounded by men jabbing him with what felt like rifles. Shortly afterward, the pair were reunited before being driven to an airfield where they found themselves in the company of five members of the so-called Citgo Six—executives of a Venezuelan American oil concern who had been held as bargaining chips for more than five years: José Pereira, Jorge Toledo, Tomeu Vadell, Alirio Zambrano, and José Luis Zambrano. (The sixth, Gustavo Cárdenas, had been released in March 2022 on humanitarian grounds.) Before taking their seats aboard a small jet, each detainee was filmed reciting his name and the day’s date: October 1, 2022.

In Miami, meanwhile, as pilots finalized their flight plan, Carstens pored over the “proof of life” videos: clips of the Americans, made only moments before, that the Venezuelans had sent him via an encrypted messaging app. “These trades kind of look like old-school spy swaps,” he explained. “You don’t want the other side to pull a bait and switch where you think you’re getting Prisoner A and instead they send you Prisoner X. So there’s always a requirement to get face-to-face.”

The seven men sat idling on a scorching tarmac. But to secure their release, Carstens and Blinken had had to persuade Biden to assuage Justice Department concerns and free two drug-trafficking cousins known as the Narcosobrinos (who were serving 18-year prison sentences). Their aunt is Venezuela’s formidable first lady, Cilia Flores. “These are hard decisions,” the secretary of state acknowledged after showing me a laminated list of American hostages that he keeps in his pocket. “We value the well-being of every citizen, whoever they are, and the government is determined when they’re wrongfully detained to bring them home. If another country happens to value a spy or a thug, well, that’s the value system they have. Ours is different, and I’ll take ours any day.”

Like Blinken, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan was also monitoring the events as Carstens and company departed Miami and headed to Canouan—a tiny island in the Grenadines—for the hand-over. “The level of tension in all of this is very high because you’re just waiting for something to go wrong,” recalled Sullivan, who told me that as the pressure mounted that day, he was in his office down the hall from the Oval. “There’s deep mistrust on both sides, obviously, that has to be managed and worked through. And then there’s attempting both timing and smooth execution. All of that required a steady cadence of updates to us to make sure that we were hitting our marks for each of the elements of this complex choreography.”

Carstens was aboard the lead aircraft, a gleaming white Gulfstream V with blue stripes. The so-called narco-nephews sat in the rear compartment under the persistent watch of US marshals. A second American plane was also barreling south: a gray Gulfstream III with a mobile ICU—recognition that things could go sideways.

In the forward cabin of his plane, Carstens gathered the team around a large wooden tray table for an 11th-hour briefing. It all felt very Mission: Impossible—and very meta. A staffer captured his comments on a cell phone: “You know, when I watch these movies and the military guys are planning their operation on a plane to the objective area, I always think that’s the most fake thing on earth. You plan the operation like a day or hours ahead, you load your ammunition, then you get on the plane, and you do nothing but sleep.” And yet—he joked, to break the tension—“here we are, just like a movie, en route to the objective, and we’re going to get the plan.”

Then Carstens got all DIY. Using a couple of cell phones and some colorfully wrapped Ghirardelli chocolates as placeholders for planes and people, he walked through the mechanics and potential pitfalls. “For all we know it won’t be a perfect world and they’ll land like this,” he gestured in a way that put the Venezuelan planes behind his own. “So, if we don’t have visual out of both sides of the windows, just keep adapting.”

At home in Winter Garden, Florida, Tania Valdes was worried sick about her son, Osman Khan. “His health was getting worse,” she recalled, dabbing her eyes. “He was having seizures more often and he was rushed to the hospital several times.” She had sent Carstens an urgent email. “I told him that I was afraid that my son would not make it home if they didn’t act quickly.”

In hindsight, Khan’s odyssey from the University of Central Florida to a cell in Caracas had the twists of a spy thriller run through Franz Kafka’s typewriter. When he graduated in the spring of 2021, COVID restrictions were still in force, so he began working remotely—from Colombia. One evening he was out at a nightclub when he met an 18-year-old waitress. Khan relentlessly pursued her, and they soon became an item. “I heard of his girlfriend, Rosa, in December of 2021,” his sister Jasmin recalled. “He said that she was a very good person, very caring, very loving.” (Rosa is a pseudonym meant to protect her identity.)

The couple moved in together, and on New Year’s Eve 2022, Rosa’s father paid a visit. By several accounts, he encouraged the young American to do the honorable thing: visit Venezuela and formally introduce himself to Rosa’s family. Had Khan presented the plan to his own family, it is unlikely he would have made the trek. “I know it’s not safe,” his mother said. “The regime that they have in Venezuela is similar to the one we had in Cuba. So, I absolutely wouldn’t have approved of him going.” His sister was more blunt: “I would have put handcuffs on him.”

Khan posed some obvious questions: Do I need a visa? How will we get there? Is it safe? The answers, according to two sources, did not come from Rosa or her father but rather from her brother, Johnny, a captain in the Bolivarian National Guard of Venezuela, who was apparently tight enough with the regime to have served as a bodyguard for the defense minister. Johnny advised Khan that he was welcome to enter without a visa and was exacting about where to cross: Instead of Cucuta, a well-trafficked border town, Johnny recommended, so Khan would tell relatives, that they traverse the Arauca River from a faraway village, a trip that required a nausea-inducing overnight bus ride.

When they finally arrived, Khan and Rosa joined her father and boarded a decrepit motorized canoe. If Khan was worried, it doesn’t show in the video he shot that day, footage that captured him smiling and laughing as he crossed into a country that had been under withering US sanctions for years.

As the three disembarked, one of their fellow passengers guided them to a taxi that he appeared to own and started driving. Fifteen minutes later, at a military checkpoint, the vehicle was pulled out of line. At first it appeared to be a shakedown: Guards gathered around and rifled through their belongings. That is until Khan was asked to pull out his passport. All hell broke loose. “He’s a gringo! He’s a gringo!” shouted gun-toting men, according to multiple accounts of the incident.

Khan was held for three days in a ramshackle dwelling that reeked of human waste. “When I arrive at the house, they take my handcuffs off and I enter, and I don’t know what is going on,” Khan would later recount to Heath and others. “A really big guy comes up to me and he’s like, ‘So you think you’re a tough guy’ and punches me right in the face. I get knocked to the ground. I get thrown onto this gurney and they strap me down. They cover my face and they start drowning me. I was screaming, and I would just hear laughing. They were waterboarding me.”

