Whoever Fights Monsters Read online

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  Between 1975 and 1977, I became involved in teaching hostage negotiation techniques. The Bureau had been quite a bit behind the New York City police department, the leader in understanding and dealing with hostage situations. However, it had succeeded in extracting a good deal of information about such situations from the New York City experts, Capt. Frank Bolz and Det. Harvey Schlossberg. We expanded and taught the techniques to law-enforcement agencies throughout the country. As an army reserve officer, I also taught such techniques to MP and CID contingents, and I estimate that over the past fifteen years I have actually instructed about 90 percent of those in the U. S. Army throughout the world who are trained in hostage negotiations.

  It was an interesting time in law enforcement. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, a large number of men came out of the military—ex–Green Berets and other men schooled in the jungles of Vietnam—and went into police forces. Their skill and expertise with weaponry and assault tactics became the basis of SWAT teams, an entirely new concept in American law enforcement. A SWAT team is essentially a paramilitary force, and we’d never had such forces before. Even in the FBI, where agents were trained in the use of rifles and machine guns as well as pistols, until these years there had been little attention paid to the paramilitary aspects of making a raid. SWAT teams were sexy, however, and drew media attention. SWAT teams used snipers to kill criminals, and such heavy weaponry as assault rifles and grenade launchers in their attempts to storm hideouts or to rescue hostages. The problem was that these tactics were producing a lot of carnage. Mostly, criminals were being killed, but police officers were also going down in record numbers, and there were a fair number of hostages hurt, as well. The NYPD had started its hostage negotiation team in an effort to avoid the carnage, and the FBI quickly embraced the idea of advocating a softer approach to hostage situations.

  I liked this approach because it emphasized the need to understand the criminal mind, which was my own hobbyhorse, and, of course, was the basis for profiling. At that time, law-enforcement people were unprepared for an understanding approach. Most police lacked any real training in psychology, and were more prone to think in terms of using force than using persuasion. However, as the FBI took over the teaching of hostage negotiation techniques and added its own spin, the whole trend of using SWAT teams turned around, and so did the number of deaths in hostage situations. It became accepted practice to talk first, and to avoid using weaponry whenever possible. This approach was also midwifed into existence by some lawsuits against various police jurisdictions for undue use of force, lawsuits that cost cities millions of dollars. These soon translated into mandates to exhaust all nonviolent avenues before resorting to SWAT team assaults.

  Within a decade, the behavioral approach to crime would go far beyond hostage negotiation and profiling, into the establishment of the FBI’s National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime, and the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program; I was at the forefront of nurturing into existence both the NCAVC and VICAP—but I’m getting ahead of my story, and so will leave those developments for a later chapter.

  While I was in Cleveland, as instructor of a traveling school—a road show, as we called it—I became involved in a hostage negotiation crisis. A black gunman held a police captain and a seventeen-year-old girl hostage inside the Warrensville Heights police station, and we were trying to talk everyone out and avoid bloodshed. Somehow, the gunman’s demands had been made public. Among them were that he wanted all white people immediately to leave the face of the earth, and he wanted to speak with President Jimmy Carter about this. Since these particular demands were clearly not rational, I made no attempt to meet them. At the command site, I was handed a telephone and told that someone important wanted to speak to me. It was Jody Powell, the President’s press secretary, who informed me that the White House had learned of the situation and that President Carter was ready to speak to “the terrorist.” Dumbfounded, I told Powell that we had no terrorists in Cleveland. Trying to be polite, yet incredulous that the White House would even think to intervene in such a delicate situation, I lied to Powell and told him that we were unable to raise the gunman on the phone just then; if we had need of the President, I said, we’d call back. The situation was resolved without bloodshed and without presidential intervention.

