by Gary Noesner
Every negotiator handles the loss of a hostage differently. I tend to focus on what needs to be done now rather than what went wrong. But I was afraid Ray would feel responsible for the child’s death—that somehow he would think he’d done something wrong. I gave him a minute and then made my way down the platform and placed my hand on his shoulder.
“It’s not your fault,” I said. “You’re not the one responsible for this death.”
Ray lifted his head, but he kept his eyes closed.
“We’ve got to think about Julie now. We still have to get her out alive.”
This reminder of the mission still before us seemed to give him a new resolve. He stood up, walked back to our position, and picked up the microphone.
“I have just made my peace with the Lord,” Ray said. “I will not carry the responsibility of the death of that baby. The responsibility is yours.”
Ray sounded like a new man, a little angry and much more forceful. “I have just gotten up from my knees praying for the soul of that little boy. Also I’m praying for the girl because she’s going to die.” He was like a father talking sternly to his son.
“Julie is fine,” Mario protested. His tone also had changed; he seemed defensive and stung by Ray’s reality check.
“Are you absolutely sure?” Ray asked. “I do not want that little girl to die.”
“No, Señor Ray, she has eaten and drunk. She’s all right.” Mario sounded as if he was pleading, trying to convince Ray that he was not such a bad guy. The microphone attached to the train car was sensitive enough that we could hear Julie in the background, complaining to Mario about her stomach. Ray seized on this opportunity and immediately jumped in.
“You see? The girl is getting sick. This means that she, too, is going to die from dehydration. Julie needs immediate medical attention.”
Lathell and I watched as Ray paused for a moment, the microphone to his lips. Then he became increasingly bold, saying to Mario in a manner that invoked a sense of honor, “Will you meet me at the window now and give me Julie? I will come unarmed.”
Lathell was still interpreting that last statement for me as I saw Ray take the blanket that had been around his shoulders and drape it over his extended arms. He was already moving toward Mario’s compartment. My head was racing a million miles an hour, but all I could say was, “Wait a minute.”
I turned to tell Lathell to radio to command and SWAT and let them know what was going on. I didn’t want someone to shoot at Ray by mistake. As I did this I saw Ray remove his revolver from his holster and put it in his hand, hidden from sight by the outstretched blanket. I unholstered my own revolver, the pitifully small five-shot .38 caliber Chiefs Special I had brought with me, and followed a few feet behind him. As he walked forward I followed a few feet behind, hugging as close as I could to the railroad car to stay out of Mario’s sight. This situation was moving way too fast, and I knew Ray and I were engaging in a tactical role that had not been planned or coordinated, a big no-no. As negotiators, we shouldn’t have been doing this at all. Still, Ray needed some backup in case something went wrong, and I wasn’t going to let him go out there alone.
Ray stood just below and directly facing the compartment window. His arms outstretched to receive Julie, he was completely vulnerable. Pressed against the train itself, I had some room to roll under if shooting started, but Ray didn’t. He simply stood waiting for the child. Back then the FBI didn’t give out medals for bravery as they do today, but if anyone ever deserved one, it was Ray. What he did was one of the most courageous things I have ever witnessed an agent do.
It seemed like an eternity, waiting for the unknown, but in a few seconds the window opened and Mario reached out to shake Ray’s hand. Luckily, Ray was left-handed, and it was in that left hand that he carried his revolver.
From my position wedged between the platform and the train I could see Mario for the first time; he was tall and thin and sweating profusely. After shaking Ray’s hand he disappeared again into the train and emerged a moment later with Julie’s little body cradled in his arms. Ray wrapped her up in the blanket, thanked Mario, and headed toward the station. I turned and walked back the other way toward our protective girder, staying close to the train. Ray walked up to the surprised officers at the command post and handed Julie to an EMT, who then rushed her to the hospital.
