The last time Diane Foley spoke to her son Jim was in November 2012, when he called her at work in New Hampshire. Foley, a nurse practitioner at the clinic where her husband, John, was a doctor, was relieved to hear her son’s voice. A few months earlier, Jim had left the US for Syria to work as a freelance videographer. That decision, coming less than a year after he’d been kidnapped and detained for six weeks while reporting in Libya, horrified his family. Now the 39-year-old was in an even more dangerous war zone. Foley couldn’t really talk, she told her son; the clinic was busy. “That’s OK, Mom,” said Jim, cheerfully, and promised to call her at Thanksgiving. A few weeks later, he was kidnapped by Islamic State (IS). Eighteen months after that, Jim was beheaded by a masked terrorist, the video uploaded to social media and seen with horror all around the world. As Diane Foley remembers of the brief exchange she had, that day, with her gentle, goofy eldest son, “I never heard his voice again.”
It is almost 10 years since the death of James Foley and, at 75, his mother isn’t remotely done talking about it. We are in New York, at a restaurant downtown, where Diane Foley strikes a slight and glamorous figure, dark-haired and all in black but for a silver cross around her neck. She has written a book with the novelist Colum McCann, called American Mother, in which she recounts the story of her son’s kidnapping and murder, and her relentless campaign, in its wake, to improve the chances of Americans wrongfully detained abroad – including, as we speak, American dual nationals being held in Gaza by Hamas.
The emphasis of the book’s title is deliberate. While Jim was in captivity, Foley ran around Washington being passed between the US Department of State, the White House and the FBI, all of which gave her the impression that, as the grieving mother, she was a person of little consequence – practically an irritant. “I was treated terribly; lied to, patronised. I was threatened. I mean, it really was bad,” she says in a voice that, considering what she has achieved and withstood – including her remarkable decision to sit down with one of her son’s killers, face to face – I would call deceptively soft. It is thanks to Foley’s work and that of the foundation she set up in Jim’s name that American hostages taken today have a much better chance of being released than her son did. And so, while American Mother is the story of Jim Foley’s life and unbearable death, it is also, as McCann points out, “the portrait of an extraordinary woman”.
The manner in which Jim Foley was killed overshadows every other detail about him, and this is something his mother seeks to correct, too. Prior to her son’s kidnap, Diane Foley’s life was one she characterises as “family first”. Jim was the oldest of five, and while Foley worked part-time as a nurse, the bulk of her efforts were put into the house and the kids. Looking back, she says, she considers her life then as sheltered, privileged and, above all, naive. Foley is fond of starting sentences with the phrase “as an American”, and, raising her children in an idyllic corner of New Hampshire, the faith she had in her own security rested on various assumptions: that she and her family were fundamentally safe; that everything would turn out all right in the end; that, no matter what happened, the US government had her back. When her oldest son decided to go into conflict journalism, travelling first to Afghanistan while embedded with the US military, and later to Libya, she was alarmed. But she had faith in his good sense. And she was incredibly proud of him. He was, she believed, “a person of moral courage”.
That confidence of Foley’s that things would turn out OK was so solid that, incredibly, it survived the period of her son’s first kidnapping in 2011. Libyan government forces snatched Jim and fellow American journalist Clare Gillis, along with a Spanish photographer, Manu Brabo, while they were travelling in Libya with anti-government rebels. After a feverish, six-week effort undertaken by Jim’s brother Michael, which included reaching out via back channels to the Gaddafi regime, Jim and the other hostages were released, shaken but unharmed.
Just 18 months later, the family received news, via Gillis, who had been waiting to meet Jim in Turkey just before Thanksgiving, that he was missing again. His car had been forced off the road as he travelled through Syria towards the Turkish border. The family were horrified, but, based on what had happened in Libya, felt secure that they knew how this scenario would play out. “It’s going to be 45 to 100 days of hell,” said Michael, once again taking on a campaign to release him. “And then we’ll have him back.”
