In 1982, a British insurance broker named Doug Milne set out in search of new markets. His specialty was kidnapping and ransom insurance, known in the industry as K & R. Naturally, he was looking at places around the world where people were being nabbed. One such place was Colombia.
Milne enrolled in a Spanish-language course in London and a month later, with rudimentary skills and only one or two solid contacts on the ground, he boarded a flight to Bogotá. On his first day in the city, Milne was walking to a meeting with a potential client from Japan when “a guy pulled up alongside and this chap who was walking in front of me, his head just exploded.” It was a drive-by assassination.
Milne canceled the meeting and spent the afternoon in the Trafalgar Bar near Bogotá’s entertainment district. “I missed my meeting and I think I left there about eleven o’clock at night after having drunk a couple of flagons of Tres Esquinas rum,” Milne recalled.
Of course, Milne was horrified. But he also realized that he’d come to the right place. While he knew nothing about the victim or the motive, the murder drove home to him the extent to which Colombian society was at the mercy of criminals and guerrillas. His clients needed what he had to offer.
Kidnapping and ransom insurance was first created in response to the Lindbergh baby kidnapping but didn’t really catch on until the 1960s, following a spate of kidnappings in Europe. These were carried out by criminals and political groups using terror tactics, like ETA in Spain, the Red Army Faction in Germany and the Red Brigades in Italy. The specialized insurance initially catered to wealthy individuals and was later marketed to companies to cover their employees. The appeal was simple: In the event of a kidnapping, the insurance would provide reimbursement for a ransom payment.
There were caveats and carve outs to prevent fraud and ensure the existence of the policy did not increase the risk of kidnapping. The first was that the policy had to be kept secret. In fact, it could be voided if its existence became public. The concern was that if the kidnappers became aware of the policy, they would demand more money. Companies that have this type of insurance generally do not tell their employees. Insured families keep the information closely guarded.
The second principle is that the policy will only reimburse the ransom once it is paid. The insurance company never fronts any money. In order to raise the cash, the victim’s family will probably have to liquidate assets—mortgage the house, sell stocks, pool money from other relatives. This process makes the negotiations credible by dragging them out. This is not just about minimizing the payout by the insurance company. Quickly making good on a large ransom raises the expectations of future kidnappers. It can make hostage-taking more lucrative and inevitably more common. It also increases the risk of a “double dip,” in which the kidnappers become convinced that their initial ransom demand was too low. They then refuse to release the victim until a second ransom is paid.
In the 1960s and 1970s, when K & R insurance first came on the market, the policyholders were left on their own to negotiate the ransom and work out details and logistics with the kidnappers. But over time it became clear that this approach had serious disadvantages. The families were obviously under tremendous stress and generally had no experience handling such tense high-stakes negotiations. They were certainly not in a position to strike the best deal. This would mean greater hardship for the victim and a bigger payout for the insurance companies.
In the mid-1970s, Julian Radcliffe, an insurance broker with Hogg Robinson, came up with an idea that would revolutionize the industry. Milne describes Radcliffe as “a very clever man, a very creative man, a bit of a genius, actually.” Radcliffe and several colleagues convinced Hogg Robinson to set up a subsidiary focused on hostage response. They called it Control Risks. Control Risks would hire security experts to handle negotiations. These would be people with expertise, mostly former military and police. The cost of hiring the consultant was included in the policy and borne by the insurance company. In 1982, Control Risks became an independent company.
This was the product that Milne was peddling back in the late 1970s when he began to explore the world for new opportunities. At the time, the threat of kidnapping was declining in Europe as the radical, leftist groups that had used the tactic either faded away or were busted up. The market was fairly small and specialized, but included wealthy families in Spain’s Basque region. Some of them had investments in Latin America and wanted to know if their policies would cover them if they were kidnapped in the region (the answer was yes). By the early 1980s, hostage-taking was exploding in Latin America, particularly in Colombia. Surely, there would be wealthy families interested in purchasing insurance.
When Milne arrived in Colombia, kidnappings were being carried out by common criminals, drug cartels, and leftist guerrillas, including the National Army of Liberation (ELN), and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). Both groups espoused a Marxist ideology but had different origins, grievances, and zones of operations. One area of agreement was that kidnapping was a legitimate tactic of war. Ransom was a reallocation of Colombia’s highly skewed wealth, and hostages could also be held to extract political concessions. The vast majority of the thousands of kidnapping victims were Colombians, but wealthy foreigners were also targets. In the late 1990s, FARC instituted a practice that became known as the pesca milagrosa, a reference to Jesus’s Miracle of the Fishes, but also the name of a popular children’s game in Colombia. The guerrillas would set up roadblocks, checking the identification of everyone they stopped against a list of targets. Those on it were immediately detained.