When Ray got back to our negotiation position he seemed oblivious to what he had just done. I gave him a big hug and said, “You stupid son of a bitch, don’t ever surprise me like that again.” We laughed together, but I could see the sadness on his face. I looked him in the eye and said, “You aren’t God. All you can do is your best to save every life that you can. That’s the measure of our success or failure as negotiators. You just saved that little girl.”
On Monday, very early, Paul Warburgh arrived, escorted by FBI agents. Fred Lanceley made it clear to the attorney that we did not want to turn him into a negotiator and move discussions into legal or other matters that might cause further delay in the surrender.
“I get it,” Warburgh said. “Let’s just wrap this thing up peacefully.”
We took him down to the train and he said a few words to Mario. “I’m here, my friend. You’re going to be safe.”
Now it was the moment of truth. Ray got back on the speaker and asked Mario to surrender any remaining weapons.
Moments later, Mario lowered the sheet, which now contained his MAC-10 submachine gun.
“Time to come out,” Ray said.
At 5:45 a.m., Mario slid back the door to his compartment, raised his hands, and surrendered to the SWAT team. As he emerged from the train, Ray stepped forward and offered him a cigarette.
Leaning toward the flame from Ray’s lighter, Mario looked him in the eye and said, “I didn’t want to hurt anybody.”
Chief Heineman would later tell the press that his primary concern throughout the seventy-two-hour ordeal—the longest nonprison siege in U.S. history up to that time—was the safety of the children. A more aggressive approach might have led to Julie losing her life and would have placed his officers in clear jeopardy. In a press conference, Chief Heineman said, “I feel good that we didn’t fire a single shot. We were all saddened by the loss of the baby, but I felt we got all we could possibly get out of this.” He was right. The chief also graciously acknowledged the assistance of the FBI, saying that he had benefited immensely from our expertise.
The entire Raleigh community had been closely watching this situation, and the hospital where Julie was in good condition received more than fifty calls from people who said they were willing to be her foster parents. Her relatives soon arrived from Colombia to take her home. Mario would eventually be convicted of first-degree murder and given a life sentence.
A few days after the siege ended, The Washington Post ran an editorial titled “Freeing Hostages Safely.” It spoke about the Amtrak siege, as well as another hostage incident that had been handled successfully at the same time in New York City by NYPD lieutenant Robert Louden: “Impressive work was done by specially trained hostage negotiating teams, a relatively new phenomenon in law enforcement.” After summarizing these two incidents, the editorial concluded: “Such person-to-person bridge-building, psychologists tell us, is just what’s needed when dealing with a dangerous person who feels trapped. The objective is to set up voice communication—through a wall or window or over the phone—and keep talking until the gunman has established a trusting relationship with at least one lawman. It takes time, but in almost every case it’s far more sensible than attempting to rescue the hostages with force.”
Our methods were bearing fruit, and we were thrilled that the press and public were beginning to take notice. Unfortunately, many of our law enforcement colleagues still viewed negotiation with skepticism. That, combined with the fact that we all had day jobs doing other things, meant that it would be a while before we could fully consolidate the respect we’d earned in Raleigh.
CHAPTER FO
UR
TROUBLE ABROAD
There is no den in the wide world to hide a rogue. Commit a crime and the earth is made of glass.
—RALPH WALDO EMERSON
Though I found myself increasingly drawn to negotiation work, my primary posting in the early 1980s was still with the Terrorism Squad, a job that suddenly was to become much more demanding.
In 1985, a series of violent hijackings across the globe made nearly constant front-page headlines both in the United States and overseas. The first I was involved with directly was the June 14 hijacking of TWA Flight 847 out of Athens, Greece, by Lebanese terrorists. During a standoff that ultimately would last until June 30 and unfold over multiple locations from Algiers to Beirut, U.S. Navy diver Robert Dean Stethem was murdered and his body thrown onto the tarmac at the Beirut airport. Because of a recent U.S. law that had made it illegal to take an American citizen hostage anywhere in the world, I was assigned to lead the case, the first extraterritorial hostage situation investigated by the FBI. Over the next five years I would travel extensively in connection with this and other cases, developing evidence, interviewing U.S. citizens who had been victims, and in the case of TWA 847, coordinating witness testimony for the trial of one of the hijackers, Mohammed Ali Hamadei, who was arrested in Germany, convicted in May 1989, and sentenced to life in prison (though he was paroled in late 2005).
