Via Teleconference
9:37 A.M. EDT
MODERATOR: Thank you to everyone for joining our press call this morning on the release of Mark Frerichs.
As a reminder of the ground rules, this call is being held on background, attributable to "senior administration officials," and the contents are embargoed until the end of the call.
For your awareness but not for your reporting, our speakers on the call today are [senior administration official] and [senior administration official].
Now I'll turn it over to our first speaker, [senior administration official].
SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL: Thank you so much, and thanks to all of you for taking the time to join this call.
I am delighted, gratified, and relieved to share with all of you that U.S. citizen Mark Frerichs is now a free man after two and a half years as a hostage in Afghanistan.
This result is the culmination of an extraordinary amount of effort and care across the U.S. government for many months now to bring him out of captivity and to safety.
Most importantly, after initial assessment, it appears that Mark is in stable health. He has been offered a range of support options after his time in captivity.
The President was able to speak earlier with Mark's family and share the good news about his release. His family members, who have advocated tirelessly for his release, are, of course, eager to be reunited with him.
Stepping back and as you all know, President Biden is deeply committed to bringing home all Americans held hostage or wrongfully detained abroad. That's been a priority for the President, for the Secretary of State, and for the administration's entire national security team.
This administration is proud to have brought home American hostages and wrongful detainees from Afghanistan, from Burma, from Haiti, from Russia, from Venezuela, from West Africa, and from other parts of the world in cases that we have deliberately kept discreet for various reasons.
As part of our commitment to bring home all Americans held hostage or wrongfully detained, we have engaged extensively with Mark Frerichs's family and advocates quite truly from the earliest days of the administration. We continued to engage with them and provide them with updates on our efforts on Mark's behalf through various complications and permutations that we worked through assiduously in order to reach today's success.
When U.S. troops departed Afghanistan and we ended America's longest war last year, we remained committed to bringing Mark home, as we said publicly at the time. Since then, we've raised Mark's case with the Taliban at every opportunity and we've regularly reminded them that Mark had done nothing wrong and that releasing Mark had to occur before the Taliban could hope for better relations with the United States.
We undertook months of tough negotiations with the Taliban for Mark's release. And it became clear in the course of those negotiations that the release of Bashir Noorzai, a drug trafficker who spent 17 years in U.S. federal custody, was the key to securing Mark's overdue freedom.
We consulted with experts across the U.S. government who assessed that Noorzai's return to Afghanistan would not materially change any risk to Americans emanating from the country or the nature of the drug trade there.
And I'll emphasize, because this has been reported erroneously in some foreign reporting already: Noorzai was never a detainee at the Guantanamo Bay detention facility.
The President made the difficult decision this summer in June to grant clemency to Noorzai if that meant bringing an American home where he belonged and reuniting him with his family who missed him.
We ensured that we'd be prepared to carry out Noorzai's release when we were confident that the Taliban was prepared to release Mark.
Now in the weeks after that decision and in order to protect Americans and really the whole world, as this group knows, the President authorized an airstrike that removed from the battlefield al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri. And as we said publicly at the time, Mark Frerichs was foremost in the President's mind, all of our minds during that decision-making process.
We conveyed that fact to Mark's family right after the strike and emphasized that we were continuing to work on Mark's behalf and would do so until we secured his freedom.
As we also said publicly at the time, we told the Taliban immediately after the strike that we would hold them directly responsible if any harm were to come to Mark and that the best way they might begin to rebuild trust with the United States, with the world was to immediately release Mark.
That didn't happen immediately. But ultimately, we did have a narrow window of opportunity this month to secure Mark's freedom, including by releasing Noorzai. And we acted very quickly when it became clear that that window of opportunity had arrived and we became confident in it.
Through the tireless work of many, many individuals across many parts of the U.S. government, we were able to arrange for Noorzai's return to Afghanistan and Mark Frerichs's safe release into U.S. custody. This included extraordinarily careful logistical coordination at a very senior level of our government over the past few days in particular.
Mark has successfully and safely made it to Doha and into our care. And again, we are so grateful to all who made this possible.
As I indicated earlier, a wide range of types of support have been offered to him as next steps in his post-isolation recovery. And I'll respect his privacy and his family, and leave it to them if they choose to make public at some point where he goes from here and what his next steps are.
