by Gary Noesner
We can not-so-subtly reinforce that realization by showing a visible tactical force capability. This can also be a leverage point in moving negotiations along. For instance, we’ll suggest to the hostage taker that we won’t kill him as long as he behaves reasonably.
Dr. Mike Webster, a Canadian psychologist who has worked with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and FBI negotiation programs, describes this as the “parallel approach” to crisis resolution, in which we contrast the benefits of cooperation with the risks of resistance. Authorities negotiate in good faith, while simultaneously preparing for and showing their ability to undertake tactical action. Limited demonstration of tactical capability can help the negotiation process along by encouraging dialogue. Too little action can make the subject feel confident and secure, thus less likely to negotiate in earnest. Too much action might trigger a firefight, which is what Webster calls the “paradox of power”—the harder we push the more likely we are to be met with resistance. Law enforcement officials who have become angry and agitated owing to a lack of progress are more inclined to use force in a non-incremental way.
Most hostage takers do not begin their day planning to kill someone and then die in a hail of bullets. They are usually focused on getting their demands met. In a small number of cases, a suicidal individual purposefully holds hostages and seeks a confrontation with the clear intention of dying at the hands of the police. These rare cases are classified as “suicides by cop.” But most hostage takers want to live; even many who seem bent on self-destruction are, at most, ambivalent. That ambivalence serves as the access point to insert the wedge of negotiation.
The duration of most such incidents is usually only a few hours or less, with surrender achieved well over 90 percent of the time when a proper negotiation approach is used. Very few activities in law enforcement yield success rates that high.
Even so, it can be a complex and timely process to move the hostage taker to a point where he realizes he won’t achieve his goals, and that’s why we think about much of our work as stalling for time. After a few hours, days, or even weeks, things may not look as bad as they did at first, both for the hostage taker and for the authorities. Alternatives to violence begin to emerge, and our goal is to move the hostage taker away from the tunnel vision that prevents him from seeing those alternatives.
One example from these early days came during a domestic hijacking when a young man brandished a weapon and demanded to be flown to Cuba. The FBI and local authorities surrounded the plane and negotiations began. At some point during the dialogue, the hijacker forcefully demanded that the negotiator send him in a hot cup of coffee with cream and two sugars. The negotiator replied that it would be difficult to get coffee out to the plane, but that he would do his best. Several hours later the coffee showed up. It was black with no cream, very cold, and it contained no sugar at all. A short time afterward the young hijacker surrendered. With the man in custody, the FBI agent asked what had made him decide to give up. He responded: “I figured if I couldn’t even get a decent cup of coffee, I certainly wasn’t going to be able to fly to Cuba.”
Few case studies so succinctly illustrate the value of the negotiation process: Contain. Open communications to deescalate tension. Stall for time. Lower expectations. Make him bargain for everything.
I came away from the training course excited by what I had learned and anxious to spread the word. Even though I was a brand-new negotiator, I immediately began to run occasional negotiation training courses for officers in the D.C. area, and I became negotiation coordinator for the WFO—all of this in addition to my day job hunting down foreign spies. I really enjoyed those training courses, and they were hugely helpful in developing my own knowledge of the field. I’d travel to a local police station and put on a daylong seminar for fifteen or twenty guys. I’d say, “I don’t have a lot of practical experience, but here are the things I’ve learned from the FBI academy, and here’s what they’ve learned from around the world.” In those days the FBI had a rep for taking and not giving, and so the police really appreciated getting this information. In return, they told me about the hostage incidents in which they’d been involved, and we talked about how the FBI methods could’ve been applied to them.
In 1982, as global terrorism became an increasing threat, I transferred to the WFO Terrorism Squad, identifying and arresting suspected terrorists, developing informants to penetrate groups we were concerned about, and monitoring individuals in the United States who we believed were supporting terrorist organizations in the Middle East. In those days, there were probably only a dozen or so FBI agents who knew the difference between Iraq and Iran, or between Sunni and Shi’ite. But I made it a point to learn everything I could about the Muslim world and its troubled politics, as well as the threats presented by Islamic extremists. For the next eight years I would travel the globe working terrorism cases, often applying communications lessons from the FBI negotiation course to the task of recruiting informants and investigating terrorist incidents.
One early case for the WFO Terrorism Squad occurred close to home. I was called to assist with the investigation of the kidnapping of Clelia Quinonez, the wife of a former Salvadoran ambassador to the United States. Mrs. Quinonez had been abducted from her home in Miami. FBI teams responded to the Quinonez residence and set up technical support and provided assistance to Roberto Quinonez, who was negotiating for the release of his wife. The first task was to figure out where the kidnappers were.
As just about anyone knows who has ever seen a cop movie from this period, in those days law enforcement could trap and trace telephone calls, but it took a while. Digital technology, of course, now makes this process instantaneous. But at the time, the information available immediately was limited to the region of the country a call was coming from. The longer a caller stayed on the line, however, the more specific technicians could be in identifying the town, the neighborhood, and ultimately the precise telephone where a call originated. Sophisticated criminals knew to limit the length of their calls, but the men who had abducted Mrs. Quinonez were not sophisticated. One of them had done odd jobs at the Quinonez house, and he and his partner had seen this contact with a wealthy family as a chance to make some easy money.
