by Gary Noesner
When my mom came home from work that day, I could speak of nothing else. Being a good mom, she went out and got me a kids’ book about the FBI, which amplified and further dramatized all the stories of derring-do that Hoover had only hinted at. The book contained stories of agents tracking down dangerous fugitives, arresting bank robbers, and securing the release of kidnap victims. From that time forward I never wanted to do anything else.
Of course, life was not as simple and sweet as it was portrayed on television, particularly if you lived in the segregated South, as I did. Throughout my childhood I would be reminded regularly that there were people who lived near me in Florida who had a very different kind of life. My first memory of this came on a shoe-buying expedition to Jacksonville, when I first noticed the omnipresent signs indicating separate water fountains, building entrances, and the like. I had never really appreciated the ugly face of discrimination before then, and I didn’t like what I saw. I remember my parents sitting me down and telling me that segregation was not right, and emphasizing that we had a responsibility to look out for others less fortunate than us, regardless of their skin color.
During my senior year at Florida Southern College, I took secondary education courses and did a teaching internship in history and sociology at Lakeland High School. This was 1972. School busing was causing protests as far north as Boston, and down in Florida, when Lakeland’s all-black high school was closed and its students merged into two formerly all-white schools, it did not sit well with many people. During my internship at Lakeland High School, there were frequent altercations in the hallways between white and black students. Whenever the school siren rang at an unscheduled time, all the male teachers were expected to rush out to break up those fights. I had always been a kind of mediator and peacemaker among my friends, but this was my first exposure to crisis containment as an adult. These were kids, technically, but not long after I started on the job, as I stepped between two football players, one black and one white, to create a physical barrier, I realized that they were easily as big as I was, and half crazy with anger. I’m almost six foot two, but they were bigger and stronger than I was. I don’t remember what I said, but I was able to use words to calm them down and keep them apart until some of their anger had subsided. I knew intuitively that once the fists started flying, it was all over.
For some Americans during this period, the stark contrast between the inspiring goals of the civil rights movement and the reality of everyday life caused them to revolt to varying degrees against America’s institutions, including the FBI. But I was raised more traditionally, and I never really embraced the counterculture movement. I continued to dream of being an agent; for me, the FBI still represented justice, something American society seemed to need more than ever.
And so when I graduated in the spring of 1972, there was only one job I really wanted. I didn’t want to run a business or be a banker. I wanted to be an FBI agent. Problem was, you needed to be twenty-three and have three years of other work experience. I had enjoyed teaching in spite of the time I spent breaking up fights, and thought this would be a great way to gain the required work experience, but full-time positions were scarce, and so I became a substitute. I also met with a recruiter at the local FBI office in Jacksonville. He suggested an idea I hadn’t considered before, which was to start as a clerical employee at FBI headquarters, something I could do right away. So I filled out an application, sent it in, and was eventually accepted. A few months later I found myself loading up the 1954 Ford I had purchased from my grandfather and driving up to Washington, D.C.
The FBI I joined in 1972 was in a kind of time warp. Even though J. Edgar Hoover had died a few months before I came on board, his presence was still felt, largely in the straitlaced conservatism of the Bureau. No matter how much the world had changed since the Beatles and Bob Dylan had shaken up American culture, agents at the FBI still wore white shirts only; some still even wore fedoras. Not long after I joined, one agent was given a special commendation for nabbing a Top 10 Most Wanted fugitive. But he was also reprimanded when a photograph during the collar showed him wearing a sports jacket rather than a dark suit.
This conservative atmosphere didn’t dull my wish to be an agent; the only trouble was that I wasn’t one yet. I immediately discovered that, far from being thought of as agents in training, clerks were members of a different caste altogether, one whose purpose was to do the entirely unglamorous work of supporting the field agents. I found myself engaged in mundane tasks such as delivering mail and filing paperwork. There was a seemingly endless pile of documents. To say that I was demoralized would not do the experience justice. I hung in, though, and after a few months, I got to know an agent named Jim Sherman, who became a kind of mentor for me. He knew how much I wanted to become an agent, and while he couldn’t make that happen any sooner, he did arrange for me to get an interesting assignment assisting him on the Foreign Counterintelligence Squad, collating data on the movement of foreign spies in Washington. It sounds more exciting than it was—but it was certainly a huge improvement over pushing the mail cart.
During my time working for Jim I had another stroke of good fortune. One night, about three months after I’d started working for the FBI, I went out with other people from the office and found myself seated across from an attractive young woman in our group. Her name was Carol Drolsbaugh, and I plucked up the courage to introduce myself. She had joined the FBI as a stenographer just a few months earlier, right out of high school. I was immediately attracted to her irreverent wit, which distinguished her from many of the more traditional, restrained southern girls I’d grown up with. I didn’t have much money to date in those days (Carol made more as a stenographer than I did as a clerk), but we began to see each other regularly.
