mickey bergman, welcome to hardtalk. thank you. now, let's go back to october the 7th and the days after, when your phone started ringing. tell us what happened. well, like the rest of the world, i woke up in the united states on october 7th to kind of get the news and start understanding what is happening. but very soon after, i started getting phone calls, initially from the mother of an israeli soldier who's been killed and kidnapped in gaza years ago, leah goldin, who i've worked with over the years, to let me know that there's a lot of hostages�* families that are seeking help. she started organising and listing their names, and i started receiving a lot of phone calls from what ended up being about 67 different families asking us to help. now, just... we should be clear, you are not involved in the formal negotiations, either now or then. so what was it that you were doing? so that is correct. we are a not—for—profit, non—government organisation. we work on behalf of families at their request and at no cost to them. so what we do, the first thing that we do when we started taking the calls and understanding what is happening, we have to do a little assessment for us of something we call the theory of return. and in this case, we had very basic assumptions. one, hamas and israel cannot communicate directly. two, there are countries and entities that can influence hamas, be it qatar, egypt, iran and turkey. but none of these countries have any interest in helping israel, but at least two of them have an interest helping the us. so from that, we built a theory of return that was very simple and stands to this day, which is, we had to make this an american story very quickly, and a priority of the president of the united states. that would be used by the mediators, egypt and qatar, to lean on hamas and say, "we need you to solicit... "we need to get proposals from you," to solicit those proposals from hamas. once they have those, if these proposals are feasible by the us, then the us can help israel accept them and implement the deal. right. that is the first thing that takes place in a case. 0k. butjust to be clear, i mean, you are... you were born and brought up in israel. you're a former israeli soldier, but of course, now us resident, but you were...and your history has been acting for us detainees. and there were, what, about eight american hostages here? but you were acting for many more. well, right. first of all, the work that we've done with the richardson center included non—americans. it's just that the vast majority of our work ended up being americans, because these are the families that heard about us and asked us to help. but in the case of october 7th, in the early days, the early numbers we had, we were upwards of 20 americans, american citizens and permanent residents that have been taken, whether they were killed or kidnapped, in the first days, we didn't know. so the first list that we had went over to upwards of about 20. now they're settled into eight, but there were times that they were higher, times that they were lower. but, in any case, even when it's a non—american family that reaches out, we take the call, we engage and we try to help. 0k. but, so, what can you establish? you know, what difference? cos you have contacts, i know you have very good contacts in qatar who are directly involved in the negotiations. yes. how are you able to help the families? yeah. so once we have our theory of return, as i described it, we started getting to work. the first call was to our american counterparts, in this case the special presidential envoy on hostage affairs, roger carstens, who sits at the state department, and my colleagues in qatar who have been working on this issue for years, not regarding gaza, but they've helped us get people out of iran. they helped us get people out of afghanistan and other places. and in that, in these conversations, we introduced our theory of return. we talked informally about what it is and how we can manipulate or...or manoeuvre the scene in order to allow to test this theory. in this case, it was very, very easy to convince the americans because the president of the united states felt this very personally. what we saw of him immediately after october 7th is the real, his real dna and his instinct. and so he made it, very quickly he made it an american issue. he met with the families within five days. secretary of state blinken met with the families when he visited israel within two days. and that was what the qataris and the egyptians needed. they needed to show hamas, "hey, this is an american priority. "don't mess with us here. "we need you to resolve it. "we need to get a proposalfrom you." ok, but what i'm curious about is your involvement, because one can imagine the us president reacting in that way anyway. what difference are you making? are you able to get information about the hostages out and back to them? yes. so i'm not able to get information about the hostages from hamas because hamas does not have, especially in the first days, they had no...no complete information themselves. and even if they do, they don't really... they're not eager to release that. however, sarah, the point is, and what is important to understand about our role, we're able to experiment and have conversations informally with the different parties that they cannot have directly between them, be it even when the israelis and the qataris were meeting a little bit later on, when a proposal was on the table, they could talk between them on the formal stuff. but then i would get phone calls, both from the qatari officials and from members of the israeli negotiation team, asking me to test different things, because even as the propo... the deal itself came to be, every single day was almost renewed negotiations because hamas was not living up exactly to what they... ..israel understood that they will do. and israel was not living up exactly to what hamas understood that they would do. so all of these kind of things beyond the official table are managed in conversations and meetings that happen around it in the...in the informal level. right. so what sort of things are you testing? what... ? give us an example of the experimenting that you're talking about. yeah. so for example, when we were executing the first deal at the end of november and early into december, when with every day hamas was supposed