After Waco, the importance of well-planned and well-thought-out policy on dealing with international hostage situations was recognized across government agencies at the highest levels. And in 2002, President Bush signed the National Security Presidential Directive (NSPD-12), which would offer a set of guidelines for dealing with Americans held hostage abroad. “Gary Noesner was a principal architect of NSPD-12,” says Voss. The Hostage Working Group, a subcommittee chaired by the National Security Council, was given the charge to implement the directive. Standing members of the group included the FBI, State Department Counterterrorism, Department of Defense, and CIA. “Gary was present when the heads of the agencies, [Secretary of State] Colin Powell, [Secretary of Defense] Donald Rumsfeld, [CIA director] George Tenet, sat in a room and agreed to it.” The committee would meet either on an “as needed” basis, which was as much as once a month, or more frequently if international kidnappings called for it.
In January 2003, Noesner retired from the FBI, and Voss moved into his mentor’s seat within the Hostage Working Group. A month later, Noesner, now a senior vice president for Control Risks (which was under contract to Northrop Grumman to handle the kidnapping of Howes, Stansell, and Gonsalves), was put on his first case as a civilian negotiator. By then, the seasoned negotiator had worked on over 120 hostage cases with the FBI. He didn’t expect this case to bring anything he hadn’t dealt with in the past. Working in Colombia would be nothing new for him, either. In Noesner’s tenure with the FBI, he’d worked more Colombian kidnapping cases than any other type of case (mostly managing them from the States while sending a full-time agent to the country).
For more than a decade before Howes, Stansell, and Gonsalves were kidnapped, Colombia held the dubious distinction of having the highest kidnapping rate in the world, and the problem plagued not only Colombian citizens but also foreigners. Because Colombia has a wealth of as-yet-untapped oil and mineral reserves and there are hundreds of millions of U.S. government dollars earmarked to fight drug cultivation and production, numerous U.S. and foreign companies have employees in Colombia who have commonly been the target of kidnappers. The corporations have become accustomed to dealing with abductions, and dozens of hostage situations have been settled by dropping caseloads of American currency into jungle and mountain terrain. By early 2003, the process of dealing with kidnappings of foreigners in Colombia had been repeated so many times that there was an expected protocol—a commonly played-out exchange between kidnapper and negotiator that usually began as soon as the kidnapping took place.
Immediately after an employee was kidnapped, a negotiator from a security company was deployed to Colombia to try to establish contact with the kidnappers. In the United States, security companies such as the Florida-based Ackerman Group and the Washington, D.C., office of Control Risks provided operational guidance to clients as part of what was commonly referred to as “kidnapping and ransom insurance,” underwritten by large insurers such as Lloyd’s of London. The kidnappers might have been from one of the guerrilla groups—most notably, the FARC or the ELN—they might have been linked to paramilitary groups, or they could have been common criminals. The guerrillas had become so much of a problem that some North American companies were accused of paying illegal paramilitary groups for “protection” of their investments. In 2007, Chiquita Banana Company admitted to paying “protection” money to Colombian paramilitary groups—identified by the U.S. government as known terrorist organizations. (The company agreed to pay a $25 million fine to end a federal investigation.) Although the U.S. State Department forbids government concessions to terrorists or kidnappers, in all cases that Noesner had handled since 1990, a full-time FBI negotiator worked alongside and assisted the private security consultants to secure the safe release of hostages.
“Historically, FARC would grab an oil-exploration worker, a mining guy, an agriculture worker or someone like that and hold them for money,” says Noesner. “Then they communicate with the family or the company. The company would sometimes have a relationship with a [company like] Control Risks, sometimes not. If it’s an American citizen being held, even if it’s a Colombian with dual citizenship, the FBI would deploy. Not to take over the negotiations but to say, ‘Here’s what we recommend; here’s the issues as we see them.’” The security company’s negotiator and the FBI agent would then appoint a family member or someone close to the case, who, after coaching, would act as a communicator to speak directly with the kidnappers. “The U.S. ambassador to Colombia would be informed of what was going on, but they pretty much gave the FBI free rein to assist and help the families as long as they reported back to the embassy.”
If the kidnappers had already made a monetary demand, the negotiations would be fairly straightforward. The communicator would ask for proof of life, such as a video or photo of the victim. If the kidnappers refused, the negotiators would try to establish whether the victim was alive by asking questions that only the victim could answer. Once proof of life was established, the negotiations for money would begin. At the time of the kidnapping of Howes, Stansell, and Gonsalves, a common rule of thumb for Colombian kidnappings was that payment would likely be about 10 percent of the initial demand. Just under four years earlier, in a 1999 case, a $3.5 million ransom was paid for seven Canadians and one American oil worker seized in the Ecuadorian village of Tarapoa—the original demand had been $35 million. The settlement was a tremendous boon for the kidnappers. In the aftermath, the kidnapping of foreigners turned into large-scale and well-planned operations for various guerrillas and paramilitary groups, and negotiations became increasingly difficult to manage because of the enormous stakes.
