How Danny Pearl Helped Save David Rohde

AFP / Tomas Munita for The New York Times As more reporters are held in Tehran and one is now free from the Taliban, Asra Q. Nomani—who was with Danny Pearl when he was kidnapped—on what the media has learned since then and how it is saving reporters' lives.

The survival of New York Times reporter David Rohde is a happy ending within a disturbing trend that has become part of journalism in the 21st century: the assault and targeted assassination of journalists from the Philippines to Oakland, Calif., and Iran—where 24, including a Newsweek correspondent, have been arrested in the last week.

But David’s kidnappers, who held him for seven months, are still out on the streets—or in the mountains, in this case—a reminder that assailants are getting away with crimes against journalists.

In 2002, Wall Street Journal editors and Dow Jones officials chose to publicize Danny’s kidnapping. Media outlets learned from Danny’s fate.

After I learned David had been kidnapped, in November 2008, I sent him an email with the subject line “prayers to you,” just as I had done when my friend and colleague, Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, was taken in 2002. I closed the message to David on a hopeful note: “Please, be well.” I volunteered my assistance to an editor and friend at The New York Times, and I set a Google Alert to his name. But no stories about his kidnapping popped up. The media was respecting a decision by The New York Times and the Rohde family’s kidnapping specialists not to publicize the news, on the premise that a kidnapping target’s value only increases with attention.

I understood—and I agreed. In 2002, Wall Street Journal editors and Dow Jones officials chose to publicize Danny’s kidnapping with interviews on Larry King Live and regular headline alerts on CNN.

Behind the scenes, some Pakistani investigators, FBI kidnapping specialists, and Wall Street Journal staffers didn’t agree with the strategy, with one arguing: “Get Danny’s face off TV!” Humanizing Danny was a gamble that would have been seen as brilliant if he had come out alive. Alas, he didn’t. No one is to blame. We all just do the best we know how to do at the time.

But media outlets learned from Danny’s fate. The Christian Science Monitor chose to keep a low profile in 2006, after journalist Jill Carroll was kidnapped in Iraq. I know that was the strategy this year, after the arrest of Roxana Saberi in Iran and Laura Ling and Euna Lee in North Korea. Roxana was freed. I hope for the same outcome for Laura and Euna.

To be sure, media outlets still go public. On Sunday evening, Newsweek—apparently operating under the assumption that the Iranian authorities aren’t seeking money or prisoner swaps but to silence the journalists—published an article on its Web site openly calling for the immediate release of its detained journalist, Maziar Bahari.

This weekend, I held my breath as I opened an email with the subject line “Good news—David Rohde escaped unharmed :).” Speed reading, I raced through the details of Rohde’s journey to freedom. I exhaled and sent him an email to read someday, many days from now: “Hallelujah, David. Hallelujah.”

Seven years ago, Danny met a very different fate when he was kidnapped in Karachi, Pakistan. We never got the call that David’s family and friends did. Instead, a Pakistani cop came to my rented home in Karachi and told Danny’s wife, Mariane, “I’m sorry I couldn’t bring your Danny home.”

According to an “Impunity Index” compiled by the Committee to Protect Journalists, a New York-based organization, 523 journalists were murdered between 1992 and 2008, and of those murders, the criminals got away with it in almost nine of 10 cases. In just 6.5 percent, there was partial impunity.

Back in 2002, we never expected Danny to die. He and Mariane had been visiting my house in Karachi when Danny went off for an interview and was kidnapped. The worst I imagined, as we worked around the clock to find him, was a long captivity.

Into the fifth week of our search, I turned to Mariane and said, “We have to be prepared that Danny might become another Terry Anderson.” (In 1985, Anderson, an Associated Press reporter, was kidnapped in Lebanon and wasn’t released until 1991.)

But at that moment in 2002, across town in the lobby of the Karachi Sheraton, a Pakistani man was delivering a video documenting Danny’s murder to an undercover FBI agent.