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Embedding with America's top hostage negotiator
With US detainees being held in Russia, Gaza, and Venezuela, VF embedded with the team tasked with gaining their freedom.
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. U nder 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. 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.
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