One of the most ill-fated cases that Noesner oversaw from his Quantico, Virginia, headquarters began on October 12, 2000, when nine foreign workers were captured in Ecuador near an oil-drilling area close to the Colombian border. Forty men, dressed in fatigues and armed with assault rifles, surrounded the site. The victims—four Americans, a New Zealander, an Argentinean, a Chilean, and two French citizens—were forced into a helicopter, which the kidnappers then stole from the site and flew off to a jungle prison camp. Four days later, the two French helicopter pilots escaped. The seven remaining hostages had been working for three different corporations, each of which was represented by its own security company. The security companies’ representatives had varying degrees of experience in hostage negotiations and held vastly differing views on how to proceed.
From the beginning, the negotiations were tense. The first contact from the kidnappers came over VHF radio to the large group of negotiators who were based in Quito, Ecuador. The group included an FBI agent, members of the Ecuadorian Police Anti-Kidnapping and Extortion Unit, three security officials from Chile and Argentina, and three private security consultants representing Erickson Air-Crane, a heavy-lift helicopter company; Helmerich & Payne, Inc., an oil-drilling firm; and Schlumberger, a New York oil-services firm. The kidnappers identified themselves as the “Free America Commando” and launched into a tirade against the role of the United States in Colombia’s narcotics industry. The kidnappers, who were believed to be associated with FARC guerrillas, demanded eighty million dollars for the release of the seven men. It was a ridiculous and unprecedented demand. The negotiators went quiet and then broke out in nervous laughter. As the bargaining began, tensions grew. “There were arguments about who should lead the negotiations, what to offer, how quickly to offer it … all kinds of complications,” an employee of one of the security firms told a local reporter after the crisis was over.
By early November, with the kidnappers sticking to their eighty-million-dollar demand, the negotiating team began considering the risky option of a rescue attempt. A thirty-five-member team from the U.S. military (SOUTHCOM) concluded that a rescue attempt would be too risky because the hostages were being held in the deepest part of the Amazon jungle. For more than two months, the heated negotiations went back and forth. The team of quarreling negotiators hadn’t received an
y proof of life, and the kidnappers weren’t budging on their first demand. Negotiators from one of the security companies argued that the $3.5 million that had been paid in 1999 was too high, and that by taking a tough stance with a lower offer, they could curb the guerrillas’ outrageous demands. After twenty different communication exchanges between the kidnappers and the security companies, the kidnappers demanded that a counteroffer be made. Without conferring with the others, a representative from one of the security companies spit out a number: $500,000. Before anyone could stop him, the flustered intermediary repeated the number into the radio. The paltry sum was ridiculous—an absolute insult to the kidnappers. The blunder resulted in the kidnappers screaming expletives and terminating the conversation. “It was an ungodly mess. And sadly, the lack of effective communication between all the parties led to the execution of hostage Ronald Sander, the American,” says Noesner. On January 31, 2001, the body of Sander, a fifty-four-year-old Helmerich & Payne employee, turned up full of bullet holes; he’d been shot five times in the back with a semiautomatic rifle. His body was wrapped in a white sheet, on which was scrawled, “I am a gringo. For nonpayment of ransom.”
Days later, a deal was brokered. The security companies and their insurers would pay thirteen million dollars to the kidnappers. Logistics were worked out over the following weeks. The money, packed in seven boxes weighing more than nine hundred pounds, was shoved off a helicopter as it hovered over a jungle clearing that was marked by a red oilcloth. The hostages were given their freedom and arrived in Quito six days later, on March 1, 2001, after 141 days in captivity.
It was the high-dollar precedent set by this case that had Noesner expecting the FARC to demand a ransom in the tens of millions for the three Americans. The company was well aware of the possibility, too, and even before there was a demand of any kind, a Northrop Grumman representative told Howes’s and Gonsalves’s wives and Stansell’s fiancée that the company might not be able to pay the ransom amount. Noesner assumed that in his new role as a civilian negotiator, he would work with the FBI and Colombian intelligence to negotiate a safe release. But Noesner was wrong. Since the attacks of September 11, 2001, the Bush administration had turned the word negotiate into a statement of weakness, a sign of failure. And this new paradigm would completely shut down any interest on the part of the U.S. government in looking for a diplomatic solution for the hostages’ freedom. Confounding the situation even more, the FARC made an unprecedented demand. The ultimatum was posted on the FARC’s official Web site on February 24, 2003: “Three Gringos in the custody of our organization will be liberated, along with other Colombian prisoners of war, once a prisoner exchange materializes in a large demilitarized zone between the government of Uribe and the FARC.”
The FARC statement came as a complete shock to Noesner, to U.S. military bosses at SOUTHCOM, to politicians in Washington, and to the FBI agents, who had grown accustomed to helping negotiate for hostage releases in Colombia. It was especially shocking to the Northrop Grumman brass, who, although the company had acquired CMS four years earlier, claimed that they didn’t have any idea that Northrop Grumman had employees running such dangerous missions. (A source within the company would later defend the company’s ignorance, arguing that companies like Northrop Grumman are so enormous that it is sometimes impossible to keep track of subordinate companies or to learn about every aspect of the company for sale before purchasing it.) The FARC’s statement was even a shock to Colombian president Álvaro Uribe; never before had Americans in Colombia been considered spoils of the country’s civil war. The “other Colombian prisoners of war” the FARC was referring to had been captured over the last half decade. They included Colombian politicians, military and National Police officers, and soldiers.