His captors—convinced he was an American spy—took him to another room where, he said, they stripped him naked. “One of the guys starts pricking me with something. I was screaming and then I started feeling needles going through my body. They started electrocuting me. I fell to the ground, and I started throwing up. And the guys start making fun of me and they forced me to eat my own vomit.”

Soon he was shoved onto a military plane, flown to Caracas, and taken to the House of Dreams, where he was placed in isolation. Only after he smashed a mirror and tried to cut himself did the guards relent ever so slightly. They opened a slot in his cell door, which allowed him to peer into the corridor and communicate with Matthew Heath and Eyvin Hernandez.

On January 17, 2022, Khan’s sister received a frantic call from their mother. “She was like, ‘Jasmin, I got this voice recording and I need you to listen to it,’ ” she remembered. “I hear Osman. He’s like, ‘Mom, I need something.’ And then it cuts out. And I remember immediately thinking, My brother is being held hostage.”

Within hours, the Khans turned their dining room into a command post as family and friends took out their laptops and tried to reconstruct what had happened. Cross-referencing phone numbers with various social media profiles, they identified some of the individuals who were initially holding Khan: They were members of the same outfit to which Rosa’s brother, Johnny, belonged. The family tried to reach American officials. But since the US had suspended diplomatic operations in Caracas in March 2019, responsibility for American citizens in the country had fallen to a unit stationed at the US embassy in neighboring Bogotá, Colombia.

The Khans, like other families whose loved ones are taken, were eager for Carstens and his 25-member SPEHA team to take up Osman’s case. That, however, required a formal designation by the secretary of state—based on 11 criteria set forth in the Levinson Act—establishing that the person in question had in fact been detained illegally or under false pretenses. In high-profile cases like that of the Journal’s Gershkovich, that process took two weeks. For Khan, it took six months.

The administration is sensitive to allegations of disparate treatment. “I know it can be opaque and confusing to people, but these are often not static stories that are frozen in time,” Blinken argued. “We learn more about the circumstances of someone’s detention as time goes on. We see how a particular case evolves and that is what may in some instances cross the line from [a lawful] arrest to an arbitrary detention.”

When Carstens took over in 2020, he and his chief of staff, Carolee Walker, radically restructured the way families were treated and settled on an unconventional approach. Now, when Americans are “designated,” Carstens and his team fly out to visit their families in their homes. They sit with them. They dine, drink, and cry with them. Before they leave, the families have Carstens’s cell phone number and are encouraged to call him and his staff at any hour of the day—and often do.

Relatives can also visit the team on the sixth floor of the State Department, where a sitting room, adorned with a single white orchid on a small table, is reserved for heart-to-heart sessions. To ensure that the group’s mission is front of mind, the hallways are lined with pictures of current and former hostages, making it impossible for the staff to get to their offices without encountering their successes—and their failures. Another area is dominated by a panel of digital clocks denoting the times in locations where Americans are at risk. During one of my visits, they read: Bamako, Damascus, Tehran, Pyongyang.

While the success of a prestige unit like Carstens’s can breed envy and resentment among counterparts in other offices and agencies, his coterie is generally given a wide berth. That’s because other stakeholders seem to dread the strain and drain that come from constant interaction with distraught family members. One frequent refrain in these circles: “Let’s let Roger’s folks handle that.”

Team SPEHA spends lots of time brainstorming, playing the angles. They vent collectively and console one another when the chance for a release goes up in smoke or when a detainee’s family calls—yelling or sobbing—and says they aren’t working fast enough or being sufficiently creative. “Every day I have a Starbucks coffee at my desk and I’m wearing a suit and tie, I’m thinking, This is total bullshit,” Carstens said about certain facets of the gig. “If this job turned into what it should be, we would be forward in a full-time negotiation, drinking Red Bull, popping Adderall until the job gets done.” Clearly, the soldier in him can be at odds with diplomacy’s demands. At moments like these, he said, he catches himself and realizes, “I’m exactly where I need to be. There’s someone in a prison waiting for me to get this done and get them out.”

“In a very polarized country,” O’Brien told me, “bringing American hostages home is one of the things that pulls people together.” In his experience, the public is captivated by the phenomenon. “I think it’s one of those ‘There but for the grace of God, that could be me.’ ”

Jake Sullivan, who assumed O’Brien’s position at the White House when Biden took office, professed a similar view. “On a day-to-day basis, we’re dealing with big structural issues of historic sweep,” he said, ticking off examples such as climate change, the war in Ukraine, nuclear proliferation.

“Trying to resolve cases of individual people and their families is an entirely different kettle of fish. It is about strategy and diplomacy, for sure. But it’s mostly about trying to deliver—at a very human level—a result in which you are bringing home somebody and reuniting them with their loved ones. That is not wholesale. That is retail. It’s as retail as it gets.”

When the plane door closed in Caracas, Heath and Khan realized that Hernandez had been left behind in the House of Dreams. After six months in Venezuelan custody, the public defender had yet to be labeled by the State Department as wrongfully detained, and therefore he was not part of the exchange. Heath and Khan felt enormous survivor’s guilt.

Upon landing 90 minutes later, Heath worried that, given the flight’s short duration, they may have only gone as far as Cuba. “All the Citgo guys were yelling and they were so happy,” he recalled. “I remember telling Osman, ‘We still have time for this to go bad because they didn’t turn off the engines. Flip a switch or take off the brakes, and that plane rolls right back out to the runway and we go back to Venezuela.’ ”

His suspicions were understandable. During takeoff, the senior Venezuelan official whom Heath describes as his main torturer had been stationed by the plane’s exit with a handgun tucked into his waistband. Ever eager to keep his captors off-balance, Heath started the day by threatening to remain a hostage rather than participate in any exchange in which his nemesis had a role. His outburst—part legitimate grievance, part psyops bluster—evidently prompted his tormentor to make himself scarce in a bid to defuse the situation. Yet once Heath and the other Americans were on board, with their hands and feet bound, the senior prison official reappeared.

Out on the tarmac, the US delegation followed the tabletop plan they had rehearsed. Carstens met and conferred with the head of Venezuela’s National Assembly, Jorge Rodríguez, a psychiatrist turned politician. He is Maduro’s fixer, entrusted to engage with avowed enemies like the United States. Wearing a baseball cap and dark glasses, he looked like he was trying hard not to be recognized—or photographed.