As it turned out, nothing about Jim’s kidnapping was the same the second time around. For the first few weeks, there was no indication of who was even holding him. For a while, the family wondered if it was forces loyal to the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad. They wondered if it might be al-Qaida. Eventually, months after his kidnapping, they received word from various sources, including a former terrorist who had returned to Belgium and been arrested, that Jim had been taken by IS, although it would be an entire year since his kidnap before the family received any communication from his captors themselves. It came in an email, all in lower-case letters, which was sent to Michael: “hello. we have james. we want to negotiate for him. he is safe: he is our friend and we do not want to hurt him. we want money fast.”
Details of what Jim was going through in captivity during this time and in the subsequent six months, are known from accounts given by his fellow prisoners after they were released. The conditions were much worse than in Libya. The captives, which included American and European journalists and aid workers, were sporadically starved. Beatings and torture were frequent. The captives were made to assume stress positions for hours, were waterboarded and subject to mock executions. They were often agonisingly cold, sleeping without beds or blankets. According to his fellow hostages, as an American, Jim was singled out for the worst treatment and abuse.
This wasn’t only because the militants hated America. They were responding to a fact that, in the weeks and months after her son’s disappearance, Diane Foley was struggling to comprehend: that the American government under Obama maintained a hard line on not negotiating with terrorists. While European hostages from Denmark, France and Spain were released by the terror group after ransoms were quietly paid, British and American captives, including American aid workers Steven Sotloff and Peter Kassig, and British aid workers Alan Henning and David Haines, languished in captivity. For Diane Foley, one of the hardest aspects of dealing with the aftermath of her son’s death has been less one of managing hatred towards his killers than anger towards his government. “There was no one who was accountable. It was so appalling as an American.” She assumed, after Jim was taken, that there would be a protocol in place; that the FBI would help, or the state department; or that, perhaps, the president would see her. Instead, she says: “I went to Washington, not knowing government, and I was literally sent in circles.”
The energy released by this anger, and the sense that, correctly channelled, it might change things for the next family to find themselves in her shoes, has been part of Foley’s extraordinary trajectory of the last few years. In the spring of 2013, Foley resigned from her job to devote herself full-time to trying to secure Jim’s release. She started a public campaign – against the advice of the government, which urged the family to stay silent. “They said it was to keep the hostages safe and to not increase their value to the captors, but in many ways I began to feel that it was about keeping them, the authorities, safe,” she writes in the book.
Foley met with everyone in Washington who would see her, including the Syrian ambassador, Bashar Ja’afari, delegates at the UN, and any senator who would let her in the door. Susan Rice, the then national security adviser, suggested in a meeting with Foley that they might do a prisoner swap for Jim with detainees at Guantánamo Bay, before hastily referring her back to the FBI and the state department. Meanwhile, the family was told that if they tried to raise money to pay a ransom, they risked criminal prosecution. The second Christmas without Jim came and went, and, for six months, no further emails from his captors were received.
Later, Foley would discover that a rescue mission made up of Navy Seal commandos had been ordered by the US government during the summer of 2014, and had failed due to stale intelligence – because, as Foley writes in the book, “our government waited until all the other negotiations by foreign governments for their hostages were over and done”. She was desperate, a state only slightly alleviated in June when she received a message from Jim, sent via the released Danish hostage, Daniel Rye Ottosen, who had memorised it and relayed it to her over the phone. “I remember going to the mall with Dad,” said Jim via his interlocutor. “A very long bike ride with Mom. I remember so many great family times that take me away from this prison. Dreams of family and friends take me away and happiness fills my heart.” A few weeks later, Jim was told to put on an orange jumpsuit, led out into the desert, and, after reading a prepared statement written by his captors condemning the US, was beheaded in front of the world.
How is it possible to survive what Diane Foley has been through? To know not only that her child has died in the most horrific way possible, but that a video of that death exists on the internet? “She’s fierce,” says McCann. “She turned that grief into something profoundly different.”