  I was in charge of the FBI’s hostage training for just two years, but continued to be involved in the area for many years after 1977—mostly, as the chief resident terrorist. At a remote desert atomic facility in 1978, at Lake Placid in the early 1980s, and at other sites throughout that decade, major law-enforcement agencies of our government and of some foreign countries participated in full-scale, week-long simulations of terrorist attacks and subsequent hostage negotiations. On several of these exercises, I played the part of the head terrorist. We would hijack a busload of volunteers who played important people—scientists or visiting dignitaries, for example—and take them to an isolated farm or ski lodge, where we would hold them hostage. Real guns, grenades, dynamite, and other weapons were used, and when I demanded an airliner to fly us out of the country, one was commandeered and delivered to the nearest airstrip. Once the exercise had begun, we were in earnest about it, and stayed in character. At Lake Placid, I was “10,” while an FBI machine-gun expert was “20,” and the parts of “30,” “40,” “50,” and “60” were taken by men from the CIA, the Secret Service, the army’s Delta Force and from the British counterpart of that Delta Force, the SAS. These simulations were so realistic that some hostages became subject to the “Stockholm syndrome,” in which the hostage so identifies with the hostage-takers that he or she is willing to act with them in order to survive. The men on the other side of the telephone from me, negotiating for the FBI, were former students of mine who sometimes complained that I was too tough an adversary because I knew and countered all of their tricks. In each exercise, however, the “good guys” did manage to retake the hostages and the terrorists, though not always without—simulated—bloodshed.

  That I had gotten into teaching hostage negotiating techniques at all, in the mid-1970s, was a sign of restlessness on my part. Not entirely comfortable with repeating the same lessons in classes all the time, I thirsted for new challenges. Many of my fellow instructors at Quantico were not interested in looking for something new to do; innovation is discouraged in most bureaucracies, and the FBI is no exception, though management claimed they always encouraged instructors to improve their techniques and presentation. A lot of guys were perfectly content to teach “canned” cases, the majority of which they had inherited from an earlier generation of instructors. My colleague John Minderman called such instructors “oil slicks,” because they covered a lot of territory but only at a depth of a millimeter or so. Minderman, a former San Francisco motorcycle policeman, taught me a good deal about how to relate to the police officers who made up the bulk of our classes.

  Most of the cases I expounded upon in my criminology lectures were not canned, but widely known cases where the basic information came from sources available to the public. Books and articles about Charles Manson, Sirhan Sirhan, David Berkowitz, the Texas Tower killer Charles Whitman, and so on, formed the basis of our arsenal. Studying these cases intently, I began to see that our classes were not presenting original or unique information on these killers, principally because none was readily available. The books on Manson had been written from the point of view of the prosecuting attorney, or from a gleaning of media coverage and interviews with ancillary members of Manson’s entourage. Where was the unique understanding of the mind of Manson that a police officer would want to gain from having attended a course on criminal psychology at the world’s leading facility for the teaching of law enforcement? Most people, viewing the Manson cases from the outside, had long ago decided that Manson was “crazy” and that nothing further could be gained from studying what he had done. What if he wasn’t precisely “crazy”? Would that mean there was new understanding to be gott
en from the Manson-inspired murders? Unfortunately, that question couldn’t be answered, because all we had to go on was what everyone else had. On Richard Speck, killer of eight nurses in Chicago, the material was somewhat better, a book written by a psychiatrist who had done extensive interviews with him. Even these interviews were inadequate, though, because the man who had conducted them did not have the background in dealing with criminals, or the need to understand matters from a law-enforcement perspective, that would be necessary for our students. I wanted to better understand the mind of the violent criminal, first of all to satisfy my own curiosity, but also in order to become a better teacher, so that our classes at the FBI Academy would be more highly prized by the police personnel who attended them.

  At the time that I came to this conclusion, the FBI was almost completely uninterested in murderers, rapists, child molesters, and other criminals who prey on their fellowmen. Most of these violent-behavior cases fell entirely within the jurisdiction of local law-enforcement agencies and were not violations of the federal laws that the FBI was charged with enforcing. At the Academy, we did teach criminology to visiting police officers, so the study of the criminal mind was a relevant exercise for me—but, in the eyes of most of my colleagues and superiors, it was only barely relevant. They wanted no part of it. Conversely, I became deeply intrigued by it.

