As soon as Alisa Weinstein answered her cellphone last April and heard her sister Jen’s voice, she sensed what was coming. ‘‘It’s been confirmed,’’ Jen said. Alisa stood motionless at the foot of her bed in her tiny San Francisco apartment; just a moment before, she was getting ready for work as a researcher at Uber. She knew what her sister meant: The government was now certain that their father, Warren, was dead, executed by his jihadi captors. She felt herself ‘‘crumpling,’’ she remembers, but quickly ‘‘went into automaton mode.’’ She told Jen that she didn’t want any details. She didn’t want to think about how he had been killed.  ‘‘How do you occupy your brain?’’ Alisa texted a friend later that day, wondering how she would get through her five-hour flight to Washington to join Jen and their mother, Elaine. As she sat on the plane, she was besieged by nightmarish images — her father awaiting execution, her father being shot in the head, her father’s throat being cut, her father beheaded. For more than three and a half years, ever since Warren, who worked in economic development, was kidnapped in Pakistan at the age of 70, she had fought to keep these images at bay. Now they swarmed through her. What she had long pictured and managed to persuade herself would not happen, what had permeated her sleep and jolted her awake, her heart racing, was now reality. She tried to flee into the world of the movies the airline offered, but she couldn’t escape the likelihood that when she landed, she would find out that a video of her father’s killing had been released. She had dreaded this added torment since he was taken. She would never watch it, but she would never be able to forget that it was out there — and she feared the fact of its existence would be so powerful that it would overwhelm all her memories of him.  At the gate at Dulles International Airport, Alisa saw her mother, silver-haired, round-faced and accompanied by F.B.I. agents from the team that had been assigned to Warren’s case and to the family. Elaine hugged her and murmured: ‘‘I’m sorry. You were right. I was wrong.’’ Her mother was apologizing for harboring too much hope, as if this had lured Alisa into optimism. But Alisa’s forebodings had always competed with her own belief that her father would come home alive. It was only as she and Elaine drove from the airport, with two of the agents riding along with them, that Alisa learned why he hadn’t.  There had been no shot at close range, no beheading. Her father, 5-foot-5 and plump-cheeked; her father, ‘‘the Energizer Bunny,’’ as the family called him, who didn’t intend to retire until he was 90; her father, forever entranced by foreign cultures, who was in Pakistan to help carry out the ‘‘hearts and minds’’ part of American policy there, had died accidentally in what one agent informed her from the back seat was a ‘‘counterterrorism operation.’’ Alisa understood that phrase: Her father had been killed by an American drone strike.  In 2004, Warren Weinstein was hired as a contractor to oversee a program, funded by the United States Agency for International Development, to train and advise Pakistani farmers and furniture makers, marble miners and jewelers, and to help their businesses grow. The effort was part of the many billions of dollars that the American government has poured into Pakistan in nonmilitary aid since the Sept. 11 terrorism attacks in 2001, with the elusive goal of generating good will in a country where two-thirds of the population, according to Pew Research Center polling, views the United States as an enemy.  Early on, the front gate of Weinstein’s house in Lahore was manned by a lone armed guard. Elaine visited him for a few months and thought about joining him permanently; Weinstein didn’t feel Pakistan was safe or comfortable enough for her. Yet he himself traveled throughout the country even as suicide bombs were set off more and more frequently by Islamist insurgents. In 2008, in the capital, Islamabad, the Marriott Hotel, a favorite among Westerners and a place where Weinstein sometimes stayed, was attacked: Terrorists detonated a truckload of explosives near the entrance, killing at least 50 people and wounding more than 250. In late 2008, another American contractor working to stimulate economic development was shot to death in Peshawar, where Weinstein often traveled. The next year, a hotel in that city frequented by Westerners was blown up.  In January 2011, a C.I.A. contractor shot and killed two Pakistanis on a Lahore street not far from Weinstein’s house. Anti-American rallies erupted. That May — three months before Weinstein’s kidnapping — the United States government announced that Navy SEALs had killed Osama bin Laden and dropped his body into the sea. Many Pakistanis protested the American military operation on sovereign Pakistani soil.  