In 2014, terrorists took US photojournalist James Foley into the Syrian desert, decapitated him, then shocked the world with video footage of his death. His mother talks about her doomed attempts to save him, her mission to help today’s hostages, and the meeting that helped her to heal
The last time Diane Foley spoke to her son Jim was in November 2012, when he called her at work in New Hampshire. Foley, a nurse practitioner at the clinic where her husband, John, was a doctor, was relieved to hear her son’s voice. A few months earlier, Jim had left the US for Syria to work as a freelance videographer. That decision, coming less than a year after he’d been kidnapped and detained for six weeks while reporting in Libya, horrified his family. Now the 39-year-old was in an even more dangerous war zone. Foley couldn’t really talk, she told her son; the clinic was busy. “That’s OK, Mom,” said Jim, cheerfully, and promised to call her at Thanksgiving. A few weeks later, he was kidnapped by Islamic State (IS). Eighteen months after that, Jim was beheaded by a masked terrorist, the video uploaded to social media and seen with horror all around the world. As Diane Foley remembers of the brief exchange she had, that day, with her gentle, goofy eldest son, “I never heard his voice again.”
It is almost 10 years since the death of James Foley and, at 75, his mother isn’t remotely done talking about it. We are in New York, at a restaurant downtown, where Diane Foley strikes a slight and glamorous figure, dark-haired and all in black but for a silver cross around her neck. She has written a book with the novelist Colum McCann, called American Mother, in which she recounts the story of her son’s kidnapping and murder, and her relentless campaign, in its wake, to improve the chances of Americans wrongfully detained abroad – including, as we speak, American dual nationals being held in Gaza by Hamas.
