Securing Brittney Griner’s release: A Q&A with a U.S. hostage policy expert

Brittney Griner
By Richard Deitsch
Aug 9, 2022

If you are looking for optimism in the Brittney Griner case, former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Bill Richardson offered up a handful on Sunday while speaking to ABC “This Week” about the WNBA star and U.S. Olympian. Richardson said he believed that Griner and fellow prisoner Paul Whelan will be a part of a two-for-two prisoner swap with Russia.

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The Athletic has offered coverage of the case, including this Jenna West and Chantel Jennings primer following Griner being found guilty of drug smuggling and possession charges in Russia and sentenced to nine years in prison.

I spoke with Dr. Dani Gilbert, a Rosenwald Fellow in U.S. Foreign Policy and International Security at the John Sloan Dickey Center for International Understanding at Dartmouth College, and an expert on U.S. hostage policy and diplomacy, for my Sports Media Podcast this week. (Gilbert is followed on the podcast by T.J. Quinn, an investigative reporter for ESPN who has reported on the Griner case.)

Dr. Gilbert offered an interesting perspective, and I imagine you’ll find it as interesting as I did if you have been following the case. You can get the podcast below, along with some selected excerpts.


Was there anything surprising about how the guilty plea played out?

We expected the Russian court to find her guilty and to give her a very long sentence. She was found with 0.7 grams of hash oil, and yet they charged her with international drug smuggling, clearly not something that she was actually doing. It’s really a political process, not a criminal one. There were a couple of slightly surprising moments to me during the court case itself, which is that she had members from her Russian team … testifying on her behalf. They were extremely brave to come out and to speak on her behalf and to, in essence, go against the Russian government in saying what they had to say about her character, about her devotion to her team, to her teammates, to the Russian public in being such a sports star over there. But as we can see, that’s not something that the judge really took into consideration. She most certainly has Vladimir Putin breathing down her neck to make sure that Brittney Griner got the guilty verdict and this incredibly long nine-year sentence.

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How have you evaluated at this point what the Russians have said publicly?

I see this process as three-dimensional chess. There’s a lot of strategic interaction that is really difficult to understand on the surface. In general, when there’s more public attention to one of these cases, we may think that that’s pretty good for the Russians because the more attention given to this case, the more likely that the Biden administration might make concessions that are otherwise really difficult to make because they feel domestic political pressure to do so. So you would expect that the Russian government would love to see Brittney Griner’s name all over the media. They would love to see debates about what the administration should do to bring her home. They would love to see criticism of the administration for what they’ve done and not done already.

The fact that they’re now coming out and saying, “Keep this quiet, don’t let it come out to the public, we shouldn’t be having this conversation in public,” in some ways, that’s surprising to me. Then I start doing the mental gymnastics of, “Well, maybe they do want to keep this quiet. Why would they want this quiet?” Or, “Do they have to pretend that they want it quiet?” Because at the end of the day, they are pretending that this entire process is a legitimate arrest, that it’s a legitimate part of their criminal justice system, that Brittney Griner and Paul Whelan are criminals, which we know in the United States that they’re hostages. They’re being held for political leverage. So many different sides that it’s really difficult for us to evaluate from the outside.

One of the most frustrating things for me when I have read commentary, particularly on social media, is the idea that Griner deserves her fate. Russia is a massively bad actor on the world stage. This is not for argument. They have certainly trumped up political charges before. That is not in dispute. So maybe Griner brought cannabis oil into the country, but maybe she did not. I have seen many people taking what the Russians are saying as pro forma truth. How do you see it?

I am right there with you. I mean, Vladimir Putin is currently engaged in a completely unjust, totally horrifying war in Ukraine. This is not an international actor that we should take seriously. He’s also shown that he has a very high priority of creating division among the American domestic public. This is all something that he wants. He wants that kind of confusion. He wants that debate.

The fact that the public has responded sometimes in this way is also not surprising to me. In some of my research, I look at public opinion on hostage recovery efforts. One of the things that comes up time and time again is that when the American public believes that an individual hostage is responsible for putting themselves into danger, then those members of the public are unlikely to support government efforts to bring them home. So a lot of people look at the Brittney Griner case and say, “Well, she was carrying drugs.” … The willingness to blame her is directly connected to the opposition to any efforts that the White House would make to bring her and Paul Whelan home. So how the public feels about the deservingness of an individual hostage is a really good predictor of how the public responds to these cases.

