Stalling for Time

by Gary Noesner

  The lengthy discussion produced a cogent list of twenty-one demands, which Dirk carefully copied down for the record:

  The prison will follow all administrative rules of the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction.

  Inmate discipline will be administered fairly and without bias.

  Complete medical attention will be given to the prisoners.

  The inmate surrender will be witnessed by a religious leader.

  The prison’s unit management system (a policy to hear inmate complaints) will be reviewed.

  The prison will review the White v. Morris federal case that permits prison cell integration.

  All high-security inmates will be transferred out of L Block, as has been done in Cellblock K.

  The procedure for early release will be reviewed and changed if warranted.

  An attempt will be made to reduce overcrowding.

  Policies involving inappropriate supervision will be rigidly enforced.

  Medical staff will be reviewed.

  Plans to install a new phone system will be speeded up.

  Work opportunities will be evaluated and improved.

  There will be no retaliation against rebelling inmates.

  Policies concerning mail and visitor privileges will be reviewed.

  Prompt transfer will be conducted for those eligible.

  An attempt will be made to improve communications between inmates and officials.

  Commissary prices will be reviewed.

  The Ohio Department of Health will be contacted about tuberculosis testing.

  The FBI will monitor prisoners’ processing to ensure that their civil rights are upheld.

  Prisoners’ requests to be transferred out of state will be taken seriously if those inmates can prove an Ohio prison cannot provide a safe environment for them.

  I was pleased that the inmates were now focused on reasonable and obtainable objectives, but this list of demands wasn’t going to be an easy sell. The prison tactical teams were not in a conciliatory mood, especially after the murder of their colleague. Warden Tate had his doubts, too, until I pointed out to him the way each point was qualified with phrases such as “an attempt will be made,” “will be reviewed,” “will speed up,” “changed if warranted,” and “will be taken seriously.” It was clear to me that the inmates wanted to end the siege and that we were hardly giving away the store or making promises that could not reasonably be kept.

  With only slight modifications, the authorities agreed to these demands, and Tate signed a document to that effect.

  When the inmates later asked if the agreement was enforceable, Schwartz told them quite honestly that it had no legal foundation. He quickly added, however, that based on his conversations with Tate, he was convinced that every effort would be made to honor the agreement and that each and every issue would be given full examination by the authorities. The inmates found this acceptable.

  That evening, as a reward meant to reinforce the inmates’ good behavior, correctional officers brought out a short ration of food and left the carts about a hundred feet from the L Block entrance. As agreed, the inmates left in exchange a videotape of the hostages that could be shown to their concerned families.

  The next day, according to a protocol previously arranged, corrections officers delivered laundry bags to the yard for the inmates to use to carry out their personal belongings. Then at 3:55 p.m. the actual evacuation process began. We purposefully called it an evacuation, which sounded better to the inmates than surrender. The injured were the first to come out, four on stretchers and twenty-two walking. Two hours later, a group of inmates who had been identified by the others as predatory and subsequently isolated came out. After this, the rest came out in a trickle, a process that took many hours.

  At 10:25 that night I stood at the window of the administration building and watched as three corrections officers, Richard Buffington, Michael Hensley, and Larry Dotson were walked out of L Block into the brightly lit prison yard. Five minutes later, Jeffrey Ratcliff and Kenneth Daniels came out. As they limped down the long hallway leading out of the facility, unshaven, their faces bruised but smiling, these released hostages were met by waves of applause from their emotional fellow officers, who lined the hallway.

  Twenty minutes later, 407 inmates were in custody and the surrender was complete. L Block had been thoroughly trashed, with shredded mattresses and smashed television sets everywhere. While going through the debris, officers discovered the bodies of two additional inmates, the only remaining negative in an otherwise positive outcome.

  Afterward, Tate and some members of the negotiation team received a number of harsh comments from other corrections officers who were angry over what had happened to Officer Vallandingham and frustrated by the lack of retribution. But if we had learned one thing from Waco, it was the lesson about not letting our own emotions overpower our responsibilities.

  The negotiation team at Lucasville managed to save the lives of seven of the eight officers held. The other’s death had not come as a result of failed negotiations. If those in charge had acted on the basis of their understandable anger over the death of their colleague, there would have been a great many more deaths to mourn. Their restraint paid off.

  I flew home from Lucasville the next day. I felt good about the outcome and my small role in helping, but I was still thoroughly drained from the Waco experience and I wanted nothing more than to spend some time with my family. Thinking about the death of Robert Vallandingham, I could only imagine the pain his wife and son were feeling. It made me appreciate all the more the fact that I was going home, and what I was going home to. At this time my kids were thirteen, eleven, and nine, and I wanted to be at their weekend soccer games, have dinner with them and Carol, see friends, and just be home to deal with everyday, normal “honey-dos.”