Drone strikes were being used intensively by the United States in Pakistan, especially in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, known as the FATA, a region that is a stronghold of the Taliban and Al Qaeda. The strikes, with their collateral damage and civilian deaths, inflamed Pakistani anger. At his house, Weinstein had two armed guards on duty at all times. ‘‘I had a terrible queasy feeling,’’ Alisa said, recalling the months after Bin Laden’s assassination. ‘‘The way the killing was done, the celebration here. My father and I were on the phone three or four times a day. I said to him, ‘I think I would literally die if something happened to you.’ ’’  But Weinstein seemed to feel protected by his eager embrace of Pakistani ways — he had taught himself Urdu, dressed in long Pakistani tunics and even substituted a Pakistani-style silver wedding ring with a stone for his simple gold band. He was also reassured by his mission of bringing change through peaceful engagement. He thought of his work, Alisa said, as a way ‘‘for the good people of the world to find each other and collaborate,’’ to create more and better-paying jobs — ‘‘alternatives to the fundamentalist path.’’  From Togo to Sri Lanka, Weinstein had devoted the past three decades of his career to fostering economic growth. He had worked for the Peace Corps, directly for U.S.A.I.D., for the World Bank Group and as a contractor. And he had been infused with exuberance for just about everything he encountered along the way. The family’s modest suburban house in Rockville, Md., outside Washington, was overstuffed with statues and spears and salt lamps and closetfuls of traditional garments — boubous and salwar kameezes. ‘‘I am somewhat ecstatic,’’ Weinstein wrote to Elaine in 1979 from Niamey, the parched capital of Niger, ‘‘because as I type this letter there is a mullah on the radio who is reciting from the Quran singing away in the drone chant which I love and which gives you a headache.’’ As a teenager in Brooklyn, he attended an ultra-Orthodox yeshiva and intended to be a rabbi. ‘‘He is just chanting about God being the one.’’  Elaine met Weinstein in 1967, when she was an elementary-school teacher living with her parents in the Bronx. Having abandoned his rabbinical dreams, he was getting his Ph.D. at Columbia in international law and economics. ‘‘He was disillusioned with organized religion,’’ she remembered, ‘‘but he never stopped believing. He didn’t need a temple. He always said you can pray under a beautiful tree.’’ Her father was a tailor; her parents had never traveled beyond the Jewish enclaves of the Catskills. But she soon found herself, as Weinstein’s bride, in Burundi in the late ’60s, where he was doing doctoral research, and where, one Sunday, they went to Mass at a rural church. ‘‘It was amazing,’’ she recalled. ‘‘The singing and the beating of the drums, and it comes time to take communion, and Warren stands up — this nice Jewish boy! I say, ‘You can’t do that, you’re not Catholic,’ and he says, ‘It’s O.K., it’s God, I’m so moved.’ I say, ‘Sit down.’ But that was Warren.’’  In the early ’80s, when their two daughters were young, the family lived for two years in Lomé, the capital of Togo. Weinstein, as the Peace Corps director in the West African country, donned his boubous and traveled to villages, where some of his Peace Corps volunteers were introducing animal-drawn plowing to farmers who tilled their fields by hand. But those brief years together out in the world were the exception. Elaine adored Weinstein’s spirit, his drive to connect across divides, but it was a spirit she didn’t share. She belonged at home. The girls grew up in Rockville, with Weinstein traveling for six or eight weeks at a stretch, nurturing businesses in the impoverished parts of the planet. Even much later, with Alisa in graduate school in Chicago, and Jen married with two children and settled in another Washington suburb, Elaine chose not to live with Weinstein in Lahore; he returned to Rockville for several visits each year, while she was a constant presence for her two grandchildren. The wanderlust had always been Warren’s.  Soft-spoken and self-effacing, Elaine had no idea what to do when she found out that her husband had been kidnapped on Aug. 13, 2011. Weinstein’s boss, Kevin Murphy, the president of an American development company that contracted with U.S.A.I.D. and other donor agencies all over the world, called her in the evening and said that Weinstein had been taken. No one had yet claimed responsibility. Murphy, who was in Bogotá at the time and who learned about the situation from a Pakistani employee, wasn’t sure what to do next either. They received no guidance from the American government. Neither U.S.A.I.D. nor the State Department contacted Elaine or the company to counsel them, though the American Embassy in Pakistan got word of the kidnapping soon after it happened. (The State Department and U.S.A.I.D. declined to comment, citing privacy considerations.)  Elaine entered a state she described as ‘‘controlled panic,’’ a mix of horror and confusion and an outward composure she couldn’t explain. After Murphy called, Elaine went to the house Jen shared with her husband, Carl. It was around 10 at night. Jen, who was then 39, worked in customer service at a Pottery Barn; she had no more wherewithal around Washington’s political culture than Elaine. She dialed 411 and said she needed to reach the F.B.I. — she wasn’t sure why that seemed the right agency. She rushed to explain: ‘‘I need a number where someone’s going to answer the phone, my father’s been kidnapped, he lives in Pakistan, I just need someone.’’  