The Hostage Negotiation Edition

Talking to the man who helped bring home Brittney Griner and Otto Warmbier.

Nick Parish (NP) has been a long-standing friend of WITI since his days as a junior reporter on the New York Post’s sports desk. He’s since worked in editorial, strategy, and product design and currently lives in Portland, Oregon. He’s a fly fishing mentor to Noah, and has written about fermentation, dams, media sharing in Cuba, the Bike Bus, and Super Neighbors for WITI. He writes about fly fishing at currentflowstate.com.

Nick here. Over the last decade Mickey Bergman has operated largely out of the spotlight, helping free Americans held by some of the world’s most repressive regimes: Iran, North Korea, Russia, Venezuela, Syria, Gambia and Sudan. He’s been responsible for securing the liberty of many, including high-profile missions to free student Otto Warmbier from North Korea and WNBA star Brittney Griner from Russia. As the director of Global Reach, he acts as a non-governmental representative for families of political prisoners and hostages. Together with his mentor and friend, the late Governor Bill Richardson, he was twice-nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. 

Why is this interesting?

His memoir, In the Shadows: True Stories of High-Stakes Negotiations to Free Americans Captured Abroad, reveals the inner-workings of Mickey’s high-profile efforts. It’s a gripping tale of success and failure on the biggest stages, and a glimpse at how the diplomatic sausage is made, at the speed of human-relationship-building. 

I had the good fortune to join him on a pair of his Fringe Diplomacy trips to Cuba, and was pleased to connect with him for a conversation after reading In the Shadows.

Bergman, photographed by David Ewald

NP: Across every mission in the book is the use of emotional intelligence and empathy. How would you encourage others to develop this in themselves? 

MB: When I want to engage with someone, I lead with my own vulnerability. I start out by opening up personally, not professionally. And in combination with my personality, or what I project, the combination lowers their guard and invites them to open up. They’re much more open with you. By exposing your neck, and being vulnerable, with both parties knowing they can use that against you if they want to, you’re laying down a level of basic trust you can build on. 

The most important thing is figuring out who you are. Once you’re comfortable with who you are, you use that in terms of who you want to be when you lead. From my perspective, I can’t bluff. My face shows my emotions very clearly. I lean in with my vulnerability because I’m comfortable in that space. I’m comfortable privately connecting and sharing information, it’s a very, very different style to what you might expect. 

At one point in the book you mention a lesson you keep learning about the work you do, which is “never assume you know everything that’s going on.” To what extent is a primary goal in your negotiation helping both parties build shared knowledge? It feels like a lot of the solutions you come to are only available once there’s a mutual, symmetrical understanding of the information at hand. 

This notion that in negotiation you need to bluff, hide things, is not how I do it. There’s some notion of that in transactional negotiations, yeah. You want this glass of milk, and you bluff on the price you’re willing to pay. But what I’m focused on in my type of negotiations is what happens before that. I’m establishing a relationship with my counterpart, so we can be very honest, even if we don’t talk about the price. We can be open about how much we want that glass of milk, and what are the limitations of our position around wanting that glass of milk. We talk about intentions, not price. When you set up around intentions you defuse potential defensive reactions. 

That goes the same for me in an unspoken way with a counterpart, whether it’s a leader or bureaucrat. Setting those intentions: I’m there to listen to their intentions, even if I’m skeptical. When you do that you create a different environment. 

So many times, even when we were working through a severe crisis, I always tried to assume the best intentions. Even if it was with people that tried to hurt me. Because not assuming best intentions, I cannot be effective. It was true with my North Korean counterparts when we were negotiating over releasing Otto Warmbier, and it was true with my counterparts at the State Department when I felt that they wronged me. 

Let me give you an example from when I tried to engage over the situation in Gaza. I can go into the conversation, with whichever side, and have exactly the same content in two different meetings. But if I just start one of those meetings, with “Hey, before we get into it, let’s acknowledge we’re all hurting, and some of us have suffered, and people that we know have been lost, but for the sake of this conversation, let’s assume the best intentions,” that little setting of tone can lead to extremely different results.

There’s another phrase you use in the book, “the difficult, we can do right now, the impossible will take time.” I remember hearing a similar phrase from you in Cuba, “you can do anything in seven minutes”. In many of your missions you’re forced into a position where you have to move fast. How are you able to move your team quickly, making sure everyone is aligned, when the stakes are so high and logistics, communications, etc. need to be so precise? 