The Griner camp and certainly the WNBA, which can be very vocal when it comes to issues, made a conscious and strategic decision to have initial silence on her case. Obviously, that changed. How did you initially view the decision by people in and around Griner to not make this very loud and public?

To me, it makes a lot of sense to stay quiet at the start. There’s always the hope and the slight possibility that the entire thing will be viewed as a mistake, that the Russian government might have said, “Oh, this was a misunderstanding, we didn’t mean to do this. She’s released, she’s freed.” That gives Vladimir Putin and the Russian government the ability to save face so that this didn’t turn into an international geopolitical crisis, into a dilemma of any sorts. So you keep quiet at the beginning in the hopes that it can just be resolved quietly and easily. Unfortunately, that rarely is how it turns out.

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Once the administration classified Brittney Griner as wrongfully detained, that is kind of the point at which the WNBA started speaking out. “Wrongfully detained” is not just a phrase that I and others use. It is a specific legal designation at the State Department. The Secretary of State looks at the cases of Americans who are arrested abroad, and lots of Americans are arrested abroad for breaking laws all the time. In some of those cases, the U.S. respects what happens, that the American broke the law and that they will go through a criminal justice system and that we trust that they’re being treated fairly. But in dozens of these cases, the U.S. government doesn’t have any faith that the American is being treated fairly. Maybe the U.S. government thinks that that person is being held as a hostage or that they were arrested specifically because they’re an American. Or it might just be that we don’t trust the person could be treated fairly within a certain country’s criminal justice system. Given Russia’s discrimination against Black people and against gay people specifically, it’s entirely possible that the United States government feared for Brittney Griner’s safety.

So once the State Department designated her as wrongfully detained, it changes a lot of factors in her case. It meant that her case is moved out of the purview of the Bureau of Consular Affairs … and into the purview of a different office at the State Department called the Office of the Special Presidential Envoy for Hostage Affairs. That office is essentially the chief diplomat of the U.S. government who works on hostage and wrongful detainee cases. It’s essentially our government’s chief hostage negotiator. Once her case was moved there, it was an admission by the United States government that she is being held for political purposes and that the government was going to intervene on her behalf. At that point, the WNBA saw it as their prerogative to raise attention to her case, because then it becomes a specific job of the United States government to put pressure on Russia and to negotiate for her release. So the timing of when that volume and that attention really changed makes a lot of sense to me.

Brittney Griner
The WNBA has stepped up its push to advocate for Brittney Griner’s release. (Joe Camporeale / USA Today)

On the topic of public advocacy, you have suggested that Griner’s sexuality and race played a role in how much attention her case was getting until last week?

There are a few different factors that shape how much attention these cases get in the media, with the caveat that right now Brittney Griner’s case is getting a lot of attention and is getting way more attention than any other Americans who are held hostage or wrongfully detained abroad. Over the whole population of Americans who’ve been through similar situations, there are some real trends that stick out to us. This also applies to people who are kidnapped or held hostage domestically in other situations.

There’s a phenomenon called the missing white woman syndrome, which essentially says that female, white, often young, pretty, victims of abduction get much more attention in the media than women of color or counterparts of other races, or of men who are abducted. JonBenét Ramsey is one of the first ones that come to people’s minds, of this young, blond, little girl. Certain cases like that get a lot of outsized attention. Race plays a really big deal here in that white hostages get a lot more attention than victims of color. I’ve done some research on what drives media attention to Americans who are kidnapped abroad, and if there’s a group of Americans kidnapped together, the white hostages receive far more media attention than people of color who are also kidnapped or taken hostage in the same attack. So even within the same incident, those people were taken from the same place, they might have had the same job. There’s a real difference across the color line.

This also affects a lot of the other people who are in similar situations who are held hostage or wrongfully detained abroad. A lot of the Americans who are currently wrongfully detained are dual nationals. A lot of them share citizenship with the U.S. and Iran or the U.S. and Venezuela. That’s what allows them to travel to these places. They’re visiting family or conducting business in a place that they’re able to travel quite easily. But many American citizens might not see them as white, might not see them as purely American. That can really affect the amount of sympathy and the amount of media attention that these cases get.

In broad strokes, who is working on her case specifically? Who is doing the legwork?

