How the journalist Danny Fenster found himself in a notorious prison complex known as “the darkest hellhole in Burma”—and eventually got freed.
Last spring, Danny Fenster decided to return home from Myanmar for a family visit. Fenster, a thirty-seven-year-old journalist and a Detroit native, had moved to the country in 2019 to take a job as an editor at a local news outlet. On his way to the Yangon airport on the morning of May 24th, Fenster saw trucks full of soldiers and a police checkpoint on the road to the terminal.
The officers at the airport blindfolded Fenster and trundled him into a van. When the blindfold was removed, Fenster was in what appeared to be a police station. Two men interrogated him. The environment was more menacing—Fenster was shackled to a chair while they fired off repetitive questions about why he had come to Myanmar and what he was doing in the country. Hours later, he was blindfolded again and taken to a new location.
Fenster now believes he was arrested because bumbling officials actually did suspect that he worked for a banned publication. But once he was in custody he had become a bargaining chip in the fraught relationship between the generals ruling Myanmar and the Biden Administration, which had declined to recognize their new regime. Other authoritarian states, such as Iran, North Korea, and Russia, routinely jail Americans, looking for concessions from the U.S.
Thousands of Americans are arrested each year in foreign countries, many of them for petty crimes such as public drunkenness. A small number of these detentions, those that the State Department deems politically motivated, are designated “wrongful” under the Levinson Act, a 2020 law named after Robert Levinson, a former F.B.I. agent who was secretly held in Iran for roughly thirteen years and died in custody.
The needle-threading nature of hostage diplomacy has opened the door for people like Bill Richardson, who, as a former U.S. official, can give the patina of legitimacy that isolated authoritarians crave.After Danny’s arrest, Bryan also received a call from Mickey Bergman, the executive director of the Richardson Center for Global Engagement, run by Bill Richardson, the former governor of New Mexico and U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations.
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