to release ten hostages of certain categories and certain priorities, but every day those were not being met. and there was always a test, an experiment between the mediators and the israelis to figure out, how far can you push the envelope and still make sure that we stay within the frame of the agreement? so, for example, is it, if we're releasing a hostage that is not in the same category as was supposed to be, is israel going to walk away? if hamas is introducing a date in which they release less hostages than the ten that they agreed for, will israel be moving... ..moving away from the agreement or will take it in and still do it? if there is a soldier involved or a female soldier involved, will the price that israel is willing to pay be higher? so extracting all these menus and all these options just to figure out how we can keep it going another day, another day in order to try and get as many hostages as possible in this, in this first round. right. so given where we are now, because there was that release and then nothing, how close do you think we are to a deal now? um... i wish i was optimistic on this, but i can tell you, sarah, that, um, after the first deal collapsed, after it was successful for a while, there were about 10, 14 days of fighting in which negotiations didn't happen. i flew back to doha at the request of members of the israeli mission, to explore what is available and what is possible for a next round. and i can tell you that as of mid—december, a deal very similar to the deal that we have now was on the table, but we entered a very frustrating part from there until now. this is about six months in which we had to try and convince israelis and hamas to come together and to agree at least to get into this first stage of this agreement. one of the reasons that we have these gaps or this, um... ..the inability to execute, is because there's a real gap between what the prime minister of israel is willing to commit to and what hamas is demanding. now, there is a complete mismatch between the israelis and hamas in understanding how negotiations work, or how they should work. but right now, we saw president biden last weekend, basically outing the proposition that he believed bibi netanyahu has provided him over and over again. he made it public in order to pressure the israeli prime minister to... ..to stick with it. um, but in the next few days, we're going to see whether the prime minister, if he wants the negotiations to succeed, he needs to publicly talk about what has been achieved and what is in common. but if he talks... but he has again stated that his... ..primarily his priority is the elimination of hamas. he says, "we want... "we've gone the extra mile to bring them back, "but the goals of the war, "primarily the elimination of hamas." unfortunately, that's why i am not very optimistic that even this round will work, because the prime minister is focused publicly on highlighting the gaps and his unwillingness to commit that going into this agreement in good faith will be the end of the war. however, again, this is not exactly what he was telling quietly to the americans. so the fact that the president made it public put bibi a little bit in a box. and i think if bibi indeed keeps sabotaging this with his statements, biden is putting himself in a position where he has the moral authority to increase the pressure and potentially even engage in a humanitarian indirect track to at least help the american citizens who are still being held in there. as you mentioned, there are eight of them. right. now, we're talking about gaza, which, of course, has all happened since you wrote a book called in the shadows about the work that you do and the fact... and it's the reason the family called you. because of your involvement in cases like the release of the us basketball star brittney griner in russia, otto warmbier, the us student jailed in north korea, xiyue wang, the princeton graduate student in iran, and many others. but also danny fenster, who was a journalist arrested by the myanmarjunta in 2021. can we focus on what happened with him? because this is something that you were obviously deeply involved with, and you secured his release. it's something that at times the us government has recognised as well. how did that come about? yeah, so we have two different ways in which we actually are able to bring people home. in the case of danny fenster, we were actually able to conclude a deal ourselves and actually physically bring him home. in most of the cases, just like it is in gaza, and with brittney griner, we step in and we're able to conduct conversations and refine and define what the deal would be, and they'll need to sell it to our own government in order to execute. but back to danny fenster. he was taken... he's a journalist. he was taken out of the airport, as he was leaving myanmar legally, by the military government. once they knew that there was an american in the system, things kind of escalated because the us and myanmar, and the military government in myanmar after the takeover in 2021, they were not talking to each other. so if you don't talk, how are you going to figure out how to release your own citizen? so we started working really hard on trying to penetrate, to get a visit in there. our relationship with myanmar go back about ten years before that, that we...where we helped as the richardson center. we helped with some of the activities for them in the transition to democracy. we managed to get that invitation around august, and then the us state department was very reluctant in... ..in being positive about our visit, not because they were bad, not because they didn't want him back. they really wanted him back. but i believe they were worried that if we go and meet with the general, the head of the military government, and ask for danny fenster, that he will ask for something in return from the us government that the us government was not willing to give. 0k. but instead, so... but that was not our approach there. so when you say we, that is you and the former new mexico governor, bill richardson. correct. what was it...? so you're in the meetings with the myanmar military. how do you secure his release? the main objective there was danny fenster. look, this is at the heart of what i do. i studied the leader, the general in myanmar. i watched his speeches. i watched him being