Milne soon discovered a vast, untapped market. As an insurance broker, he sold a variety of policies offered by different companies available through Lloyd’s of London. The job of the broker is to serve the client and to advocate for their interests in the event of a claim. The underwriters represent the insurance companies. Specialized, high-risk policies were placed on the Lloyds insurance exchange, and Milne would field offers from different underwriters. He would select the policy that best suited his client.
Milne’s parents were in the oil business and he grew up in the Middle East. He attended boarding school in Scotland, and only got into the insurance business after “failing as an artist.” He combines British reserve with an easy laugh. He dresses in tailored suits with a perfectly positioned pocket square. He enjoys a good stiff drink, sometimes two. To his South American clients, he was as quintessentially British as James Bond. “When I went to Colombia everyone wanted to see me,” Milne recalled. “I started with a few contacts, but it grew like topsy. All their friends at the golf club wanted to meet. We got enough business to recruit a team in London. We started specializing. It suddenly became a viable business.”
Milne rented a house in downtown Bogotá, which he made a base for his travels throughout Latin America, from Guatemala to Brazil. By the time he wrapped up his stint in Latin America ten years later, he had sold hundreds of new policies, recruited a specialized team in London focusing on the Latin America market, and developed a new service to provide risk mitigation. Insurance companies and their clients both have an interest in reducing the likelihood of a kidnapping. So Milne came up with a new “preventative training” program that educated clients on risk avoidance and crisis response. He then convinced insurance companies that they should foot the bill. Today, Milne’s company, Special Contingency Risks, is a subsidiary of Miller insurance brokers, which in turn is part of Willis Towers Watson. The SCR crisis center is located in a farmhouse outside London.
The K & R insurance business has grown up as well. Today two insurers—Hiscox in the UK and AIG in the U.S.—dominate the market. About a half dozen additional companies that issue K & R policies are listed on the Lloyds exchange in London. There are also many security firms that specialize in kidnap response, from large corporate entities like GardaWorld and Kroll, to small, boutique concerns, including one-person operations, scattered throughout Europe and the United States.
Hostage negotiation has become something of an industry, with conferences, conventions, and shared strategies. In general, the negotiators operate in the background, and try to convince the kidnappers that the family or the business has limited resources. Ransoms paid to criminal groups are generally between 5 and 10 percent of the initial ask. More than 97 percent of kidnappings handled by professional negotiators are successfully resolved through the payment of ransom, according to several different security consultants with access to internal industry data. A small percentage of hostages escape and a very few are rescued through high-risk operations. Less than 1 percent are killed. More than 75 percent of Fortune 500 companies have K & R insurance policies and the overall market is between $250 and $300 million a year.
International hostage negotiation is high stakes, but the industry’s professionals shun drama and manage each situation like a business transaction. They have refined the process to the point that negotiators can now predict with a good degree of accuracy how long a case will take to resolve and how much ransom will be paid based on the location of the incident and the nationality of the victim. Often, the haggling over the amount of the ransom is typical of a commercial transaction, except that lives are on the line. Some critics argue that this tendency to look for monetary settlements fuels global kidnapping. Others simply find it unseemly that the companies, which charge hefty fees for their services, are making a comfortable profit off of human suffering,
Milne prides himself on the personal touch he provides to his clients, including serving as the initial contact when kidnapping occurs. He also makes it a point to monitor the work of the negotiators, and to urge clients to replace those who in his view are not up to snuff. The security consultants, with backgrounds in the military or law enforcement, are a gruff bunch who don’t always appreciate having someone looking over their shoulder. While Milne is a leading figure in the K & R world, there are many others. Some grumble that in an industry that values discretion, Milne is a bit of a self-promoter. But no one denies his success. While Milne has faced some difficult moments—one of his clients in Colombia was cut into tiny pieces for daring to report his kidnapping to the police—the vast majority of the approximately eighty cases Milne handles each year “go to plan,” meaning the hostages are released. “If kidnappers are not making it on the money front, they will start making political demands, or sell their hostages to terrorists,” Milne argued. “It’s much better to resolve them as commercial cases.”
London is the global center for K & R insurance. It’s also the base for many of the world’s leading security firms. But it has not always been a comfortable fit. This is because the UK has been a leader of the no concessions camp. Margaret Thatcher, who became Prime Minister in 1979, talked a tough game, repeatedly emphasizing that Britain does not negotiate with terrorists, pay ransom, or make concessions. She was not happy that London had become the center of a global industry that did just that.