In October 1985, only a few months after the TWA hijacking, Palestinian terrorists hijacked an Italian cruise ship, the Achille Lauro, in the Mediterranean Sea. Aboard were a number of Americans, including wheelchair-bound Leon Klinghoffer. The hijackers shot and killed him, then threw his body into the sea off the coast of Syria.
Egyptian authorities intervened, working out a deal on their own for the passengers to be released and the four hijackers to be flown to Libya aboard an Egypt Air commercial plane. The U.S. government had its own ideas, and U.S. Navy F-14 jets intercepted the plane over the Mediterranean and forced it to land in Sigonella, Sicily, where the four hijackers were arrested.
Based on my experience handling the TWA case, I was initially assigned as the FBI lead agent for this new investigation as well. I traveled to Italy with other agents to conduct interviews aboard the returned cruise ship and to interrogate the four hijackers, now in Italian custody. The Italian authorities at first resisted our efforts to question the hijackers, apparently because they hadn’t secured confessions and didn’t want us to get them first. Eventually, though, political pressure prevailed. We soon found ourselves escorted to a stark prison in Turin, where we would interrogate the four terrorists, including Majed al-Mulqi.
A guard led me and my partner/interpreter down a corridor to a large interview room. We seated ourselves at a table, and Mulqi was brought in, wearing a khaki prison uniform and handcuffs. As he sat down, he gave us a look of such unadulterated hatred that I was momentarily concerned that he might try to jump across the table and kill us. I could feel myself tense in readiness and observed a similar involuntary reaction in my partner; we were now focused and alert. I thought, There’s no way we can get a meaningful statement from this guy.
We began by explaining who we were and telling him that we wanted to ask him about the hijacking. Taking a page from my hostage-negotiation training, I had planned to approach him in an open and unthreatening manner. I assumed the Italians had been more direct and confrontational with him, to say the least, and I thought this would allow us to assume the role of “good cop.”
I began asking simple questions about his background, which my colleague would frame in the Palestinian-inflected Arabic that Mulqi spoke. His command of the dialect—like Mulqi, he had been raised in Palestine—and his nonthreatening delivery of the questions really surprised Mulqi. Initially, Mulqi said little, but after an hour he became less tense and began to open up. My partner would pose my question and Mulqi would respond, often with a long stream of words, after which my partner would render it in English for me. I periodically glanced at the Italian policemen standing outside the door, and I could tell they were surprised that Mulqi was talking to us for so long.
We appealed to his vanity, praising the efficiency of the operation and telling him it was among the boldest and most well-executed hijackings we’d ever seen. As we did this, we embedded questions that encouraged him to give us important details such as who had been in charge. After one exchange, my partner suddenly turned to me and translated a key admission: “I was the leader.” Without missing a beat, I asked, “How were you able to keep control of the entire ship and your comrades?” Mulqi seemed to sit up straighter with this acknowledgment of his abilities as a terrorist team leader.
A little later I sought to find out why they had targeted one disabled older American. “We’re very interested to know what brought about Mr. Klinghoffer’s death.”
Mulqi told us that at one point the ship had been surrounded by news helicopters. He didn’t like them flying so close, and so he’d threatened to harm people if the copters didn’t move farther away. The helicopters didn’t withdraw, so to show that he was serious, Mulqi moved the passengers up on the deck below the bridge and surrounded them with cans of fuel as a warning. But he and his fellow hijackers couldn’t move Klinghoffer because of his wheelchair. What followed was a confession that we hadn’t expected.
“So I wheeled him to the side of the ship and shot him, then threw him overboard for all to see.”
