Jeff Verszyla

Eight days before Fogel flew home, guards came for him. They put a bag over his head and loaded him into a freezing truck. The ride took eight hours. It was late at night when they pulled him out by the scruff of his neck and pushed him inside a building. He could tell he was in another prison. What stayed with him was that the floor was clean. After the colony, that alone was shocking. They shoved him into a cell. He stayed there seven days, let out once for a five-minute shower, and was told nothing. On the eighth day, the guards came back carrying the clothes he had been wearing when he was arrested more than three years earlier. “We’re leaving in one hour,” they told him. He did not let himself believe it. In Russia, he explained, a prisoner’s hopes get raised and crushed so many times that he learns not to trust them. “There’s not this beam of light,” he said. “It’s hard to be hopeful in Russia. Hope is not a big word to those people. It really isn’t.” The men who moved him wore balaclavas. Nobody looked him in the eye, and nobody spoke to him. That was fine with him. He had kept his Russian deliberately bad the whole time. “It was one of my weapons,” he said. He could keep people at a distance or simply say, “I don’t know what you’re saying. Get me a translator.” They put him in a proper vehicle and took the mask off. Then someone finally told him where they were going. “We’re going to the airport.” He still did not know what would be waiting for him there. Witkoff had come straight from the Kremlin. Fogel was waiting inside. Witkoff remembers walking in and seeing him “like it was yesterday.” “I said, ‘Steve Witkoff, United States government, we’re bringing you home,’” Witkoff said. “‘Marc, it’s time to get on the plane.’” Fogel finished the line for him, the way people do when they have each replayed a moment a thousand times. “He looked at me, and he said, ‘Marc, let’s get on the plane.’” washingtonexaminer.com/opini…