Carstens invited Rodríguez onto the US plane, he recounted. “He had a chance, quickly, to talk with the nephews, make sure that they were okay.” Rodríguez then returned the courtesy. “When I popped on the plane, they all recognized me,” Carstens added. “They all broke out in cheers and screams and shouts of joy. For my part, I wanted to be there with them in spirit, but I still had to count seven people and make sure the math was right. I remember getting up to Matthew Heath, and I think even at that point I could tell he was still looking for a fight.” Carstens turned to the steely Marine and said, “Hey, Matthew, bringing the heat!”

Shortly thereafter, the swap commenced. US marshals unshackled the two Venezuelans and sent them forward. Then the main guard, as Heath recalled, began barking instructions: “ ‘Walk off the plane, walk straight to the other plane. Don’t run, don’t deviate to the left or the right. Walk slowly, do not stop.’ My fear was like, What if they try to snatch us? What if they try to screw this deal up?”

As seven Americans took their first steps toward freedom, Carstens embraced the moment. “I can’t tell you,” he said, “how special it was for me personally just to physically touch someone who was coming off a plane and tell them that it’s almost over.” No one needed that more than Khan. As he shuffled toward Carstens, footage captured of the exchange shows him in a catatonic state. He was no longer in the House of Dreams, but he was not out of danger.

Sullivan described the atmosphere at the White House as upbeat but steeped in uncertainty: “It was 99.9 percent great. And then you’re like, Okay, but we will not fully feel like the mission is complete until their feet are planted on American soil.” He went to see his boss. “Most of the time we’re in there briefing the president on threats and challenges, on things that require very hard decisions. It’s not that often you get to walk into the Oval Office and say, ‘Mr. President, you have the opportunity now to give seven families really good news.’ ”

The hostage families had dialed into a conference call, thinking they were receiving an update from Sullivan, when Biden came on the line. “We’ve secured the release of each of your loved ones,” he began. “They’ve been through a lot, and we’ve been working like the devil to make sure that this happens. They’re all safe—all seven of them, and they are now in the custody and care of the US government.” Sullivan recalled the reaction. “Through the speakerphone in the Oval Office, we could just hear some combination of relief and joy and release and that was an incredibly human, poignant moment, and it’s the kind of thing that really sticks with you. In a job that has a lot of tough days, that was a very good day.”

Over the Caribbean, the scene was less euphoric. “Osman Khan had three physical seizures—I’d say two of them were quite bad,” remembered Carstens, who accompanied the young man on the G-III with an ICU. “What was going through my mind was, We have a medical team here. We’re going to get through this. But the other part that I had to reflect on is: What got him to this state? What happened to him during his time in a prison in Venezuela that caused these seizures?”

Heath, too, was aboard the G-III, which was racing toward Kelly Field at Joint Base San Antonio, where American hostages are typically brought and put through a Pentagon program created to treat and reintegrate prisoners of war. “I’m worried about Osman,” Heath said. “I don’t know what’s going on—maybe he could die.” Heath held Khan’s hand and psychologist Young Hoang rubbed his chest while medics pushed intravenous medications into his system.

I was at the base in Texas when word came that a medical emergency had been declared in flight. The recovery mission was so tightly compartmentalized that those around me were scrambling. “Maybe 15 people in the whole US government knew that this was about to happen,” Carstens would later recollect. “So, imagine if you’re in the Department of Defense and you’re getting a call from your buddies at the State Department warning that in the next few hours seven people are going to be coming in hot from a jail cell in Caracas, some of them with some pretty tough medical situations—and we need help.”

The G-V landed shortly after 8 p.m. Four of the Citgo executives disembarked and walked toward a hangar where dozens of family members had gathered. As I observed the encounter, something both remarkable and disquieting happened: The men came to a halt only a few feet from their loved ones. Conditioned by years behind bars, they appeared to wait for permission to cross an invisible barrier. Then a voice shouted “Go! Go!” and, as though a dam broke, the two sides flooded toward each other. The raw emotion of spouses, children, and grandchildren reuniting was overpowering.

Still, the joy of freedom was tempered by the wreckage that captivity had wrought. The G-III landed 15 minutes later, and Carstens, Heath, and a fifth Citgo exec climbed off. Medical personnel then carried Khan down the jet’s stairs on a stretcher. Months later I showed him footage of that evening. “I don’t even recognize myself,” he remarked. “I can tell I’m out of it—I don’t even look like I’m cognitively there.”

With great interest and emotion, he watched a video I had captured of Carstens addressing the seven returnees. “On behalf of President Biden and the secretary of state, welcome home,” he began. Cheers broke out. After thanking the families for their tireless work in holding the government accountable, Carstens turned to the newly freed men. “I’ve been so inspired and impressed by how resilient you’ve been, how strong you’ve been. And this is key: None of you ever lost faith in your country. You knew that at one point we were going to come and get you.” The cheers grew louder.

October 1, 2022, represented the largest release of US hostages in four decades. But the glow of that day quickly faded, and worry set in: Could the US hostage enterprise repeat the feat and find a way to gain the release of Hernandez—and the dozens of others still held elsewhere in unforgiving conditions?

PART TWO

Under overcast skies, Carstens steered a white Buick rental through the streets of Compton, California, checking his GPS for the home of Henry Martinez, a tattoo artist whose life had been upended when his brother, Eyvin Hernandez, disappeared in March 2022 while on vacation in Colombia—where he had gone to take a break from his day job as an LA public defender.

For his first 10 days in-country, Hernandez had texted and called his family daily. Then he went dark. “We let it slide for a day,” Martinez recalled. “Then the second day came. Maybe his phone’s dead.” Soon he tried reaching hospitals in Medellín. When that failed, he rang the US embassy in Bogotá, passing along details about the Airbnb his brother had booked. The Colombian police followed up, and a camera phone was rolling as they entered the dwelling. “When they’re walking into that door,” Martinez choked up, describing what was running through his head as he watched the video. “The worst of the worst—thinking, you know, they’ll find a body. And there was no one there.”

“We had heard rumors of an American who might have gone missing around the border region of Colombia and Venezuela,” Carstens recalled. “I went to see Matthew Heath and Osman Khan and, typically, the Venezuelans will just parade every American that they have in custody and put them in a room with me and let me kind of sort things out. And in one of those meetings, Eyvin Hernandez showed up.”

