DES PERES, Mo.—According to a leading nonprofit organization, at least 42 American nationals and lawful permanent residents are being held hostage and unlawfully detained around the world today, in countries ranging from Russia, to China, from Iran to Saudi Arabia.

It’s a situation Sam Goodwin knows all too well. Goodwin, a New Jersey native who grew up in St. Louis, was trying to complete a personal quest to visit every recognized country around the world when he was held in Syria for 63 days in 2019. 

Unlike some of the high-profile cases, like those involving basketball player Brittney Griner, or more recently, journalist Evan Gershkovich, Goodwin’s capture was kept quiet and there was no larger swap that resulted in his freedom.

Goodwin is ready to more fully tell the story behind his capture and the obstacles his family had to overcome to gain his release, in a new book, Saving Sam, out Tuesday. It’s written from his perspective, but with contributions from his family and others who were enlisted to advocate for his freedom.

“It’s five years later today and I’m still saying thank you to people. I’m still learning about someone who talked to someone or made a phone call or said a prayer, whatever it may be and it's overwhelming to learn about all of these things that happened,” Goodwin said last week in an interview with Spectrum News at Des Peres Park, near his family’s home.

“Sometimes I feel like I had the easy part, when I learned about everything that happened on the outside, everything that happens in cases like this…what I realized very quickly is that half the story wasn’t even mine to tell. And when it came to writing this book and structuring it this way, it became very important to realize that it needed to be two stories being told simultaneously together. It’s kind of this Apollo 13-esque situation where there’s this under-resourced entity trapped on the inside and a group of people trying to save them.”

After a college hockey career at Niagara University, Goodwin worked at a tech startup in Singapore in 2012 that served as a gateway to see the world. He also served as a coach for Singapore’s national hockey team.

“I was in the heart of Southeast Asia. I had the world’s best airport in my backyard, had a little bit of flexibility in my work schedule and I took advantage of the opportunity to explore as much of the region and beyond as possible and just a personal preference when I traveled, I didn’t like to repeat places.”

By early 2018, he’d been to roughly 120 countries. The United Nations recognizes 193 sovereign states.

He insists that the quest to see them all was not about checking boxes—it was about lifting up and exposing cultures to a world that sometimes doesn’t want to see past the surface, like when he was part of a hockey delegation to North Korea. Despite some close calls in places like Haiti, he also said safety was a top priority.

“A journey like this is inherently going to come with risk, as so many things in our lives do,” he said. “One of the best ways that I found to ensure the greatest safety situation was to follow the path of other travelers.”

In 2019, while visiting the South Pacific island nation of Tuvalu, he met a woman he later realized was Joss Stone, the English singer, songwriter and actress. Stone, as it turns out, was on a mission to perform a concert in every country. They struck up a conversation at an airport in Fiji and their remaining travels naturally came to mind.

“We were both at a similar stage with our journey, we both had about 20 or so countries remaining. I gave her the information for a couple of my fixers and guides in Libya and Iran and a few other places, and then she gave me her contact for her fixer in Syria where she had been just a few months earlier and that did alter the trajectory of my plans and I ended up traveling there the way she did.”

Despite the best of intentions, Goodwin and Stone both ended up running into trouble after they swapped contacts. Stone was briefly detained in Iran and released. Goodwin believed he was safe to travel in an area of Syria held by Kurds, but may have been taken by Syrian regime elements in a pocket that was not.

What was supposed to be a few days in Syria instead became more than two months in captivity, where he could hear what he believed was torture happening to others, and feared it would happen to him.

“One thing was always at the top of my prayer list—Please let me get out of this place physically unharmed. Even in my distant corner of the basement dungeon, I could hear the muffled screams emanating from the prison’s epicenter, and they felt like a warning of what was to come,” Goodwin wrote. 

The family wrote of its frustrations with the slow pace of information and action from the U.S. government, a “fusion” team that the family lamented was more like a “confusion” team. While Goodwin’s captors may have believed he was an American spy, the U.S. spent time trying to determine if he had been radicalized and had gone abroad to join ISIS, but also probed for hours if Sam was working for another government agency. His mother, Ann wrote about an early meeting with an FBI agent by the name of Paul.

