60 minutes overtime
our report this week is on hostage diplomacy there are currently more than 40 americans unjustly
detained abroad held by foreign governments not by terrorist groups and often they're used for
political leverage the countries holding americans right now include russia china iran and venezuela
our government calls them wrongful detainees one of them an american journalist named danny fenster
was recently released from nearly six months in prison in myanmar we spoke with him about what
life was like locked up in what's actually called insane prison danny fenster told us about the
little things that got him through his captivity reading books running figure eights in the small
courtyard and waiting for secret notes from his wife juliana the cell was i think it was about
nine by seven feet concrete uh concrete floor and walls you know there's a door on the front that
is just bars like you would imagine a prison and a little window in the back that's barred
um and then there's a wooden pilot in the corner that's your bed that's your bed and then there's a
slab of porcelain with a hole in the middle that is your toilet
uh and that's the room immediately in front of that there is a wall in another door with um
bars with no ceiling so it's sort of uh open air wow like you're like your patio
like a patio so yeah i mean that's your your personal outdoor space that's where you shower
uh there's a trough of water but it's a small space with walls and immediately outside of that
there's there's a sidewalk in a little area of grass and dirt could you go out there yeah during
the day you could go out there and walk in circles you weren't tortured what about sleep deprivation
i mean anything deliberate like that well they make you sleep with the light on and this isn't
your average you know bedroom light this is like when you walk into a 7-eleven at 2 a.m
dark outside incredibly brightly lit uh you know fluorescent lit could you sleep at night
the first night not at all it was difficult for a little while but i started sleeping all right
i mean pretty quickly you adapt and start falling asleep at night pretty quickly you adapt really i
think so so what about food did they feed you well or were you hungry and what did they feed you well
well i wouldn't say they fed me well um the thing that really sustained me and the food that i was
you know most excited about was these food parcels these food packages that juliana would bring
every two weeks could you see her no she just had to drop it off yeah yeah my only connection
with there in the i mean i wouldn't have gotten through it and had for the amount of time that
i did have a positive attitude that wouldn't have been possible if i didn't know those packages were
coming which in themselves felt like a connection to her and also the tiny little notes that she
was writing and sneaking into them in boxes of granola bars and you know bags of cereal
telling me a little bit about what was going on but mostly just telling me how much she loved me
and i was able to early on sneak out some notes to her telling her the same and that's i mean
that's what kept me sane in there really how did you sneak notes out i've always been intrigued by
prisoners who get the word out somehow how does that work there were several different ways
and it kind of became fun as a game to think of new ways something to occupy your thoughts i had
several pairs of pants that had a drawstring so i would write a small note and wrap it around
the drawstring and tie it with a piece of dental floss and then shimmy it back into the waistband
and then when i went to court as i'm sitting there listening to the judge i would kind of fidget with
my waistband and pull it and rip it off i would say you know please give this to juliana were you
never afraid in all this early time there must have been some fear early on but i mean i think
the real fear is set on later but what about in the beginning you they take you to this prison
you you don't know what's going to happen i don't know what's going to happen and i
that maybe worked to my advantage because my recollection is that
early on my assumption i think was that this isn't going to last long so as angry and as uncertain as
everything is i like there's no way i'm going to be here for very long i knew a japanese journalist
had been kept for i think a couple weeks i knew that a polish journalist had been kept for less
than that i thought they wanted to get us out of there i didn't think they wanted to hang on to us
do you feel strangely more connected to myanmar than you did before yeah much more
i feel like me and my will be an important part of my life for the rest of my life but yeah the
thing about it is uh that entire country is is being held prisoner right now uh they're
all sort of captives of the military and that's ongoing when i left that none of that changed