  I was encouraged in pursuing my interests by people I met at the conferences and conventions I was beginning to attend, gatherings of professionals in mental health and related fields. My curiosity brought me into the American Psychiatric Association, the American Academy of Forensic Sciences, the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law, among others. None of my colleagues at the FBI saw any value in associations like these, and the Bureau did not consider them particularly worthwhile, either; for many years, I paid all my dues as a member of these and other organizations myself, although the Bureau occasionally did reimburse me for attendance at professional conferences. The Bureau’s avoidance of mental-health professionals was of a piece with the Bureau’s belief that if there was something worth knowing about criminals, the Bureau already knew it.

  I had a different view, a sense that there was a great deal to be learned, and that many experts outside of law enforcement could teach us things we didn’t know. Certainly my outlook and horizons expanded when I attended professional conferences and, later, was invited to speak at them and share my work with people other than police officials. Meeting psychiatrists, psychologists, people active in caring for victims of violent crime, and other mental-health professionals gave me the impetus to look further into doing the sort of research that I was uniquely positioned to do.

  As I traveled around the country doing road schools, I began to drop in at local police departments and ask them for copies of case files on particularly violent offenders—rapists, child molesters, murderers. Because of my years of liaison work with policing agencies, I was able to talk rather easily with the various authorities, and to obtain such information. If I was interested in a case, when an officer from the jurisdiction involved in that case showed up for training at Quantico, I’d assign them the task of assembling their department’s files on the case for their own miniresearch report, and would gratefully accept a copy of the materials for my own private burgeoning file cabinets of data. People were so cooperative, so interested in the area of trying to systematize what we knew and didn’t know about violent criminals, that they sent me reams of stuff. In a way, their cooperation was a recognition of our great need for information and for understanding in this area.

  At around this time, I came across a quotation from Nietzsche that stuck with me. It seemed to pinpoint both the fascination I had with this research and the dangers it posed. Thereafter, I put it on a slide that I always showed during my lectures and presentations. Here it is:

  Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.

  It was important for me to keep such sobering thoughts in mind as I proceeded to muck about in the depths of human criminality. As a result of my inquiries and requests for information, I soon had far more factual files on violent criminals than were available to the news media or any local police department, and I had more of them than anyone else—perhaps because very few people were asking for them. As the quotation suggests, dealing with monsters entails problems. Then, too, other seekers encountered a procedural difficulty: Academics couldn’t obtain police files as easily as an FBI man could, and they had often been discouraged from trying. So I was in a privileged position from which to undertake this research.

  In the office and at home, I pored over this material, gaining occasional new insights from it, systematically analyzing it, and began to get a feeling for the possibilities of doing in-depth research that would lead to a greater understanding of violent offenders. At last, I came to the point where I wanted very much to talk to the people about whom I’d been lecturing, the killers themselves. I discussed this idea with John Minderman, and we decided we’d have a go at it. We wanted to learn more about what factors in the killer’s environment, childhood, and background made him want to commit such crimes. And we also wanted to know many more details about the crimes themselves—what happened during the assault, what went on immediately after the killer was certain that the victim had died, how had he chosen the site for disposal of the body. If we got enough information from enough interviewees, we’d be able to compile useful lists: So many took souvenirs; so many read or viewed pornographic materials. Then, too, there were some old chestnuts in regard to murder that we wanted to test; for instance, whether killers really did return to the scenes of their crimes.