Hernandez, a seasoned lawyer, gave a rapid-fire summation of how he wound up in the House of Dreams. Carstens scribbled furiously in a Moleskine notebook as Hernandez recounted how, during his vacation in Colombia, he had met a Venezuelan woman who asked him to accompany her across the border into her home country to sort out a passport issue. After he and the woman traversed a bridge, armed men demanded his papers and soon hauled him away. Like Khan, he was held locally before being turned over to military intelligence in Caracas.

As Carstens entered Martinez’s house in Compton, he was received warmly, hugs and all, by a living room full of Hernandez’s family, friends, and colleagues in the legal profession. It was clear, though, that the attorney’s imprisonment had devastated his loved ones—emotionally and financially—and infuriated his coworkers. “He’s somebody who will use every tool available to defend his clients,” said Drew Havens, a public defender whom Hernandez had mentored. “Now he’s in a situation in Venezuela where he doesn’t have any remedies available to him. And he has told me that it’s incredibly demoralizing for him just knowing that the values that he’s dedicated his life to don’t apply in his current situation.” (Depending on the guards’ moods, prisoners in the House of Dreams are allowed to phone home a few times a month. They can only speak in Spanish, and their conversations are monitored by Venezuelan agents.)

Havens, who sat in on the meeting with Carstens, expressed the belief that there was a solution to his colleague’s predicament: “The Maduro regime wants Alex Saab. If Alex Saab were to be released, I’m confident that Eyvin would have been home yesterday.”

Alex Nain Saab Morán is not a household name, but the Colombian-born businessman has routinely been described as a pivotal figure in helping Venezuela evade sanctions. The US indicted him in 2019 on money-laundering charges and in June 2020 he was detained in Cape Verde during a refueling stop on his way to Iran. O’Brien—Carstens’s and Sullivan’s predecessor—told me that he and other Trump administration officials were so concerned that operatives from Venezuela or one of its allies would try to spring Saab from custody that they stationed US vessels in the waters off the tiny West African island nation. Sixteen months later, the Biden Justice Department would extradite Saab to Miami.

“Within Venezuela, and obviously with the guidance of Nicolás Maduro, Alex Saab was labeled a freedom fighter,” explained Mickey Bergman, an associate of the late Bill Richardson, the New Mexico governor and UN ambassador. An early practitioner of what insiders call fringe diplomacy in regions that can be averse to American diplomats and interests, Bergman has been one of the more active nongovernmental facilitators working to free Americans.

Bergman shared the larger backstory about Venezuela’s repeated abductions. He argued that Saab’s arrest and continued confinement had invited significant blowback. “Alex Saab gets extradited in October of 2021,” Bergman said. That same day, the Citgo employees “get sent back to prison from house arrest. And months later, Osman Khan gets arrested and detained, and Eyvin Hernandez gets arrested and detained. Especially if the Venezuelans’ narrative is that Alex Saab is a political prisoner wrongfully detained in the United States, you can see how there’s a buildup there.”

US officials had consistently told the captives’ families that trading Saab was a nonstarter on the grounds that he had yet to be tried. Federal prosecutors also argued, in pleadings unsealed by a judge in Miami, that the businessman’s life might be at risk if he were to return to Caracas. The reason? Saab, they say, had been a confidential DEA informant who, as part of his agreement to surrender to US authorities, provided details about bribes and sanction-busting crimes he committed in the US and Venezuela. Maduro’s reputed bagman, however, failed to surrender as promised in 2019, prompting his opportunistic arrest the following year.

While the prospect of swapping Saab was unpalatable, it was not without precedent. Only weeks before visiting Hernandez’s family, Carstens, along with David Cotter, the NSC’s director for hostage and detainee affairs, had flown Viktor Bout, a notorious arms dealer (and inspiration for the film Lord of War), to an airfield in Abu Dhabi for the high-​profile exchange for Brittney Griner. And eight months before that, Carstens and cohorts took part in the swap of Konstantin Yaroshenko—a Russian pilot and drug trafficker—for Trevor Reed, a Marine Corps veteran who had been arrested in Moscow for allegedly assaulting a police officer. (Reed has denied the charges.)

Still, addressing the group in the Martinez living room in Compton, Carstens focused on the art of the possible. “I need to start finding other options that are not Saab-related,” he confided. “One of the reasons that we go down to Caracas is: I want to sit this close to Jorge Rodríguez and this close to President Maduro and just throw it out there, like ‘Okay, well, this option is no longer available. How are we going to solve this?’ ”

“I still believe so much in you,” said Hernandez’s father, Pedro Martinez, as the meeting drew to a close. “And I know you’re going to bring him here.” Both men wiped away tears before Carstens vowed, “We will bring him home.”

On a dreary evening a few weeks later, a crowd gathered for a candlelight vigil outside Hernandez’s alma mater, UCLA Law School. Grammy nominee Aloe Blacc sang a stirring rendition of Donny Hathaway’s 1973 anthem “Someday We’ll All Be Free.”

One speaker, though unknown to the crowd, was impossible to ignore. “I was locked up with Eyvin in Venezuela. My name is Osman Khan.” With welling eyes, he continued, “When I got on that plane and I saw that he wasn’t going to be with me, it hurt and it still hurts,” he said, struggling to keep it together. “When I had my convulsions due to my torture, Eyvin always stood there for me. And just the same way he had my back, we all need to have his back…. Thank you all. And bring Eyvin home!” At that, those assembled started chanting “Bring Eyvin home.”

Heath, while lending his voice to the campaign for the public defender’s release, was still bringing the heat. “They’re sadists with no oversight,” he said of the Venezuelan intelligence service. “They electrocuted me. They asphyxiated me—put a plastic bag on my head. Forced nudity. A lot of beatings.” He showed me the scars where he sliced his forearm and wondered aloud how Hernandez was coping. “He’s tough. But it’s hard on him. He’s alone. He’s distressed. He needs help.”

What Heath and Khan did not know were the other intense efforts underway. “We’re absolutely determined to bring him home,” Blinken said when we spoke about Hernandez at the time. “I’m confident that we’ll get there. The challenge is that the other side gets a vote, and you can be going down one track and it looks promising, and all of a sudden, they decide to move the goalposts, and you have to adjust.” He was not kidding.