As far as FARC high commander Manuel Marulanda was concerned, Stansell, Gonsalves, and Howes were invading mercenaries fighting alongside the heavy-handed, hard-line administration of Álvaro Uribe. And because Marulanda considered spies more valuable than regular civilians, for whom the FARC mandate was to demand cash payments, the FARC’s offer was to trade the gringos for guerrillas who had been captured and were serving time in Colombian prisons. For Marulanda, the idea of liberating his soldiers was driven by a strong paternal nature to protect his own. Above everything else, it was a question of honor. It was his number one goal, the thing that he was most passionate about. In 2001, under President Andrés Pastrana, deals such as this had been negotiated between the government and the guerrillas, resulting in prisoner exchanges, and Marulanda was hoping for a similar scenario this time around. But the political climate had changed in both Colombia and Washington, and both governments were now taking a much tougher stance against the FARC, which had the official U.S. designation of “terrorist organization.” The second part of the demand, what the guerrillas referred to as “a large demilitarized zone,” meant that the guerrillas wanted the government to guarantee there would be no Colombian troops in a 44,000-square-mile area covering the departments of Caquetá and Putumayo. Uribe announced that he had no intention of releasing FARC guerrillas from prison in an exchange or ceding a demilitarized zone to the FARC. (The FARC had persuaded Uribe’s predecessor, President Pastrana, to demilitarize a 16,000-square-mile area for more than three years, with disastrous results for the government.)
For all his experience, Noesner was about to face a completely different landscape, one that he would have to navigate for a longer time than any other kidnapping case in his career. The case would pit him against the State Department, the Department of Justice, and even his former friends and subordinates at the FBI. Noesner would fume that the classified National Security Presidential Directive (which he had helped author) signed by George W. Bush, which included the passage “The U.S. Government will make every effort, including contact with representatives of the captors, to obtain the release of hostages without making concessions to the hostage takers,” would be tossed aside as the government turned its back on the art of negotiation. Months after the kidnapping, the overarching dismissal of what Noesner had spent his entire career perfecting would lead him to conclude angrily, “Some in our government would just as soon see these guys dead as rescued.”
7
The River Queen
The roots of Erythroxylum coca and its white powder derivative, cocaine, are deeply imbedded in the history of the northern Andes, the mountain chain that runs the length of the South American continent. As early as 500 B.C., Incan tribes in the areas of present-day Peru, Bolivia, and Ecuador used the plant in religious ceremonies. Shamans burned the leaves—which were thought to have magical powers—to see the future and purify places inhabited by evil spirits. In the late 1500s, Spanish physician and botanist Nicolás Monardes wrote about South American indigenous people who would chew a mixture of tobacco and coca leaves as a stimulant. When Spanish conquistadors took over land from the native tribes, they levied a 10 percent tax on coca production. The plant’s medicinal benefits were widely known throughout South America, and in 1609, a Peruvian priest, Padre Blas Valera, wrote:
Coca protects the body from many ailments, and our doctors use it in powdered form to reduce the swelling of wounds, to strengthen broken bones, to expel cold from the body or prevent it from entering, and to cure rotten wounds or sores that are full of maggots. And if it does so much for outward ailments, will not its singular virtue have even greater effect in the entrails of those who eat it?
The town of Peñas Coloradas, on the Caguán River, under control of FARC commander Sonia until her arrest in 2004. The community was very prosperous thanks to cocaine commerce. The military took it over in 2004 and all the residents left. Photo: Carlos Villalón.
Cocaine alkaloid was first isolated in 1855 and purified in 1860 by German chemists, becoming commonly used in the late part of the century as a pain reliever and as an anesthetic during dental and eye surgery. Because of its other neurological effects, such as increased energy, lack of hunger, euphoria, and exhilaratio
n (a result of its effect of blocking the brain’s ability to take up released dopamine), cocaine was soon popular in a variety of medical practices. Sigmund Freud was a well-known proponent of the drug as an antidepressant and for the treatment of morphine addiction.
Peru supplied most of the world’s raw coca leaf and became a major industrial producer of semirefined cocaine, cocaína bruta, for export to the United States and Europe by the 1880s. Because of the growing demand, Peruvian producers began to modernize production for large-scale commercial exportation. By the turn of the century, Peru was shipping ten metric tons of semirefined cocaine to the United States, France, and Germany annually. However, the drug’s harmful effects, such as addiction, high blood pressure, and weight loss, were becoming apparent, and in 1914, the U.S. Congress regulated and taxed cocaine and opium imports, sales, and distribution under the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act. By the 1920s, a combination of prohibition and bad press about the negative effects of the drug caused demand to slow to a trickle, even though cocaine remained available and cheap. With the start of World War II, the availability of cocaine in the United States decreased and the price skyrocketed. Traditional trafficking routes were cut off by the war and remained disrupted well into the 1950s. The lack of cocaine made the drug an expensive indulgence, one for only the very rich.
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