Player Hater

Why? Now that Laura Ling and Euna Lee are home from North Korea and John Yettaw has been freed from a Myanmar prison, that's surely the question. Why were three idiots worth rescue missions by a former U.S. president and a serving U.S. senator? They weren't kidnapped; they weren't hostages. All three knowingly broke the laws of the countries they were in, and, in the process, brought harm to innocents. The pair caught inside North Korea put at risk members of the human-rights network that was helping them with their story. (The two have still to give their version of events; Brent Marcus, spokesman for their employer, Current TV, says the network is respecting their request to have time to reunite with their families.) Yettaw's adventure led to a further 18 months of house arrest for the iconic opposition leader, 64-year-old Aung San Suu Kyi, who has already been confined for 14 of the past 20 years.

 

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"I'm not particularly sympathetic," says Ambassador James Dobbins, a former senior State Department official and now director of RAND's international-security programs. "My immediate reaction is to wonder why people can't spend a few years in jail rather than counting on us to rescue them when they do things that are obviously stupid as well as illegal—things for which we would put them in jail in many cases. I can imagine the State Department grinds its teeth in frustration every time they find a new American who's done something stupid and now requires a former president of the United States go rescue them." Not many get such VIP treatment, of course. There are, according to the State Department, 2,652 Americans in jails around the world. (Many doing time for drug offenses.) Why were these three singled out for heavyweight intervention?

The answer is realpolitik. The Obama administration wants lines of communication to the North Korean and Burmese governments. "Humanitarian" missions to free Americans offer Obama an opportunity he wouldn't otherwise have. Clinton's trip to Pyongyang had huge behind-the-scenes help from the State Department, according to a source there who asked to remain anonymous; Webb's trip to Myanmar was blessed by it, according to reports.

Technically, the Logan Act of 1799 makes it a felony for private citizens to insert themselves into relations between the U.S. and other nations. But nobody has ever been prosecuted under this statute. After Jesse Jackson went to Cuba, Central America, and Syria in 1984—he was campaigning for the Democratic presidential nomination—President Reagan wondered publicly whether Jackson had breached the Logan Act, but musing was as far as Reagan went. In the vitriolic debate of the 1980s over which faction the U.S. should support in Nicaragua—Sandinistas or Contras—Washington activists on both sides almost certainly breached the Logan Act. One group of liberals so feared FBI investigation that it shredded its files. (Nothing happened.) Since then, it could be argued, the rise of high-powered Washington lobbying firms on lucrative contracts to advise foreign governments has effectively shredded the Logan Act.

But the journeys by Clinton and Webb were clearly kosher because the U.S. government was involved in both. (Webb even flew into Burma on a U.S. Air Force plane.) But that category of intervention—nonofficial trips by current or former senior officials—does raise special problems. "So long as they go basically as facilitators, that's fine," says Ambassador Martin Indyk, who represented Washington in Israel during the Clinton administration. "But as negotiators? That's a different matter."