In less than a year, Carstens and his associates had pried seven hostages loose from Venezuela. They had worked with various intermediaries to trade Russia’s so-called merchant of death for a basketball star, helped gain the release of a Navy veteran named Mark Frerichs from Afghanistan, and assisted in the recovery of five Americans from Iran. Still, the man I had known for 15 years seemed as though he was suspended in a kind of purgatory: haunted and hailed.

During a ceremony at Fort Bragg, Carstens was inducted as a distinguished member of the Special Forces regiment. Weeks later, at a Washington gala thrown by the James W. Foley Legacy Foundation, he was bestowed with the Robert A. Levinson excellence in government service award. Yet in some weird, almost cosmic way, it felt as though the hostages were ever-present. On the night of the black-tie Foley event, as Carstens sat with his family up near the podium, Henry Martinez, seated across the room, received a call from his brother inside the House of Dreams. Martinez excused himself and walked with Hernandez’s colleague Drew Havens to the lobby of the National Press Club.

“We’re in DC, we’re fighting for you, man,” Havens told his mentor over speakerphone, trying to accentuate the positive. Martinez took a dimmer view of their progress with Washington officialdom, a wide swath of which was seated in the ballroom nearby: “We’re talking to some people—about to smack some motherfuckers upside their head so they can act up and shit.” Hernandez admitted, “Man, I’m fucking tired of being here—13 months.” At that, Martinez softened. “Just keep the faith. We’re pushing the right buttons. It’s just all this fucking bureaucracy. You’ll be home soon.” The hostage, evidently hearing the tension in his brother’s voice, tried to buck him up. “Just to make things a little bit lighter, what happened in the NFL draft?”

Two weeks later, I boarded a government jet with Carstens bound for Canouan, the hard-to-reach island where the previous prisoner swap had unfolded. Dubbed the place where “billionaires go to escape millionaires,” it is a verdant no-man’s-land where senior Venezuelan officials—several of whom have been indicted and sanctioned by the West—can visit without fear of arrest.

“I don’t think any other country would spend this much time, money, or effort to bring its citizens home,” Carstens mused before adding that those on the other side of the negotiating table are often at a loss to explain America’s devotion to freeing its own. “I have these really strange conversations where I’m trying to convey that it’s part of our ethos. My nation actually cares about the individual and that the reason we’re there bargaining is because it’s a matter of national importance to us. The individual matters.”

We had flown in for a sit-down with Jorge Rodríguez, Maduro’s close associate and designated Washington whisperer. After landing on a secluded airstrip, we were met by a Venezuelan security team and driven in a white van to a sprawling villa with jaw-dropping views of the coral-blue Caribbean. The contrast between the location and the topic could not have been starker.

The sunset meeting had been arranged by an intermediary whom I’ll call Massimo, a debonair entrepreneur with business ties in Caracas and the US. As a sideline, he has worked to resolve the issue of Americans languishing in Venezuelan prisons and was a key player in brokering the release of Heath, Khan, and the others.

Massimo is what Carstens calls a wizard: a hyperconnected contrarian thinker with a knack for finding solutions to intractable problems. “He’s trusted by the Venezuelan opposition, by the regime, by the United States, by the Qataris,” Carstens explained. “In the world of kings, wizards are the people underneath them that can meet, close the gaps between different positions, and start to pull deals together in a way that the kings can’t. I’d say, on my list of five wizards, Massimo is right up there at the top.”

For an hour, Carstens was seated on a veranda with Rodríguez and Massimo—who were smoking Cuban cigars and sipping rum—before I joined the conversation. The Venezuelan ask was unmistakable: They wanted Alex Saab. And in return for his safe passage, Rodríguez suggested, his country was willing to give up Americans it was holding, starting with Eyvin Hernandez.

Carstens politely parried with a consolation prize: Venezuela, he said, was welcome to send a representative to visit Saab at the federal lockup in Miami. Rodríguez took a shine to the idea and said that if Carstens made it happen, then he, in turn, would arrange a follow-up meeting with Maduro himself—in Caracas.

“I’m cautiously optimistic that we’ll be able to get Eyvin back within the next four or five or six weeks,” the envoy said as we navigated the dark, winding road back to the landing strip. “And frankly, I might not have said that five or six hours ago.” He stressed the importance of personal interaction. “In every negotiation there gets to be this point of stress where the senior leadership is demanding this, that, and the other—and the people at the negotiating table have to trust each other, have to know each other, and have to be willing to, in a way, not just invest in each other, but really fight for the negotiation points that they’ve worked towards. And that does not happen unless you get face-to-face.”

He would later continue, “The people I talk to, most of them didn’t go to Harvard or the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. They came up in hard environments. Some have stolen elections. Some have killed their way to the top. Part of my job is to establish empathy.” Before each meeting, he said, “We’ll actually come up with a strategy. But when we finally sit down across from someone, especially someone that comes from a pretty tough country, an adversary, a dictatorship, you have to start relying on intuition.”

What Carstens couldn’t intuit was the fact that Rodríguez was, in diplo-speak, channel surfing—talking to other US officials, promising different things in different conversations, and basically playing the ends against the middle. A week before we had arrived in Canouan, Rodríguez, whose movements are constrained by US sanctions, had traveled to Doha for a clandestine meeting. His interlocutor on the US side was Juan Gonzalez, the NSC’s senior director for the Western Hemisphere. A Colombian-born veteran of the Obama years, he had spent more than a decade focused on the Andean region, and his views on Maduro and his minions carried weight with Biden and Sullivan.

“What we wanted was to do this in secret for a while until we actually knew where things were going,” Gonzalez told me as we huddled in an attic-like room on the top floor of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. “Qatar, much like they’ve been helping us in other ways, helped facilitate some of those exchanges.”

At the direction of Sullivan and his deputy, Jon Finer, Gonzalez was trying to reorient US policy on Venezuela away from Trump’s “maximum pressure” campaign, which, among other things, had involved recognizing an antiregime figure, Juan Guaidó, as the legitimate leader of the country. More than 50 nations had gone along with the gambit. But in April 2023 it became untenable: Guaidó was kicked to the curb by the opposition itself. The Biden administration sensed an opening and, with the blessing of the opposition’s chief negotiator, Gerardo Blyde, began in-person talks with the Maduro regime.

