Alert – I was about to meet my wife at the airport when I was blindfolded and put through 77 days of torture

Dave Lavery knew something was wrong as he made his way towards the terminal exit at Kabul Airport.

His wife was anxiously waiting for their reunion after he had texted her from the plane the moment its wheels had touched down on the runway.

She was expecting the former Canadian soldier and UN security advisor, who is known better as ‘Canadian Dave’, to emerge but Lavery’s training was kicking in as he spotted men surveilling him and communicating via phones.  

By then, he had spent decades in the world’s most dangerous zones. He had survived death repeatedly: from almost stepping on an unexploded ordnance, receiving a post-injury cancer diagnosis and losing a kidney, to walking away from a 2011 Kabul market attack.

He had carried his injured future wife, Junping, out of the rubble of that attack. They had met only the previous day. ‘Ten years later I carried her on the beaches of the Seychelles and married her’, Lavery told the Daily Mail.

The couple and their team were instrumental in helping 100 Afghan nationals escape from Kabul when Western troops withdrew in 2021.

Desperate evacuees had been told to wear red and shout for ‘Canadian Dave’ at the airport as Lavery combed the perimeter to pull those with documentation to safety.

His heroic actions helped kickstart his legacy. 

‘Canadian Dave’ Lavery, 64, is pictured with his wife, Junping. She was waiting for him outside Kabul Airport last November on the day he was detained by the Taliban

Lavery pulled an injured Junping from the rubble of a Kabul supermarket attack in 2011, just one day after they had first met. The pair had been shopping for dim sum ingredients

The couple married in the Seychelles a decade later. Just a few years after that Lavery found himself detained by the Taliban in Kabul

He had lived in Afghanistan on and off for 15 years so knew the dangers of a country torn apart by decades of wars. 

Now, three years and three months later, Canadian Dave, 64, was back at Kabul airport, having flown in to lay wreaths for Remembrance Day and to conduct business for the private security and consultancy firm he ran with his son. 

That included helping facilitate the exit of 18 Afghans whose travel documents he was carrying.

As Lavery quickly began clocking Taliban surveillance around him at the airport, he scrambled to text Junping and his team outside in a bid to inform them he was being followed and tell them to get back in the car.

He never got the chance. Next came an agonizing 77 days wondering when, if ever, he would see his wife and family again.

On November 11, 2024, Lavery was detained by two guards and ordered to return inside the airport. He was told to empty his bags and lay out all possessions and the travel documents for the two Afghan families. Then he was bundled into a car, blindfolded and tied up in the backseat.

‘That’s when I realized it was for real,’ Lavery said. ‘It was game on. And everything started to kick in from that.’

The former special forces service member had received and given training in security and survival for most of his life. He rolled down the car window and sat upright in the back seat, hoping futilely that his wife or team would spot him in the vehicle.

‘Your primary senses do kick in and you realize that this is not good, so you need to be prepared for the worst,’ Lavery said.

Paying close attention to the ‘direction and noise and speed and slowdowns and the turns’, he worked out that he had been taken to the old government compound housing the Taliban’s intelligence service, the General Directorate of Intelligence.

Lavery was worried for his wife’s safety but, at the same time, he was ‘in a high state of emotion and alertness’, he said. ‘I was numb. What the heck has just happened?

‘Then you’re realizing, you’re trying to play a role very quickly so you’re not seen as a threat,’ he said, noting how he emphasized his age and health problems, playing the ‘old, busted man’.

Lavery is a Canadian veteran and former UN security advisor who runs a consultancy firm with his adult son. He credits his training with helping him get through 77 days of captivity

Lavery, left, worked with his wife and team to help more than 100 Afghans leave the country amid Joe Biden’s chaotic withdrawal of Western troops in 2021. He warned the nickname ‘Canadian Dave’, which is what refugees were told to shout as they scrambled for help at the airport

‘They basically told me, “We could kill you or torture you but why would we do that when we want something?”’ he said.

Interrogators demanded that he open his devices but Lavery refused. He considers himself lucky that, ‘physically, it wasn’t hard on me’. 

They put him in a cell relatively quickly, where he began focusing on the day-to-day. He had no idea how long it might take international negotiators to secure his freedom.

‘The first thing you do is you look at every single corner or anything that could assist you or go against you. Always you’re looking at: How can I get out of here? What are they going to do to me? Are they going to torture me? Are they going to kill me?

‘Are they going to leave me in this room?’ Lavery said. ‘So that room actually ends up to be your little temple and your haven. That is your comfort zone.’

He described his cell as being four meters by six meters by three and a half meters tall. ‘[It was] an empty room, very dirty, old and industrial [with a] thin carpet.

‘It had: a little Afghan cotton bed roll, with a filthy blanket and pillow; a small, plastic garbage can in the corner; a little red plastic cup; a small electrical heater on the wall, hanging behind me; and two small windows with iron grills.’

There were two lights on the ceiling and a CCTV camera in the corner ‘watching everything’. Lavery kept himself in the dark for most of his month-long stay in the cell ‘so that they couldn’t see me or my emotions’.

And, for all his training and experience, those emotions ran the gamut.

Lavery pictured with dignitaries and his wife and son in Qatar on January 26, the night of his release. When the plane touched down in Doha, he says: ‘I just stood there and looked outside and took a huge, big gulp of fresh breath’

‘The first two or three days were brutal because I didn’t know where my wife was,’ he said. ‘You have two heads: You have your good head, your one on your side, then…that bad head on the other side.

