by Gary Noesner
This wave of international terrorism (which included attacks on the Rome and Vienna airports in December 1985) marked a turning point for the FBI and for the United States; it was the first time that any nation had aggressively gone after terrorists beyond its shores in order to bring them to justice, rather than just target them for assassination, as the Israelis had done to the Munich Olympics terrorists. We were blazing new ground, which was exciting, but because we had limited manpower (in 1985 the WFO terrorism squad, which handled all international hijackings for the FBI, had only six or seven agents; after the tragic events of September 11, 2001, literally thousands of FBI agents began to work terrorism cases), I was called on virtually every time a terrorist incident involving Americans took place. From 1985 to 1990 I was probably on the road at least six months out of the year, and when I was home I was working nights and weekends. After several years of this high-stress, globe-trotting routine, I began to get worn out. I had a ten-year-old, an eight-year-old, and a six-year-old; I missed them; and I felt I needed to be there coaching soccer games and going to piano recitals and swim meets. There were times when good friends had to shovel snow from my driveway because I was out of town. The FBI always said that families came first, but that was not true. The needs of the Bureau always took precedence over family. I recalled speaking to my kids on brief phone calls from overseas, hearing them ask, “Daddy, when are you coming home?” My work was exciting and stimulating, but my family was suffering as a consequence.
I had barely returned from spending the summer and fall of 1988 in Germany for the Hamadei trial—where I had been off and on for eight months, testifying twenty times—when Pan Am Flight 103 was bombed over Lockerbie, Scotland, on December 21. The FBI was slow to realize just how much manpower and resources were required to do this kind of work effectively. As soon as we received word of the Lockerbie incident, I was called into my boss’s office and told I would be taking the lead on this major terrorism case. But I had reached my breaking point and was in no mood to be brusquely informed that I was being deployed yet again, this time to Scotland. I was tired of being taken advantage of, and we argued. Not getting the understanding I felt I deserved, I left his office, walked down the hall to see his boss, and said, “Enough already.” I felt righteously angry at being told I would once more have to work around the clock with limited support, all because the Bureau didn’t have the foresight to adequately staff this crucial squad. I suppose that in a way I was being complimented; after all, Lockerbie was the largest single homicide in the history of the United States at the time, and my boss wanted me to head up the investigation. But I had made up my mind. I did later deploy to Lockerbie for a short time to provide an assessment of the investigation, but by then other agents had been brought in to manage the case.
After I came back from Lockerbie, I met with my senior Assistant Special Agent in Charge, Nick Walsh, and told him I really needed to get away from terrorism for a while and wanted to transfer off the squad as soon as possible. Nick acknowledged that, as the longest-serving agent on the extra-territorial terrorism squad, I deserved a break, and he said that wherever I wanted to go within WFO, he would see to it that I got there. I had been working terrorism for eight years and a change of pace would be welcome.
CHAPTER FIVE
CRISIS INTERVENTION:
LISTEN AND LEARN
To listen closely and reply well is the highest perfection we are able to obtain in the art of conversation.
—FRANÇOIS DE LA ROCHEFOUCAULD
For the next six months I held a quiet job investigating corrupt politicians from the Bureau’s Tyson’s Corner, Virginia, office, twenty minutes from my home. Life was good. Then an unexpected opportunity arose. One of three full-time positions on the negotiation staff at Quantico came open. I had been asked on previous occasions to transfer to Quantico to become a full-time hostage negotiator, but had declined the offers due to my demanding terrorism work. This time I agreed to apply for the position, and I was selected for the job. I would assume responsibility for the two-week training course and provide operational support during hostage crises. This meant a promotion, as well as a transfer down to Quantico. Finally I’d be able to devote myself to what by then felt like a calling.
As one of the three agents assigned to the hostage negotiation program, I was part of the Special Operations and Research Unit (SOARU), which was configured to support tactical, hostage negotiation, and crisis management research, training, and operations for the entire FBI. Those of us on the staff were in a position to greatly influence the direction of the FBI’s policy and operational guidelines for these programs. The SOARU was purposefully set up to better coordinate the often conflicting and sometimes contradictory approaches historically practiced by the FBI’s SWAT teams and field hostage negotiators.
Behind closed doors, our crew was not above jokingly referring to the SWAT guys as Neanderthals and knuckle-draggers. But experience had shown us time and again that hostage negotiators were less likely to achieve a desired surrender when there was no visible show of force and a lack of tactical containment. Conversely, we had also learned that tactical entry was almost always safer and more successful after negotiators had bought time for necessary planning, practice, and implementation.
It wasn’t that we didn’t appreciate the SWAT teams—we knew that we depended on them just as much as they depended on us. I also had my own reasons to appreciate them: while I had been in Germany for the Hamadei trial, information surfaced that terrorists might be targeting me for reprisal. In response, the FBI had dispatched members of the Hostage Rescue Team to my house to guard my family, even accompanying my wife and kids on outings and daily errands.