In April 1986, Jennifer Guinness, the wife of banker and member of the Guinness brewing family John Guinness, was kidnapped by the Provisional IRA, which demanded a ransom of $2.6 million. She was rescued in a police raid only eight days after being abducted. But the fact that a K & R policy had been triggered and the security firm Control Risks brought on to negotiate a possible ransom fueled outrage. “Private security firms such as the ones called in on the Guinness kidnapping are operating at the very frontiers of official tolerance,” a top police official announced.
The Thatcher government charged that the insurance industry was fueling a global kidnapping epidemic, facilitating the payment of ransom, and undermining the British no concessions policy. In 1986, the issue was debated in Parliament, which passed a motion expressing concern. There was even talk of working through European institutions to impose a ban on K & R insurance throughout the European Union.
Recognizing that its very existence was under threat, the security industry rallied. “There was a study done that argued the case that if you were insured you were actually less likely to be kidnapped,” Milne recalled. “The more aware of the risk, the more you do to avoid being a target.” The industry claimed that since the policies were kept secret, it was clear that people were not being kidnapped because they had insurance. Rather, they were being taken hostage because they had resources. Banning insurance would not change the dynamic. Since the policies only provided reimbursement and were always written for amounts less than the net worth of the policyholder, the industry also argued that insurance did not drive up the amount of payment. What’s more, security consultants who handled the negotiations often came from law enforcement backgrounds and cooperated with authorities to bring the perpetrators to justice. And they pointed out that the availability of K & R insurance helped international businesses to manage risk, which in turn allowed companies—including British and European companies—to operate in dangerous environments while exercising appropriate “duty of care” toward their employees.
The public debate helped the insurance industry to refine its arguments and lobbying skills, which would serve it well throughout the next decade. While the British and European debate eventually wound down without new legislation or regulatory measures being put in place, individual countries in Europe and throughout the world continued to wrestle with how best to respond to the crime of kidnapping. Italy, for example, passed a law in 1991 that banned the payment of ransom and the sale of K & R insurance. It froze the assets of the victim’s family and made it illegal to provide assistance, meaning professional negotiators could be criminally prosecuted. Italians, who continued to be victimized, simply stopped reporting the crimes to the authorities. Victims would arrange to pay the ransom outside the country, for example in neighboring Switzerland. Meanwhile, Colombia banned ransom payments, then unbanned them, then banned them again. Reports of massive payments, like the more than $20 million ransom allegedly paid to win the freedom of Mexican banker Alfredo Harp Helú in 1994, fueled public debate. Through it all, the K & R industry not only survived but thrived. By 2000, more than 60 percent of Fortune 500 companies carried K & R insurance for corporate employees.
Then came September 11, 2001.
The terror attacks, and the wave of high profile kidnappings carried out by Al Qaeda-aligned groups, spawned a coordinated, global effort to deprive terror groups of financing. Since kidnapping for ransom was one source of revenue, this changed the terms of the debate. Rather than challenging the K & R industry as a whole, governments sought to draw a clearer distinction between criminal groups, to whom ransom could legally be paid, and terror groups, to whom it could not. The U.S. and UK governments both maintained lists of Foreign Terrorist Organizations who could not receive ransom payments. In industry parlance, these groups were designated as “proscribed.”
When applied to real-life kidnappings, the attempt to draw distinctions between criminal and terrorist organizations created tremendous complexities that were difficult to manage. It was clear that K & R policies could not reimburse policyholders who paid a ransom to a terrorist group. But could security consultants legally assist families or businesses who sought to make such a payment? Could they handle negotiations and help to deliver the money? Could they help families to raise and assemble the funds? And what about the families themselves? Would they be held legally liable for paying ransom to terrorists? “It’s all a gray area,” Milne acknowledged.
Further complicating the process is the fact that kidnappers often try to hide their identity. Hostage negotiators told me that some terror groups pretend to be criminal organizations so they can collect ransoms. The opposite also occurs. Criminal groups who are ignorant of the legal prohibitions sometimes pretend to be terror organizations in the hopes that the fearsome reputation of these groups will push negotiations along. Under the law, the onus is on the insurance company to demonstrate that kidnappers are “proscribed” in order to invalidate the policy. Negotiators working for the victim’s family would sometimes refrain from asking obvious questions about the group holding the hostage. They simply preferred not to know.