‘You can see one head talk, saying “You’ll be all right”; the other one saying, “No, you’re not going to be all right, you’re going to be here for the long haul”, or worse, “They’re going to kill you.”

‘At one point of time I succumbed to the fact that, okay, they’re going to kill me,’ Lavery said. ‘I lived with that thought for probably about two days.

‘For me the dying part was okay, I’ll get it over with. The only thing that I did struggle with was was thinking about how they were going to kill me? Are they going to cut my head off? Are they going to shoot me?”

‘It was really dark and difficult,’ he said. ‘Everything was bizarre. Dreams are bizarre but you didn’t really sleep. You pass out because you’re so tired, and you’d be thinking, “What’s happening? Are you here? Is this real?”’

What grounded him, Lavery said, was sticking to the training that teaches ‘do not go outside that 24-hour period’, focus on routine, on the now, on specifics in real time.

‘Try to keep track of what day it is, what time it is, so you don’t want to complicate things. Because the minute you go outside and say, “I’ll be out hopefully in one week”, well that one week comes and goes, you’re not out of there,’ he said. ‘Then what? Then what happens to you?’

‘Canadian Dave’ had spent decades as a soldier and consultant in conflict zones before his November detention. After his 77 days of detention he says he hopes to help more people ‘specifically in conduct-after-capture resilience training’

He tried not to focus on events that he was looking forward to, such as the upcoming birth of his son Brant’s child or the annual training he did with friends and fellow security personnel that was planned for Brazil.

‘Every day I prayed to my family and just said, “I’m so sorry I put you in this position.” I was really brutal on myself. I was saying, “What kind of a security professional are you to go down this track?”

But he snapped out of that sort of mindset quickly, Lavery said, telling himself that ‘all you have to do is survive.

‘I just had the easiest job: to survive every day,’ he said. ‘My family had to endure every second… and they didn’t know.

‘My job was to stay healthy, stay fit, play the gray man, the old man, busted man, which I am,’ he said. ‘And I let them know, every day, every time they talked to me and gave me an opportunity to speak: “I’m hurting. I’m old. I had a new hip put in. I need to do a checkup on my kidney function.”’

He was vigilant about water, looking after his sole kidney. Though he avoided the meat he was served in paltry rations he still ended up in the hospital after becoming violently ill. After that he was moved to a new location.

Lavery says he focused solely on getting through 24-hour periods while imprisoned, rather than on events he was missing. He had been looking forward to the birth of his son’s child and once freed met the newborn 

‘They pulled in, took the hood off and I’m at a secured villa,’ he said.

There, he walked into a room with a television but next to no other furniture – and four other American hostages who had already spent years in captivity.

They knew who Lavery was from TV news reports but were initially wary.

‘They’d seen a lot of people come and go so it wasn’t like jumping and joy and all that kind of stuff,’ he said. ‘They looked at [it as] I’m possibly a threat to them, which could increase their time of stay because they would see me as probably the first guy to get out, and they would still be waiting.

‘And it came to that, pretty much.’ 

Dave notes that his life perspective is informed by years of training, risk assessment and comfort with danger but said: ‘I  carry a lot of guilt. I felt very guilty putting [my family] in that situation’

Lavery was released on January 26 after 77 days in Taliban custody. Two Americans – Ryan Corbett and William McKenty – were sent home days beforehand but George Glezmann would remain in detention for another two months.

Shortly before his own release, Lavery was granted a particular privilege: he was moved from the shared safe house to his own four-story villa and base in Kabul. As guards stood watch, he cooked for himself, fed a stray cat that Junping had previously befriended, and worked out in a rooftop gym.

He also found a forgotten phone in one of the rooms. Hiding under the covers late one night, he used it to make a call in which he tried to convince his son, through whispers, that it really was him.

That’s when he discovered that serious efforts were under way for his release. His son told Lavery that he had been due to come home earlier that month.

‘I slept well and then I started preparing my bags,’ he said. He also chose mementos and tidied up the villa knowing that he would never return. 

Within days he was on a flight to Qatar, though he refused to get his hopes up until he ‘saw the lights of Doha’.

When the plane doors opened, he said: ‘I just stood there and looked outside and took a huge, big gulp of fresh breath there.’

He was greeted by international diplomats before entering the airport. Then he spotted ‘a head pop out from down the corridor.’

It was Junping.

When Lavery was reunited with his terrified wife upon his release, he says, ‘You could feel the intensity . It was like she wasn’t letting go’

‘I started walking while she started running towards me, and then my son came out, and she jumped on me,’ he said. ‘You could feel the intensity. It was like she wasn’t letting go.’

That was nearly four months ago. Since his release, Lavery has been traveling consistently from the Middle East to meet his new grandson and to Mississippi for training.

He admitted, however, that things have changed.

‘I carry a lot of guilt,’ Lavery said. ‘I felt very guilty for putting [my family] in that situation.’

He is still in contact with fellow detainees Corbett and Glezmann. 

When Lavery landed in Qatar, he was told: ‘You are our first successful case that was resolved in such a short time frame.’

Dave hopes his experience can serve some positive purpose. He has volunteered his services to help with negotiating in other similar cases. He also told the Daily Mail he wants to do more training to help people with ‘conduct-after-capture’ resilience training.