Ingrid Betancourt had been freed before Shalit, in 2008. As always, France (like most major countries) denied paying to free the French hostage, who flew away by helicopter after a military operation.
At the time, Radio Suisse Romande (Swiss public radio in French) reported a $20M ransom, claiming the operation was just a show staged to make people forget the money6. According to every single person I interviewed and knew at the time, including people very close to the operations, that information is false, and Operation Jaque, which secured her release, was entirely real. No ransom was reportedly paid. A version confirmed several times by Ingrid Betancourt7, and also by the Colombian president at the time, Álvaro Uribe.
That isn’t always the case.
To bring home the journalists Christian Chesnot and Georges Malbrunot, kidnapped in Iraq in 2004, France paid $15M. A sum in line with the “market”, which runs from $2.5M to $10M per person.
That is what the life of a citizen of a major country is worth when captured by terrorists in a country at war.8
Impossible to say how this cost is really set. But the price is directly indexed to the hostages’ fame. Paradoxically, the harder the support committees work, the more the State steps in, and the higher the price climbs.
Because in reality, what States are mostly paying for is their own image.
In 2007, Nicolas Sarkozy, then French president, made the Bulgarian nurses one of his media priorities. The $100M was the price of his image. And while no ransom was paid for Ingrid Betancourt, the cost of Operation Jaque was borne entirely by France.
What is clear, though, is that these ransoms directly fund terrorism and a whole swarm of middlemen. Some countries (like the United Kingdom) flatly refuse to pay, with heavy consequences.
Of the fifteen or so British hostages over the past 50 years, only 5 came back alive. All of them under a deal between Lebanese and Palestinian movements.
In March 2023, Mali accused France of funding a group close to al-Qaeda to negotiate the release of the journalist Olivier Dubois9. A sum estimated at $6M, according to a local source.
Practices that inevitably raise questions, since from 2001 onwards, hundreds of laws have been churned out around the world to curb terrorist financing. It is in fact one of the main obligations placed on financial firms.
But hostage-taking is nothing new.
In 1430, John of Luxembourg captured Joan of Arc at Compiègne and sold her to the English for 10,000 livres tournois, the French money of account at the time1011. It was after this that she was handed over to the Bishop of Beauvais, who tried her for heresy and sent her to the stake a few months later.
Julius Caesar, in his day, had already been captured by pirates for ransom. History (without anyone being entirely sure) even has it that he was offended… by how little his captors asked for.12
But the story is interesting because it is the first real record of a human life being turned into cash. Because while Aetius was a Roman hostage of the Visigoths, and Arminius, a Cheruscan prince, a hostage of the Romans, that was above all a way of guaranteeing a peace treaty. Something the Spartans were already doing in the 5th century BC, with no money changing hands.