‘They’d ask me: “Do you want to die today?”’ How I was kidnapped by pirates – and rescued by US Navy Seals

In the first moments of her kidnapping, Jessica Buchanan’s brain seized up, her mind went blank – but her body knew. Her experience of terror was physical. She struggled to breathe. She somehow turned icy cold, while at the same time she felt roasted alive.

“I had this very basic rumination: ‘This is so bad, this is so bad,’ running through my head and I couldn’t move past it,” she says. “I’d been given some rudimentary training through my work, but there’s no course, no book, no movie that’s going to prepare you for something like this, because you never in a million years think it will happen to you. It doesn’t matter if you’re in Somalia, LA or London, we always think we’re the exception – that’s how human beings survive. And then suddenly it hits like a bat to the middle of your forehead that you’re not the exception, you’re in the middle of it and completely powerless. I don’t think I’d recognised that mentally yet – but my body recognised it.”

This happened in October 2011, when Buchanan, an American from rural Ohio, was 32 and living in Hargeisa, the capital of Somaliland, with her Swedish husband, Erik Landemalm. Both worked for NGOs. Buchanan was a regional educational adviser, producing materials to teach children how to avoid landmines and war munitions. She loved her life. “From a creative perspective, Africa is a feast for the eyes. There’s always something to look at, something new to experience,” she says. “I appreciated the simplicity, too. People would suffer, but were also happy, and I craved that. I felt like my work meant something. It’s debatable whether aid workers are helping or not, but at the time I was super-naive. I felt maybe I was doing some good.”

When she was kidnapped, she was 480 miles away from Hargeisa, attending staff training in the south of Somalia. The field office was located in an unstable region where territories were marked by invisible borders, controlled by warring clans and the Islamist group al-Shabaab. It was also 500 metres from a known pirate den – and Somali pirates were progressing from seizing ships to seizing people on land. Buchanan didn’t know this, but she did know the region was dangerous and hadn’t wanted to attend the training. She had voiced her concerns and cancelled it three times already.

On the day she attended, she was travelling in a 4x4 with a Danish colleague, 60-year-old Poul Hagen Thisted, when a vehicle roared alongside, splattering the windows with mud and forcing them to a halt. There was shouting, doors were pulled open, armed men jumped into the car and commanded the driver to drive. As they sped off, the man seated beside Buchanan put an AK-47 to her head.

She tried to make sense of it. A carjacking or armed robbery was her best hope. “The man sitting behind me was going through my bag, my wallet, pulling everything out, looking at it and throwing it behind him,” she says. “You know circus music? I could almost hear that while I was watching him. He was high on khat [the flowering plant chewed for its stimulating effect] – he had the rolling eyes, the stained teeth and he was mumbling and laughing; giddy, erratic.

“At some point, the guy next to me wanted Poul’s ballpoint pen and Poul refused to give it to him. There was this standoff – a gun right in Poul’s face – and when he handed the pen over, the guy took it apart bit by bit, then stared at us and threw every part out the window. That’s when I thought: ‘Oh my God, I’m going to die.’”

They drove for hours, sometimes stopping to change vehicles or drivers. The kidnappers changed, too. Different men jumped in, ammunition slung over their shoulders, armed with grenades and machine guns that were so long they had to hang them out of the windows. By now, Buchanan could hope only that this was a pirate kidnapping for ransom, not an ideological one that would culminate in a public execution.

In the dead of night, they finally stopped in scrub desert. Buchanan and Thisted were ordered to walk into the wilderness. She believed they were marching to their deaths. “I wanted my last moments to be dignified, not desperate,” she says. “It felt important, even though there was nobody that loved me to see it.” Buchanan’s mother had died a year earlier and that was where she found comfort. “I felt her so near – it was something to tether myself to,” she says. “I kept thinking about her last moments, which I hadn’t been there to witness. Did she feel like I did now? I was thinking: ‘Now, I get to be with my mom.’ Your brain is all over the place, looking for some silver lining.”

Finally, they were ordered to kneel with their backs to the men. “Then you’re waiting,” she says. “Is this going to hurt?” Instead, one of them shouted: “Sleep!” and pushed them to the ground. That one-word order was their reprieve. “My body just took over and I passed out,” she says. “I think I actually slept. Then I woke a couple of hours later and thought: ‘Oh … I’m in hell.’”

The first nugget that Buchanan salvaged from her “hostile environmental awareness training” gave her some hope. “From the back of my brain, I remembered being told that if you survive the first 24 hours, your odds surge upwards,” she says. “Who knows if that’s true, but it’s what I held on to.”

Although Thisted and Buchanan were barely allowed to talk to each other, they sometimes managed to do so. In those early days, they devised the bare bones of a strategy, agreeing to collect information. “Trying to notice and understand, and memorise details, makes you feel you’re doing something to move forward when you’re completely powerless,” she says. For example, by requesting to make a phone call (which they knew would be denied), they could at least see the chain of command and learn who held power (there were 26 men, teenagers and child soldiers guarding them in shifts). Hearing the leader referred to as “chairman” was good news, indicating this was a secular operation. Thisted and Buchanan also agreed on a ground rule to guide their thinking. They could acknowledge fear and loneliness, boredom and frustration, but never despair. “I think we realised that if we allowed ourselves despair, we were as good as dead.”

It was five days before their captors organised a “proof of life” call to their NGO and began negotiating a ransom. Their demands, starting at $45m (£34m), were wildly unrealistic. “I’m not a ship,” says Buchanan.

Days melted into weeks, then months. They were constantly on the move by car, always camping in the open air. “In the daytime, you’re hot and sweating and gross; at night, you’re cold – there’s nothing blocking the wind. Every morning, you wake up drenched – and you’re always, always covered in dust.”