McCann’s involvement in Foley’s book came about via the kind of serendipity that Foley, a devout Catholic, tends to ascribe to Jim’s influence. In 2014, the day after a video of Jim’s beheading was uploaded to social media by IS, McCann received a different image in his inbox: a photo, sent by a friend, of Jim relaxing in a bunker on assignment in Afghanistan a few years earlier, reading a copy of Let the Great World Spin, McCann’s National Book Award-winning novel of 2009. It was a strange moment for McCann – “One of those when the oxygen goes out of the air,” he says – flipping between the image of Jim that was on every front page in the world that day, on his knees in an orange jumpsuit with a knife at his throat, and the relaxed photo of him reading McCann’s novel. He felt an instant connection with the journalist and after making contact with Diane, the two stayed in touch. Years later, when she asked if he’d accompany her to meet one of her son’s killers, McCann agreed, and shortly afterwards put aside the novel he was writing to collaborate with her on American Mother. “I could not turn away from it,” he says.
Part of this compulsion draws from the sheer, horrifying drama of Jim’s death. But a larger part is the improbable success of what Diane Foley has achieved. When Jim was kidnapped, there was no effective government body in the US with responsibility for handling American hostages. Since then, an inter-agency initiative has been set up, backed by the National Counterterrorism Center and building on conversations started by Foley herself. In 2020, thanks in large part to her efforts, the US Congress passed the Levinson Act, establishing as a matter of law various protocols to aid American hostages, including the appointment of a special presidential envoy for hostage affairs.
As a result, on 7 October 2023, when Hamas kidnapped about 240 Israelis, an unknown number of them American dual nationals, hostage families in the US weren’t left quite much as in the dark as Jim Foley’s family had been. “The fact that President Biden called it a priority to bring [the hostages] home was music to my ears,” says Foley. “That was miraculous, because Obama wouldn’t even mention Jim before he died.” After Jim’s death, Foley met President Obama and, she says: “He told me, ‘Jim was my highest priority.’ And I had to correct him on that. I have great respect for President Obama, but, I mean, he tied the hands of the FBI; they were not allowed to engage with the captors. Our government was not allowed to interact.”
By contrast, in the wake of the Hamas kidnappings last October, a hostage envoy from the US flew to Israel immediately, and “we have ongoing conversations – Qatar has been a primary intermediary – between Hamas and the Israelis. Which is not perfect, but I’ve talked to one of the deputy envoys, Steve Gillen, several times, and he’s been in Israel since October. It’s a whole different ballgame.” I assume no one went to Syria when Jim was taken? “No! No! The whole thing was like: we can’t do anything and we’re not gonna.”
When Foley talks about these developments, it is in the context of what she sees as her son’s ongoing contribution to the world. The endless indeterminate days of Jim’s captivity were, she says, a “dark and lonely” time for her, but after his death, “it was almost like Jim was freed, in a way. And all kinds of goodness has happened. And a lot of that is through the eyes of faith, but it’s been real for me. Jim was a people connector, so he has connected me with some of the most beautiful people. Really, after Jim’s murder, that’s when all the good people stepped up.”
The word “murder” here sends a small shock wave; I sense Foley chooses it deliberately. Her manner is gentle, but in among all the talk of goodness and healing, one can feel, beneath the surface, the workings of a fierce sort of calculation. “When Jim was beheaded,” she will say, casually, and one understands what she is doing: keeping the listener focused, while forcing us to confront the truth of what her son went through. Foley didn’t watch the video of her son’s murder, although his brother Michael did; as he told Brian Oakes, Jim’s childhood friend who made a documentary about Jim in 2016, he wanted to “feel what Jim felt”. But Foley puts herself through other, seemingly unbearable experiences as part of what she sees as the moral imperatives necessitated by her son’s death.
For most readers, I suspect this is where the truly unimaginable part of Foley’s experience begins. It is one thing to campaign to improve government policy towards hostages. It is another to sit in court while photos of your son’s decapitated body, his head placed upon his shoulder blades, are shown to jurors. And then there’s her decision to meet with one of the men responsible.