By around 8 a.m., more than a half-dozen agents from the bureau’s Washington and Baltimore offices occupied Jen’s house. That afternoon, Alisa, then 37, arrived home from Chicago. The family said the agents knew little about what had happened to Weinstein and next to nothing about Pakistan generally. They did explain that the family should prepare themselves for the captors’ first call, Jen said — whoever answered might hear Weinstein being tortured in the background. Over the next weeks, the agents were a constant presence in Jen’s home. Yet days went by with no word from the kidnappers, with no reliable information beyond what Murphy had found out: In the predawn darkness, a group of about eight men had gotten into Weinstein’s house, some of them climbing a perimeter wall and others apparently tricking the guards into opening the front gate. The kidnappers smashed a gun into Weinstein’s head, dragged him, bleeding, down the stairs and sped away. They left behind his asthma and blood-pressure medications, along with his glasses, which compounded the horror for his wife and daughters.  Did the kidnappers belong to the Pakistani Taliban? To Al Qaeda? Were they a freelance gang of mere criminals — and if they were, had they already sold Weinstein to a jihadi organization? As weeks passed without clarity, Elaine and Jen were somehow able to fend off their worst visions. But Alisa was not. Alisa, the daughter who considered herself her father’s child, who had ventured away from home, not as far as her father ventured, but to work in Oregon as a journalist and then get her master’s degree in design, the daughter who felt that no one in the world understood her the way he did and who talked with him about everything from American policy in South Asia to her prospects for finding a boyfriend, was consumed by imagining his terror as he was awakened in his house and realized what was happening. And she was fixated on the idea of her father curled on the floor of a cave, being told, ‘‘No one cares about you. No one is looking for you.’’ She slept beside her mother, taking Ambien nightly to ‘‘stop my mind,’’ she said. ‘‘I was useless, completely devastated, exhausted all the time. I was walking around, saying things aloud and not knowing I was saying them. ‘Where is he? Where is he?’ ’’  Al Qaeda released a video through its publicity arm on Dec. 1, 2011, four months after the kidnapping, the first significant communication from anyone claiming to be holding Weinstein. ‘‘I tell the captive soldiers of Al Qaeda and the Taliban, ‘We have not forgotten you,’ ’’ Ayman al-Zawahri, the organization’s leader since Bin Laden’s death, declared. ‘‘And in order to free you, we have taken hostage the Jewish American Warren Weinstein, a former employee and current contractor with the U.S. government in the American aid program in Pakistan, which seeks to combat the jihad in Pakistan and Afghanistan.’’ But the video showed no picture of Weinstein, no evidence that Al Qaeda actually had him. After that, Al Qaeda went quiet. The family heard nothing through the F.B.I. or any other quarter of the American government. By then, the family was working with a London-based kidnapping specialist, part of a team that had handled numerous such cases globally. (The specialist asked to be identified only as a K.&R. man — kidnap and ransom — to preserve his ability to work in his field.) He gleaned what he could through contacts in the country but found little. Elaine and Jen and Alisa all tried to take refuge in the notion that Weinstein was not a hostage being tortured but instead a prisoner who had won over his captors, softening their hearts with his respect for their faith and his knowledge of their history and culture. The family shared a joke that verged on belief: ‘‘ ‘What’s he doing right now?’ ’’ Alisa recalled. ‘‘ ‘He’s getting them into economic development instead of jihad. He’s helping them to draw up a small-business plan.’ ’’  On April 1, 2012, 233 days after Weinstein’s disappearance, Elaine woke when her cellphone rang after midnight. A man spoke to her in garbled English. Her mind seized with fear that if she made any mistake he would hang up. She couldn’t decipher much of what he was saying except that he wanted 50 million Pakistani rupees — more than $500,000. Then the line went dead.  Two weeks later, a flurry of calls came in, again scarcely intelligible, until the men who claimed they had Warren suggested instant messaging.  In a few days, instant messages started to appear on Elaine’s laptop: ‘‘Hello madam are u online.’’ Then: ‘‘We are the waren secourty we want to free him.’’  Elaine was sitting at her dining table, surrounded by Jen and a handful of F.B.I. agents. The K.&R. specialist counseled her by phone through an earpiece.  ‘‘Is Warren there?’’ Elaine typed.  ‘‘No he is not here because there is alot of dangeres.’’  