In the fall of 1973 my dad began having serious back problems, so I requested a transfer from Washington to the FBI Field Office in Jacksonville, Florida, just a few miles from home. This meant being apart from Carol, and we missed each other so much that when she came down for a visit in December we got engaged. We were married in August 1974 and eventually moved in to a great little apartment near the ocean in Neptune Beach.
In 1976, after three and a half years as a clerical employee, I received the formal letter appointing me to join the incoming class of special agents for training at the FBI academy in Quantico, Virginia. For the next seventeen weeks, I studied hard for each exam, concentrated on my shooting skills, and got in great physical condition. I scored near the top of my class in every category, and, thanks to my years running track in high school, I also won every distance-running challenge.
After graduation in 1976, I was assigned to the fugitive squad of the FBI Field Office in Columbia, South Carolina. Many agents begin their careers doing tedious background investigations, but within two weeks I was apprehending criminals. A few weeks into the job, our office received an alert about a South Carolinian wanted for murder in California. He was on the run, and the thought was that the most likely place for him to be was back home in our area. Relying on the standard gumshoe work of contacting the fugitive’s family members and every other known associate, eventually my partner and I tracked him down to a crumbling white frame apartment building surrounded by palm trees and azalea bushes. This was late August, and when the landlord let us in the front door, it was so hot inside I nearly fainted, but I rushed on through the apartment and found the man in bed, reaching for his gun in a holster on the nightstand. Fortunately, he stopped before I had to fire my weapon in self-defense. For a young guy who’d always wanted to be a G-man, this was very exciting indeed.
One of my training agents in South Carolina was named Jimmy Calhoon. Jimmy looked the way I’d always thought an agent should look: with dark hair and a square jaw on a rugged face, he was a dead ringer for the cartoon police detective Dick Tracy. He was a tough guy who had played football at Florida State, and he exuded a confidence and authority that I’d never seen before. One night we were looking for
a fugitive, a guy who had murdered someone in another state, and we walked into the toughest bar in town, a dark smoke-filled place filled with tough guys. Jimmy moved into the room and slowly stared down each person, to see if the guy we were looking for was there. Not one of them dared to make eye contact with him.
But Jimmy wasn’t just a tough guy. Over the next two years he would teach me his own kind of street psychology: how to speak with witnesses, victims, and criminals and gain their cooperation. When we were out trying to develop leads, he could adapt his approach for a big-city lawyer or a farmer down at the feed store in a small town. He could tell jokes, and he seemed to be able to talk to anyone about anything, whether it was crops, fishing, dove hunting, or taxes. He was as tough as anyone in the Bureau, but what he showed me was that good law enforcement wasn’t just about using a gun or a nightstick; it was also about communication.
As much as Jimmy was a positive role model, there were others whose actions taught me what not to do. There were a couple of guys in the office who constantly took unnecessarily confrontational approaches, arrogantly asserting their authority as FBI agents. In one bank robbery case another agent and I were interviewing a guy who we were pretty certain could help us locate the robber. Practically before he had sat down, the agent was accusing him of lying and covering for his friend. I felt my frustration rise as the witness clammed up—I was certain I could have gotten what we needed from him with a more subtle approach.
Carol and I enjoyed our two years in South Carolina and even bought our first house there, but “first office” agents get transferred, and in 1978, the FBI summoned me back to the Washington Field Office and assigned me to the Foreign Counterintelligence Squad. It was great to return as an agent, though I made sure to treat the clerks with the respect that they deserved. I began my new Washington life as an agent developing evidence in espionage cases, while also working contacts to recruit defectors from hostile nations as counterspies for us. But the previous years had seen the challenges facing the FBI evolve. A series of crises would awaken it to the threat of international terrorism and to the need for a more rigorous approach toward handling major incidents. Both of these things would become the focus of my work in the years to come.
During the Munich Olympics in the summer of 1972, eight members of the Palestinian Black September terrorist organization seized and ultimately killed eleven Israeli athletes. Despite the tensions rising in the Middle East since the 1967 Six-Day War between Egypt and Israel—and the fact that at least one West German forensic psychologist had predicted this hostage event almost exactly as it played out—there was no armed security for the Munich games, no checkpoints. When the hostage taking began, there was no federal authority in place to deal with it, which left local and regional police to make do as best they could. They had no radios, woefully inadequate firepower, and too few snipers to be effective, and they relied on flawed tactics that put police forces in danger from their own cross fire. Once the action began, decision making was mostly ad hoc and cumbersome, with one tactician sharing responsibility with two politicians. For many law enforcement officials, the Munich siege of 1972 was a wake-up call. Before that time, when subjects took hostages, responding police would simply demand that the perpetrator come out and surrender. If the hostage taker refused, the police would then mount an assault. Sadly, that rigid and inflexible approach often resulted in loss of life. Even when it did not, the outcomes depended more on luck than on the application of a well-established set of procedures. In New York City, just one week before the events in Munich, police had bumbled through the botched bank robbery and hostage taking that was later depicted in the Al Pacino film Dog Day Afternoon. The actual fourteen-hour siege became a spectacle on live television, and it drew a crowd of three thousand people to the street corner in Brooklyn where the bank was located. Fortunately, the hostages were eventually rescued, and loss of life was limited to one of the perpetrators. But to all observers, it was clear that the NYPD and assisting FBI lacked an effective response. A more egregious example of the state of police crisis procedures (demand compliance, go in if your demand is refused) had been the Attica prison riot, also in New York State, which had taken place only one year earlier. When negotiations failed to bring results, the State Police moved in with tear gas and shotguns, the net result of which was the death of ten inmates and twenty-eight correctional officers. A Special Commission of the State of New York later described it as “the bloodiest one-day encounter between Americans since the Civil War,” excepting perhaps the Indian massacres of the late nineteenth century.
