The kidnappers, however, did not give the Monitor staff any respite. On January 30, a second video of Carroll aired on Al Jazeera. On February 8, Kuwaiti television station Al Rai broadcast a third one. Along with the videotape, Al Rai said that the kidnappers set a second deadline. Again, they demanded the release of all Iraqi women held in US captivity—this time by February 26. The station owner told the Monitor that his sources indicated Carroll was still alive and somewhere in Baghdad.

Watch the second video as it appeared on Al Jazeera

Watch the third video as it appeared on Al Rai

But it was no longer clear what the Monitor could do about it. Ingwerson was torn. The videotapes put Carroll in the spotlight again. Would more publicity be a good idea? He wanted to let the kidnappers know “we’re still paying attention” and, if by chance word got through to Carroll, to let her know “we’re still on it; nobody has forgotten.” In the interim, Ingwerson’s earlier publicity effort took on a life of its own. The group Reporters Without Borders, an international group that worked for freedom of the press, orchestrated a demonstration in Paris on February 6, the 30th day of Carroll’s captivity, and called for her release. An enormous banner bearing the photo of Carroll in her black head covering hung from Rome’s city hall.

Agency relations. To make matters more difficult, the Monitor’s relationship with the FBI was growing strained. Bergenheim had grown to admire a number of individual FBI officers he was working with, and was grateful for their help. But “we were frustrated in that they would never take us in their confidence,” he says. “We made it clear every way we could that whatever we learned in that regard we would only use for finding Jill, not for any journalistic purpose. But they never believed us... I’m sure they found working with a news organization like ours unbelievably difficult.” Editors had the clear impression that the FBI did not consider the Monitor a full partner sharing a common goal. Someone at the FBI told Ingwerson: “We collect information. We do not give it out.” More often than not, the paper learned what the FBI knew from off-the-record sources that reporters and editors had cultivated within government agencies over the years.

Ingwerson understood the source of the tension. The FBI and CIA, he knew, feared that as the Monitor dug through leads and made contacts, that activity might disrupt their own investigation and could even jeopardize Carroll’s life. Nonetheless, the lack of communication was frustrating. What made it worse was that the FBI, the State Department, and the CIA didn’t cooperate with one another, either. “Why isn’t the FBI talking to the CIA?” Scott remembers fuming.

Watch Marshall discuss why the FBI was hard to deal with

Sattam al-Gaood
© Christian Science Monitor
One instance of interagency dissent arose at the end of January. Cook received a call from a US TV network source in Washington that Israeli-American independent journalist Daphne Barak was trying to sell a videotape of an interview she had made with Sheikh Sattam Hamid Farhan al-Gaood, a confidant of Saddam Hussein. During the interview, al-Gaood, who according to CIA reports handled clandestine business transactions such as smuggling oil out of Iraq, had told her he could help free Jill Carroll. After further questioning by Barak, he implied that he could get her freed and would use his own money, but no one had asked him. Cook relayed the information to Bergenheim. “[Barak] was not someone who could be ignored,” Bergenheim says.

That information raised the hopes of Team Jill; perhaps Carroll’s parents could make an appeal to the sheikh on television. But the possibility of appealing to al-Gaood also created tension at the newspaper and at the various government agencies. "We wrestled with it enormously ourselves,” Bergenheim says. The sheikh, all agreed, was not a credible figure. The Baghdad Boys were suspicious of al-Gaood’s motives. The FBI opposed any contact but, in keeping with its policy of not sharing information with the Monitor , would not tell Team Jill why. Ingwerson recalls:

The FBI may have had another agenda. Gaood was caught up in the UN oil-for-food scandal, which the FBI was investigating. We suspected that the FBI may have been building a case against Gaood and didn’t want to be in a position of having to cut him a deal in exchange for helping to free Jill. They were adamantly opposed to involving him. ^[23]

The Monitor' s CIA sources, on the other hand, encouraged communication with him because al-Gaood might have the contacts to help Jill. The CIA also provided the Monitor with some background information on the sheikh in order to help editors assess the opportunity. To the Monitor 's dismay, Bowers’ CIA sources let her know that the CIA had checked with the FBI before handing over the information, and that the FBI told the CIA to stop talking to the Monitor about Carroll. Because of this inter-agency squabble, Bergenheim called FBI Director Mueller to say that the Monitor was not getting the cooperation it needed. “They went to some extent to be helpful, but their definition of helpful and ours was totally different,” he says. Bergenheim’s call had another chilling effect: Suddenly, Bowers’ CIA sources would no longer talk. “Our back channels were shut down,” Ingwerson says.

Until then, Bergenheim had not told Carroll’s family about al-Gaood’s interview. Whenever Team Jill got a lead, they tried to verify it before letting the Carrolls know because they did not want to raise the family’s hopes falsely. After some thought, and despite the opposition of the Baghdad Boys, Bergenheim told the parents. Eventually and as a compromise, Carroll’s parents did appear on the NBC program “Good Morning America” to appeal for help, but their February 9 appeal was directed at an unnamed sheikh. All they got was more silence.

The FBI also had ongoing disagreements with other federal partners. The Bureau’s Washington office, for example, refused to pass along information to the interagency Hostage Working Group (HWG), organized by the State Department to monitor American hostages in Baghdad, because one HWG member had given an interview to the Washington Post in which he described in general terms what HWG did. “That’s what ticked the FBI in DC off,” Ingwerson says. ^[24] Adds Scott: “We’re just sitting there, saying, ‘Why can’t you just get along? You have the same goal.’ For all of us, I think, it was a difficult realization of how ineffective different government organizations could be, even with such a simple task as... trying to find this one individual and get her out.”