Status Anxiety

5 July 2008

Sean left strict orders: if he was kidnapped, I was to be kept away from the region

My first impulse was to fly to Kabul and assemble a crack team of ex-special forces operatives to launch a rescue mission — and I was willing to remortgage my house to pay for it. I pressed my case with Sean’s family — ‘You need someone on the ground’ — but my efforts were not helped by the fact that Sean had left strict instructions that in the event of his being kidnapped I was not to set foot in the region. ‘If he starts throwing his weight around, I’ll be killed for sure,’ Sean said.

When that plan was quashed, my next inclination was to alert the media. I had discussed this with Sean before he left and we had joked about what picture of him I should give to the BBC, given that it would be displayed in the top right-hand corner of all their news reports. But Alan Hayling, who at this point was spending every waking minute trying to work out how best to secure Sean’s release, counselled against this. His argument was that the moment the story became public, the group holding Sean would come under pressure from more powerful forces in the region not to release him without receiving something in return, such as the release of Taleban prisoners held in Afghanistan. Not only that, but the British, Afghan and Pakistani intelligence services would stick their oars in, not to mention the CIA, and that, in turn, would complicate the negotiations and make it harder to reach an agreement. Of course, all these people probably knew precisely what was going on already, but provided it was all happening beneath the radar they were less likely to get involved.

I do not doubt that Alan was right — every decision he made was right, in fact, and Sean has him to thank for his release, along with Kevin Sutcliffe and Dorothy Byrne at Channel 4 who had commissioned the documentary — but it was incredibly frustrating. Whenever I am told to leave it to the experts my instinctive reaction is to do the opposite, but in this case the stakes were too high. I realised that the most prudent course was to do nothing — a tough thing to accept when your best friend’s life is hanging by a thread. I am just glad Sean was released unharmed. If he had been killed, I would have spent the rest of my life wondering if there was something I could have done to help him.

Toby Young is associate editor of The Spectator.