There seemed a decent chance the explanation was true. His captors were probably hiding Weinstein in or near the FATA and might have had to leave their secluded spot in order to connect to the Internet. That it was too risky to bring Weinstein along seemed plausible, with American drones hovering and possibly their own associates — they hadn’t said what group they belonged to — unaware of their plan to negotiate his release. Elaine asked for proof that they really had her husband. The response arrived: ‘‘Tomarow we well send you his adiv tepe and his photo.’’  Waiting out the hours, she beckoned and banished hope; she had never felt so helpless. But the following day, a picture came by email — Weinstein in a white tunic against a featureless blue background, his cheeks gaunt and covered by a wispy beard. The photo was undated. There was no audio. ‘‘How can I see that he is O.K. now?’’ she typed. ‘‘I have to know that you have him now.’’  There was ‘‘xome tchnolcal problem,’’ the captors messaged. They would give her proof soon.  ‘‘Please tell Warren that I love him,’’ she wrote as they signed off.  ‘‘Ok d.not warry abut warran@.. i say to warran she sad i love warran.’’  ‘‘Elaine,’’ she heard Weinstein say in the audio they sent the next day, along with a photo, dated in the corner. ‘‘I wanted to let you know that I’m O.K.’’ Weinstein’s voice was muted and grainy. ‘‘The fellow I’m with, as I told you, I think is a good guy in a way.’’ He sounded either steady or entirely drained. ‘‘This guy is really trying to put something together,’’ he continued, ‘‘in order to free me from this place.’’ Elaine told herself that his monotone didn’t matter. He was alive.  In the negotiations with the captors, the K.&R. man, who would soon fly to Washington to sit with the team at Elaine’s dining table, continued to guide her by phone in tandem with the agents. There was sometimes disagreement between the K.&R. man and the F.B.I., but everyone’s goal was to reach a resolution slowly, to keep the ransom within a range the family could handle. United States policy bars families from paying ransom to terrorists. But this prohibition never became much of a factor — though the government itself would not put up any money or trade jihadi prisoners for civilian captives. (The government has since clarified that it won’t prosecute families for paying for their loved ones.)  Elaine had taken out a home-equity loan in the hope of covering the ransom; if she could help it, she wanted to avoid selling the house. The muddled demands from the captors ranged from ‘‘malien of dollars’’ to more than $5 million.  ‘‘That is a lot of money,’’ she wrote. ‘‘I am an old woman.’’  ‘‘Age not defend on money.’’  ‘‘I have a small amount of money I can give to you for Warren to be freed.’’  Reluctantly, she heeded the advice she was given, though she wanted to start with something higher. ‘‘I have $21,820 for Warren to be free.’’  ‘‘No it is not possible it is very low.’’  She stared at her screen. ‘‘Are you there?’’ she asked.  ‘‘It look like a juck ok you don.t want to free warren.’’  ‘‘I am embarrassed, but that is what I have. Are you there?’’  ‘‘Yes if you not accpet our demand we are offline.’’  Later in their exchange, she said she needed time to get more money. They asked how long. ‘‘If not pay our maney,’’ they wrote, ‘‘so you the result of warren.’’  The bargaining spanned days, the family’s offers inching upward to $120,000. Elaine insisted on proof that they still had him. ‘‘Please ask Warren: Where did Warren meet Elaine for the first time?’’  ‘‘Before the marrage or after the marriage.’’  In a couple of days, the answer arrived: ‘‘Elaine we met at city in univeristy north uptown campus i think by three steps…. i thought you also thaught at university…. i think you had a stuffy nose.’’  She felt deep relief, again, that he was still alive, and she recorded and sent an audio message, trying, at first, to keep her tone light: ‘‘Hi Warren. Thanks for the whole story of how we met. You do remember! I’m working to get you home as fast as I can. I love you.’’  Now the negotiations gathered speed. The captors seemed to agree to a ransom of $243,000, and the K.&R. man turned to a Pakistani he had worked with before and trusted to carry out the exchange. By the second week in May, the Pakistani go-between, who asked not to be identified for reasons of personal safety, was talking with the captors by phone. They suspected he was a spy; to be sure he wouldn’t betray them to Pakistani officials, they made him recite verses about honesty from the Quran.  The go-between and the captors argued over how much should be paid before the handoff, so the captors could bribe their way past the authorities between wherever they were cloistered and whatever location they wound up agreeing on for delivering Weinstein. The family moved money to Pakistan, and the go-between then sent $45,000 via hawala, an informal money-transfer system used in the Islamic world and India. More than a week crept by — requests for more money in advance, backtracking and assuring that they would deliver Weinstein. The go-between asked for another confirmation that they had Weinstein and that he was alive. Then one night, Elaine’s phone rang.  