In 2021, Foley travelled to a courthouse just outside Washington DC to meet Alexanda Kotey, the British terrorist, since stripped of his British citizenship, who was captured in Syria in 2018 and extradited to the US. She did this, she says, for several reasons. “First of all, Jim would not have wanted me to be afraid.” Second, she says: “I wanted him to know who Jim was.” And, finally, says Foley, “it seemed only just that I hear Kotey out. It may sound odd. That was who Jim was.” She smiles and I see it; something hard-won and glittering just beneath the surface. “In another life, they could’ve been friends.”
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In the eyes of his mother, Jim Foley was drawn to conflict journalism precisely because it was so far from the world he grew up in – as Foley puts it, “in the woods in New Hampshire on a lake. So a kind of pristine, middle-class childhood, without exposure to the poverty and problems of our country.” Her oldest son, she says, was “drawn to kids who hadn’t had the same chances”. While a student at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Jim volunteered as a tutor to underprivileged children and, later, at graduate school in Chicago, took part in similar volunteer schemes in a prison.
Of the five Foley children, Jim was the least settled and most unconventional, and there is a sense, reading the book, that for a good portion of his early adulthood he remained somewhat lost. Jim taught, volunteered and freelanced around various news organisations including an agency called the GlobalPost, which, after his capture in Syria, would lend its kidnap and ransom team to try to recover him. In January 2011, he landed his first secure job in journalism: as a staff reporter for a military news organisation called Stars and Stripes. But, two months in, he was fired, after being searched by military police in Kandahar, Afghanistan, and found to have marijuana in his backpack. As his mother says in the book, wryly, “37 … and busted for weed”. Jim immediately went to Libya to report on the Arab spring, where he was briefly held in detention by the regime. On his return to the US, the GlobalPost offered him a desk job just outside Boston, but he couldn’t stick it out and left.
His choices weren’t always popular. In October 2012, when he decided to go to Syria, a far more dangerous proposition than Libya at that point, as Syrian government forces brutally put down the uprising against the Assad regime, the family was angry. “Particularly Michael, my second oldest,” says Foley. “They were very close, and Michael worked very hard when Jim was arrested in Libya. Michael really put his life on hold, and, so, when Jim chose to go back, Michael was angry. He was appalled. He was mad. A lot of feelings.”
The terrorist cell that held Jim became known by hostages and the media as “the Beatles” for their English accents, among them Mohammed Emwazi, nicknamed “Jihadi John”, who would be killed by a drone strike in Syria in 2015. Kotey had grown up in Shepherd’s Bush, west London, and converted to Islam in his 20s; unlike the third member of the group, El Shafee Elsheikh, who pleaded not guilty to conspiracy to commit hostage taking resulting in death, Kotey agreed to a plea deal, part of the terms of which were a willingness to meet the families of his victims. And so, here they were, in a meeting room at the courthouse in Virginia.
“At first it was very awkward,” says Foley. “There was nothing private about it. We had the defence team and the prosecuting team, a bank of attorneys, FBI agents. But what’s odd is that once we started to talk, it was just us. The crowd disappeared. And Alexanda wanted to talk. He wanted to tell his side of the story, big time. He wanted to tell us why, and the fog of war, and all this. But he also was willing to listen to who Jim was; and to listen to the fact that I said, Alexanda, these were non-combatants. None of them had a gun. Both Colum and I were surprised that Alexanda was a thinking, deeper person than we expected. There was a goodness about him.”
Both McCann and Foley were primed for Kotey to lie and try to manipulate them, and certainly neither believed him when he claimed only to have beaten Jim once – although they do believe that he wasn’t the person who executed him. But, says Foley, “I’m rather naive. All I knew was genuine was what I was feeling. I don’t know what he was feeling: how do I know if he was lying to me? But I know that, when he showed me a picture of his children, and he cried about that, a lot of that was real.”