Meanwhile, determinations about which groups were put on government lists of terrorist groups were often politically determined and sometimes arbitrary. For example, Mexican drug cartels were considered criminal. It was perfectly legal to pay them ransom even though they functioned more like terror organizations. The cartels engaged in wholesale violence, filming murders and posting them to YouTube with the objective of sowing terror and threatening regional and global stability through their criminal and trafficking networks.
A 2011 case, Masefield AG vs. Amlin Corporate Member, determined that the payment of ransom to Somali pirates was legal under British law. As a result, Somali pirates were presumed to be criminals rather than terrorists, even when ties to the Al Shabaab militants were alleged. Meanwhile, it was illegal to pay ransom to a criminally oriented kidnapping cell in Nigeria if they were seen to have ties to proscribed groups like Boko Haram.
Milne, who began his career insuring wealthy Colombian clients against kidnapping by leftist guerrillas, admits that once FARC was added to the proscribed list in 1997, his clients were “out of luck.” Since criminals sometimes carried out kidnappings and then sold hostages to terror groups, paying ransom could be legal one day and illegal the next. In the age of terror, the intersection of disparate national policies and the insurance market creates inequalities and complexities that determine who lives and who dies in international kidnapping cases.
In my research, I’ve found there are essentially three variables. Does the hostage have kidnapping and ransom insurance? Was he or she kidnapped by a criminal group? Is the victim a national of a country that pays ransom? Those with the best chance of survival can answer “yes” to all three questions. Those who answer “no” to one or more have few good options. They can either wait for a rescue, try to escape, or hope their family can find a way to deliver a ransom despite the legal prohibitions.
Kristen Mulvihill confronted this bleak landscape after her husband, New York Times reporter David Rohde, was kidnapped in Afghanistan in November 2008, along with an Afghan assistant, Tahir Luddin, and their driver. The three were smuggled across the border into Pakistan, where they were held by the Haqqani network, a militant group with links to both Al Qaeda and Pakistan’s intelligence service, known as the ISI. Mulvihill had access to security consultants, the full support of the Times, and regular contact with senior U.S. officials.
Despite this, the negotiations were a welter of confusion with multiple channels of communication; cascading demands from the kidnappers involving both money and the release of Taliban prisoners; two teams of security consultants; and multiple U.S. government agencies involved, from the FBI to the State Department. Mulvihill obviously recognized the Haqqani network was doing “bad things” and did not want to be accused of funding terrorism. But she was still prepared to negotiate. The FBI made clear that the government had never prosecuted a family for paying ransom and that she would not face legal jeopardy for doing so. “I was told that early on and throughout,” Mulvihill recalled.
Soon after her husband was kidnapped, Mulvihill enlisted the support of Richard Holbrooke, the legendary U.S. diplomat who had helped secure Rohde’s release after he was taken hostage by a pro-Serbian militia while reporting in Bosnia in 1995. In his new role as President Obama’s Special Envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, Holbrooke had taken a personal interest in Rohde’s case and had raised concerns with Pakistani intelligence officials. Holbrooke’s efforts didn’t win Rohde’s freedom. But the ISI, at least in Mulvihill’s view, was able to use its influence with the Haqqani network to ensure better treatment for Rohde. In March, 2009, Holbrooke called Mulvihill to let her know he had done all he could. “We can’t do a raid,” she remembered him saying. “The diplomatic approach isn’t working. If it were me—I’m telling you as a private citizen—one million, two million, what does it matter? It’s a human life.”
Mulvihill was furious because she saw Holbrooke as signaling the limits of U.S. involvement, effectively letting her know that if she prepared to pay ransom she would be on her own. The advice was also unhelpful to the extent that no serious ransom negotiations were underway. Later, she came to appreciate Holbrooke’s honesty.
In kidnapping cases, time can be your enemy or your friend. In Rohde’s case, it worked to his advantage. Over the months of his captivity, Rohde had been able to build enough trust with his captors to move freely around the compound where he was being held. Slowly, he developed an escape plan. He found a rope, which he stashed outside a bathroom ledge, and one night he and Tahir Luddin snuck past sleeping guards and used the rope to lower themselves off a twenty-foot-high wall. They hobbled down a dry riverbed to reach a Pakistani military base. After some tense negotiations with frightened guards, they were eventually allowed to enter. Rohde called his family from a borrowed cell phone to let them know he was free.
A year earlier, Canadian journalist Amanda Lindhout had been kidnapped in Somalia, along with an Australian colleague, Nigel Brennan. As young freelancers, they did not have insurance. Officially, neither Canada nor Australia pay ransom. Driven by desperation, their families found a way forward.
