The Islamist extremist militants who beheaded American journalist James Foley had recently sent the news organization he worked for a warning email "full of rage" that threatened his life, the agency's CEO said Wednesday.
In that email, sent a week ago, the ISIS militants made no demands and said only that they would kill the journalist from New Hampshire, according to Boston-based agency GlobalPost's CEO Phil Balboni.
That was a stark departure from messages the captors had sent to GlobalPost and to Foley's family in Rochester, New Hampshire, last fall, in which they had made very specific demands.
Balboni said he knew the last message before Foley's execution had a different tone.
"Obviously we hoped and prayed that that would not be the case and we communicated as quickly as we could with the captors, pleaded with them for mercy, explained to them that Jim was an innocent journalist, had done no harm to the Syrian people - indeed, cared deeply about them," he said.
GlobalPost knew where Foley was being held after it hired an international security firm, Balboni said, and he thinks that Washington did, too. "I think it's safe to assume our government knew where Foley was," he said.
Balboni said that he believes the government did things that were "highly classified" in regards to Foley's capture, and that he was not condemning anyone.
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He did not say whether his company had offered a ransom for Foley's return. He said only that it had left "no stone unturned."
Balboni's statements came hours after U.S. officials confirmed the video depicting Foley's beheading was real.
Foley, 40, was abducted while covering Syria as a freelance photojournalist on assignment for GlobalPost just before Thanksgiving 2012.