I spent hours in my mind, in my kitchen, making something like a pasta sauce, drinking red wine

As the only woman, Buchanan was on high alert – 13 years later, she still sleeps with her arms crossed over her chest as a kind of protection. When asked about her family, she invented a son, giving him the name of her dog, knowing that mothers hold a higher status in Somali culture and that she would therefore be less disposable than a childless aid worker.

“You have to read the room,” she says. “And I got very good at that.” Her captors clearly despised her when she showed emotion, cried or pleaded – from a woman, it was seen as a dishonest attempt at manipulation. The response was an instant knock to the ground and a gun in her face. (“Do you want to die today?”) Instead, she did all she could to foster calm. “I knew which men felt safer, which to avoid, which ones were evil.”

One, Jabreel, who was there as an interpreter, would lie beside her at night, touching her, stroking her. Buchanan had to hold him off without angering him. (“No, Jabreel, I’m married.”) “I don’t know how I wasn’t raped,” she says. “I had a very clear awareness that it was coming and considered myself lucky every time I managed to avoid it.” Most of the kidnappers were there for a small salary and a daily khat delivery. The fact that impotence is a common side-effect of the plant may well have given her a layer of protection.

Practicalities also provided a distraction: finding private places to try to wash, tearing strips from her scarf for sanitary protection. As time passed, the men allowed Buchanan to cook. “Collecting wood for the fire, cooking rice, making bread was kind of empowering. I’d learned a new skill. I remember thinking: ‘If I get out of here, I can’t wait to show my husband how I can bake bread in the sand!’ It gave me some sort of autonomy.” For a while, to pass the time, Buchanan made an English vocabulary game using strips of cardboard. “Some of the men got really proud of themselves, learning English words – they were all bored,” she says. That game stopped after an order from one of the leaders.

Every night, Buchanan imagined herself away. “I had a very vivid visualisation before I went to sleep,” she says. “I spent hours in my mind, in my kitchen, making something like a pasta sauce, drinking red wine. I’d walk through our apartment, straighten up the couch cushions and feel how cool the tiles were. We had this really beautiful ornate bed and every night I’d get in and Erik would be there – and there was always a baby boy between us.

“Until then, I had no idea how powerful my mind was, how in control of my thoughts I could be,” she continues. “I’m midwestern, glass half-empty; I complained a lot. This changed me fundamentally, because I was so dependent on finding something good to hold on to.”

By January, though, that was increasingly hard to do. The absence of sanitation and limited water supply brought on a urinary tract infection that spread to Buchanan’s kidneys and she spent much of her time curled up in pain. Ransom negotiations had stalled; their captors were losing patience and constantly threatening to sell them on (“We get $5m for you from al-Shabaab”).

What Buchanan had never imagined was that the FBI knew all this, having gathered a wealth of information through local intelligence, as well as drones. The bureau knew their precise location, how many men were involved and what weapons they held. It knew that Buchanan’s infection, compounded by her weakened state and the lack of medication for a thyroid condition, put her life in imminent danger. The shift from piracy at sea to the kidnapping of a non-political, non-religious aid worker represented a new level of threat. President Obama ordered her rescue. On the night of 25 January 2012, after Buchanan and Thisted had been in captivity for 93 days, 24 US Navy Seals parachuted close to the camp.

For Buchanan, the shootout felt like Armageddon. “I thought I was being kidnapped by another group and I didn’t have the strength for it,” she says. “It didn’t occur to me that rescues took place for people who weren’t military. I’m still unpacking that today and it’s really humbling to think the US government put that in motion. When one of the men started talking to me and said my name, I was overwhelmed by shock. All I could say was: ‘You’re American?’ It just didn’t compute.”

The nine kidnappers on guard that night were killed and Buchanan and Thisted were rushed to a helicopter. “It wasn’t until we landed in the military base in Djibouti and got into a minivan that it began to sink in,” says Buchanan. “I remember putting my head on Poul’s shoulder and starting to weep. I just said: ‘We survived.’”

The aftermath, what Buchanan calls “surviving survival”, has been no less challenging. “Everyone wants to hear about the event, but it’s the day in, day out of living that’s the real hard work,” she says. Buchanan’s son, August, was born just over nine months after her release. (“It had been a very happy reunion,” she says. “That visualisation was really powerful!”) Although the family initially remained in Africa, Buchanan struggled. “I was having panic attacks, convinced I was being watched and that someone was going to kidnap my baby.” They now live in the US, near Washington DC, where Landemalm works for an international organisation and Buchanan runs a small publishing company specialising in women’s memoirs. They have two children, 11 and nine.

She still has her triggers. The worst is car travel. “We spent so much time in cars, with music blaring, men shouting, chaos, potholes, guns at my head, explosives in the back,” she says. “If I’m in the car now with any noise, it’s hard. I’ve had panic attacks and had to pull over. I drive in complete silence like a little old lady.” Last summer, on holiday at a ranch in Montana, the dust and sand in the sheets caused her to wake in the night, crying hysterically. “Usually, though, I can manage pretty well. I’ve been through a lot of therapy.”

Only now does Buchanan see something to take from those days in the desert. “It’s taken me a really long time to get to a place where I can say it – and I wouldn’t want to do it again – but I know who I am now,” she says. “When it happened, I was naive, immature – I had some good qualities, too! – but I was too willing to let people make decisions for me. I’ve learned to trust my instincts, to trust myself. I learned that I’m really resourceful and innovative and that I can take responsibility for my life now. I like to think I met myself out there.”

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• The subheading of this article was amended on 5 September 2024. An earlier version said Jessica Buchanan was kidnapped in Somaliland. While she had been living in the self-declared republic at the time, as the article itself made clear she was in the south of Somalia when she was taken captive.