on october the 7th last year, 120 are believed to be in gaza, and of those, 39 are presumed to be dead. there are formal negotiations for their release, but there are also informal conversations by individuals and organisations working behind the scenes. my guest today is the hostage negotiator mickey bergman. he s spent much of the last two decades working behind the scenes, helping to negotiate the release of americans kidnapped or detained abroad, either by criminals, political actors or governments. what difference do such fringe diplomats make? are they a help or a hindrance?
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 cer
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.
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
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