As distinguished from the fifty-six part-time SWAT teams in FBI field offices around the country, HRT was a dedicated national counterterrorism tactical response unit. HRT was located, like SOARU, at the FBI academy, and was staffed by over sixty-five full-time tactical operators who were always either engaged in training rotations or operationally deployed on unique missions anywhere in the United States that required their unique skill sets. Protecting my family became one of those missions.
When I wasn’t traveling to conduct law enforcement training programs or speaking at law enforcement conferences, my time was spent developing new negotiation instructional training blocks or researching and writing articles for the FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin. The objective was to gather information, assess its value, identify the key learning points, and then pass that information to negotiation practitioners.
In addition to the intensive two-week hostage-negotiation training courses we conducted four to six times each year at the FBI academy, we also conducted regional training programs for local police departments in the field. The basic negotiation course in Quantico provided essential training for all new FBI negotiators, but we also kept open several slots for domestic and foreign officers.
Practically every significant law enforcement leader in the free world cycled through the FBI academy at some point or another. Many of these officials would take time to stop by our unit to learn about the negotiation program, and to tap into our experience and expertise. They collected copies of our training materials and often requested that we travel to their jurisdictions to conduct field negotiation schools for their personnel.
During the six months I spent at the Tyson’s Corner resident agency, I hardly left the zip code. I remember telling my wife, Carol, that this new assignment at Quantico would be less disruptive to our family life, and that I would not be traveling nearly as much or to such faraway destinations as I had when working overseas hijacking cases. Little did I know that by becoming a full-time negotiator, I was setting myself up not only for continuing worldwide travel but also for round-the-clock duty as a consultant to on-scene negotiators, taking those urgent phone calls seeking advice on nights, weekends, and holidays.
The FBI has worked kidnap cases since 1932, when the abduction and murder of the two-year-ol
d son of aviator Charles Lindbergh stirred public outrage. In response, Congress passed a law making it a federal crime to kidnap and transport a victim across state lines. From that point forward the FBI aggressively investigated kidnapping for ransom in the United States and did much to make this a fairly rare crime today. Through the years the FBI developed significant expertise and capabilities in working these cases. Sophisticated electronic, airborne, and ground surveillance and tracking make this a crime with small prospects for success. As a result, while kidnapping for ransom has become a scourge overseas, for the most part criminals in the United States have moved on to different crimes. (Of course, women and children continue to be abducted by sexual predators, not as hostages but as “homicides to be.”)
When I arrived at Quantico the FBI’s negotiation training tended to focus largely on classic hostage situations, in which a perpetrator holds someone against their will in order to compel a third party, usually the police, to do something (or abstain from doing something). During a class Fred Lanceley and I led in Oakland, California, for local, state, and federal law enforcement officers, Fred asked our group of thirty-five experienced hostage negotiators how many had dealt with such a classic bargaining situation. Not one hand went up.
Then he asked how many students had negotiated an incident in which a hostage taker was in emotional crisis and had no clear demands, and every hand went up.
We were both surprised, though we had felt all along that such emotionally driven incidents, not bargaining interactions, constituted the bulk of what most police negotiators had to deal with. Right then, Fred and I realized that the need was not so much for training in quid pro quo bargaining but for the skills needed in crisis intervention situations, with a heavy dose of active listening. Our students needed to learn the slow and patient communication skills that could defuse the kinds of situations they were most likely to face. When we returned to Quantico, I pitched my boss on revamping our negotiation training curriculum. He agreed, and I set out to redo the program, putting more emphasis on how to deal with individuals under extreme emotional stress.
The core of the new curriculum consisted of specific active listening skills first developed by the counseling profession. In brief, this entails creating positive relationships with people by demonstrating an understanding of what they’re going through and how they feel about it. By applying this approach, the negotiator can demonstrate empathy and show a sincere desire to better understand what the individual is experiencing. We know that people want to be shown respect, and they want to be understood. Listening is the cheapest, yet most effective concession we can make. The positive relationship achieved through this interaction then sets the stage for the negotiator to exert a positive influence over others’ behavior, steering them away from violence. The skills boil down to restatement of contact and reflection of the captor’s feelings. Increased use of these techniques would have dramatic results.
I sent my new ideas to the fifty-six field offices for input, and incorporated their feedback into the final product, an extensive binder filled with hundreds of new and improved slides. This was probably the most impactful thing I did at the FBI. In those days your local police department depended on its local FBI office for training, which occurred on an entirely ad hoc basis. Now, for the first time, there was a precise, standardized, detailed approach to handling emotionally driven cases. The manual also covered every other aspect of the negotiation process. If you had a siege situation and the media became involved, you could find out what to do. It provided guidance for dealing with family members outside the crisis site. Most important, the manual identified specific active listening skills that could be easily learned and applied to most negotiation situations.