FBI agents coached Ambassador Quinonez on maintaining just the right degree of cooperation while drawing out the conversation with questions. Again, this was a stalling-for-time strategy to give the perpetrators an incentive to keep talking, while also stretching out the discussion in order to keep them on the phone longer each time. When the abductors made a demand, we instructed the ambassador to break it down and address it in tiny increments, which necessitated additional phone calls. With each phone call, the technical team was able to zero in more closely on where the calls were coming from. Eventually, they narrowed it down to a few square miles in the Washington, D.C., area.
We were getting close. The ambassador agreed to a ransom of $1.5 million but insisted on receiving proof that his wife was still alive before making the payment. As we’d expected, the kidnappers agreed, and they told him they would have Mrs. Quinonez herself make the next call so that he could hear her voice. Armed with that information, as well as knowledge of an approximate location, we stood at the ready to respond, rescue, and arrest. We hoped they would bring her to a phone booth.
I led a six-person team assigned to a rough part of northwest Washington, ready to respond the moment the technicians identified the specific location from which the call was being made. Additional agent teams from WFO were spread out to cover other parts of the city. Usually, in such a situation, the agents will locate the suspect making the call, then follow him back to the location where the victim is being held. In this case, the perpetrators saved us a step.
Four days into the crisis, Agent John Heieck and I had set up shop in a crime-ridden part of town and were sitting in an unmarked FBI car parked on a dark street near the Pitts Hotel, a run-down place whose name seemed entirely apt. We were across the
street from the entrance, about fifty feet down the block. Nearby was a phone booth that we suspected might be used by the kidnappers, since we thought earlier calls might have originated from this block. The two other teams I was responsible for were parked at similar locations not far away. Our attention was focused on the radio as we watched the comings and goings of those on the street. The idea was simply to be spread out in this neighborhood, ready to move in quickly when we determined the location the call was being made from.
We sat there for the rest of the afternoon and into the evening. In this mostly black neighborhood, two white men sitting in a sedan was a fairly obvious giveaway that we didn’t belong, but no one seemed to care. We exhausted all manner of small talk as we endured the tedium of a stakeout.
At 9:40 p.m. the radio finally crackled to life with the news we’d been waiting for. Mrs. Quinonez was at that moment talking with her husband from a pay phone, which had been traced to a street location just outside the Pitts Hotel. John and I could see a white woman standing at a phone booth, with a young black man on either side of her. We had a photograph of the victim, and we had binoculars. A closer look confirmed that this was indeed Mrs. Quinonez.
We radioed for backup, got out of the car, and drew our weapons as we approached them.
When we got twenty yards away, we shouted, “FBI!,” flashing ID and pointing our revolvers. “Hands on your heads! Get on the ground! On the ground now!”
John moved to handcuff one of the subjects and I moved to handcuff the other. Meanwhile, the other members of our team pulled up, got out of their cars, and grabbed Mrs. Quinonez. She simply dropped the phone, which was now dangling at the end of its cord a few feet away from me.
As I moved to handcuff one of the subjects now lying facedown on the ground, later identified as Craig Blas, I noticed his body rise slightly off the ground and his hand move toward his waistband. I saw the butt of a revolver. “He’s got a gun,” I yelled. Then I pounced on his back and jammed the barrel of my revolver directly into his ear. “Move another inch and I’m going to blow your fucking head off,” I said. Then I reached down and confiscated his revolver. Mr. Hoover would not have approved of my language, but it certainly got Blas’s attention.
With the handcuffs on Blas, I raised him to his feet and quickly frisked him for additional weapons. I then turned him over to two other agents, who took him back to my vehicle for transport. That’s when I noticed that the telephone receiver was still dangling, presumably with Mr. Quinonez in Miami still on the other end. I picked up the phone and said, “This is Gary Noesner up here at WFO. We got both subjects and the victim. She’s safe.” I could hear a loud cheer come over the line from Miami.
As I continued to hold frequent training sessions for police officers in Washington, I have to admit that, like any other highly trained professional, I was curious to see how my expertise would hold up in a major hostage crisis. In those early days, I often worked closely with the Washington Metropolitan Police negotiation team and assisted in several of their hostage or barricade incidents. But the siege that would first really put my negotiation skills to the test occurred 240 miles to the south, in Raleigh, North Carolina, in 1982.
CHAPTER THREE
MY FIRST MAJOR SIEGE
When the conduct of men is designed to be influenced, persuasion, kind, unassuming persuasion, should ever be adopted.
—ABRAHAM LINCOLN
It all began on October 7, 1982, when a passenger listed as W. Rodriquez boarded the 10:40 p.m. Amtrak Silver Star out of Jacksonville, Florida, bound for New York. Accompanied by his sister, Maria, and her two children, Julie, four, and Juan, nine months, he entered the sleeping car they’d reserved and handed the porter a three-dollar tip for carrying his luggage, which instead of clothes and other personal items held a Browning semiautomatic pistol and a fully automatic MAC-10 submachine gun.