  While the successful resolution at Lucasville had offset some of my frustration about Waco, the reverberations of the events in Texas were far from over. Several television documentaries would attempt to assess what had happened, thereby keeping the issue in the spotlight. Some were accurate; some were sensationalized and filled with errors. And like Ruby Ridge, Waco also became a huge rallying point for domestic extremist groups and the far right wing.

  In their comments, Republican congressmen railed against what they called the ineptitude of Janet Reno and Bill Clinton in dealing with the crisis. The Department of Justice and Treasury Department conducted separate inquiries and issued reports, mostly blaming David Koresh, and rightly so, but also questioning the FBI’s aggressive and contradictory approach. ATF took the worst criticism for the ill-advised raid that sparked the standoff. The political leaders also raised questions about the appropriateness of the FBI’s use of tear gas in a compound that held so many young children.

  Meanwhile, conspiracy theories abounded. One held that the FBI purposely set the fires to kill all inside—this despite clear evidence that the Davidians had lit the flames. It was in the context of outrage over Waco that the Ruby Ridge incident was brought back to public attention as yet another example of FBI failure.

  Attorney General Janet Reno publicly accepted responsibility for what had happened at Waco, an unheard-of act of honesty by a government official. Many praised her candor, but her political opponents sensed weakness and pounced. In reality, she had been brand-new to the job when she attended that FBI briefing with all the talk of children being sexually abused. I’ve often wondered what decisions would have resulted if a negotiation representative had been allowed to participate in the briefing on the final days of the siege to answer her questions and offer a somewhat different perspective on the existing risk to the children versus the risks of the planned operation.

  Byron Sage, Jeff Jamar, Dick Rogers, and I were all called to testify before the House and later the Senate during congressional hearings. The lengthy and difficult task of assembling data on the incident fell mostly to Byron Sage, who gathered all the negotiation tapes, r
ecommendations, call logs, and other information for the various inquiries.

  The four of us shared a table with four microphones and faced our questioners, who grilled Jamar and Rogers on the decision making and the tactical operation. The criticism of their actions was so withering that there was no need for me to add my own broadsides. The format also called for us to respond to direct inquiries rather than to offer prepared statements. I used the opportunity to describe what we had accomplished on the negotiation front and articulate the strategy our team had pursued to secure the safe release of thirty-five individuals. The fact that the Bureau had failed to effectively manage the larger operation was painfully obvious to everyone.

  This was my first congressional hearing, and I was not at all impressed with what I saw. In the hallways during recess, Democratic congressmen sought our help in formulating questions that would defend the Bureau against Republicans, normally supportive of the FBI, who seemed willing to throw the Bureau to the wolves solely for the purpose of embarrassing President Clinton—who as far as I could tell had very little input into the events at Waco.

  Many congressmen, former pop star Sonny Bono among them, showed up in the room only when it was their time to talk. You could see them enter the hearing room and receive a quick briefing from a twenty-one-year-old aide before asking us their questions, often repeating the very same ones already asked numerous times before. It seemed that most were simply posturing for the cameras. Rather than a serious attempt at fact-finding, it seemed to be an opportunity for the members to score political points against each other.

  After our testimony, the four of us went back to FBI headquarters to confer with the Bureau’s legal counsel. Rogers, Jamar, Sage, and I were kept waiting for a while in a conference room. Neither Rogers nor Jamar was an expressive man, but they both nodded and thanked me for what I had said—or, more accurately, not said. While I fundamentally disagreed with Rogers’s approach and Jamar’s management of the incident, I believed both were dedicated public servants who had tried to do what they thought was best. They knew that I could have raked them over the coals. The truth was, I felt that I should emphasize the positive story of the negotiation effort without heaping scorn on the mistakes they had made. The evidence of their misjudgments spoke clearly enough.

  Despite it all, I was heartened time and again to hear from a wide array of knowledgeable colleagues and experts in the crisis management and negotiation field that the negotiation team at Waco had it right, that the patient “trickle, flow, gush” strategy we pursued should have been supported and allowed to continue without the ill-advised tactical activities that led to disaster.

  Louis Freeh became the new FBI director after Waco, and fortunately he was a vocal supporter of the negotiation process. He and several other high-level Bureau officials thanked me for my testimony. While I was completely honest in what I testified to, I didn’t sell the Bureau down the river by emphasizing the negatives. It seemed to me that FBI leadership mistakes at Waco were by now quite obvious to all concerned.

  All in all, there were five major investigations, the last of which was headed by former Missouri senator John Danforth. With the benefit of the passage of time and a calmer atmosphere, the Danforth Commission conducted the most comprehensive and thorough examination of the incident. Once again, the commission’s findings correctly faulted many FBI management decisions while praising the undervalued and underappreciated negotiation effort.

  No FBI internal after-action meeting was ever held, so the rift that had surfaced between negotiators and tactical team operators was never adequately addressed and resolved. The lingering ill will would diminish with time, but it remained a sad situation for me.