Gonzalez noted that early sessions were filled with the ritual “airing of -grievances.” Despite his training as a psychiatrist, Rodríguez evidently would not contain his disdain for the US. “The interesting thing about Jorge is that his father was tortured and killed by a previous government,” Gonzalez elaborated. “So he has, in my view, a deep-seated hatred of America as an imperialist-affiliated government. These guys feel they are on this mission to bring a better Venezuela and that we are the ones standing in the way of their ability to create this socialist or communist utopia.”

“We would say to them, ‘You don’t want to be in the same club as countries like North Korea. We should focus on negotiations, clear the decks,’ ” he recalled. Some issues were resolved quickly, like the repatriation of untold numbers of people back to Venezuela who had unlawfully crossed America’s southern border. But Maduro’s representatives held firm on the issue of American hostages, whom, as Gonzalez lamented, they treated like currency.

The hostage portfolio is replete with false starts, shifting motivations, euphoric moments of promise, and dead ends. All were on full display last June when I landed at Simón Bolívar International Airport near Caracas. Rodríguez had sent word that his president was amenable to engaging with Carstens, who would be arriving on a government plane. And Maduro had seemed agreeable to granting me a rare press interview, but I was told he first wanted to take my measure. It was not clear what that would entail, but there I was in Venezuela with my blue passport, which no one asked to see, much less stamp. Rodríguez, I’m told, had set things up so that our group, flying in our own small aircraft, never encountered an immigration official.

I was ushered off the jet and into a bulletproof car with some burly bodyguards. We waited planeside until a matte gray G-III pulled up. Carstens bounded down the steps, ducked into the car, and our armored convoy raced off.

As we made our way into the capital, however, anonymous plane spotters—who had tracked the tail number of Carstens’s jet—took to social media with allegations that the envoy had arrived on a CIA aircraft and that a hostage trade or recovery was imminent. The reports were not accurate. The plane belonged to a State Department contractor, and Carstens was there to see Maduro in hopes that he might hand over an American as a good-faith gesture while continuing to seek a grander bargain with the US—one that might include sanctions relief that could help the oil-rich country reopen its spigots. For my part, I was there to see if Maduro would speak about his reasons for taking Americans hostage and the prospects for their release. Our collective hope was that the separate diplomatic and journalistic forays might aid in springing Eyvin Hernandez.

The following morning, as we wound our way through Caracas, I glanced over at Carstens, who was looking intently at a card he had taken from his wallet. When I asked him to explain, he said that when headed into a negotiation with “an adversary about trying to release an American,” he tends to refer to a Bible verse. “I’ll just read and meditate and pray to God.” The verse that day was Matthew 10:16, which he summarized as: “Help me be as wise as a serpent, innocent as a dove, and please give me the words that you want me to offer in that moment.” In essence, he was beckoning the Almighty: “I might not be smart enough to come up with the brilliant words to say. So, Lord, if you can help me by giving me the words that would be most effective, I’m here.”

We arrived at Rodríguez’s tightly guarded compound in a leafy part of town. He invited me to sit in on his meeting with Carstens. While some of it was off the record, the two men—over rounds of espresso and local pastries—shared an easy rapport. Consistent with his remit, Carstens sought the immediate return of wrongfully detained Americans. Rodríguez, though, had his own demands, and Saab was priority number one. He casually boasted that he was talking to other US parties, conferring with Gonzalez at the NSC about the broader US-Venezuelan relationship. Still, our host said Maduro wanted to see us at Miraflores, the presidential palace, at 7 p.m.

In the hours that followed, Carstens and a small team of American diplomats visited the House of Dreams, where they checked up on Hernandez and other detainees. They then stopped at another facility where, to their surprise, they encountered a prisoner decked out in a pinstriped Gucci leisure suit. It was Leonard Glenn Francis, the fugitive known as Fat Leonard. To say he was wrongly detained would be a stretch. The Malaysian national was rightfully detained, but in the wrong country. Eight years earlier, he had pleaded guilty to bribing scores of US officers in what is said to be the largest corruption scandal in the history of the Navy. Before sentencing, however, he ditched his ankle bracelet in San Diego and headed to Cuba, then Venezuela.

The American delegation also saw two other noteworthy individuals: Airan Berry and Luke Denman. Former Green Berets, the pair were rolled up by the Venezuelans in 2020 for their alleged part in a half-baked coup attempt. For their role in “Operation Gideon,” they’d been sentenced to 20 years. The envoy, in the absence of a local embassy with consular services, checked in on them during his visits. The men—veterans of the same Special Forces group that Carstens had served with years before—told him point-blank to prioritize the release of other Americans.

While US officials were still inside the correctional facility, Massimo texted me to say that Maduro had canceled our meeting, citing an unforeseen “emergency.” What’s more, Rodríguez had split town with him.

I was not shocked that a head of state would blow me off; that’s an occupational hazard for journalists. It was unnerving, however, that a chest-thumping autocrat would ghost an American president’s special envoy—someone Maduro had specifically invited in hopes of improving Venezuela’s fortunes. It was also a bad sign that he made no effort to reschedule. It was worse still for Hernandez, who at that point was entering his 15th month in captivity.

We gathered at a private residence in the hills for a debrief and dinner. Then things took an even bleaker turn when a message came through from Rodríguez indicating he was on the road with Maduro and regurgitating social media claims about a CIA plane and a secret mission. The implication was clear: The Venezuelans were blaming the US side for a lack of operational security.

As midnight drew near, we heard that Maduro was on a military base seeking to shore up what was described as lackluster support among key members of the armed forces—the hidden hand that keeps him in power. (Earlier this year, in fact, the government arrested 32 alleged plotters for supposedly trying to assassinate him.) With each phone call or text, the whole thing felt a little coup-y, and those of us gathered around the dinner table scrambled to arrange our departures.

It seemed like a fitting coda that even my exit was fraught. Carstens’s plane—with his retinue of officials carrying black diplomatic passports—taxied and took off first. When our pilots tried to follow suit, the engines powered down. One of them exited to troubleshoot the problem. And as I looked down at the security officials outside my window, I was left to ponder how I would explain to them—given Maduro’s cold shoulder—why my decidedly civilian passport had neither an entry nor an exit stamp. Fortunately, it was a blown fuse that was quickly fixed. We flew out with Massimo standing on a bluff alongside the runway, waving farewell.