interviewed. and i did it not in order to figure out what the national interests are, but in order to understand who he is as a person. anything in his personality, in his background that we can use in order to establish an emotional attachment between him and former governor richardson in a very short time, so that the governor can ask him as a favour to him to let danny go. and one of the things that we concluded from that was that we cannot raise this issue in front of anybody else. it had to be a one on one. so we conducted the big meeting with the leader. we had ministers around and we talked about covid, humanitarian aid, the things that we came to myanmar to speak about. and then the governor asked to spend private time with the leader. and in that time, we focused very specifically on how the governor approaches him on a personal level, recognising, showing him that not only does he see him, he invested in the relationship between them, the personal relationship. and by the way, it wasn't manipulation, it was genuine. it has to be genuine. and they ended up in a conversation that instead of five minutes, took 45 minutes, about leadership, about how it impacted the families. they bonded, and that was one of the things that we do very, um... we focus on in our work, to the extent that then the governor told him, "look, general, i'm going to get criticised for being here, "for seeing you, for what they say is legitimising you. but i don't care. i'm a politician. i have thick skin. let them criticise me. i'm here because i love the people of myanmar, and i want to help the people of myanmar. but if you want to help me with those critics, there is this young guy here, danny fenster. if you let me go, it will shut our critics up." and the leader looked at him and he said, and this is, by the way, the governor telling me outside of the meeting, the leader looked at him and said, "is this a big story, danny fenster?" and the governor said, "look, if you let him go for us, it will be a big story, but i don't want you to do it for that. i want you to do it for me, as my friend." and that was at the point when the leader looked at him and said, "i will give you danny fenster. i will give him to you. i will do it here, but it will take me about a week or two. will you come and visit me again?" to which the governor, of course, said yes. and he said, "you cannot let anybody know about this." so, sarah, we flew back from myanmar on a very long flight, not able to tell the family, not able to tell our own government that we have secured his release. and meanwhile, the reason why the leader needed that time is because he needed to conclude his trial, which he did, and sentenced him for 11 years. so you can imagine the heat that we got. not only did we go to myanmar, didn't get him, but he got maximum sentencing and we had to stomach it for about a week until the phone call came and we arranged to fly back in there and bring him home. now, we should say that the us special presidential envoy, roger carstens, who you've mentioned, the envoy for hostage affairs, has praised you. he says, "there's probably not a week that doesn't go by when i don't call mickey bergman about 8.30 at night when i'm heading home to ask some advice." he has acknowledged what you do, but i... one wonders what it is, why it's not possible for a government to do it. and we have... you will know of families who are very critical of the us government because they haven't secured, for example, the release of paul whelan from russia. yeah, well, first of all, roger carstens is a good friend, and we've been doing this for years now together. and i trust him. and we share information again on the informal part that, you know, we're able to talk and secure and give each other information that is useful. here's the thing with it, sarah. imagine, even if the russians and the americans decided, "hey, we're going to get together right now and we're going to talk about hostages and prisoners." and they sit in the room. they're wearing certain suits. there are certain flags, even before the first word is said, the weight of the war in ukraine, the weight of nuclear stability, the weight of world order is weighing on that conversation. it is almost impossible, as much as they try, to insulate the issue of the prisoners in a humanitarian way and refine what might be possible. that's where we come in on behalf of the families and are able to do it because we're not policy people. ok, but you have no power and you will know that there is criticism, and there was of governor richardson. danielle gilbert, of the dickey center for international understanding at dartmouth college, said, "the danger is a freelance diplomat could wind up working at cross purposes with the us government and putting deals injeopardy." yes, and i know dani very well and we actually sit together on a commission on this with the centerfor strategic studies here. um... it is...she is right that if a party is doing this on behalf of families irresponsibly, it can hinder and it can run cross purposes. we do everything in our power. we co—ordinate with the government. we tell them what we're doing, as long as it helps support our theory of return and getting people home. there are times, as you will probably saw and mentioned, that governor richardson was criticised or i was criticised for the role that we play, but that's the key. while we co—ordinate with them, with the government, we don't work for them. we work on behalf of the families and there's always a friction between families and the cases the government, our government doesn't... when they look at a case, they have a complex set of interests with that country. right. there is... and here we are, pushing one item. there is... there are other concerns. one is that for every person, for every deal that you strike, it feeds the beast. more hostages will be taken, because people now know that there is a price that will be paid. and another, more sinister one, we know only recently. the october the 7th attacks were masterminded by yahya sinwar, someone who was released, one of the thousand palestinian prisoners released in exchange for the israeli soldier gilad shalit. that there is...there are consequences to these deals. absolutely. and here's what i'll say, because i have to... this is something that i would love to debunk a lot. the argument that you just said, the