The following is a transcript of an interview with Wall Street Journal editor Paul Beckett on “Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan” that aired on Aug. 4, 2024.
ED O’KEEFE: We turn now to the historic prisoner swap that freed Wall Street Journal, The Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich from Russian captivity. The Journal’s assistant editor Paul Beckett joins us now. You devoted your life essentially and your career to getting him released over the last 400 plus days. Most importantly, I think people must be wondering how is he and his family doing this morning?
PAUL BECKETT: Thanks very much Ed. They’re doing fine. They’re having a wonderful reunion down in Texas where all the detainees were taken when they came back. And it’s just a joy for us to think of them there getting reunited.
ED O’KEEFE: You are wearing one of the buttons that became ubiquitous with this movement, “I stand with Evan,” it was something that was seen in the pages of The Journal every day on the website, among reporters in this town and across the world. Talk to us briefly and we’ll talk more about it after the break about the decision to be so public about his case, when in most instances, detained Americans, it’s kept a little quieter.
BECKETT: Very very early on, someone in the government to whom I’ll always be grateful to for this advice said there’s a time to be loud, and there’s a time to be quiet and now is the time to be loud. And so we stayed loud until we knew the time to be quiet. And that time to be quiet was Wednesday and Thursday of this week.
ED O’KEEFE: Because it ultimately led to his release.
BECKETT: Correct.
ED O’KEEFE: And it earned the assistance of world leaders of celebrities but most especially Evan’s mother.
BECKETT: She’s an extraordinary advocate for him, the whole family has been and you know she was in her own way a power player in getting this done. And we’re just so grateful to everybody who contributed, CBS high among them. Everybody came out and said we stand with Evan too and that meant the world to us.
ED O’KEEFE: We do and we and we did and we do and we’ll talk more about it in a moment. Please stay with us.
ED O’KEEFE: Welcome back to Face The Nation, we return to our conversation with Wall Street Journal Assistant Editor Paul Beckett, whose assignment in essence for the last several months has been to bring home Evan Gerskovich. And you’ve certainly completed that assignment quite well. I want to go back to this decision to be public about his situation versus many cases where they tell people keep quiet about it, that’s better. Was there ever a concern that by being so public, it potentially put him at greater risk or that it put other colleagues either at the journal or at other publications at greater risk?
BECKETT: There is a fascinating argument around that, the Russians didn’t give us much of a choice, because they came out and said, he is a spy, total nonsense. But what were we going to do, then, I mean, we had to very, very quickly and very loudly, make it very clear to the world that he works for the Wall Street Journal and The Wall Street Journal only. So to some degree, that became academic, I do think the Biden administration had an idea of what it would take to get him back from the moment he was seized. And I don’t think that changed. For all our noise, I don’t think the dynamic changed, if anything, maybe it expanded the aperture so that 16 people came back.
ED O’KEEFE: We were talking about this a little in the break, you’re working with an administration to get a colleague home. But at the same time as any good American newspaper does, aggressively covering and scrutinizing the exact same people that some of you at least had to be on the phone with, that had to have been a little awkward at times?
BECKETT: We tried to separate the two as best we could, and appropriately so. We had the newsroom who was covering the story. And we have written a huge amount of tremendous journalism, on the case and related cases and the dynamics and everything. We’ve covered it very aggressively as a story. And then there were a few of us who were really ambassadors for Evan, and we went about that advocacy work with the appropriate, I think, separation from the coverage just so that we could do everything we could to get our guy back while also delivering for our readers and the country on what was happening.
ED O’KEEFE: You know, there’s always conversation when Americans are freed in these kinds of negotiations that it potentially puts more Americans at risk in the future. I also wonder, given the high profile nature of Evan’s case, whether it’s going to make it harder for journalists who either are American or work for American outlets, to be working in places like China, Iran, Hungary, Russia, even some parts of Latin America, does this now increase the risk for all of them?
BECKETT: It’s a very complicated picture. First of all, we have huge respect. I have huge respect for the fact that the United States dedicates such efforts to get its citizens back, not every country does that. Secondly, nobody likes these deals. I don’t think the administration likes the deal. I think and we’re grateful for that, that they saw travesties of justice. Remember Vladimir Putin is the aggressor here. He committed crimes against these people and bringing them home ends a path that would have had Evan Gershkovich, this week in a Russian penal colony. So we understand the risks. We understand the hypotheticals. I think the key to all of this is what can now be done to prevent these countries doing this in the future. We need to find a way to take away the incentive to do it in the first place. Once they’ve been taken, that conversation becomes a bit mute, because then you’re either going to leave them there, or you’re going to get them back. It’s pretty binary.
ED O’KEEFE: Right, do you expect Evan to return to reporting full time for The Journal?
BECKETT: The amazing thing about this is he will get to do whatever he wants.
ED O’KEEFE: He put in a formal request, as he was leaving Russia, in writing in Russian to Vladimir Putin saying, could we conduct an interview together? So have you gotten any response yet?
BECKETT: I saw a spokesman for the Kremlin said that it would be considered, I think we might ask that it’d be done over here.
ED O’KEEFE: —Or at least remotely—
BECKETT: —right.
ED O’KEEFE: Well, Paul Beckett you’ve, you’ve been a hero to so many at the Wall Street Journal, but really, frankly, to all of us in journalism for devoting yourself to this on behalf of a colleague. We appreciate you being here today. And we’re so thrilled for Evan and his family and for all the detained Americans who are now home.
BECKETT: Thank you to CBS and to you for all your support.
ED O’KEEFE: All right. We’ll be right back.