by Gary Noesner
Well into the Burnhams’ captivity, we attempted to mount a sting-type operation by offering to pay a $300,000 ransom. Our plan was to pay the money, secure the safe release of the Burnhams, and then sweep in to destroy the ASG element and recover the money. The ASG agreed to our offer and the plan moved forward, but then they kept the money and didn’t follow through with the promised release. At least the funds allowed the ASG to purchase much-needed food and supplies that Gracia later said helped them during a very lean period in their captivity. But then the group disappeared deeper into the jungle, and the already long and painful plight of the Burnhams continued. I spoke with my deployed negotiators almost every day during this yearlong case, always attempting to develop approaches that would establish dialogue with the ASG. Limited negotiation via text messaging was the best we were able to do.
Just days after the one-year anniversary of the Burnhams’ capture, a Philippine military unit located the ASG camp where they were being held, and initiated a rescue operation. Tragically, the assault included indiscriminate shooting, which resulted in Martin’s being killed, not by the ASG but by the rescuing forces. He was hit by three gunshots to the chest and died at the scene. Gracia received a gunshot wound in the right thigh but survived. A Philippine nurse also being held hostage was killed as well. Gracia was rescued by Philippine soldiers and taken to Manila for medical care.
Those who believe that military action is the only strategy against terrorism should view this sad ending as a cautionary tale for what can go wrong when bullets start to fly. The tactical capability of law enforcement and military units in the developing world is often limited. Unfortunately, bullets cannot tell good guys from bad guys. The ASG contingent and its leaders who held Martin and Gracia were later hunted down by the Philippine military and destroyed.
On July 25, 2002, Gracia traveled to the Washington, D.C., area and kindly appeared before the team of FBI negotiators who had been involved in trying to secure her safe release. It was a bittersweet meeting, with all in attendance thankful for her survival but deeply grieved by Martin’s death. As I listened to Gracia recount her ordeal, I was yet again reminded how very important the work of our negotiators is, and how close to the line between life and death we usually operate.
In January 2002, my unit also provided significant assistance after the kidnapping of Wall Street Journal reporter Danny Pearl. We were never able to sustain a meaningful dialogue with his captors, but the limited contacts we did have assisted FBI investigators in identifying those responsible through their use of an Internet café in Pakistan.
CHAPTER TWELVE
BEING OUR BEST WHEN OTHERS ARE AT THEIR WORST
If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs …
—RUDYARD KIPLING
Having joined the FBI several days after my twenty-second birthday, I often joked that my parents had given me to the FBI as a child. The FBI had never been a job to me; it was a calling, an honor, and a privilege. Being a special agent wasn’t just what I did for a living, it was who I was. It had been a demanding ten-to-twelve-hour-a-day commitment, working nights and weekends and often being away from my family, but the rewards had far outweighed the burdens.
By 2002, I had achieved most of my goals for the FBI’s crisis (hostage) negotiation program and felt it was the right time to retire, and by the beginning of fall I had the necessary paperwork all filled out and submitted. But just like in all those pulp fiction detective novels, I had one more case to work.
This final case would be very different from anything I or anyone else had ever worked. We were dealing with an unknown adversary engaged in a rampage that terrorized everyone within a large metropolitan community over a period of several weeks. This incident filled the news as nothing before ever had.
It all began at 5:20 p.m. on Wednesday, October 2, 2002, when a bullet flew through the front window of the Michaels craft store on Georgia Avenue in Wheaton, Maryland, a suburb of Washington, D.C., fortunately not hitting anyone. Forty-four minutes later, fifty-five-year-old James D. Martin was walking across the parking lot at the Shoppers Food Warehouse not far away when a bullet struck him in the chest, killing him. What was going on? Was this the action of a lone madman, or perhaps the work of a group of violent Islamic terrorists attempting to strike fear in Americans in our own homeland? No one claimed credit for these shootings and no one knew the answers to those questions.
Over the next two days a total of six individuals in Maryland and Washington, D.C., were felled by a sniper’s bullet. There was no apparent pattern to the shootings and no indication of any grievance against these seven individual victims, who were white, black, Hispanic, and Indian, male and female, and ranging in age from twenty-five to seventy-two.
Every law enforcement officer in the metropolitan area was in a state of high alert. Citizens in the area were panicked; parents, particularly, were worried about the safety of their children as they traveled to and from school and even as they sat in the classroom, but on October 4, police announced that the schools were safe and that parents should continue to send their kids to class. Then on October 7, a thirteen-year-old boy was shot and seriously wounded at Tasker Middle School in Bowie, Maryland.
It seemed as if the shooter was listening to the news and responding to what was being said. At one point an “expert” suggested that the shooter would likely stay near his own familiar area of comfort; the shooter’s next victim was about sixty miles south, in Fredericksburg, Virginia. On another occasion a retired FBI profiler suggested that the shooter was apparently not a skilled marksman, since he had shot several victims in the torso and not the head; the next victim died of a bullet to the head. Her name was Linda Franklin, and ironically she was a support employee of the FBI.