  Not long after the congressional hearings I went through a difficult period emotionally, moping around as I had never before done in my life. I was forty-three years old and had been in the FBI for twenty-one years. I had enjoyed a varied career that most agents would never know. I still loved my job, but something wasn’t right. I felt very sad. I also wasn’t sleeping well, and I became so withdrawn that my wife became concerned and close friends began to ask me what was going on. I wasn’t sure myself, so I didn’t know what to say to them.

  Eventually I talked through my state of funk with several negotiation colleagues who had also been at Waco. I learned that a lot of the negotiators from my team were having a tough time, too. Particularly supportive among my friends were John Dolan and Jim Botting, who had been a negotiator and a team leader, respectively, at Waco, and Dr. Mike Webster, the Canadian psychologist who had helped us develop much of the theoretical basis for our crisis intervention program and who specialized in counseling law enforcement officers. We talked on the phone regularly about work, and our conversations would naturally turn to these personal issues and how I was coping. I told them that I was in a total funk—low energy and not myself. I had been an informal counselor for dozens of law enforcement negotiation friends going through difficult times after tough incidents, never thinking I would someday need the same type of help. But I did.

  Mike in particular was able to help me recognize and address my anger over what had happened at Waco and my frustrations over the failure of some FBI leaders to take responsibility for what had gone wrong. I felt like I was rowing upstream against the current of arrogance. Police agencies around the world took our negotiation training as gospel and followed our guidelines and recommendations to the letter, yet it seemed that within the FBI itself the negotiation program might be destined to remain undervalued and unappreciated.

  As unlikely as it seems, the thing that snapped me out of my funk was more work. Some months after Waco, my longtime partner, mentor, and friend, Fred Lanceley, decided to retire. Ruby Ridge had been especially tough on Fred. The success of him and his team in negotiating an end to that tense standoff had never received appropriate recognition from the Bureau. SWAT gets the medals, but getting someone to surrender looks easy—until you have to convince a hostage taker to put down his weapons and come out.

  I was promoted—put in charge of the entire FBI negotiation program and given the newly created title of chief negotiator. This would give me the opportunity to grow the FBI negotiation program and advocate on behalf of the strategies I had spent more than a decade helping to develop. These new responsibilities contributed greatly to helping me move past the funk I had been in. Simply put, I was far too busy to dwell on what had happened in the past. Almost every night calls came in asking me to assist with ongoing incidents or seeking guidance. It was a rare evening when I was not on the phone for an hour or more. Carol, for her part, pleased to see me happy again, never objected to my going to work and traveling, but she hated those calls interrupting our family life. She used to say, “If you’re going to be working, then go to work. If you’re going to be home, then be at home.” She was right, of course, but the FBI had a way of demanding all you could give and then some.

  Fortunately, the Waco experience also led to deeper reforms within the FBI. The FBI is an entrenched bureaucracy that tends to be resistant to change, but after Waco, the public criticism demanded it. Like me, Bob Gleason from our unit, now called the Crisis Management Unit (CMU), had long known that management was the weak link in the FBI’s crisis response. Now he was tasked to put together an advanced crisis management curriculum for FBI leadership. I was assigned to develop a companion negotiation training curriculum for all potential FBI incident commanders. I later summarized this block of instruction in an article called “Negotiation Concepts for Commanders,” published in the FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin. It remains one of the most widely circulated and heavily used negotiation training and operational guidance tools for law enforcement today. Bob and I gave this training to every SAC in the FBI.

  Following a directive from Attorney General Janet Reno, I gave Leon Schenck, one of the newly assigned negotiators on my five-man team, the task of putting together the FBI Hostage Barricade Database System (HOBAS), bringing together a
complete statistical summary of all such incidents based on FBI and police data we collected. Today HOBAS is the primary source of hostage and barricade data in the world and is nationally available to all law enforcement negotiation teams.

  Eventually, Waco spurred Director Freeh to create the Critical Incident Response Group (CIRG), housed at the FBI academy. For the first time, this placed HRT, behavioral profilers, crisis managers, crisis negotiators, and some additional specialized components under one unified command. Henceforth, CIRG would manage all major sieges with the objective of ensuring proper coordination and management of the many skilled resources the FBI could bring to bear. The FBI would no longer simply rely on the capabilities or limitations of the local Special Agent in Charge.

  Before these initiatives, very little high-quality training had been provided to FBI leaders. Too often, the Bureau assumed that because an individual had risen to a high rank within the FBI, he or she automatically knew how to manage a crisis. But few executives in the FBI, or even throughout the larger U.S. government, had the training or experience necessary to function competently in such situations. Sad to say, this remains largely true today.

  In addition to providing this training, the FBI negotiation program was increasingly recognized by police departments around the country as the place to get expert negotiation assistance twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. The FBI’s negotiation expertise was increasingly in demand abroad as well. Between 1990 and 1993, we deployed negotiators overseas in response to the kidnapping of American citizens more than thirty times; the number of cases would rise to over 120 by 2003. Each deployment was time-intensive and operationally challenging, not only for the negotiators deployed but also for our unit at Quantico, since we actively deployed, managed, and directed the response to these cases.