Before we departed, I’d watched Carstens fume, uncharacteristically, pounding on the table at one point. He had brought along his entourage, only to have been turned away without explanation. “We’re done,” he’d said, referring to the Maduro bait and switch. “I’m going to worry about Afghanistan, China, Syria, Russia—because this was, actually, no-shit important. Mathematically, this is not going to happen right now.” I understood this to mean, sadly and quite decisively, that Hernandez would not be getting out any time soon. (Maduro and Rodríguez declined repeated requests for an interview.)

The fracas in Caracas led to considerable soul-searching. But as Carstens focused on hard cases in other places, the administration designated Gonzalez as the single point of contact for the Maduro regime.

Throughout the summer and into the fall, he met with Rodríguez on the down-low in unexpected locales, alternating between Doha and Milan. Whatever else was on the agenda—sanctions relief, oil production, Maduro’s desire for respect— the issue of hostages was never far from the fore. “Eyvin and the unjustly detained Americans kept being something that they kept taking off the table and taking off the table,” Gonzalez recounted with exasperation.

Things came to a head in a rendezvous at a private residence in Doha in late September. Gonzalez represented the US side; Rodríguez led the Venezuelan delegation—with a Qatari interlocutor. Gonzalez recalled, “We were getting very close to finishing our understanding that would allow them to finalize the political agreement with the opposition and would include a good-faith gesture at the beginning. That, for us, was Eyvin.”

Intent on wrapping things up, Gonzalez went to the US embassy in Doha for a secure call with Sullivan and Deputy National Security Advisor Jon Finer at the White House. With their blessing, he returned to the villa in hopes of sealing a deal. When he arrived, though, his Qatari host pulled him aside to say that while Gonzalez was away, the Venezuelans had had several calls with Maduro. For his part, Gonzalez watched as Rodríguez and the governor of Miranda State in Venezuela “got into a side room and just started screaming at each other.”

“They came in and said that they couldn’t do Eyvin,” he recalled. After several more hours of negotiation, Gonzalez flew home empty-handed.

Then the ground shifted.

Nine days after the stalemate in Doha, Hamas forces swarmed over the Israeli border. And Carstens and his lieutenants were tested as never before. “October 7th happened, and everyone was shocked, stunned, surprised—pick your word,” he told me. “I initially thought my caseload might have gone up by 27 Americans who might have been either killed or captured and taken into Gaza.” As remains were recovered and identified, the number of American hostages, it turned out, was 12. (Some would later be returned in a trade. Others, the US determined, had perished.)

“There were a lot of sleepless nights because of both workload and just the pain of imagining what those people were going through,” he said. His voice began to crack. “It’s a heavy weight,” he said of the ongoing horrors endured by the hostages in Gaza. “It’s probably bad enough if you’re an average citizen watching this, but it’s worse when it’s your job to get these people back.” His team began dialogues with a whole new set of families going through immeasurable anguish.

“There is a sense,” Finer said, “that when a crisis happens somewhere in the world, the US government can only focus on one thing at a time.” Not so, he insisted. “While we were negotiating and working on getting hostages released in Gaza, at the same time, Venezuela was also something that we did not take our eye off of.”

The Venezuelans, meanwhile, were finally reading the room. With their allies—Iran and Russia—antagonizing and actively confronting US interests, the Maduro regime had apparently sensed that Washington’s tolerance for gamesmanship had worn thin. They returned to the bargaining table in earnest.

And so, with the world’s attention seemingly focused anywhere but South America, on October 18, 2023, Blinken heralded the arrival of the Barbados Agreement, which laid out a road map for Venezuela to hold credible, competitive elections in 2024. Although the deal was signed by the Maduro government and the opposition, the US had acted as a midwife, providing crucial sanctions relief that, absent corruption, might allow Venezuela—with the world’s largest proven oil reserves—to rehabilitate its shambolic economy. Americans, it was hoped, might benefit from better prices at the pump.

In announcing the agreement, Blinken said American officials understood that by the end of November, Venezuela would “begin the release of all wrongfully detained US nationals and Venezuelan political prisoners.” But again, there was a snag. While some Venezuelans were indeed freed in the weeks that followed, Maduro and his cronies did not let a single American go.

Hernandez and his family expected that he would be released by Thanksgiving. But the holiday came and went. So, too, did the November 30 deadline. To keep up the pressure, his father and brother traveled to Washington with Drew Havens. At the time, Havens told me, they had heard that another American had recently attempted suicide. “It’ll be a tough pill to swallow if Eyvin doesn’t get out soon,” he said.

As the days ticked by in December and the capital was full of infighting over aid to Israel and Ukraine, not to mention securing the southern border, behind the scenes at the White House, a frantic effort was underway to extract those held in Caracas. Time was tight, particularly with the nation heading into an election year, in which every action or inaction might be politicized. Suddenly, what was once impossible became inevitable.

On December 6, 2023, Rodríguez called Gonzalez with a proposition: If the US could find a way to send Maduro’s moneyman Alex Saab back, Venezuela would release all Americans, wrongfully detained or not, hand over Fat Leonard, and let 20 of its own political prisoners walk free.

Finer and White House chief of staff Jeff Zients went to see Biden in the Oval Office on December 7. “We laid out for the president our understanding of the deal that was on the table,” Finer recalled. “He asked if everybody on our national security team was on the same page. We said that they were.” At that point the president wondered how the deal might play in Congress and called Delaware senator Chris Coons, his friend and close Capitol Hill ally, for counsel. Satisfied that the swap was politically defensible, Biden instructed his team to put the wheels in motion.

At 6 a.m. on December 20, 2023, I was on the tarmac at Miami International with Carstens and David Cotter, the FBI hostage specialist assigned to the White House, who bore a strong resemblance to Irish actor Domhnall Gleeson. Moments later, US marshals pulled up in a minivan and escorted Saab—shackled and sporting a man bun, sweatpants, and a crisp white T-shirt—up the stairs of a G-III, nearly identical to the one that had caused such a stir in Caracas six months earlier.

The preceding day and a half had been a whirlwind. In the eyes of the White House, the Venezuelans were backpedaling. “The reason this got stuck is because they all of a sudden said that they were going to release the 20 Venezuelan prisoners later,” Gonzalez recalled ruefully. The planes were already in Miami and the American team was effectively camped out in a hotel lobby nearby. I watched them pace and field a flurry of calls from Washington and Caracas. Gonzalez was doing much the same at the White House. “This was probably the only time I’ve thrown something across the room in my office,” he told me. “I briefed this up and said, ‘Do we go or do we not go?’ ” Ultimately, Finer and Sullivan put the question to Biden, who insisted that Venezuela stick to the deal. The trade, originally scheduled for the 19th, was delayed.