The new training slides provided specific guidance, for example, on recognizing a “suicide by cop” situation, in which the subject purposefully engages with the police to bring about his own demise. It also contained a list of indications of progress and a similar list to help identify incidents that were becoming more dangerous. Specific active listening skills were provided, with examples of how they could be incorporated into dialogue to create a relationship of trust with an individual in crisis. The response to these new training materials was enthusiastic and overwhelmingly positive. The number of field-training requests quadrupled; more and more police began to look to the FBI for guidance in this area.
On one Fourth of July, I was sitting on a blanket on the Washington Mall, having a picnic with my family and looking forward to the start of the fireworks show, when my beeper sounded. I pulled out my cell phone, punched in the number on the display, and soon reached Mike Duke, an FBI negotiator assigned to South Carolina. He was calling to tell me that a gunman had taken over the USS Yorktown, a decommissioned Navy aircraft carrier and museum in Charleston. According to the best information Mike had, the subject was a Vietnam vet with emotional problems. He had taken a high-powered rifle on board the ship and fired off some rounds, but he was not believed to be holding any hostages.
It does not take Sigmund Freud to connect the dots that might link a symbolic U.S. Navy ship, the Fourth of July, and a Vietnam veteran suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). I told Mike that this was probably a classic crisis intervention situation where the gunman had no clear substantive demands, and advised him to suggest to the police our standard approach of establishing rapport with active listening skills and talking this man through his crisis. I then asked him to call me again once he arrived at the command post and had gathered additional information. He said he would, and I returned to my family picnic.
About an hour later my beeper went off again, but this time it displayed a different number. When I dialed the number, my call was answered by a voice I didn’t recognize. I asked to speak with Mike Duke, but the man on the phone said he didn’t know a Mike Duke. I then asked if this was the command post; the man said it was not. I next asked if this was the negotiation team room, and again the man said no. Then he asked me who I was. I told him my name and said that I was a negotiator with the FBI, calling from Washington, D.C. In response, he said, “I guess I’m in bigger trouble than I thought.”
Dumbfounded, I asked: “Are you by any chance the man with the gun?”
“Yes, I am,” he said.
I learned later that the phone number Mike had sent me was for the souvenir shop where the command post and negotiation team had been set up. What Mike didn’t know was that this same number also rang on the ship’s bridge, where the gunman was.
Now that I had been thrust into the dialogue, I didn’t want to just hang up on him. I needed to do what I could to keep him calm, then extricate myself as diplomatically as possible.
“What’s your name?” I asked him.
“Jim.”
“You okay, Jim?”
“I’m okay.”
“Well, you know that no one wishes you harm. We all want you to come off that ship safe and sound, with nobody getting hurt, either.”
I didn’t want to cross wires with the local police’s strategy, but with this basic civility I thought I was on pretty safe ground.
“What happened today, Jim?”
He responded, “I’m a Vietnam vet and I’m not getting the help I need. I served my country, but nobody cares about me or wants to hire me. I’ve got nothing to look forward to.”
He projected hopelessness and helplessness, the most important suicide warning signs. He seemed to be saying that life wasn’t worth living, and I was worried that he might take his own life.
As I started to acknowledge his feelings, he suddenly interrupted me.
“What the fuck was that?” he said. I heard the sound of his phone receiver banging against something—he must have stepped away.
Then he picked up the receiver again and said, “You tell those fuckers that nobody better try to come up here. I see anybody coming at me and I’m going to start firing this weapon.”
I was worried now, and at a seriou
s disadvantage, because for all I knew, whatever sound he’d heard was indeed the SWAT team moving in. But I had to try to contain him.
“Jim, no one wants to hurt you. They’re there to try to help you.”
I could hear him breathing heavily, but after a bit he seemed to calm down.
“Everything’s going to be okay, Jim.”
“Yeah. So long as nobody tries to come in here.” He was silent for a moment. Then he said, “I gotta go.…”
I could hear the receiver banging around again, but he hadn’t hung up. I stayed on the line and waited, hoping for the best.
A moment later my beeper went off again and displayed yet another number. I grabbed my wife’s cell phone and quickly punched it in, hoping that it was Mike and I’d be able to explain that I had Jim on the other line.
My call was answered, but the voice that said hello wasn’t Mike’s.
“Hi,” I said. “Is this … Jim?”
“Yeah.”
“Oh my gosh, this is Gary again.”
I couldn’t believe this. This was one of the more ridiculous moments of my career. The command post had given me yet another number that Jim was able to intercept, so I was now speaking to him on one line and on hold with him on another. Meanwhile, I was five hundred miles away on the Washington Mall with my family, holding a plate of potato salad on my lap.
“Jim, tell you what. I’m going to hang up on this line, but let’s keep talking on the other. Is that okay with you?”
The line went dead. I went back to my own cell phone again, and Jim picked up the other receiver at his end. But even before we could speak I heard the second line at his location starting to ring again. I had no idea what kind of circus this was going to turn into.