Few law enforcement officers had ever even talked to a terrorist at this point, and we were momentarily stunned by what had just happened. A hardened terrorist who had refused to reveal this information under prior relentless interrogation had just opened up. This was an important moment for me, when I began to think about the distinction between interrogation and interviewing. The former, at least at face value, seemed the appropriate way to handle someone who had committed the kind of atrocious crimes that Mulqi had. And yet if the goal was to find out useful information, there were at least times when it made more sense to use a nonthreatening and relaxed manner and try to project some sense that we were trying to understand him. Even a hardened terrorist, when handled the right way, might be encouraged to provide important information.
One month after the Achille Lauro tragedy the terrorists struck again, when operatives for Abu Nidal, a terrorist organization committed to the destruction of Israel, hijacked Egypt Air Flight 648, again out of Athens. When the three hijackers took over the plane it prompted a shoot-out with an Egyptian sky marshal, who managed to kill one of them. During the shoot-out, the plane’s fuselage was pierced by a bullet, leading to cabin decompression and forcing the pilot to fly low. The decompression and a declining fuel supply eventually led the pilot to perform an emergency landing in Malta. Once on the ground, the two surviving hijackers demanded that the plane be refueled so that they could fly it to Libya, but the authorities refused. And so one by one, over several hours, they marched five of the passengers, two Israelis and three Americans, to the open doorway and shot each of them in the head. Amazingly, three of these victims would survive their wounds.
The Maltese government had no structured crisis management apparatus or any trained hostage negotiators. The Maltese president and other officials assembled in the airport control tower, but had little idea of how to effectively communicate with the hijackers on the plane. In fact, a big part of their strategy seemed to be to avoid communicating with them altogether and instead await the arrival of Egyptian commandos. A skilled negotiation team might have been able to fully engage and occupy the hijackers, thereby preventing them from feeling compelled to execute hostages in order to have their demands addressed by the authorities.
There was no serious attempt to negotiate a nonviolent resolution; instead, Egyptian commandos stormed the aircraft in what would prove to be an exceptionally ill-conceived and poorly executed rescue attempt. As a diversion for a tactical assault, they planted an excessively high-powered explosive charge in the luggage compartment near the rear of the aircraf
t. When it detonated it killed one of the two remaining hijackers and dozens of hostages. The resulting fire and indiscriminate shooting from the tactical teams resulted in more than sixty-five deaths. I would later assist in debriefing the two surviving Americans from Flight 648, since the FBI investigated this crime against American citizens. I could not help thinking that skillful negotiation might have delivered a better outcome.
In addition to the TWA Flight 847 and Achille Lauro incidents, the terrorism squad at WFO (which became known as the extra-territorial terrorism squad) worked an ongoing hostage ordeal in Lebanon involving several Americans who had been taken prisoner by Hezbollah terrorists over a long period of time, including journalist Terry Anderson, who would be held for seven years. I assisted case agent Tom Kelly (the helicopter pilot from Sperryville) in debriefing Reverend Benjamin Weir, the first American to be released from captivity.
I also assisted case agent Tom Hansen during the investigation of Royal Jordanian Flight 402, which was hijacked from Beirut by the Amal militia on June 11, 1985. As we investigated the TWA Flight 847 hijacking that happened three days later, we learned that two American citizens had been aboard this other aircraft, giving the FBI investigative jurisdiction. We eventually hatched an operation to lure the hijack’s leader, Fawaz Younis, to the Mediterranean Sea; he was arrested by undercover FBI agents, returned to the United States, and eventually convicted. His apprehension on the high seas and return to the United States to face justice was a historic first in the war against terrorism.
These were indeed busy times for the very few of us who were working these matters. All the major investigations were intense and time-consuming, and we were up to our necks in work. I would spend five years on the TWA Flight 847 investigation alone, not only helping successfully prosecute Mohammed Ali Hamadei in Germany but pursuing the apprehension of the other two hijackers, Hasan Izz-al-Din and Ali Atwa, both of whom are sadly still at large. All this, and I was still teaching negotiation courses and responding to callouts such as the incident in Sperryville.