Army Lt. Gen. Bennet S. Sacolick still remembers the call: The body of an American hostage had been found in Iraq.
It was 2004, and the Iraqi insurgency was building momentum. Four Blackwater USA contractors had recently been killed and their burned bodies hung from a bridge in Fallujah. The Mahdi army, a Shia militia created by cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, was rising up and Sacolick, then a colonel, was commanding a special operations task force in Iraq.
After the call, Sacolick and his men tracked down the insurgents and captured or killed the group responsible for the kidnapping. It was a single-minded hunt with little concern for anything but the location of the next target. Sacolick never considered the victim's family--either during the hunt for the insurgents or after the body was recovered near an overpass. The family wasn't part of the mission.
“We eventually were able to kill or capture every single one of them, but I never associated that with a family back home,” said Sacolick, who asked that the victim not be named for privacy reasons. “I’ve since met the family and they are wonderful people, and now I’m on the other end of it and I realize there is a huge tail associated with hostages. Maybe that was my own personal maturing process, when you realize there was more to it than just what is going on in my battle space in Iraq.”
That disconnect between those trying to free the hostage and the family waiting for news of their loved ones is one reason the Obama administration ordered a review of how the U.S. government handles hostage negotiations and rescues. Sacolick, now director of the strategic operational planning directorate, was tapped to oversee the review, thrusting his little known planning office at the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) into the spotlight.