“I was freaking out at that point,” said Gonzalez. “What if they pull back the Americans, then we’ll get nothing. But Jake and Jon said, ‘Calm down, stand your ground, we have our guidance,’ ” Gonzalez recalled. “Saab is a horrible criminal. It is a very, very tough decision that only the president of the United States can make. And if we were going to do something like that, we wanted everybody”—meaning all US citizens, Fat Leonard, and the 20 political prisoners the Venezuelans had promised.

A waiting game began. The following evening, however, the decision was made to send the planes to Canouan and force the issue. The same sparse island runway. The same setup: captives held in aircraft. This time, six planes—two American and four Venezuelan—rolled into position. While the detainees’ freedom seemed close, it was by no means certain.

Whatever understanding had been reached while the team was in Miami was firm enough for the White House to authorize the mission—sending Carstens and company south with Saab in tow. And yet details remained to be ironed out before they would greenlight the trade, which would have required Cotter to obtain Saab’s countersignature on the pardon papers that days earlier the president had executed, by hand, in the dining room off the Oval.

Regardless, the sides began going through the motions. Rodríguez boarded the G-III to confirm Saab’s presence. Carstens bounded up the stairs of each of the three planes flown up from Caracas that were carrying captives. “I found Eyvin on the first plane I entered. I looked him in the eyes and said, ‘It’s finally happening. You’re going home,’ ” Carstens recounted. “I also told him, ‘We’re gonna need some time to work things out here on the ground, but the day ends with you back home in the United States.’ ”

Carstens also confirmed the presence of Fat Leonard, the American Green Berets Berry and Denman, and a mix of citizens who had been—or were in line to be—designated as wrongfully detained. All told, the US was set to receive 10 citizens and one fugitive in exchange for an indicted money launderer.

The American team then boarded the lead Venezuelan plane—belonging to Maduro—on which Rodríguez had arrived. In Washington’s view, the Venezuelans needed to affirmatively prove that they had released the 20 political prisoners. “They were in different courthouses or prisons around the country and so it was not actually easy to get verification—essentially photos of them leaving custody,” explained Finer, who, along with Gonzalez, was following events from the White House. “A number of hours went by where the Venezuelans were saying, ‘Just go ahead and execute the deal.’ We were saying, ‘We’re not going to get suckered into doing something when it’s not clear you’ve lived up to your end.’ ”

Aboard Maduro’s plane, Massimo tried to keep the mood light, hoping for the best. Both sides conferred with their capitals on cell phones, turning the Canouan runway into a makeshift Casablanca. While things were outwardly convivial, tempers were flaring over the phone. “There were lots of calls going,” Gonzalez explained, and in “those hours, I was screaming at Jorge. I said, ‘We’re not going to be wheels up until every single Venezuelan has been released; we just can’t do it. That’s our instruction.’ ”

But Rodríguez had other ideas. According to Gonzalez, who at the time was pacing the halls at the White House, “On multiple occasions, Rodríguez would say, ‘I’m just going to get out of here.’ ” Cotter sensed the situation was deteriorating: “We started to get worried that maybe they”—the group on Rodríguez’s plane—“were going to try and take off” before everything was finalized. So Cotter crossed the tarmac, climbed the steps of the lead Venezuelan jet, and made a beeline for Saab, who was seated “right in the middle.” Cotter made it clear that if Saab were to leave without the presidential pardon, he would revert to being a fugitive, forever in the crosshairs of US authorities. Saab took in the gravity of the ultimatum. Then he announced to the other passengers, “I will stay.” Said Cotter: “At that point, everything kind of settled down.”

“By about 1:30 in the afternoon,” Finer recounted, “it was clear that we had documentation that the political prisoners had been released.” Saab, with pardon papers in hand, would fly to a hero’s welcome in Caracas, where Maduro would praise him lavishly—and place him in charge of the country’s international investment center.

As Saab departed, the two American planes made their way down the runway, four long and tense hours after they had arrived. Hernandez and the others were aboard the G-III with Carstens and Cotter. Some 2,500 miles away, in Milwaukee, Biden stood at the foot of Air Force One to announce, “We’ve secured the release of every American being held in Venezuela…. They’re in an aircraft on their way home to the United States.” He then emphasized what his administration considers a cornerstone of its foreign policy: “We have no higher priority than the release of… Americans being held hostage.”

“As we were taking off,” Carstens recounted, “I could see Eyvin lost in his thoughts, just looking at the blue waters of Canouan.” The Angeleno, whose fellow public defenders joined forces with his family when he disappeared, was filled with gratitude. “I’m overwhelmed because of all the support, all the love that I received,” he later told me. “You don’t expect this mass of people that you know in your life to get together and dedicate themselves to getting you out. That’s not something anybody expects—I don’t care how great your friends are. But it just so happens I have the greatest friends in the world.”

Of the bonds built behind bars with Osman Khan and Matthew Heath, Hernandez said, “In the most unlikely of places—a prison—you find this community that embraces you, that gives you solidarity and love and hope and strength. It showed me what life could be like if we all just decided to help each other and treat each other like family.” Hernandez does not look back in anger, nor does he regard his confinement as wasted time. “Reflection is a very powerful thing—it’s something that we almost never get to do because we’re so busy in our daily lives. And so, what I did was reflect on who I wanted to become—what was the best way for me to overcome the daily struggles and focus on being a better person while I’m there so that when I get out, I’m going to be ready for a new chapter in my life.”

The jet was hurtling toward Joint Base San Antonio, where Hernandez and his fellow hostages would soon be reunited with loved ones. During the flight they got some shut-eye. But Carstens, not surprisingly, was still haunted. “Venezuela’s finally in my rearview mirror,” he recalled. “But then the phrase that goes right on after that is: Now can we just clear up Afghanistan, Russia and China, and Gaza? That’s where your head goes.”

Over the last two years, Carstens and his crew have recovered 19 Americans from the House of Dreams and other Venezuelan prisons. Yet there was no looking back. “You cannot rest on your laurels,” Carstens said. “You can’t sit still. People are depending on us getting our shit together and figuring out how to get this done.”