To westerners, the public beheading of the US journalist James Foley in Syria was grim confirmation of the brutality of Islamic State and, more specifically, of the cruelty of a trio of British militants nicknamed “the Beatles”. For Foley’s mother, Diane, who since his kidnapping two years earlier had been pressing Barack Obama’s government to rescue him or negotiate his release, his death was incomparably more painful. But that didn’t deter her from meeting Alexanda Kotey, the man found guilty of conspiracy to murder her son and three other hostages.
Warm but steely, buoyed up by Christian faith but not the least “saintly”, she wanted to see how much sorrow, if any, he felt for what he had done. The meeting took place in a Virginia courthouse in 2021, two months after the murder trial and seven years after the beheading. It was an “intimate standoff”, with Kotey saying nothing of his involvement in waterboarding, chokeholds, electric shocks and other forms of torture, and apologising only for what Diane went through, which to her was “sorrow verging on the cheap”. He did offer a motive, though – his experience of pulling a dead baby from the rubble after a US drone strike. And “her heart vaulted” when he showed her photos of his three young daughters stranded in a Syrian refugee camp.
The encounter between mother and murderer that opens the book is written in the third person, as narrated by the novelist Colum McCann, who agreed to help Diane tell her story. He’d been interested in the case since seeing a photo of James Foley in a military bunker reading one of his novels. And by sitting with Diane and her husband in their New Hampshire home, he became a kind of “story whisperer”, hoping to “thaw some of that frozen sea”. His account of her face-off with Kotey doesn’t stint on high drama; in places it reads like an excitable would-be screenplay. But thereafter he’s more measured, switching back in time to voice Diane in the first person.
James – Jim to her and all his friends – had a privileged childhood: “the clapboard house, the picket fence, the intact family”. After graduation from Marquette (a private Jesuit university) he lived “in a fog of good intent”, trying out teaching in a tough inner-city school, doing a writing MFA and working with convicted felons. Journalism in war zones gave him focus, first in Iraq then in Afghanistan. After being caught with marijuana in his backpack, he lost his job with a military news organisation. Ashamed but undeterred, he went freelance and headed to Libya – where, two months in, he was captured by Gaddafi loyalists.
The experience might have given him pause; a colleague was killed during the abduction. But, once released, he was game for more frontline action. In Syria, the taxi he was travelling in was forced off the road. His captors seemed to think he was a CIA man, not a journalist. Hearing the news, and knowing his ordeal was bound to be worse than the first kidnapping, his family wanted to do something. The FBI told them to hold their tongues.
Even after the gag order was lifted, Diane became increasingly angry. She was angry with Obama, even though she voted for him, because he didn’t make Jim a priority. She was angry with the “misguided obstinacy” of a “shortsighted, heartless and arrogant” administration for not acting as France, Spain and Italy had done and paying for hostages’ release. She was angry with a patriarchal system that condescended to her as an emotional and impulsive mother (“They didn’t see me at all. I felt invisible”). She wasn’t angry with her son, a man of moral courage who saw journalism as a spiritual mission. But she did wonder why he took such risks: “Why didn’t you just stay here? … Was it too suburban? Was it not enough?”
After his death (“a funeral without a coffin”), she worked ferociously on behalf of hostages and journalists, raising money, advocating reforms, travelling far and wide to meet anyone she thought might help. She had been a nurse practitioner, not a campaigner or administrator, but her efforts slowly paid off: US policy on hostages has changed for the better and she takes comfort in that (“a candle gives light to other candles”). Testifying against another of the IS “Beatles” on trial for murder was solace of a kind, too.
By contrast, a final meeting with Kotey, after he sent her two letters, wasn’t the breakthrough she hoped for; she was perturbed by his aloofness and unwavering self-belief as he denied being brainwashed. But before she left, she broke the rules by stepping across the floor and reaching out to shake his hand. It was a gesture so unexpected that he sat down stunned, as if he had “just flown into the windowpane of his life”.
• American Mother by Colum McCann with Diane Foley is published by Bloomsbury (£20). To support the Guardian and the Observer buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