"I guess he had to cover all the bases, to use his detective skills and not draw any conclusions. And the real reason for Sam going to Syria did sound a little far-fetched, even to us as we repeated it to him. The agent pointed out that Sam had lived in the Far East for the past six years. Was it possible that during that absence he had changed? That we didn’t know him quite as well as we once had, as we did our other children? If not lured in by a religious extremist group, could we rule out that he might not have been working for some other government agency, perhaps the CIA? We sensed from Paul that he was beginning to view us as naïve parents who were unaware of their oldest son’s purpose overseas. Sam had the character for a secret agent. He is intelligent, essentially introverted but social, physically fit and good at putting people at ease and getting information from them. Sure, that was his natural curiosity and quiet charm, but could he have used those characteristics to work for an intelligence agency? How would a parent know? There was a moment, coming out of the meeting later that evening, when TAG and I looked at each other and asked ourselves—could Sam be in the CIA?"

There was a more blunt meeting with Robert Ford, the most recent U.S. Ambassador to Syria—the countries don’t have direct diplomatic relations. He told the family he was the only one who could get Goodwin out, and he couldn’t do it. 

From there, the family largely worked its own channels. Goodwin’s father TAG refused to speak with the Fusion team, leaving it to Ann. 

Ultimately, it was then-Lebanese Intelligence chief–General Abbas Ibrahim, who happened to be an acquaintance of Goodwin’s sister’s college roommate’s uncle–who made the family whole again.

After they had been reunited in Beiruit, Ann recounted Ibrahim’s discussion with his Syrian counterpart that led to Sam’s release.

“Let me have this guy, he’s a nobody, he’s not a terrorist, he’s not a spy, he’s just a nobody, let me have this one,” he told the Syrian spymaster. What General Ibrahim didn’t know was that President Assad himself was in a room next door and overheard the conversation. He stepped in and interrupted. “Well, considering he’s a nobody, everybody seems to want him,” the Syrian dictator said. “The Vatican wants him. The patriarch wants him. Doctors Without Borders want him. The Russians want him too. Even the Czechs want him. That’s quite a ‘nobody.’”

“My family is a normal average family from the Midwest and the fact that they were able to rally and persevere and reach a head of state on the other side of the world in multiple ways allegedly, from what we understand…it speaks to the flexibility, the creativity the resourcefulness, the determination of my family and it’s humbling,” Goodwin said.

There is irony in that while Goodwin’s travels were conceived in the hope of exposing the world to goodwill in some unlikely places, he ended up finding it in Syria in the most unlikely spot.

At a less restrictive prison facility, fellow detainees helped arrange for glasses, smuggled messages out via laundry, and helped him connect with his family via Instagram messages sent by a relative of a fellow prisoner.

“The overwhelming majority of people are well-intentioned, proud of their country, happy to help others and this was the case even inside a prison in the Middle East. I learned very quickly that virtually none of these men were true criminals, they were just victims of a corrupt system and had been caught up in the instability of the conflict. They frankly were some of the most incredible people I’ve ever met. Their hospitality and the way that they embraced me is something that I will never forget,” he said.

When he asked one of them why they were being so nice to him?

“In Syria… all the good people are here in prison because all the bad people are outside putting us in here,” Goodwin said a prisoner relayed to him.

Post-release, Goodwin did ultimately finish his trek around the world. Now living in Washington, D.C., he’s worked with the James Foley Legacy Foundation, which advocates for innocent Americans held abroad and also promotes safety in travel. He’s offered himself as a resource for families of loved ones who find themselves in the same relative position he did.

“Syria doesn’t define me but it has become a part of who I am,” he said.

“I don’t want to be known for the things that happened to me, I want to be known for the way I’ve responded to them and I hope that people who hear me speak or read this book will adopt a similar mindset and implement it into their own personal, professional or spiritual lives. Frankly, rock  bottom taught me things that a mountain top never could and I try to share those today,” he said.