BY: JAMES RAINEY and RUBEN VIVES

Journalist kidnapped by Somali pirates in 2012 was released this week.

LOS ANGELES – The first phone call jolted the modest Redondo Beach townhouse in the middle of the night. Many others like it would follow, for nearly three years. The voices on the other end of the line would vary, but all were insistent — turn over millions of dollars or you will never see your son again.

It was a mother’s burden to field the calls and do anything she could to try to save her son, kidnapped journalist Michael Scott Moore.

Marlis Saunders answered the phone time after time, and made calls of her own to the Somali pirates who were holding her son.

The faceless captors showed no sign of backing down until two months ago, when something changed. They suddenly gave up their most outrageous ransom demand and began to bargain. Saunders finally felt reason for hope.

When her son’s freedom finally came this week, his colleagues said it was owed to a mother’s resilience and resolve — along with the delivery of a smaller, unspecified payoff.

Freed on Tuesday after 32 months of captivity, Moore flew to Kenya and planned to travel to Berlin this weekend to be reunited with his mother. It was a ray of good news after the recent beheadings in Syria of two American journalists by Muslim extremists.

“I am just overjoyed,” Saunders said in her first interview about the ordeal.

“I’m not healthy but I am safe,” Moore, 45, said in a statement. “It’s an astonishing story, but right now I have to recover my wits and spend time with family and friends.”

Moore’s odyssey began Jan. 21, 2012, in the town of Galkayo, where he was nearing the end of a month of research on the pirates in the Horn of Africa.

Moore had been to Somalia before and was traveling this time with a $12,000 grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.

He planned magazine articles and a book because he felt people in the West did not know enough about the troubled country.

His security team betrayed him for a cash payment. Two days after he disappeared, Saunders said, the phone calls began. The kidnappers put her son on the phone.

“He said, ‘They need this money right away for me to get free,’ ” Saunders said. He spoke to his mother periodically. She always felt like someone was standing over him. Saunders said she got directives from the U.S. government and from other advisers, but she declined to give details.

Saunders said the pirates with whom she spoke thought they would receive restitution from the U.S. government for the deaths of Somali guards killed by U.S. troops during a rescue of other Americans.

She told them they would not. She also told them the government would not pay any money for her son.

The pirates proposed a fundraiser in which American donors each gave $1 and suggested Saunders ask her church for money.

After Moore was released, a rebel commander claimed that his group had received $1.6 million to free him, but his mother said that figure was high. She would only say that she raised the money with the help of family and friends.

Saunders laughed when asked if her son will settle into more conventional work.

Source: LA Times

“Maybe he will think about it now,” she said.