“W. Rodriquez” was, in fact, one of many aliases used by twenty-nine-year-old Evangelista Navas Villabona. Nicknamed Mario, he was a native of Colombia who had entered the United States illegally and set up shop trafficking drugs into New York.
All was quiet on the Silver Star until 5:45 the next morning, when passengers in the adjacent sleeping berth awoke to the sound of children crying and a man and woman arguing loudly in Spanish. The argument grew increasingly heated for the next hour, gaining intensity until, shortly before the train arrived in Raleigh, North Carolina, shots rang out. The conductor radioed ahead for help, and local police were waiting when the train arrived in Raleigh.
In charge of managing the incident was Raleigh police chief Frederick K. Heineman, a retired NYPD official, easily identified by his crisp big-city accent amid the southern drawls. Chief Heineman was an experienced and thoughtful law enforcement leader and well aware of the dangers associated with this type of situation. The FBI offered our resources and deployed personnel to the scene. We also went about the task of fully identifying Mario Navas and learning all we could about his criminal and mental-health history, as well as his connections in both Florida and New York. We discovered that in 1976 Mario had been convicted of conspiracy and possession with intent to deliver a narcotic in New York. He had been sentenced to fifteen years and had served time at three prisons before being paroled in 1980 on condition that he return to his home in Colombia. His prison record also indicated that he had an explosive temper and was given to fits of rage.
During the next couple of hours, Amtrak officials and police evacuated the other passengers and detached the train car holding Mario, its windows curtained, onto a side track about fifty yards to the right when viewed from the station. There was one empty car immediately adjacent on either side. Responding police officers, shielded by the steel girders of the station, attempted to communicate with the Colombian via loudspeaker, but their overtures were met with silence. Next, a tactical officer under heavy cover crept up to Mario’s train car and attached a listening device as well as a speaker. As he worked to set up this means of communication, he noticed a hole where a bullet had exited the compartment door.
At around 9:00 a.m., the Raleigh officers on the scene heard another shot ring out from inside the compartment. At this point they considered the option of storming the train, but they simply did not know enough about what was going on inside and who was at risk.
At 10:20 a.m., the portion of the train not isolated by the police pulled out of the station to continue with the journey to New York.
Based on the few facts available at the time, neither the FBI nor local police had any reason to assume that Mario had boarded a train in Jacksonville with the intention of shooting off his weapons just before arriving in Raleigh. The loud argument reported by witnesses suggested that a domestic dispute had triggered the violence. It made sense that the subject inside had acted spontaneously, was now scared, and probably had no clear plan on what to do next or how to extricate himself.
About an hour after the other train cars left the station, several more gunshots rang out from inside the compartment. Once again, the police had done nothing to provoke Mario. Was he killing his captives one by one? Had he killed himself? The police simply didn’t know.
Chief Heineman knew he had three options. The first was to mount a rescue attempt. The second was to establish a dialogue with Mario to convince him to surrender. The third was to wait and do nothing, and see if he would come out on his own, what the NYPD’s Harvey Schlossberg used to call “dynamic inactivity.”
Heineman questioned Amtrak officials to try to pick up any insights that might help him devise a strategy. He learned that railroad passenger cars are made with heavy-gauge steel in order to survive derailments, which makes them almost impenetrable. He also learned that the thick glass windows were built to withstand gunshots coming in from the outside, which meant that a rescue attempt was not a viable option. He knew it wouldn’t be like trying to kick in a wood-framed door in a tenement building; Mario would have plenty of time to kill the children if he was so inc
lined. And Heineman couldn’t simply wait, because the children were at risk. So he was going to have to establish a dialogue with Mario.
Unfortunately, the Raleigh Police Department did not have a Spanish-speaking negotiator. Fortunately, one of the EMTs deployed to the scene was Jorge Oliva, a Cuban native. Heineman recruited him on the spot and installed him in another sleeping compartment about fifteen feet away. He took over the effort via bullhorn to elicit a response from Mario.
At around 12:30 p.m. officers heard four more shots fired from inside the compartment. So Mario had not killed himself earlier. But what was going on? Was he simply firing off rounds to keep the police at bay? Most of all, were his captives still alive?
Throughout that afternoon and early evening, Jorge conveyed to Mario offers of food and drink, with special concern for the children. No response. Then the listening device attached to the compartment door picked up the sound of the children crying. Okay, the kids were still alive. But this only increased the urgency of establishing communication; they were clearly in distress and in danger.
At 8:00 p.m. Mario fired another shot. Then silence returned.
Four hours later, almost nineteen hours into the standoff, Mario suddenly and inexplicably yelled out to the police in Spanish, “Everything is okay.” He told the police to leave him alone. At least he was now communicating with words rather than gunfire. With some coaching by officers on the scene, Jorge stepped up efforts to open a dialogue, throwing out questions like “What’s going on? How can we help?” But shortly after midnight, Mario stopped communicating just as abruptly as he had started.
At 9:55 a.m. Saturday, Mario broke the silence once again, blurting out that he was holding a gun to the head of one of the children. Again, the police had done nothing to provoke this action or this announcement.