And what of the hatred she must surely feel, too?
“Yeah, well, I guess I did definitely put it aside – I didn’t really think about it. Because I wanted him to listen. I wanted to be able to be open, and to hear him. I guess in that sense I didn’t think a lot about that fact that this is the guy who beat him, who kidnapped him. I really dwelled on how can I meet him as a person; how to have an open heart.”
“I thought he was going to be a thug,” says McCann. “Everything I’d read was that he was a Queens Park Rangers football thug; and it turned out he’d never gone to a QPR match. I expected someone who wasn’t very articulate, who was angry, all of these things. And I got someone very different. Diane and I came out after the first break that morning and were looking at each other, and were, er, I kind of like him?”
Kotey was interested in McCann’s Irish roots, according to the writer. “He was reading Patrick Radden Keefe’s book Say Nothing. And so he’s British working class, a Muslim convert, not in love with what the British government represents. He wanted to ask me questions about the IRA and things like that.” Kotey wouldn’t admit to being brainwashed by IS, and justified his actions as a consequence of war. But he apologised to Foley for the hurt he had caused. Later, he wrote to her from prison – he is serving eight concurrent life terms without parole – and Foley recognised, in his arcane style, words used in the final statement Jim had been forced to read aloud before being beheaded. It was Kotey, she understood as she read his polite, thoughtful letter, who had written her son’s dying words. An extraordinarily chilling moment. “Yes. When I think that – some of those things. Yeah. Yeah. Oh.”
Diane Foley’s family don’t get it; not the long hours she puts in for the foundation, or the obsessive decade-long campaign to improve the fortunes of American hostages, or, above all, the meeting with Kotey, which she sees as an example of the best of the American justice system; the trial of his IS cohort cost the American state $50m, she writes in her book. Others in her family, however, just want to move on. “Even my own daughter – I don’t know if she gets it, even though I’m close to her. I don’t know. They think I’m a little nutty. My mom’s proud of me, but the kids don’t get it. That’s OK. Let them think what they want. I think, at my age, I’ve done my part for you guys. I devoted my all to you, and it’s like, now, guys, this is what I want to do with my retirement. It brings me healing.”
I ask when she feels closest to Jim. “When I’m doing this! When I’m talking to you. I feel like this is what Jim would be saying. I’m awed by the man he became. My Jim? God bless you, honey. I’m not anywhere near as good as he was. A good, deep heart.” This assessment from a loving mother is supported by accounts from captives held alongside Jim, all of whom described him as a man of awesome generosity, sharing his food and clothing, breaking up fights; remaining decent and giving to the end.
And when does she feel Jim’s absence most keenly? There is a long pause. “Sometimes it’s just in the pain of – you know, we miss him. Like at Christmas. Over the years, I’ve given all the kids Christmas decorations for the tree, with their names on or whatever. And once they’ve married, I’ve given them back all their decorations, for their own tree. The main decorations that remain on our tree are Jim’s.” She is silent for a moment. “That’s hard.”
She says: “He was the gatherer; he was the big brother. Everyone wanted to see Jim. He was fun. He wanted to play games, and he laughed and loved the nephews and nieces and would run around with them. He always made time for everyone. A lot of things I didn’t even notice at that time, but … ”
The fact is, says Foley, that while her attitude towards those responsible for the murder of her son may seem incomprehensible from the outside, from her point of view, it is the only way forward. “How sad,” she says of Kotey’s children, who will never know their father. “We all lost. I think, at the end, that’s the most poignant part. That’s where hatred leads us. Everybody loses. Look what’s happened in Gaza. It’s a truth that we know, but our human instincts get in the way.” I tell her the book, and her grace, are very powerful and she smiles, sadly this time. “I hope it touches people. Loss is part of living, right, and it’s just one way, but for me it has been healing to try to work with other families and help them get people home.” I can’t think of a tougher, more resolute outlook. “It’s been a gift,” she says.