Hostage Nation (10 page)

Gary Noesner on an FBI mission to train Jordanian police at the Dead Sea in 1995. Photo: Gary Noesner
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That same year, the FBI began to investigate international kidnapping cases involving American citizens under the Comprehensive Crime Control Act passed by Congress in 1984. Any such incident would be considered a federal crime and therefore under the jurisdiction of the FBI. What had been Noesner's forte domestically was now under his domain globally. The first two overseas hostage cases were handled by Noesner's colleagues. One involved a coal mine employee in Ecuador; the other, a Peace Corps worker in the Philippines. Both cases ended in successful negotiations and hostage releases. At the end of 1990, Noesner was deployed on the FBI's third international hostage case. Brent Swan, a U.S. helicopter mechanic with Chevron Corporation, was kidnapped in Cabinda, Angola, by separatist rebels. While the rebels demanded a large ransom for Swan's release, the Angolan government threatened that if Chevron paid a ransom, the company would be thrown out of the country and cut off from significant investments in oil exploration and extraction infrastructure. For Noesner, the negotiation was a challenge he was eager to take on, and for eight weeks he worked alongside negotiators from Control Risks, the private security company hired by Chevron (and the company that Noesner would later work for). “What was eventually structured,” explains Noesner, “was instead of giving them money or weapons, we gave them blankets, medical supplies, two vehicles, and office equipment.” Swan was released. “The oil company got its employee back, and it was able to continue to operate in Cabinda. The Angolan government did not object to the agreement, because they weren't going to get hurt by these guys buying guns to fight against them. The U.S. government was happy. Everybody was happy. It was creative problem solving.”

Noesner continued working on both overseas kidnappings and domestic cases, and he felt good about the FBI's new role in dealing with international crimes against American citizens. Although Noesner was a physically commanding man with a very strong personality, he realized that the role of a good negotiator was not to act as a sole operator in a hostage situation. Credit was something he could do without. The payoff was finding nonviolent ends to the crises, and Noesner had
perfected the art of persuasion, even in the most volatile of circumstances. Over the next several years, Noesner and his colleagues worked quietly on international cases; all during this time, the U.S. government claimed that it would not negotiate with terrorists while silently consenting to the FBI's involvement. Each hostage case was assigned two FBI negotiators until an outcome was achieved. “We were helping companies in South America, Asia, Africa,” says Noesner. “If the company had to pay ransom, the FBI would say, ‘Okay, we don't condone it. We're not going to give you the money. We have to officially tell you that paying ransom encourages more kidnapping. But if you're gonna do it, let us help you do it smart so you don't get ripped off.'”

The successes were mounting for the FBI's hostage negotiators, who were also considered “behaviorists” because of their intense training and understanding of criminal minds in hostage situations. However, negotiators were still subordinate to FBI tactical agents from the hostage rescue team (HRT) during hostage crises. It was this power differential that would bring about what Noesner would consider the single worst day in the history of the FBI.

In February 1993, after a year watching a religious sect called the Branch Davidians stockpile weapons at their headquarters in Waco, Texas, agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms attacked the compound. Inside, cult leader David Koresh sent women and children to take cover and launched a counterassault on the federal agents. Four ATF agents were shot and killed and another sixteen were wounded. Koresh allowed the bodies of five Branch Davidians killed in the gun battle to be removed from the compound, and he held fire as the ATF retreated. He then hunkered down with more than one hundred followers, including women and children, and refused to surrender.

Noesner was immediately deployed to Waco. Jeff Jamar, the head of the FBI's San Antonio office, was the FBI's on-scene commander. He was to rely on Noesner, the chief negotiator, and Dick Rogers, the head of the HRT. For the first twenty-five days of the siege, Koresh proved difficult, but Noesner and his team of negotiators were having success almost daily. The day Noesner arrived, he and his team of negotiators convinced Koresh to release four children. A total of twenty-one children
and two elderly women were released between February 28 and March 3. Noesner and his team's continuing strategy was chronicled in a Department of Justice (DOJ) report:

According to Noesner, Jamar and Rogers were not happy with what they considered slow progress. “There was an element, in my judgment, within the FBI that was frustrated it was taking so long. They felt it made them look weak and ineffective. They wanted to use force. They were embracing the concept ‘We can make people do what we want them to do.' It seemed like every time we got hostages out, they would do something stupid on the outside. I was in charge of the negotiations. I'd have to dig us out of the hole again, and we'd get a few more people out.”

The Department of Justice report cited some of what Noesner and other negotiators felt was undercutting the negotiations:

Of working the crisis with Agents Jamar and Rogers, Noesner says, “Dealing with David Koresh was easier. I'm more proud of anything that I've done in the FBI that we got thirty-five people out under incredibly difficult circumstances,
internally
.”

After five weeks on the job, FBI bosses removed Noesner and replaced him with another negotiation coordinator. “They wanted to bring in another guy, Clint Van Zandt. He was really close friends with one of the more tactical-oriented guys high up in the Bureau. They never told me it was because I was thwarting their efforts.” The official
explanation from headquarters was that they were taking Noesner out of Waco because everybody else had rotated out. “They said, ‘You've been there five weeks. It's time for you to get a rest.'” Noesner was told that when he returned from his scheduled trip to the Middle East, he would be brought back to handle the negotiations at Waco.