The New York police would lead the way as law enforcement sought to respond to these kinds of crises. Shortly after the Munich and Dog Day Afternoon events, New York police commissioner Patrick Murphy established a committee to explore ways to respond to crises in a more organized and effective fashion. The committee’s conclusions led the NYPD to create a full-time unit—the Emergency Services Unit—that would be responsible for responding to crisis events. No longer would the response to and management of the incident be left in the hands of whoever showed up first. They also established protocols emphasizing proper containment of the situation as well as nonviolent approaches, in contrast to what had previously taken place.
In January 1973, the Emergency Services Unit had its first opportunity to apply this new, more restrained approach when officers responded to a robbery in progress at John and Al’s Sporting Goods Store in Brooklyn. A group of perpetrators held nine hostages, and an immediate exchange of gunfire resulted in the death of one officer and the wounding of two others. Nonetheless, forty-seven hours later, the situation was resolved with all hostages released and all four perpetrators in custody.
A post-incident review concluded that restraint had succeeded far better than earlier, more aggressive approaches. One flaw that the review commented on was that communication with the subjects inside had been uncontrolled and uncoordinated. This prompted NYPD Lt. Frank Bolz and Officer Harvey Schlossberg, a trained psychologist, to be assigned to build the nation’s first dedicated hostage negotiation team, selecting and training a group of officers specifically for this purpose.
In 1974, the FBI recognized that the NYPD was on to something, and developed its own formal hostage-negotiation training program at its Quantico training academy. This course was designed for use by FBI agents as well as police officers. Those who volunteered for negotiation training, selected from each of the FBI field offices around the country, tended to be mature and experienced agents, known in their offices as solid, effective, and successful. Many had shown a knack for developing informants or gaining confessions from otherwise uncooperative criminals. The negotiation skills they learned during the course further enhanced their ability to communicate with citizens on the street and avoid verbal confrontations.
After training, these agents would then work with FBI SWAT teams in regional field offices around the country to help resolve hostage and barricade situations. Then as now, FBI agents were assigned to a SWAT team or field negotiation unit on a part-time basis only. An agent might spend most of his time hunting down mobsters and get called in every now and again when a siege occurred. The original concept developed by NYPD and adopted by the FBI focused primarily on bargaining skills, among them reciprocity; negotiators would in essence say, “If you cooperate with me and do this, I’ll cooperate with you and do that.” This gave rise to the principle we saw applied early on in Sperryville: never give a hostage taker anything unless he gives you something in return.
During my initial training to become an FBI agent, I had made a mental note to try to become involved in this new specialty at the earliest opportunity. In 1978 I mentioned this interest to my partner Ken Schiffer, a very experienced senior agent who knew the WFO training coordinator, the person who decided who got to attend the negotiation training program at Quantico. With Ken’s support, two years later, in 1980, I was given the opportunity to attend the FBI two-week negotiation course.
During the course I learned the mechanics of the negotiation process, studied abnormal psychology, heard case studies, and participated in role-playing exercises. I was deeply impressed by the power of the simple communication techniques being taught. I was also impressed by the insight of the man teaching these new skills, Agent Fred Lanceley. Fred’s great skill was his ability to break down incidents into their component parts and glean the dos and don’ts. He also had a unique ability to draw out stories from the agents and police officers he trained and use this information to build a base of knowledge.
Fred taught us that the key to successful negotiation was to discern the subject’s motivation, goals, and emotional needs and to make use of that knowledge strategically. Once we understood the hostage taker’s real purpose, we had a better chance of convincing him that killing the hostages would not serve that purpose and would only make an already bad situation worse.
One of our most effective tools for negotiation is to offer the hostage taker something he wants in exchange for something we want—ideally, the release of at least one hostage. (In the Charlie Leaf situation, as I’ve said, this didn’t work—he didn’t want anything from us—so we had to try a different strategy.) Often we’ll say something like, “Why don’t you help me help you? Give me something to work with, and let’s see what we can accomplish working together.” If the subject resists making a trade, the negotiator might say, “I’d like to help you, but my boss just won’t let me send in what you want until you send someone out in return.” By making the subject work hard for everything gained, we wear down his resolve. He realizes he doesn’t have as much power or control over the situation as he thought he had.