You were a negotiator with the FBI for 30 years. During that time what did you discover were the key skills to being a negotiator?

I think to be an effective and successful negotiator you have to have a lot of self-control and avoid becoming emotionally involved in the situation yourself. Rudyard Kipling has a famous quote which says, ‘If you can keep your head while all about are losing theirs…’ and it is something I include in my book because I think it is a good indicator of someone that will be successful as a negotiator. Also you have to be a very good listener and to acknowledge the perspective and viewpoint of the other person without necessarily agreeing or disagreeing with it. So I think those are some of the great skills that you would see in a good negotiator.

And presumably you need to be flexible as well.

Yes, I think you do. If you have a rigid, inflexible approach to problem solving I think you shut down a lot of avenues of resolution. So you need to come across as someone who is able to adapt to the circumstances and be open to dealing with the issues that are important to this person. 

Those sound like qualities that have served you well. Let’s talk about your first choice, Bullets, Bombs and Fast Talk: 25 Years of FBI War Stories by James Botting, who sounds like he worked on some high-profile cases.

Yes, Jim Botting is a very close friend of mine and a colleague in the FBI. Jim’s stories are based out of the Los Angeles office of the FBI, where he worked on a number of very interesting and high-profile cases. The book gives the reader a really good glimpse into a day in the life of an FBI agent working on the streets. He is very good at setting the stage and sharing with the reader what it is like to be an FBI agent.

Can you give me an example of one of his more high-profile cases?

He was involved in some of the cases that I worked on, like the Waco Siege. In fact I asked for him to be on my team. He also worked on a case involving the Symbionese Liberation Army. This was the group that had kidnapped the American heiress Patty Hearst. At one point group members were found barricaded in a house in Los Angeles and there was a big shoot-out. The police responded and eventually there was a fire that burned down the place that they were hiding in. Jim was on the scene of that. It was a very dangerous and challenging case.

Tell me about what you were both doing in the Waco Siege.

Jim was one of my team leaders. I had a large team of negotiators split between two 12-hour shifts and he was in charge of one of the shifts. As the overall negotiation coordinator, I divided my time between the two teams. I brought Jim in because I thought he would do a great job managing that team, which he did.

Most people know that the Waco Siege ended badly, but your work there was one of the more successful parts of the operation.

I was in charge of the negotiations for the first 26 days and during that time it was a very vulnerable situation. It started when Federal agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms tried to exercise an arrest warrant and a search warrant and there was a big shoot-out that occurred between ATM agents and some of the followers of David Koresh, who were part of a Davidian religious sect. Four agents were killed and a number of them were wounded, and six of David Koresh’s followers were killed as well. 

The FBI was charged with investigating the murders and Federal agents tried to come in to resolve the situation, and I headed up the negotiations during the siege. For the first 26 days my negotiation team got 35 people out, including 21 children. And then, in a sort of controversial aspect of this, the FBI decided to take a more aggressive approach during the second half of the ordeal and no one else came out. Some tear gas was inserted on the 52nd day and the Davidians started fires and essentially committed mass suicide.

And this is something that you feel deeply frustrated about because you had been taken off the case.

Clearly it is the most challenging, difficult and frustrating case I had ever worked on because I believe the negotiation strategy that I had formulated and led my team on was working because we were getting people out. It certainly wasn’t succeeding as quickly as some would have wanted but the more aggressive approach had the opposite effect and served to shut down any meaningful negotiations. I am quite confident in my own mind that had we continued on as I had led the group we probably would have gotten quite a few more people out – perhaps all of them.

What about the techniques used in your next book, Negotiating Hostage Crises with the New Terrorists by Adam Dolnik and Keith Fitzgerald?

I actually met Adam Dolnik at a conference in Turkey and he asked me to review his book and write a foreword for it, which I ended up doing. And I think it is a very interesting book because they examine primarily terrorist hostage sieges that occurred in Russia. For example, they looked at the Beslan school and Moscow theatre situations. Their premise is that the authorities are under-prepared to deal with the new terrorist, who is a bit more sophisticated in understanding how to manipulate law enforcement’s response. 

I think it is a very good book on articulating many of the problems that authorities have, and by authorities I mean not just police but governments, in dealing with organised radical terrorists who are willing to die.