WASHINGTON: When President Barack Obama met recently with the mother of James Foley, the US hostage beheaded last August by Daesh, she said, he told her freeing her son and the other US hostages held with him had been his top priority.

“With all due respect,” Diane Foley said she answered, “that may have been the intention, but in practice, it certainly wasn’t.”

Obama, she said, also conceded his administration had failed her.

“That was the least he could do,” Foley said in an interview this week. “That was hopeful. I recognise the administration feels badly it was not handled well and it was not given the priority it should have had.”

That encounter in the West Wing in April came as Foley visited Washington to take part in a White House-ordered review of the government’s policy on US hostages held overseas by terrorists, which will result in several proposed changes to be announced in the next month, said a senior administration official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the review had not been completed.

The review is likely to recommend the creation of an interdepartmental “fusion cell” for recovering US captives, which would include a “family engagement coordinator” to support relatives and keep them informed, the official said. Also under consideration is a group to be based at the White House to settle conflicts in hostage cases and the designation of a senior State Department official to oversee the government’s contacts with foreign nations on hostage issues.

The administration has said publicly it would not change the government’s long-standing policy against offering ransoms to terrorists, which Obama and senior officials argue is essential to discouraging future hostage takings. But family members are pushing the administration to at least say explicitly that private citizens and companies will not face criminal charges for negotiating or raising money for ransom on their own. The Foleys and other families say that when they tried to do so, government officials threatened them with prosecution.

It appears unlikely that the review will publicly recommend whether the government should pursue criminal charges for private ransom payments.

The review, which is Obama’s attempt to grapple with the hostage takings that have prompted anger from families who say his administration has botched their cases, began last year. It is led by Lt. Gen. Bennet S. Sacolick of the Army, the director of strategic operational planning at the National Counterterrorism Centre. In a December letter, Lisa O. Monaco, Obama’s counterterrorism adviser, invited 82 families of hostages and former hostages to provide information to the review team. Two dozen of the families agreed.

One by one, they have travelled to the office complex in McLean, Virginia, that houses the counterterrorism centre to meet with Sacolick.

They have told him, the family members said, of a hostage policy that has often left them feeling powerless, trapped in a bureaucratic morass and victimised by officials who have threatened them with prosecution if they negotiated with terror groups for the release of their relatives.

“The State Department said to us, ‘Oh, well, you could be subject to prosecution if you pay a ransom,’ and then the FBI says, ‘When you try to negotiate a ransom, we will help you do it,’” said Nancy Curtis, mother of Theo Padnos, who was held by the Syrian branch of Al-Qaida for nearly two years before his release last summer. “They’re not playing straight with the families.”

The gruesome videotaped slaying of James Foley last summer laid bare the plight of US hostages held by terror groups overseas, a problem that has only grown with the rise of Daesh. Daesh has raised tens of millions of dollars in ransoms — at least $20 million (Dh73.46 million) last year alone, according to US officials — to finance its operations.

“It took the death of those kids and the public embarrassment to change the attitude on this at the White House, and we have now seen a change,” said Marc Allen Tice, the father of Austin Tice, a US freelance journalist who disappeared in Syria in 2012.

Elaine Weinstein, the wife of Warren Weinstein, who was accidentally killed in a US drone strike in January while being held captive by Al Qaida in Pakistan, said in a statement last month that she hoped his death and similar tragedies would “finally prompt the US government to take its responsibilities seriously and establish a coordinated and consistent approach to supporting hostages and their families.”

Gary Noesner, who retired in 2003 as chief of the FBI’s Crisis Negotiation Unit, said since the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, US officials had grown less willing to negotiate with terrorist hostage takers or to help families in doing so.

“Now everyone is so self-conscious about being perceived as giving in to terrorists or being weak that I don’t think they explore the possibilities,” said Noesner, the author of Stalling for Time, which recounts his 23-year career as a hostage negotiator. “There’s been a march toward inflexibility, and that’s what the families are complaining about.”

— New York Times