There are two answers for you on that. There’s the people who are doing the legwork inside the government, and the people who are doing legwork outside the government. I’ll talk about inside the government first. There’s the special office that I mentioned earlier that when someone is named wrongfully detained, their case gets transferred to the office of the Special Presidential Envoy for Hostage Affairs. Right now, that person is … Roger Carstens. He works around the clock dealing with these cases. He is the first line of contact for the U.S. government on these cases. He visits wrongful detainees in prison overseas. He spends a lot of time talking to the hostages and detainees, family members, to the press, to public events, to other members of the government. He is the day-to-day operational person, and his staff are supporting him on figuring out how to resolve these cases, how to bring people home, how to deal with everything around it.

This is one of the issues that’s probably very much on Secretary (of State Antony) Blinken’s agenda right now. He probably deals with a handful of issues all over the world every day, and this issue has risen to that level given that the Secretary is speaking about this and that the White House is speaking about this. President Biden himself has released an executive order about hostage taking and wrongful detention and has written to Brittney Griner and has made statements about Brittney Griner. So there is a whole operational staff whose job it is to focus on this. It is the kind of thing that is breaking through at the highest levels outside the government.

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There’s a whole different crew working on this as well. Bill Richardson, former U.N. ambassador, former governor (of New Mexico), served a lot of different roles in the U.S. government, is now retired from U.S. government and has a foundation called the Richardson Center. Their primary job is to work on these negotiations all around the world. They negotiate on behalf of people kidnapped by non-state actors, by people held wrongfully by states. They’ve been working on this for a long time, and they have a tremendous record of success of these really painstaking, high-stakes, high-value negotiations with some of America’s worst adversaries all around the world. We’ve heard that Ambassador Richardson is engaged on the Brittney Griner case and also on Paul Whelan’s case, and that he was planning a trip to Moscow.

There’s some real benefits to also having this other group of people outside the U.S. government working on the case as well, which is that he might be able to meet with people that the U.S. government might consider unsavory. He might be able to have the kinds of conversations that might be difficult for U.S. diplomats to have at a time that Russia is engaged in this war in Ukraine and the United States government is trying to keep pressure on Vladimir Putin. They might be able to sit down and brainstorm a whole range of creative responses, creative possibilities in this negotiation that might be a little bit more risky if the U.S. government put those options on the table.

I want to ask you to hypothesize here. Brittney Griner is obviously a high-profile prisoner in Russia. I know Trevor Reed was as well. Given how high-profile she is, is there any possibility the Russian government would place her in a less horrible prison facility? While I ask that, I know what happened with Trevor Reed.

I say this — and I don’t mean it to sound callous because these are incredibly painful, excruciating circumstances — but hostage takers need their hostages to stay alive, and they need them to stay healthy enough that they’re going to be worthwhile in a trade. When I’ve spoken to these former kidnappers from Colombia, they talk a lot about the good care that they have to take their prisoners when they’re marching through the jungle and making sure that they don’t get too sick. It’s really important that they keep her value high. To some extent, that protects her. …

There’s a couple of other things that we can extrapolate about her time in prison. Right now, she is in prison. She’s been sentenced to a labor camp. I mean, these are just excruciating circumstances. But her lawyers are going to appeal her case, most likely. As long as the appeal is going on, she stays in prison. She’ll be in the prison and not into the labor camp, at least until the appeals expire.

The last thing I think about is the case of Jason Rezaian. Jason is a journalist for The Washington Post. He was the bureau chief in Tehran, Iran, and he was arrested for espionage and put into prison there. He was held at times in solitary confinement. He had just a really gruesome ordeal. He’s written a wonderful book about it that I highly recommend. One of the things that he says in that book is that when his case got more attention, he started getting better treatment. They gave him a better cell and access to the outdoors and room to walk around. They bought new clothes and things like that. He attributes that to the public attention that his case was getting. Sometimes I think that the more attention these cases get, the worse the hostage takers are going to treat the prisoners to kind of drive up the leverage and put pressure on the U.S. government. But it very well might go the other way. We have to remember that Brittney Griner is quite popular in Russia. She’s a star athlete. She brought her Russian team to multiple championships and victories. She works really hard for the people of Russia. So if this case is really making its way into the public realm there, there would be a lot of reasons for them to consider treating her a little bit better for those reasons as well.

(Top photo: Sputnik via AP)

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Richard Deitsch

Richard Deitsch is a media reporter for The Athletic. He previously worked for 20 years for Sports Illustrated, where he covered seven Olympic Games, multiple NCAA championships and U.S. Open tennis. Richard also hosts a weekly sports media podcast. Follow Richard on Twitter @richarddeitsch