critics that are arguing that argument, it is a very emotional, irrational argument. it fails on two major levels. one, it is intellectually lazy, and second, it is morally bankrupt. why do i say that? intellectually lazy, because there's actually no data that supports whatsoever that the way we resolve these cases increase or decrease the amount of americans or political prisoners taken under...after. quite the opposite. i would, i can argue, and a different narrative in russia, when the russians took paul whelan, and they wanted to negotiate, and i wrote about it in my book because we had those channels, and the us refused. so they took trevor reed and the us refused. so they took brittney griner, and suddenly we were negotiating. so you can argue the other way as well. so intellectually, there's very little data. and one of the people that compiled that data was brianjenkins from rand. and he's...he did a study of 20 years of the data on this. complete ambiguity between the way that these issues are resolved and the number of americans being taken. that's the intellectual part of it. now, the...the moral bankruptcy of this is that if we want to build deterrents, we are the united states, or israel for that matter, if we're talking about october 7th. we're strong enough to build deterrents. we cannot do it on the backs of those who are being held. 0k. so... first, we need to make sure that they come back. then we can do deterrence. so you said that in the situation with the gaza hostages now, that president biden should consider working independently for the us hostages. are you seriously suggesting that that's the next step? not exactly, but in principle, yes. i want to suggest the fact the us president has a responsibility for his own citizens. now, he has worked really hard for eight months trying to get a deal for the totality of the hostages. and it has been... it's succeeded at the beginning and has been failing since for the last six months, over and over again. and i believe that pursuing a deal that will help get some of the americans back home is not doing it in spite of israel, or despite bibi netanyahu. not at all. it's a way to demonstrate that it's possible and be able to kind of open the doorfor this. so it's not a negative, it's not a... ..a friction inducing kind of deal, but it's a way to actually get them. by the way, they're americans. they're also israelis. they are dual citizens. so i think there's an opportunity to do that. and i think the president has a responsibility to do whatever he can to bring back americans home. mickey bergman, thank you for coming on hardtalk. thank you so much, sarah. hello there. on tuesday, we had a cold front move southwards across the uk. now, after a cloudy and wet start to the day across northern areas, once that cold front had moved its way through, well, the skies brightened up and we had a mixture of sunshine and these big shower clouds. the other thing that the cold front did was what cold fronts do — it's really dumped the temperature. so, for example, in aberdeen, we started on monday at 21 degrees for the highest temperature. it was just 15 degrees, though, for tuesday. and those temperatures dropping by five or six degrees was quite typical as this colder polar air mass worked its way in. that means the air started from a long way to our north. now, at the moment, we have plenty of showers around, particularly near coastal areas in the north—west. otherwise, some lengthy, clear spells. and it's a chilly start to wednesday morning, with temperatures widely down into single figures, the coldest spots probably down to abouti in sheltered areas of scotland. that really is cold for a start to a summer's day. despite the chilly start, though, there will be plenty of sunshine. showers from the word go around these north—western areas, particularly near to the coast. but through the day, as those temperatures rise, the showers become really widespread, particularly across the northern half of the uk and especially in scotland, where, again, we're looking at some hail and thunder. it's going to feel quite chilly, particularly in the brisk winds here. but further south, ok, temperatures below average, but in thejune sun, it should probably feel ok but on the fresh side. now, our weather pattern�*s blocked at the moment. this is a blocking pattern that's out in the jet stream, out in the atlantic to our south—west. what that's doing is it's forcing this north—westerlyjet stream across the uk, and that continues to pull in cold air, particularly to the northern half of the uk. and because we've got a blocking weather pattern, well, that means the weather doesn't change very much from one day to the next. wednesday, we have loads of showers in the forecast across the northern half of the uk. it's the same thing for thursday. again, with those showers coming in across scotland, there'll be quite a few that turn heavy with some hail and thunder, and it will continue to feel quite chilly here. spot the difference, then, for friday. again, loads more showers, particularly affecting scotland, quite a few for northern ireland, northern england. drier weather further south with some sunny spells. and again, we've got those same kind of temperature contrasts — chilly in the north, temperatures fairly close to average in the south, but feeling ok in thejune sun. and guess what? into the weekend, we don't really see a great deal changing with the weather. you'll have to wait till next week for some changes. live from london, this is bbc news. a very fiesty exchange on tax, immigration, and the nhs marks the first live tv debate between rishi sunak and sir keir starmer. we'll have all the reaction. the king and queen willjoin second world war veterans at an event in portsmouth, to mark the 80th anniversary of the d—day landings. indian prime minister narendra modi declares an historic third victory in india — but fails to win an outight majority. hello, and a very warm welcome to the programme. i'm sally bunn dock. in the first debate of the uk general election, rishi sunak and sir keir starmer have clashed on taxes, the nhs, immigration and the cost of living. the labour leader saud the government's plan was not working, while the prime minister claimed taxes would rise under labour. the labour leader said. our uk political editor chris mason has broken down the highlights of the debate.