The Negotiator: My Life at the Heart of the Hostage Trade by Ben Lopez

Author:Ben Lopez
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Organized Crime, True Crime, Law Enforcement, General, Political Science, Biography & Autobiography, Terrorism
ISBN: 9781616088620
Publisher: Skyhorse
Published: 2012-09-01T21:00:00+00:00

10

THE EMPEROR’S CLOTHES

Michael Andersen’s kidnap was not the first hostage case I had worked in Afghanistan. The previous year, I’d participated in the capture of a Westerner who seemed to have a deathwish. He’d rocked up to the hinterland of Afghanistan with a fixer and a driver. No personal security detail, no convoy, no nothing. If that’s how you intend to travel across the most desolate, savage, lawless country in the world, make sure you take out the biggest K&R policy on the planet. Because you are virtually guaranteed to be abducted.

I came to the case relatively late. A buddy of mine called Howard had been handling negotiations up till then. Negotiating is a lonely business but every once in a while you’ll be in a hotel some place and meet three or four consultants and security guys working different cases. Sometimes, too, you’ll see someone you worked with on a previous case. I knew Howard from a case I’d worked in Mexico that lasted six months. Negotiators can only work for three or four weeks or so before having to take a break because of the mental burnout that results from the lack of sleep and dealing with sociopaths all day. In Mexico I rotated with Howard every three or four weeks.

Remarkably, on this other Afghanistan case I was able to communicate directly with the hostage. His name was Brian Delaney and the kidnappers had left him at the house of a friend. They visited him only infrequently. The friend, Khalid, owned a satellite phone and had given Brian permission to use it to call me. It was clear that Khalid had not sought the kidnappers’ approval before allowing this.

By talking to Brian I was able to ascertain that he had not been taken to Waziristan, as he had previously claimed on the phone. The earlier calls had been made under duress, with the kidnappers present, and he had been forced to lie about his whereabouts to put any rescue mission off the scent. It didn’t take long before I figured out that Brian was being held hostage by the same guys who would later snatch Michael Andersen: the al-Hakim clan. At times it almost seemed as if these guys had a monopoly on hostage-taking. And yet their lack of professionalism was surprising. No Latin American kidnapper worth his salt would permit the hostage to have free and unsupervised contact with the outside world. In Afghanistan things are often more relaxed. They just let hostages use sat phones. They dump the victims at the houses of friends. This devil-may-care attitude is just as true for the Taliban. Most of these guys are unsophisticated hillbillies. They’ll do ridiculous stuff like talk enclair (French for ‘in clear’) on their radios about the precise details of an attack. Not surprisingly, the Coalition forces take advantage of this. The thing about being undisciplined and unruly is that sooner or later, it costs you. Maybe one day you leave a sat phone out. Maybe the next day, a guard falls asleep and your investment escapes into the night.

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