Over the next twenty-six days, not a single person came out of the Branch Davidian complex. On April 19, the day that Noesner returned to the United States, a combination of tear gas and ammunition rounds started a fire that destroyed the compound. Seventy-six people died in the fire, including David Koresh, twenty-one children, and two pregnant women. Finger-pointing ensued in the immediate aftermath, and the official blame was put solely on Koresh and the Branch Davidians. But many, including Noesner, who were critical of the handling of the incident demanded and got an investigation, something that angered many in the Bureau. The reports that came out shed light on what had essentially been an FBI debacle of epic proportion. The devastating and very public failure at Waco catapulted the idea of negotiation to the forefront of the FBI's agenda and brought Noesner's position as a negotiator to the same level as that of tactical leaders who would be deployed in such cases. “All these commissions said, ‘You've got to prop up the negotiation programs,'” says Noesner. For the rest of his career as an FBI agent, Noesner headed up the Crisis Negotiation Unit and never again took a subordinate role in a hostage crisis.

FBI agent Chris Voss, a lead international kidnapping negotiator until November 2007, remembers Noesner's proclivity to cause a stir within the agency. “He only seemed like a maverick because he knew what the right thing was to do; he wasn't afraid to push ahead with it at any given point in time. He would often scare the government bureaucrats who would be around us in the different interagencies.” Voss says that Noesner could be incredibly insistent on pushing for what he believed in, but he was extremely skilled and artful when using a method Noesner called the “soft touch.” “So, yes, Gary was a maverick, but he was also a tremendous leader, and he knew his business.”

After Waco, the importance of well-planned and well-thought-out policy on dealing with international hostage situations was recognized across government agencies at the highest levels. And in 2002,
President Bush signed the National Security Presidential Directive (NSPD-12), which would offer a set of guidelines for dealing with Americans held hostage abroad. “Gary Noesner was a principal architect of NSPD-12,” says Voss. The Hostage Working Group, a subcommittee chaired by the National Security Council, was given the charge to implement the directive. Standing members of the group included the FBI, State Department Counterterrorism, Department of Defense, and CIA. “Gary was present when the heads of the agencies, [Secretary of State] Colin Powell, [Secretary of Defense] Donald Rumsfeld, [CIA director] George Tenet, sat in a room and agreed to it.” The committee would meet either on an “as needed” basis, which was as much as once a month, or more frequently if international kidnappings called for it.

In January 2003, Noesner retired from the FBI, and Voss moved into his mentor's seat within the Hostage Working Group. A month later, Noesner, now a senior vice president for Control Risks (which was under contract to Northrop Grumman to handle the kidnapping of Howes, Stansell, and Gonsalves), was put on his first case as a civilian negotiator. By then, the seasoned negotiator had worked on over 120 hostage cases with the FBI. He didn't expect this case to bring anything he hadn't dealt with in the past. Working in Colombia would be nothing new for him, either. In Noesner's tenure with the FBI, he'd worked more Colombian kidnapping cases than any other type of case (mostly managing them from the States while sending a full-time agent to the country).

For more than a decade before Howes, Stansell, and Gonsalves were kidnapped, Colombia held the dubious distinction of having the highest kidnapping rate in the world, and the problem plagued not only Colombian citizens but also foreigners. Because Colombia has a wealth of as-yet-untapped oil and mineral reserves and there are hundreds of millions of U.S. government dollars earmarked to fight drug cultivation and production, numerous U.S. and foreign companies have employees in Colombia who have commonly been the target of kidnappers. The corporations have become accustomed to dealing with abductions, and dozens of hostage situations have been settled by dropping caseloads of American currency into jungle and mountain terrain. By early 2003, the process of dealing with kidnappings of foreigners in Colombia had
been repeated so many times that there was an expected protocol—a commonly played-out exchange between kidnapper and negotiator that usually began as soon as the kidnapping took place.

Immediately after an employee was kidnapped, a negotiator from a security company was deployed to Colombia to try to establish contact with the kidnappers. In the United States, security companies such as the Florida-based Ackerman Group and the Washington, D.C., office of Control Risks provided operational guidance to clients as part of what was commonly referred to as “kidnapping and ransom insurance,” underwritten by large insurers such as Lloyd's of London. The kidnappers might have been from one of the guerrilla groups—most notably, the FARC or the ELN—they might have been linked to paramilitary groups, or they could have been common criminals. The guerrillas had become so much of a problem that some North American companies were accused of paying illegal paramilitary groups for “protection” of their investments. In 2007, Chiquita Banana Company admitted to paying “protection” money to Colombian paramilitary groups—identified by the U.S. government as known terrorist organizations. (The company agreed to pay a $25 million fine to end a federal investigation.) Although the U.S. State Department forbids government concessions to terrorists or kidnappers, in all cases that Noesner had handled since 1990, a full-time FBI negotiator worked alongside and assisted the private security consultants to secure the safe release of hostages.