Diane and John Foley endured two kidnapping ordeals. Their son Jim, a journalist, was abducted in both Libya and Syria. Photographs by Carla Van De Puttelaar

Five American families, each harboring a grave secret, took their seats around a vast dining table at the home of David Bradley, a Washington, D.C., entrepreneur who owns the media company that publishes The Atlantic. It was May 13, 2014, and in the garden beyond the French doors, where magnolias and dogwoods were in bloom, a tent had been erected for an event that Bradley’s wife, Katherine, was hosting the following evening. The Bradleys’ gracious Georgian town house, on Embassy Row, is one of the city’s salons: reporters and politicians cross paths at off-the-record dinners with Supreme Court Justices, software billionaires, and heads of state.

The families weren’t accustomed to great wealth or influence. Indeed, most of them had never been to Washington before. Until recently, they had not known of one another, or of the unexpected benefactor who had brought them together. They were the parents of five Americans who had been kidnapped in Syria. The Federal Bureau of Investigation had warned the families not to talk publicly about their missing children—and the captors had threatened to kill their hostages if word leaked out—so each family had been going to work and to church month after month and reassuring colleagues and neighbors and relatives that nothing was wrong, only to come home and face new threats and ransom demands. After hiding the truth for so long, the families were heartened to learn that others were going through the same ordeal, and they hoped that by working together they might bring their children home.

Bradley, who is sixty-two, has a priestly presence: meek, soft-spoken, hands clasped in his lap. He is pale and nearly bald, with a ring of vivid white hair. His courtly demeanor disguises considerable ambition and persistence. His publishing company, Atlantic Media, has amassed half a dozen titles, from National Journal to Quartz. He was drawn into the families’ tragedy because he had helped to free hostages once before. In 2011, Clare Gillis, a freelancer who had contributed a few stories to The Atlantic’s Web site, was captured in Libya, along with two other reporters, by soldiers loyal to the government of Colonel Muammar Qaddafi. (A fourth reporter was killed.) Bradley was surprised to learn that the U.S. government was not involved in negotiating the return of the hostages.

Even though Gillis was not an Atlantic employee, Bradley felt an obligation to help her. He assembled a small team, drawn mostly from his staff, to identify people who might locate Gillis. On a whiteboard, Bradley drew several concentric circles. The smallest represented people in charge of the hostages, such as guards and wardens; a wider circle included military officers and junior members of the Qaddafi administration; wider still was the circle of senior Libyan officials, including Qaddafi and his family. The largest circle contained any people Bradley or his staffers could think of who might have a connection to those in the smaller rings. Bradley called this a network-analysis chart. The idea was that someone would know someone who knew someone who could locate Gillis. The team pinpointed about a hundred people to approach. One led to an American woman, Jacqueline Frazier, who had once lived in Tripoli, serving as the personal assistant to one of Qaddafi’s sons. Frazier volunteered to return to Libya, and she persuaded her contacts in the government to release the reporters, after forty-four days of captivity. It hadn’t been that hard to gain Gillis her freedom. But where would she be had no one tried?

At the dinner in Washington, Bradley urged the families to serve themselves before the main course—chicken pot pie—got cold. When everyone was seated, he suggested going around the table, with each guest telling the others about their missing children.

Jim

One of the reporters who had accompanied Gillis out of the Libyan prison was a thirty-seven-year-old freelancer named James Foley. Bradley had never met Foley, but he received a thank-you note after the release. A second note arrived a couple of weeks later, in which Foley said that he hadn’t fully understood how much he owed to Bradley and his team. Bradley was touched that Foley had taken the extra trouble, and presented the second letter to his children as a model of grace. Scarcely a year and a half later, Foley was kidnapped again, in Syria, on Thanksgiving Day, 2012.

Foley’s parents, John and Diane, live in a small town in New Hampshire. John practices internal medicine. Diane worked as a nurse practitioner until she quit to focus on obtaining her son’s freedom. Three of the five mothers at Bradley’s gathering happened to be nurses. Diane had already experienced the journey through gray government offices that the others were about to endure. Her anger and weariness were evident, and some of the parents found her off-putting. But to others her steeliness was inspiring. “She could run General Motors,” one of the mothers said. Diane became the group’s de-facto leader.

As Diane spoke about her son, she mentioned themes that the others recognized in their own children’s stories—courage and idealism chief among them. Jim had been an altar boy in an observant Catholic family, the oldest of five children, growing up in “Norman Rockwell country,” as Diane describes it. After graduating from Marquette University, Foley joined Teach for America and spent three years teaching history and social studies and coaching basketball in a run-down Latino neighborhood in Phoenix. For years afterward, he kept in contact with the kids he taught, through e-mail and Facebook.

Foley was tall and striking, with his mother’s long face and dark features and his father’s jutting Irish chin. Women were drawn to his wide, gap-toothed smile and welcoming eyes. He struck up conversations effortlessly, even in Syria, despite having rudimentary Arabic. He’d pass out cigarettes, trusting in the good will of strangers, while children trailed after him in the streets. Those who knew him well saw another side to him, however—a vulnerability that left him unable to manage the feelings that war stirred up. He was fiercely opposed to violence but helplessly drawn to conflict.

After Foley was freed in the first kidnapping, his relatives joked about hiding his passport. Most of Foley’s work had appeared in GlobalPost, an online news service founded by Philip Balboni. Balboni had offered Foley a desk job in Boston, but after a few months he longed to be back in the field. He returned to Libya in 2011, during the fall of Qaddafi, and the following March he was part of the first wave of Western reporters to enter Syria. The country quickly became a graveyard for correspondents, including Marie Colvin, of the London Sunday Times, and Anthony Shadid, of the New York Times. But the war was heating up, and the migratory troop of war reporters set up camp on the Turkish border. Clare Gillis arrived, as did many of Foley’s colleagues from previous wars.

The friends noticed that Foley had become more introspective. It wasn’t enough for him to bear witness to the chaos in Syria—he had to do something. He set up an online fund-raising campaign that brought in ten thousand dollars for a used ambulance needed by a hospital in Aleppo.