My family was as worried as anyone else. My twenty-two-year-old daughter, Kelly, had driven away from the parking lot in Fredericksburg, Virginia, just a short time before a forty-three-year-old white female was shot in the back while loading packages into her car. My other daughter, Katie, age twenty, attending Mary Washington College in Fredericksburg, regularly filled up her car at the same Exxon gas station where fifty-three-year-old Kenneth Bridges was shot and killed on October 11. My son, Rusty, eighteen, had been named homecoming king at Robinson High School in Fairfax, Virginia, where we lived. Like any proud parents, my wife and I looked forward to seeing our son honored in the homecoming parade that would culminate at the football stadium. But like so many schools in the area, Robinson was forced to cancel all outdoor activities.
Yet these were minor concerns compared to the grief that the sniper was causing so many families in the Washington, D.C., area. Because several victims had been shot while fueling their cars, some gas stations hung large drapes near their pumps so that customers would not be scared away. People crouching down while pumping gas became a common sight. There were thousands of stories of individuals and families changing their routines and exercising high levels of caution in every aspect of their daily lives.
The FBI and ATF, along with other local, state, and federal agencies, quickly set up a task force to help identify, locate, and apprehend whoever was doing these shootings. The public came to know Chief Charles Moose of the Montgomery County Police Department as the leader of the investigation. In reality, there was a triumvirate of sorts in charge, consisting of Chief Moose and senior representatives of the FBI and ATF. This group attempted to bring some structure and coordination to the challenging task that was facing the many agencies working over a wide area encompassing Maryland, the District of Columbia, and Virginia.
As head of the Crisis Negotiation Unit within the Critical Incident Response Group, I had assigned the agents in my unit to geographic territories that matched up with FBI field offices, with one supervisor assigned to several regions to provide support. Vince Dalfonzo was responsible for Maryland. He happened to be a Baltimore native, so I attached him to the joint command post that had been established in Montgomery Co
unty. Vince joined a multiagency negotiation team that had been assembled in the hopes of drawing the sniper into a dialogue. That team also helped craft the daily press messages from Chief Moose and the other leaders. Until we could establish a direct dialogue with the sniper, our only means of communication was through these daily statements. It was important that the authorities avoid saying anything that might agitate the sniper and prompt him to kill again. A large team of negotiators from the FBI and other involved agencies stood ready to open a dialogue with the shooter if we could successfully get him to contact us.
On October 7, the sniper had left a tarot card near Tasker Middle School, where the thirteen-year-old boy had been seriously wounded. Written on the tarot card was “Mr. Policeman, I am God.” The negotiation team expended much effort trying to interpret this message, but we also realized that its mere existence could be useful. If we kept the card secret from the press, we might use it to verify that we were talking with the real sniper if he contacted us. Unfortunately, this information was leaked to the press in a matter of hours.
On October 17, a man claiming to be the sniper called the public information officer for the Montgomery County police, saying, “I’m God.” The three-minute call consisted of a very angry man demanding, “Don’t you know who you’re dealing with?” The caller also made reference to a crime in “Montgomery,” which we assumed referred to the shootings in Montgomery County, Maryland. Later the sniper would call the police again and was quickly put through to the negotiation team room. FBI negotiator Marina Murphy took the call and attempted to draw him into a dialogue, but the caller seemed to become scared, and he simply hung up.
The next day, October 18, the sniper contacted a priest in Ashland, Virginia, Monsignor William Sullivan, the pastor of St. Ann’s Church, and again said, “I am God.” He also referred once more to a crime in “Montgomery.” Unfortunately, the monsignor did not report this call to the police initially, believing that it was a prank call.
Officers and agents were busy chasing down more than sixteen thousand leads and following up on more than a hundred thousand phone calls to a telephone tip line. Despite their efforts, on Saturday, October 19, a thirty-seven-year-old man was shot in the abdomen in the parking lot of a Ponderosa Steakhouse in Ashland, Virginia. He was critically wounded but survived. A search of the crime scene revealed that the sniper had left a note in a wooded area from where the shot was fired. Wrapped in plastic and tacked to a tree was a four-page message, the cover sheet of which said, “Call me God,” along with, “For you, Mr. Police” and “Don’t release to the press.” The letter demanded that $10 million be wired to a stolen platinum Bank of America Visa credit card. The account number and PIN were included. The note said, “We will have unlimited withdrawal at any ATM worldwide.” Despite this demand, I didn’t believe the crime spree was about money. There had been no demand for money up front, and if money is what you want, there is no need to keep killing people before you’ve made that demand.
In his note, the sniper complained that the authorities had made it hard for him to make contact to begin ransom negotiations. He denounced the operators of the tip line, saying that he had called four times and been taken “for a hoax or a joke.” He went on to say that “your failure to respond has cost you five lives” and “your children are not safe anywhere at any time.”
Most unusual was the sniper’s demand in the note that the police announce that they had “caught the sniper like a duck in a noose.” It made absolutely no sense, but that was what he wanted us to say. After analyzing this demand, the negotiation team drafted the following message for Chief Moose to deliver in response: “You asked us to say, ‘The sniper has been caught, like a duck in a noose.’ We don’t understand why you want us to say this, but we know it’s important to you. That is why we are saying it now, to stop the killing.”
