Was there a deal? Perhaps we'll never know. In any case,
here's a link to the BBC report:Mr Johnston said he was not tortured during captivity but he did fall ill from the food he was served.
He added that he had been kept in four different locations, two of them only briefly.
He was able to see the sun in the first month but was then kept in a shuttered room until a week before his release, he said.
He was kept in chains for 24 hours but was not harmed physically until the last half hour of his captivity, when his captors hit him "a bit".