She could barely make out anything, only that it was her husband. ‘‘Warren? Warren? Hello? Hello?’’ The line went dead. Hours later, the phone rang again.  ‘‘Can you hear me?’’ Weinstein said.  ‘‘Yes, I can hear you, Warren. I can hear you.’’  Elaine sat on the guest-room bed in Jen’s house, where she often slept these days. She had woken Jen after the first call, and her daughter, having switched on a recording device, sat beside her. To be on the phone with him was staggering — the relief felt almost like an assault — yet wife and daughter remained focused. Jen didn’t grab the phone as she longed to do, and Elaine never forgot that the captors were surely listening.  ‘‘They’re telling me that they’ve only got a little bit of money,’’ Weinstein said, ‘‘and unless they get all the money, they won’t release me.’’  But this wasn’t the agreement, she said. She had to hope he understood that the hardness in her words was meant for his captors; she forced herself to believe that he did. ‘‘It’s very dangerous to give them money, Warren. We won’t have anything left. We will have to give them our entire life savings. They’ll keep asking for money until we have nothing left to give them, and I don’t think they’ll let you go. So I don’t know what to tell you.’’  ‘‘They’re asking for, what, $240,000?’’  ‘‘Yeah. If you give them that money, I don’t think they’re going to ask for anything more,’’ Weinstein said. ‘‘The guy I’m with is saying, if you give them the money, I think they’ll bring me to Islamabad.’’  ‘‘I don’t know what to say, Warren.’’ The connection filled with static, with banging, a menacing rhythm. ‘‘Warren? Warren? Are you there? Warren?’’  ‘‘I’m here,’’ he said. ‘‘Elaine, I think we need to give them the money — have they asked for more than the $243,000?’’  ‘‘They have not asked for more than $243,000. But they — ’’  ‘‘I’m afraid, Warren, that they’re going to take the money, and then they’re going to keep you for some more money.’’  ‘‘They’re not going to ask for more money. I already told them that — ’’  ‘‘They told me twice already they were going to bring you. They promised me.’’  ‘‘No, no, no.’’ He defended them, saying that the go-between ‘‘only gave them a small amount.’’  ‘‘They have $45,000. That’s not a small amount.’’ She continued: ‘‘They didn’t come with you, Warren. They said they needed to give that money to the guards and the police, so that they could come down with you safely.’’  ‘‘No, no. Elaine, what they told me all along is unless they get all the money, they’re not going to deliver me.’’  They went on, back and forth, debating. She agreed to speak with the go-between, but added: ‘‘I have no control of the money. It’s not in my hands.’’ She said: ‘‘He has the money. It’s there. It’s waiting for them.’’ Her voice shifted. ‘‘Listen, I love you. The kids love you. We will do everything we can to get you.’’  ‘‘I’m sorry I did this to you.’’  The captors soon sent Elaine an email with a video. In it, Weinstein wore a black tunic. His hair was unkempt, but his tone was level. ‘‘I know that you find it difficult, but I think we have to trust them. I believe they’re going to free me and they’ll keep their word. Please put the money into their account, and a few days after they receive the money, they’ll deliver me.’’ He gave a small nod, affirming his own words. ‘‘Let’s trust them. I think, in fact, I’m almost certain they’re going to free me.’’ He continued: ‘‘I trust the fellow that’s been dealing with me. I think you have to trust them as well.’’ He nodded again, insistently. ‘‘I ask you to please do this.’’ Then: ‘‘I love you, and please give my love to the kids. And tell them that no matter what happens’’ — he bobbed his head yet again — ‘‘I love them very much. I’ve always been proud of them and always will be.’’ His words caught in his throat, and he tipped his head back, restraining tears and resuming an expression of resolve.  Though the K.&R. man warned against it, the family felt they had no choice but to turn over the money. In his next talks with the captors, the Pakistani go-between made them swear — on the Quran and by the Pashtunwali, a tribal code of the Pashtun ethnic group — that they would honor their promises to deliver Weinstein once the money changed hands. He sent them $150,000, and several days later, in early June, heeding their instructions, he arranged to give the final $48,000, in a zippered nylon bag, to a pair of men on a motorbike on a street in Peshawar. After the motorbike raced away, the go-between got a call. Weinstein, dressed as a devout woman in a burqa, his face covered, would be brought to a Peshawar hotel that night, where an associate of the go-between was standing by.  The family waited for word that all was done. Jen refused to let herself visualize the homecoming that would soon follow — she would trust in nothing until he stood in front of her. But Elaine and Alisa, who came to Rockville during the last phase of the negotiations, envisioned it. ‘‘I could feel myself leaning against him,’’ Alisa said. They had been told the reunion would happen privately, but they imagined airport scenes like the many they had experienced, when Weinstein returned from his travels. He would emerge where the throng of families gathered. ‘‘I waited for his feet,’’ Elaine recalled. ‘‘I couldn’t always see him over people’s heads.’’ He was too short for that. ‘‘But I could tell his feet. I would go over to him. A little hug. A little kiss. No big scene. He would push his cart to the side and unzip one of his bags right there in the terminal, and he’d say, ‘I brought you some chocolates.’ Or a torte. He’d say, ‘I brought you a fork, I’ll drive and you can eat.’ ’’  The next day, the captors phoned the go-between to say that the men on the motorbike had been arrested, swept up in the police response to a bombing. The family checked; there it was on the Internet — 21 killed on a bus near Peshawar. The captors told the go-between that the situation was too risky for them in Peshawar, that they would bring Weinstein to Islamabad and free him there, that they would be in touch with details in two days.  Two more days of waiting. With the F.B.I. agents and the K.&R. man, the family stared at reality TV — ‘‘Duck Dynasty’’ and ‘‘Diners, Drive-ins and Dives.’’ They made s’mores on the stove. Repeatedly, silently, Alisa spoke the simplest of prayers.  But the call never came. The captors made excuses and entreaties for more cash but gradually, by the end of the summer, went silent. The family began to crack. The fissure didn’t widen right away. It took another excruciating year of futility, of failing to locate Weinstein, let alone free him.  On Christmas Day 2013, Al Qaeda released another video of Weinstein. Wearing a gray tracksuit, his face slack and his gaze dull, he addressed President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry. ‘‘Nine years ago, I came to Pakistan to help my government,’’ he said tonelessly. ‘‘And now when I need my government, it seems that I have been totally abandoned.’’ He went on to ask the American media ‘‘to mobilize public opinion’’ and his family to do everything it could to persuade the administration to ‘‘actively pursue negotiations’’ for his release.  The K.&R. man, like the F.B.I., had long told the family to avoid media interviews. The danger, if they took their case public in an attempt to prod the government to somehow rescue Weinstein, was that the captors would see him as an important figure, which could drive up his price or get him killed as a trophy. But now Elaine, Jen and Alisa were spurred past their fear. Together they gave interviews to CNN, ABC and The Washington Post, then pushed for meetings at the White House and the State Department. In early 2014, the three of them met with Lisa Monaco, the assistant to the president for homeland security and counterterrorism; with Kerry and Ambassador James Dobbins, the special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan; with Jeff Prescott, Vice President Joe Biden’s deputy national-security adviser. At every meeting, Elaine handed around a framed photograph — Weinstein huddled with his wife and children and grandchildren, all of them smiling — and Alisa made sure everyone received a copy of her father’s résumé, so that they were confronted with his work on behalf of American foreign policy.  Couldn’t the administration, the family asked, pressure Pakistani leaders to use their covert channels to find Weinstein and broker his freedom themselves? Didn’t all our development and military aid to Pakistan give us some influence? And how, the family pressed again and again, could officials be sure that American drones wouldn’t strike wherever Weinstein was hidden?  The C.I.A. carried out more than 400 drone strikes in Pakistan from 2004 to 2014, according to research by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism. These strikes killed as many as 3,900 people, including up to 960 civilians. Many of these bombings have been in the jihadi-dominated region where Weinstein was probably held. Jen, who was taking notes at the meetings, said that Monaco declared to the family that ‘‘we apply the highest standards.’’ Monaco said that the government would have a near certainty about both the target and that no civilians would be injured or killed in a strike. (Monaco and other national-security officials, and the F.B.I. agents who worked with the Weinsteins, declined interview requests about the case.)  The family was unified in its distrust of everything it was told, from the State Department’s insistence about the limits of Pakistani intelligence to Monaco’s ‘‘highest standards.’’ But while Alisa wanted to keep Weinstein in the public eye, to shame the government into some unspecified action that would bring her father home, Elaine and Jen were terrified that if he got too much attention in the media, he would be killed as an advertisement for jihad. ‘‘I wanted to channel what my father would want,’’ Alisa said. She wrote lengthy emails to persuade her mother and sister that the family should consider being more active on social media. But she was outvoted; Jen felt her sister’s approach was too risky. Alisa thought that Elaine and Jen were crippling the family’s efforts, that Elaine was paralyzed by something more than worry about her husband. There was, in Elaine, a compulsive self-restraint, a reflexive deference toward power. Alisa wanted another meeting with Kerry, she said, ‘‘and I remember my mother saying, ‘I don’t want to bother him, he already took the time to meet with us, I don’t want to be a nudge.’ And I told her: ‘If I’m ever kidnapped and in a cave somewhere, I hope your concern isn’t being a nudge. I hope your concern is getting me the [expletive] out of there.’ ’’  On Feb. 12, 2015, Elaine got a call from an F.B.I. agent she knew well. The agent was in a coffee shop close by with two colleagues and asked if they could come over.  ‘‘Is it good news or bad news?’’  For the past six months, the Islamic State had been releasing high-profile videos of the beheadings of Western journalists and aid workers. ‘‘The panic,’’ Alisa recounted, was that ‘‘Al Qaeda would take the same action to show that they were still the baddest.’’ When the agents appeared at Elaine’s door minutes later, she was already trembling. They sat with her on her living-room sofa and told her that their intelligence indicated that ‘‘there has been chatter,’’ she recalled, ‘‘that the Jewish hostage has been killed.’’ The information, they added, was unconfirmed, but she went halfway into shock, shivering uncontrollably. They mentioned nothing about how the killing might have occurred.  Two months passed without any word of corroboration. Elaine and Alisa again let optimism rise inside them. On April 22, agents again called Elaine, asking to see her. Again they sat her down in the living room. This time, one of them sat beside her, eyes on a smartphone screen. The agent read a prepared statement referring to Weinstein’s regrettable death — three months earlier, in January — in a ‘‘counterterrorism operation,’’ a euphemism for a drone strike. It was as if vague language could lend a veil of secrecy, or a measure of deniability, to a C.I.A.-run program that all the world knew about. The agents drove Elaine to Jen’s house and said that two senior national-security officials would be arriving shortly to provide what details they could.  The officials sat across from Elaine, Jen and Jen’s husband at the dining table and apologized grimly, their shoulders slightly bowed. They explained that an ‘‘operation’’ that had eliminated four terrorists at an Al Qaeda compound had also — unknowingly — killed Weinstein and another hostage, Giovanni Lo Porto, an Italian aid worker who was kidnapped in 2012. Hundreds of hours of surveillance had failed to detect that the hostages were hidden at the compound, but observation after the strike noted more bodies than expected being pulled from the rubble. The officials didn’t specify whether they had been able to see with any clarity that the dead might have included Weinstein. They didn’t say what had made them sure in recent days. The officials unfolded a map. They pointed imprecisely at an area in the FATA where the assault took place and put the map away. That was all they would disclose.  The family knew one of the officials from previous meetings, and Jen, eyes brimming with tears, asked rhetorically if the family hadn’t warned about this very outcome. Hadn’t the family begged for caution? Hadn’t they pleaded for restraint? Hadn’t they demanded, ‘‘If you don’t know where he is, how can you know where he isn’t?’’ The official’s eyes teared up, too. Elaine said almost nothing. ‘‘I was furious, and maybe that’s why I didn’t speak,’’ she said afterward. ‘‘I was afraid to open my mouth. I was brought up a certain way. I’m not going to be a bitch. It’s an old-fashioned principle, but I have been very ladylike throughout this entire thing.’’  President Obama called after the officials left. The connection was terrible; Elaine and Jen listened on separate extensions, barely able to hear with fingers jammed against their other ears. To his contrition and condolences they hardly replied. ‘‘What I would have liked to say and what I said are two different stories,’’ Elaine said later. ‘‘ ‘Where the hell were you when I needed your help?’ No, I couldn’t say that. It was, ‘Thank you, Mr. President, thank you for calling.’ ’’  On June 18, 2015, a spokesman for Al Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent posted a statement in Urdu on Twitter that Weinstein had converted and was a ‘‘hard-working student of Islam,’’ that he was treated as a ‘‘beloved elder’’ by the mujahedeen and that his corpse emitted a ‘‘mysterious but pleasant fragrance that mesmerized everyone.’’ Along with the text, Al Qaeda included a photograph of Weinstein seemingly prepared for a Muslim burial, his bearded face ensconced in a white shroud. At the K.&R. man’s request, Jen glanced swiftly at the picture online, confirming that it was him. Elaine and Alisa avoided any glimpse. Elaine doubted the conversion — ‘‘chances are he was praying orally in Arabic and reciting a Hebrew prayer in his head’’ — but the idea that Weinstein was beloved by his captors fit with the story the family had told themselves all along.  