Warren Weinstein, the American aid worker killed by an American drone, spent the last three years of his life pleading to President Barack Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry to work to rescue him from his Al Qaeda captors.
Weinstein, husband, father and grandfather, scholar, teacher and humanitarian, who lived in the Washington suburbs in Rockville, Md., when he wasn’t working abroad, was taken from his fenced, guarded compound in Lahore, Pakistan, on Aug. 13, 2011, four days before he was scheduled to come home.
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He had been serving as a development advisor for J.E. Austin Associates, Inc., an Arlington, Va., contractor to the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, when his wife got a call from his boss.
“Warren has been kidnapped,” Elaine Weinstein said she was told.
Two men tricked Weinstein’s guards into opening the door to his compound, according to Pakistani police at the time, saying they wanted to share food with them for Ramadan. Those two, plus five more, all of them armed, stormed in and upstairs to Weinstein’s bedroom. They took him and nothing else.
Nine months later, on May 7, 2012, Al Qaeda released a video of Weinstein.
“My life is in your hands, Mr. President,” he said. “If you accept the demands, I live. If you don’t accept the demands, then I die.”
It was the first of three such videos in 2012.
The following year, in a letter dated Oct. 3, 2013, and labeled LETTER FOR MEDIA, he wrote in clean, careful cursive that he was a former professor at the State University of New York at Oswego, that he had worked as a Peace Corps manager in Africa in Togo and the Ivory Coast, that he had spent so much of his life studying and working to advocate for human rights and ease ethnic conflicts around the world. He said he had a heart condition and an acute case of asthma. He said he didn’t want to be forgotten. He was hoping for a resolution, he wrote, “before time and my age end the issue.”
He added: “I have appealed several times to President Obama to help me but to no avail.”
Not three months later, on Christmas Day, Al Qaeda released another video. Weinstein, now bearded, appeared weary and pale-faced. He made his latest request.
“Mr. President,” he said, “for the majority of my adult life, for over 30 years, I have served my country. … Nine years ago, I came to Pakistan to help my government, and I did so at a time when most Americans would not come here. And now, when I need my government, it seems that I have been totally abandoned …
“You’re now in your second term as President of the United States,” he continued, “and that means you can make hard decisions without worrying about reelection. And so I again appeal to you to instruct your appropriate officials to negotiate my release.”
He made a similar appeal to the secretary of state. “Mr. Kerry …”
He asked reporters to keep writing about him. He asked people to keep talking about him.
He talked about his family.
Jennifer Coakley, one of his two daughters, in an interview, called her father “the eternal optimist.”
In a piece she wrote for Newsweek Pakistan, Elaine Weinstein said her husband had immersed himself in the culture of Pakistan, like he did everywhere he went and worked. She said he had learned Urdu and dressed in the traditional style of shalwar kameez. She said he “urged friends and family to visit him there so they could see and experience the country’s warmth and beauty firsthand.”
She said he “was already an old man” when he had arrived in Pakistan and that “he is even older now.”
She said she and her daughters loved him and wanted to take care of him.
On Aug. 13, 2014, the three-year anniversary of his capture, Al Qaeda issued a statement to Weinstein’s family: “Your continued silence on the inaction of your government will only lead to your prisoner dying a lonely death in prison after this deliberate and prolonged neglect on the part of your government. Therefore, if you want Warren Weinstein to be released, do whatever you can to pressurize your government.”
“We are just normal American citizens,” Elaine Weinstein said that day in an interview on CNN. “We don’t have any special ins with our government.”
What, she was asked, was she hearing from Obama, from Kerry — from anybody?
“The U.S. government says they’re doing whatever they can,” she said, “looking at every possible way of getting my husband back, but we don’t really know what that means, because we’re not privileged to that information. We just have to believe what they tell us.”
The State Department said it was concerned and that it continued to “monitor the situation closely.”
“Are they doing enough?” Alisa Weinstein, Warren Weinstein’s other daughter, said on CNN. “I mean, he’s not home, so …”
“I have to have hope,” Elaine Weinstein told Al Jazeera America. “If I don’t have hope, I won’t get up in the morning. It’s what keeps me going, the belief that something good will happen — just like I got a phone call to hear he was taken, I’ll get a phone call to hear that he’s been freed.”
On Wednesday, she got a call, not the kind for which she was hoping, from the president.
“It is with tremendous sorrow,” Thursday morning’s White House statement began.
Obama said Thursday morning at the White House that his “national security team” and “dedicated professionals across our government” did “everything possible to find him and to bring him home safely to his family.” He said he takes “full responsibility for all our counterterrorism operations” — including, he said, the one that killed Weinstein.
Elizabeth Weinstein said in a statement later Thursday morning that her husband’s captors “bear ultimate responsibility.” She thanked her local politicians — Congressman John Delaney, Senator Barbara Mikulski, Senator Ben Cardin — “for their relentless efforts to free my husband.”
She added, though, that the help she and her family got from “other elements of the U.S. Government was inconsistent and disappointing over the course of three and a half years.”
A spokesman for J.E. Austin said Thursday afternoon the company had no comment.
“Dr. Weinstein devoted his life to making the world a better place,” SUNY Oswego president Deborah F. Stanley said. “He left us to serve others in some of the world’s most impoverished and troubled regions. His life was an inspiration that will not die.”
“He liked Pakistan very much,” Raza Rumi, a Pakistani journalist who knew Weinstein, told NPR. “He loved it, in fact, you know. He had a very good network of fellow aid professionals, contacts in the government, and he wanted to contribute to change, and it breaks my heart when I think that he is no more.”
Weinstein, 73, was a Fulbright scholar who earned a master’s degree and a Ph.D. in international law and economics from Columbia University. He was proficient in seven languages. He is survived by his wife, his two daughters, a son-in-law, a granddaughter who was 7 when he was taken who wondered if his captors let him eat, bathe or go outside, and a grandson who was 3 who would ask his mother every time she left the house, “Are you going to bring Grandpa back with you? Is he coming home with you today?”
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