  Grace Hopper, a naval admiral and computer expert, had come to Quantico to give a lecture, and she was especially eloquent in describing her strategies for dealing with the bureaucracy of the Navy when she wanted to get something innovative accomplished. She said that the basis of her success in neutralizing the bureaucracy was the axiom “It is better to ask forgiveness than to ask permission.” Once something was out on paper in a request format, Hopper said, if it was then denied, the project was dead. But if it’s not on paper … well, you get the idea. To avoid being stopped before I got started, I thought that I’d better go ahead with my pet project to interview some killers, and not tell anyone in a supervisory capacity about it.

  In early 1978, I was to go to northern California to teach at a road school, and I saw a window of opportunity. Agent John Conway, who had been in one of my classes at Quantico, was stationed in San Rafael and was the Bureau’s liaison officer to the California prison system. I asked Conway to locate certain offenders in the California prisons, and when I arrived for my week of teaching, he had all the information ready for me. As Bureau agents, we could enter any prison in the country just by showing our badges to the prison authorities, and once inside, we didn’t have to explain why we wished to interview any particular offender. So, on a Friday, after four days of teaching, Conway and I took off on a whirlwind tour of prisons and inmates that lasted through the weekend and into the next week. In one swoop, we interviewed seven of the most dangerous and notorious murderers ever apprehended in the United States: Sirhan Sirhan, Charles Manson, Tex Watson (a Manson associate), Juan Corona (killer of many migrant workers), Herbert Mullin (who had killed fourteen people), John Frazier (who had killed six), and Edmund Kemper. Interviewing convicted killers in this way had never been done before and was a breakthrough of rare proportions.

  My first interview was with Sirhan Sirhan, in Soledad. The prison authorities put Conway and me in a fairly large room, one that appeared to be used for staff meetings. It was not really intimate enough for my purposes, but we made do. Sirhan entered the room with his eyes wild, frightened, and apprehensive. He stood against the wall, with his fist clenched, and refused to shake hands. He demanded to know what we wanted from him; he believed that if we were really FBI agents, we we
re probably consorting with the Secret Service, who regularly conducted interviews with assassins. The Secret Service’s interviews were conducted for reasons unrelated to ours. At the time of his conviction for the assassination of Senator Robert F. Kennedy, Sirhan had been diagnosed as exhibiting all the signs of paranoid schizophrenia. Now we were seeing why. He didn’t want to let us use a tape recorder, and wanted to talk to a lawyer. I told him this was all informal and preliminary, and that we were just there to talk.

  To coax Sirhan out of his fright, I asked him about the prison system itself, and that got his motor going. He was annoyed at a former cellmate who had “betrayed” him by speaking to an interviewer from Playboy. Slowly, he began to relax his fist, to edge closer to the table where Conway and I sat, and, eventually, to sit down and be somewhat more at ease.

  He told me, for instance, that he had heard voices that told him to assassinate the senator, and that once, when he had been looking into a mirror, he had felt his face cracking and falling in pieces to the floor; both of these were consistent with a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia. When he got rolling, Sirhan always referred to himself in the third person: Sirhan did this, Sirhan felt that. He said that he was in protective custody not because the prison authorities feared for his life—which was the actual case—but because the authorities were treating him with more respect than they accorded common thieves and child molesters.

  Sirhan is an Arab who grew up in a war zone, and his motivations and orientation had much to do with those facts. Out of the blue, for instance, he asked me whether Mark Felt was a Jew. Felt was a high-ranking, high-profile assistant director of the FBI; the question from Sirhan reflected his beliefs about the world. Sirhan said that he had learned that Senator Kennedy supported the selling of more jet fighter planes to Israel, and that by assassinating Kennedy, Sirhan had prevented the elevation to the presidency of a man who would continue to befriend Israel—and therefore he, Sirhan, had changed world history and helped the Arab countries. He believed that the parole board was afraid to put him back on the streets because they feared his personal magnetism. He preferred, if released, to go back to Jordan, where, he was certain, people would pick him up on their shoulders and parade him through the streets as a hero. He saw himself as having done something that was not correctly understood at the time but that would become clear only in historical perspective.