Not long after, Elaine said, the F.B.I. called to tell her that the government had been contacted by a party claiming he had Weinstein’s remains and demanding $3 million for them. The F.B.I. acknowledged that American surveillance — they still wouldn’t utter the word ‘‘drone’’ — had indeed revealed, at some previous point, that Weinstein’s grave had been dug up. And they said that DNA had been sent — they didn’t explain how this was done and Elaine didn’t ask — and matched DNA the F.B.I. had taken from Weinstein’s sister. But there was no way to pay for Weinstein’s corpse, the F.B.I. counseled, without inviting the murder of more hostages, and Elaine did not disagree. ‘‘How much worse could this get?’’ she thought. ‘‘Everything that could go wrong has gone wrong.’’  Yet things kept going wrong. The Wall Street Journal reported on Aug. 20, 2015, that Giovanni Lo Porto’s corpse had been recovered by the Italian government — how, the Italians wouldn’t say. This didn’t make the Weinsteins rethink trying to negotiate for Warren’s body, but they were plagued by the idea that their government may have known where he was buried and had not managed to reclaim his body. Then, on Sept. 10, The Washington Post cited unnamed American officials saying that, as long as a year before the strike, drone surveillance had perhaps spotted someone in captivity who might have been Weinstein. The sighting was described as ‘‘inconclusive,’’ and the entire account was murky, but the article suggested that the government might not have done all it could to find him.  The C.I.A. would not respond to my questions about the possible sighting. The government kept mostly mute about all aspects of the kidnapping. But one current and one former high-ranking State Department official, each with extensive experience in Pakistan and with Weinstein’s case, agreed to talk but requested that they not be named because of diplomatic sensitivities. They emphasized how difficult the task of rescuing Weinstein was, given the Pakistani government’s ‘‘extremely limited control,’’ as one of the officials put it, in the region where Weinstein was held and given America’s severely strained relationship with Pakistan, particularly in the aftermath of the Bin Laden raid. ‘‘You have to recognize the limits of the tools in your tool kit,’’ he said. But he went on, describing discussions with the Pakistanis, ‘‘I can’t think of a meeting when we didn’t talk about Warren. There was always competition from other issues — nuclear issues, Indo-Pak tensions — but Warren was always above the fold.’’ The other official spoke about the shortcomings of American intelligence. ‘‘In the days and nights after the announcement in April,’’ he said, ‘‘I spent a lot of time thinking about how, with all the resources of the American government, the presence of two civilians’’ — Weinstein and Lo Porto — ‘‘was unknowable. It’s disheartening and heartbreaking.’’  The Obama administration has failed, so far, to settle with Elaine on compensation that was promised last April. Weinstein’s situation was unique, but there are a few comparable cases that might serve as guideposts toward determining a fair sum for the government to give the family. The family of Robert Levinson, a former F.B.I. agent who disappeared in Iran in 2007, while reportedly working for the C.I.A., and has never been found, received $2.5 million from the agency. In December, federal legislation was passed to compensate the Americans, most of them government employees, who were taken hostage in the United States Embassy in Tehran in 1979. The law gives nearly all the captives up to $10,000 for each of their days as prisoners. (Most were held for 444 days.) But, of course, Levinson wasn’t killed by his own government, and the embassy hostages came home alive. Though the Weinstein family would not discuss the settlements the government has proposed, they have been frustrated by both the offers and the delays. The family has suggested that a formula, similar to the one used with the Iran hostages, would help resolve the protracted negotiations.  Alisa, meanwhile, goes on imagining how her father died. Having heard from Jen that in the burial photo his face did not look bruised, she believes that he didn’t perish instantly in the missile’s explosion but, rather, more slowly, in the fire that must have followed, inhaling smoke and suffocating. She wonders often about his remains, decomposing in an empty room or a ditch. ‘‘I’m trying to separate the physical from the spirit of who my father is,’’ she said. ‘‘I just keep saying to myself: It’s only a body. It’s not my dad.’’  Daniel Bergner is a contributing writer for the magazine. His new book, ‘‘Sing for Your Life: A Story of Race, Music and Family,’’ will be published in September.  Sign up for our newsletter to get the best of The New York Times Magazine delivered to your inbox every week.  A version of this article appears in print on February 14, 2016, on page MM45 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: The Killing of Warren Weinstein. Today's Paper|Subscribe
After the American aid worker was abducted in Pakistan, his family undertook a delicate negotiation in hopes of securing his release. But then they got word that he had died — in a United States drone strike.