Gary Noesner - Stalling for Time: My Life as an FBI Hostage Negotiator

Copyright 2010 by Gary Noesner

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

R ANDOM H OUSE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc. Grateful acknowledgment is made to Cheryl Hart Frappier for permission to reprint the note on . Reprinted by permission of Cheryl Hart Frappier.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Noesner, Gary.
Stalling for time : my life as an FBI hostage negotiator / by Gary Noesner.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-679-60391-7
1. Noesner, Gary. 2. Hostage negotiationsUnited States. 3. United States. Federal Bureau of InvestigationOfficials and employeesBiography. I. Title.
HV6598.N64 2010
363.25092dc22

[B]
2010005888

www.atrandom.com

v3.1

To Carol
For her love and support, particularly during the many timesI had to be away from home for the FBI

The facts, dates, times, and direct quotations of dialogue are from official reports, personal notes, memos, and conversations as I recall them or as they were conveyed to me by those present. At all times, the recreation of events was done as accurately as possible. Hopefully, those depicted in this book will find their portrayals to be accurate and fair.

The opinions, observations, and comments expressed in this book are those of the author only and do not necessarily reflect those of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Furthermore, they may not reflect those of the editors, endorsers, publisher, FBI Special Agents, or other persons who are described or mentioned in this book.

M y line of work tends to inspire curiosity. The minute I tell people that Im a hostage negotiator, they want to know what its like to talk to people who have put themselves in truly desperate situations, who might at any moment kill themselves, their hostages, or the law enforcement officers attempting to bring an end to the crisis. Over the last several years, friends and colleagues encouraged me to write a book about these experiences, urging me to share the lessons I learned over years of convincing people to put down their weapons and surrender peacefully. Because I entered the field of hostage/crisis negotiations when it was still a new and evolving discipline, Ive observed the process of trial and error that has transformed a rudimentary bargaining approach developed on the fly into a highly effective and flexible method. Ive watched colleagues with no background in psychology or negotiation evolve in their tradecraft, many becoming functional street psychologists and crisis counselors, saving many lives and drastically reducing the number of police officers harmed during hostage, barricade, and suicide situations.

In the early years of the profession every negotiation seemed to involve two equally challenging components: managing the actual hostage situation, and managing leaders and colleagues captive to the entrenched law enforcement response to hostage events, which emphasized the use of force and viewed negotiators as do-gooder types who only got in the way of them doing their jobs. In those days, just when we had finally established a bond of trust with the perpetrator, moving closer to ending the crisis, wed sometimes find that a fellow agent or police officer had thrown a rock through the window, ordered a military vehicle driven up on the lawn as a show of force, or turned off the power. This often produced violent resistance and injuries or deaths that might have been avoided. Of course there are times when you are forced to put down the phone and send in the SWAT team, but all too often in those early days, that decision was reached prematurely. Im particularly proud of the degree to which weve been able to shift the balance toward the primary goal of any hostage negotiation, which is to resolve the crisis while avoiding loss of life. The results have been dramatic.

Hostage negotiation is about managing yourself and the people around you. And while the most important relationship may appear to be with the person you have on the other end of the phone, in fact this is often not the case. In the midst of trying to talk someone into giving up, you have to manage the people supporting you, to make sure that you have the help you need at hand to make split-second decisions. And you have to manage upto make sure your commanding officer is paying attention to what youre doing, supporting your decisions, and fending off attempts to take actions that would undermine them. Throughout my career I worked a great many crisis incidents, most of which youve never heard about because they received little or no media attention. Others, like the sieges in Waco, Texas, and Jordan, Montana, were covered feverishly by the national and even international media. Each of these experiences, whether success or failure, taught me valuable lessons about human behavior, interpersonal communication, and conflict resolution, and each helped me to understand how to influence people away from violent courses of action.

The observations and lessons that I discuss in this book may be derived from specific hostage negotiations, but many of them apply equally to the kinds of negotiations we face in everyday life, from hammering out contracts to tense interpersonal conflicts with intransigent colleagues or hostile neighbors, not to mention with friends and family. I know my own life relationships have benefited from what Ive learned along the way, and I believe that the skills discussed in this book can help anyone to become a better person, a more engaged spouse, a more attentive parent, a better friend, and a more effective leader. Before we can influence others we must first listen and understand.

Listening is the cheapest concession we can ever make.

ITS TIME TO DIE

Time cools, time clarifies; no mood can be maintained quite unaltered through the course of hours.

M ARK T WAIN

T here it was, hard and direct. You going to shoot me when I come out? Charlie said.

No, I responded. Thats not going to happen. You said you wouldnt hurt anyone. You said youd drop off the pilot somewhere in the mountains. So theres no reason for anyone to get hurt.

The logic of this formulation appeared to work for Charlie, perhaps because this was his only chance to go on living with Cheryl and their son, little Charlie.

But what I knew that he didnt was that somewhere out in the fields surrounding us, FBI marksmen were poised, waiting to take his life.

A large part of a negotiators job is to establish trust, yet there are fundamental contradictions in that. In order to convince someone that despite all appearances to the contrary, everything will be okay, you have to project sincerity. You have to make him believe that what you are saying is honest and aboveboard. You have to address his primal need for safety and security by establishing a bond. And on rare occasions, you have to lie.