The Miss Stone Affair: America's First Modern Hostage Crisis by Teresa Carpenter

Author:Teresa Carpenter
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781439130674
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

EIGHTEEN DAYS—the deadline set out in the first ransom letter—had stretched into two long months. It had become clear to Sandansky that this was not going to be the quick, low-risk operation that he’d envisioned. The cheta had failed in laying the blame on the Turks. It had failed to extract quick cash from the missionaries. And yet the rebels had succeeded beyond their wildest imaginings. The American public, stirred, had taken their demands seriously. American and European newspapers were reporting that Miss Stone’s fellow citizens had raised the entire amount! It was unclear, however, who had control over this money.

From the beginning, Asenov had acted as the band’s chief go-between—“Noah’s dove,” one of his biographers put it. After Miss Stone’s first ransom letter went astray, he was the one who shoved the second through Mary Haskell’s window. He was the “dark-haired young man” who visited her father and Mr. Baird, and was the one who carried back encouraging news that the missionaries were ready to deal. He was the one who was intercepted in Dupnitsa by Nikola Malashevski with the letter from Kasurova and a report that the American government was now in possession of the ransom fund.

Missionaries were unworldly and pliant. Diplomats were cynical and eager to impress their superiors and were likely to play a more roundabout game. There would be threats, posturing, and still more delays.

Krüsty Asenov, worried that the American, Dickinson, might regard him as an illiterate peasant, shed his schoolboy disguise and, on the morning of his first meeting with Dickinson, showed up dressed in a fine European suit, which, along with his impressive bearing and literary Bulgarian speech, left a very favorable impression on the consul general. Dickinson infuriated him by insisting that the newspaper accounts were wrong. Americans had not raised anything like $110,000.

Asenov and Chernopeev fumed that they were being played for fools and walked out of the talks.

As Dickinson withdrew to Constantinople to play his waiting game, Sandansky and his captives recrossed the border into Bulgaria to sit out the winter. Peet and Gargiulo, meanwhile, were still in Serres, waiting in vain for someone to contact them.

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