In one of the rare instances in which profilers and negotiators disagreed, the FBI profiling team argued against making any such statement, believing that it would simply empower the sniper. Now working at the command post, I countered that the sniper was already feeling very empowered and that our failure to attempt to address this demand could prove fatal for more victims. Both Jim Cavanaugh (my ATF colleague from Waco) and Chief Moose expressed their agreement with me, but when I went home and turned on the television to watch the chief make our recommended statement, he omitted the critical portion. I later found out that SAC Gary Ball, the head of the FBI Baltimore office and the senior FBI official managing the incident, had sided with the profiling team and blocked the reference to “a duck in a noose.” I was furious.
Chief Moose did issue a direct appeal to the sniper through the news media, saying, “We do want to talk to you. Call us.”
Following up on the earlier call to the monsignor, investigators discovered that the sniper’s reference to “Montgomery” concerned an unsolved murder-robbery on September 21 at a liquor store in Montgomery, Alabama. It turned out that a gun magazine had been left behind at the crime scene with a clear fingerprint. When the FBI ran that fingerprint, which was on file owing to an earlier juvenile offense, it led us to a young man named Lee Boyd Malvo. FBI agents sent out to investigate his background quickly discovered that he had spent the previous few years with an older man named John Muhammad. With their first solid bit of evidence, agents quickly turned up the heat to locate these two.
At about six in the morning on October 22, the sniper shot and killed Conrad Johnson, a thirty-five-year-old bus driver, as he stood in the doorway of his bus near Silver Spring, Maryland. He was the thirteenth person shot, the tenth to die. The sniper left a note near the scene saying that he was angry with the police for not doing what he had asked, which was to announce that the sniper had been caught like a duck in a noose. I took no pleasure from the fact that this validated the position I had advocated: if we had included the sniper’s wording as demanded, we might have prevented the death of Conrad Johnson.
Meanwhile, investigators traced John Muhammad to Tacoma, Washington, where he and Lee Boyd Malvo once lived. In the backyard of Muhammad’s former residence they found a tree stump where he had practiced shooting. In the stump they recovered metal casings that matched those found near the scene of the sniper killings. Police then learned (and made public) that Muhammad and Malvo were driving a Caprice. On the twenty-second, the night of the Johnson killing, an alert citizen spotted the vehicle in a rest area off a highway in Maryland. Members of the HRT approached the vehicle and arrested the two sleeping suspects.
Malvo and Muhammad were both convicted of murder. Muhammad was given the death penalty; because of his youth, Malvo was given multiple life sentences. Why had they undertaken this killing spree? It turned out that Muhammad’s divorced wife and children lived in the D.C. area. Authorities learned that Muhammad hoped to add her to the list of those killed by the sniper, thus making her death appear random and certainly not related to her ex-husband. Muhammad’s ultimate objective was to regain custody of his children. Malvo, the younger accomplice, was just a pathetic figure who had been captivated and manipulated by the older Muhammad.
So, in essence, my career had come full circle. Just as with Charlie in Sperryville and Mario on Amtrak, I was once again confronting men whose extreme violence was driven by nothing more than their inability to cope with various stresses and emotional frustrations in their lives.
At the time of the D.C. sniper incident, I had been in the FBI for thirty years, and the FBI’s chief negotiator for the past ten years. I had been eligible for retirement since turning fifty two years earlier, but I didn’t feel quite ready at first, and the events of September 11, 2001, prompted me to stick around a bit longer. I wasn’t sure if I could make any further contribution to the war on terrorism, but it just didn’t seem to be the right time to leave the FBI. By 2003, though, I was ready. My three children were all in higher-education degree programs, and the reality of three tuitions provided an incentive for me to start drawing my pen
sion while also taking on another job. I had grown weary of the administrative side of being a unit chief in a big bureaucracy, too. Fighting for budget dollars and manpower needs and attending endless meetings had never been my favorite things.
So January 3, 2003, became the effective date of a decision that had been a long time coming: the official end of my FBI career. The Bureau had sent me to all fifty states and to more than forty countries. Steve Romano took over the helm at CNU and carried forward the great legacy of the FBI negotiation program. John Flood would eventually take over when Steve retired.
I started this book with a case in which I recommended using deadly force. At first glance, this may seem strange in a book that argues for the primacy of negotiation. But as I hope I’ve made clear, there are times when we must conclude that negotiation isn’t enough. In Charlie Leaf’s case, I believed that he simply wasn’t going to let Cheryl go; even if we managed to stall him for a bit longer, at some point he would very likely kill her and perhaps little Charlie. When negotiators start a dialogue with a threatening individual, we immediately begin to track the progress of our efforts. Has he become less angry and more willing to discuss reasonable alternatives to violence? Has his emotional equilibrium returned to a more normal state? Has the negotiator been able to establish a level of rapport that will enable him or her to begin to positively influence the behavior of the individual? In the overwhelming majority of cases the answer to these questions is yes, but there will always be times when the risks increase, when you have to move on to a tactical rescue. As I did in Sperryville, at this point the negotiator assumes a key role supporting the tactical operation by providing the time, intelligence, and opportunity required for success.