Did the White House Know Where ISIS Hostages Were Being Held for Months?

By the spring of 2014, the ISIS captors, we're told, felt so confident in their situation that there was very little visible security around the hostages. And by May, eight Western hostages were held together in one location," Herridge said. She added that Mueller was kept separate from the men, but she was able to communicate with other Western hostages, including James Foley, that she was not being mistreated or abused by her ISIS captors. According to Herridge, there was very specific intelligence about the location of a group of Western hostages in May 2014, so specific that intelligence officials even knew in which building they were being held. "The question is why there was such a delay by the White House to act on this information," Herridge said. "They did not OK the rescue operation until about seven weeks later. And there was clearly a fundamental disconnect between the quality of the intelligence, which the rescue team felt was of a sufficient level that they could act, and what was described to me as a significant delay on behalf of the White House, asking for the intelligence to build up further before they would act." Herridge said that this was the last and best opportunity to rescue all of the hostages together, because after ISIS learned of the possible raid, the hostages were no longer held together.

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Toward the end of May, the British government had identified two or three locations in and around the Syrian city of Raqqa, the de facto capital of the so-called Islamic State, where the militants had moved hostages during the previous weeks and months. But the British were not absolutely sure in which location the Westerners were held. The captives included American journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff, as well aid worker Kayla Mueller. The information—based on debriefings of European captives who had been released, satellite and drone surveillance, and electronic eavesdropping—was not definitive in May. Then, in early June, London had a “positive identification and that information was shared with Washington,” said a British source. The delay of nearly a month before the rescue bid was mounted remains a source of bewilderment for British officials...Diane Foley, the mother of James Foley, who was the first American to be shown murdered on camera, also raised questions about the timing of the rescue effort, telling The Daily Beast that French officials had developed information about the hostages’ location as early as March, but that the U.S. government didn’t act on it. “That was part of our frustration,” she said. “The State Department said they were connecting with the French and everybody at the highest levels.” And yet, there was no movement on the U.S. side. “Very specific information was available as early as mid-March. And that’s what’s been so tough for us as families, because apparently they were held in the same place all those months,” Foley said.

This, however, was a different story. We work closely with British intelligence — so closely that our own NSA scandal involves them, too — and they rated this information as solid. According to Diane Foley, the French had also developed similar intelligence long before that corroborated MI-5. That would be two different agencies developing the same intelligence, and the CIA’s contacts with former hostages who had been ransomed should have confirmed the reliability of the information — at least enough to attempt a mission there.