That’s an old military half-joke. Anything is possible: you can shower in seven minutes, you can eat dinner in seven minutes. You and I had situations like that in Cuba, where we have had to make adjustments on the spot. Whoever I’m working with, whether it’s negotiating with a counterpart, or working with my own team, it’s the same. By the time we’re in the situation where we have to move quickly, we’re personally connected, and the communication is extremely open. The power of sitting together—even if it’s two or three people—and throwing ideas into space honestly, not caring if they might be shot down because they’re stupid or crazy or mundane, creating the environment in a team like that where we can throw it all out there, the power of that generating solutions is just unmatched. 

This is hard if the environment in the team isn’t right. If people are afraid to show a plan’s weakness and point out its flaws. Especially if you have a big personality who might bark at you. But it’s a must. Our extraction from Myanmar, we could have come up with a plan and it could have sounded great, but unless Steve Ross had been honest enough to articulate holes in that plan we would have crashed and burned. 

You connect with your counterparts in other countries across a lot of different communications forms: face-to-face, video calls, text, proxied embassy cable, etc. How do you decide when it’s time to escalate to a video or phone call, or to an in-person meeting? How do you make sure to use each medium to its best advantage? 

If I can meet in person, that’s what I do. I get so much non-verbal information when I sit in front of people. I look at their facial expressions. Their physical reaction. Other people in the room. Are they leaning forward or back? Are they looking at each other? That all helps me get a sense of their state of mind when they’re engaging in the conversation and processing things. 

When individuals you are engaging with look at each other, you can learn a lot from that. And you can call them on that. People appreciate it a lot when their non-verbal communications send a signal, and you invite them to talk about that. 

In the pandemic, in the best case we had a Zoom, in the worst case a WhatsApp text. We’ve had some Zooms with the Russian embassy when we were working on freeing Trevor Reed and Paul Whelan where you could see a person’s face, but you had no idea what they’re looking at. And you have no idea if they’re looking at each other. But, when we were reduced to texts, in some of these, it might sound funny, but I found emoji to be extremely useful in negotiations. Emoji help add a layer of emotional tone. 

English is not my first language. For my counterparts, it’s not their first language. While we meet it’s important to speak directly, but the written medium, afterward, is critical to make sure we understood each other and were clear in what we were saying. But I use written text after a conversation, not before. Before, it will limit the dialogue. Afterwards it will help eliminate gaps in the understanding. 

There’s always been a certain cachet to contemporaneous note-taking. Charles Hill, the American diplomat and later co-founder of Yale’s Grand Strategy program was a famous note-taker. Do you rely on notes to recreate these conversations in a precise way? 

Reading is torturous for me. So is writing. I think I’m slightly dyslexic. If I focus on writing in a meeting, I’m missing the meeting. I can’t read or write in meetings. If there’s something said I need to remember, I write a word or two to remind myself of that. I rely a lot on taking in the meeting itself, the energy, the body language. Afterwards, the way I retain the information and process it is I retell the story of the meeting. Not just describing the meeting, but giving the context of how I understand it to be. The intention behind the conversation, and the sequence of it. As you tell the story, the logic and progression of it stays. It just flows out, suddenly you remember these details. I tell all the context and motivations. By telling the story, I retain the information. 

Every trip we’ve been on I’ve always seen you in the same outfit: black slacks, black T-shirt, black blazer. Take us through your uniform. Why? Do you have one go-to brand of each, or do you vary the designers?

The reason for the uniform is simplicity. Not needing to make yet another decision. When it comes to packing it’s easy to not have to figure out what matches. I have 20 of the same black T-shirts, and three sets of the same suit. I don’t need to match the jacket or the pants, they’re all the same. It makes packing way more condensed. We never check luggage. It’s important to keep things very tight. You’re able to change planes, change plans on the go. In terms of designers, my T-shirts are Jockey, the cheapest you can get by the dozen. My suits are Alfani. I buy them from Macy’s. Governor Richardson used to love shopping. When we’d have a few hours in New York, he’d go to Paul Stuart and show me jackets and say “Mickey, what do you think of that?” I’d look at the tag and say “Guv, that’s the price of ten of my suits,” and he’d say “It shows!”

Tomorrow’s bonus WITI will feature an early excerpt from In the Shadows, out June 4. Mickey’s on tour across the U.S. in June and July.