The one factor in their favor was that the group that kidnapped the two journalists was a criminal and not a terror organization. They justified their actions in religious terms, but they also acknowledged to their hostages that they were after money. Because they were not “terrorists,” the Canadian government entered into negotiations, offering to build a school or provide development aid in exchange for Lindhout’s release. But the kidnappers wanted cash. They tortured Lindhout to put more pressure on her family, which had few resources. Realizing the negotiations were going nowhere, Lindhout’s mother, Lorinda Stewart, decided the only hope was to pay a ransom. Canadian officials had warned Stewart that paying ransom was against the law and that she could be prosecuted for doing so. But Stewart forged ahead.
Once Stewart made the decision, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, which had been handling the case, withdrew all support. The hostage negotiating team that had been camped in her living room moved out. Stewart, working with the Brennan family in Australia, eventually raised enough money to hire a security consultant from London-based firm AKE to take over the negotiations. The consultant advised the Lindhout and Brennan families that negotiations would take several months and that they would have to pay a ransom of around $600,000 each. His prediction was spot on. Lindhout and Brennan were freed in November 2009. Their families ended up in massive debt.
A number of U.S. and British hostages have also been rescued. On January 25, 2012, President Obama entered Congress to deliver his State of the Union speech. Cameras caught him telling Defense Secretary Leon Panetta “good job tonight” and giving him a vigorous pat on the back. Although it had not yet been announced, earlier that evening, Navy Seals had dropped into Somalia and rescued kidnapped U.S. aid worker Jessica Buchanan and her Danish colleague Poul Thisted, shooting dead nine of their kidnappers. Buchanan and Thisted had been abducted the previous October. Officials had decided to launch a rescue because Buchanan had developed a kidney infection, and they believed her life was in danger. Negotiations, which were being carried out by a security consultant and monitored by the FBI, were not progressing fast enough. The kidnappers had initially demanded $10 million, and had recently rejected a $1 million offer. Most importantly, the U.S. had good intelligence on the hostages’ location and ideal weather conditions for a successful rescue.
The Buchanan rescue effort was emotionally satisfying. But rescuing hostages through military force is not a scalable solution to international hostage-taking. First, only a handful of countries have the military ability to pull off such a raid. The deterrent value of rescue attempts is also difficult to judge or quantify. Less than a week before the Buchanan raid, freelance journalist Michael Scott Moore was nabbed while reporting on Somali pirates. “The Buchanan raid happened right after Michael was picked up and the pirates were furious about it,” recalled a source close to the case. “We thought the reason the initial ransom demand was so high was because the kidnappers had just been burned by the U.S. That may have accounted for Michael being held for such a long time. They were going to extract something out of us to not only compensate for the loss of money on Buchanan but also the fact that people were killed.” Moore, a dual American and German citizen, was released after 977 days in captivity.
Military rescues are also extremely risky. According to industry data, either a hostage or a rescuer is killed in half of all rescue operations. One tragic example was the 2009 raid carried out by British Special Forces in Afghanistan that freed kidnapped New York Times reporter Steve Farrell, but led to the death of a British soldier along with two Afghan civilians, a woman and a child. Farrell’s Afghan colleague, journalist Sultan Munadi, was also killed in the raid, and may have been shot accidentally by the British forces. These deaths were all the more tragic because private negotiators who were communicating with the kidnappers already had a deal for both hostages’ release. It was not clear that the British government was ever aware.
A dramatic case that tested the resolve of the British authorities came in September of 2011, when a British couple, Judith (“Jude”) and David Tebbutt, was attacked by Somali pirates while vacationing in Kenya. Their son Ollie, a twenty-five-year-old furniture designer, was at a job site in Glasgow when a colleague came to tell him that the police wanted to see him. “Because my parents were on holiday, I assumed something bad had happened, like maybe a car crash,” Tebbutt recalled. After a weeklong safari, his parents had booked a stay in a secluded resort called the Kiwayu Safari Village on the Kenyan coast. Overnight, Somali kidnappers had raided the property and abducted his mother. His father David was killed trying to resist.
For weeks after being given the news, Ollie was in close contact with the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office, or FCO. He was also visited by representatives from the SO15, the counterterrorism command of the British Metropolitan Police, who were investigating the possible involvement of members of the Al Shabaab militant group in the abduction.
Eventually, Ollie was able to arrange a proof-of-life telephone call with his mother during which he had to break the tragic news that her husband (and his father) had been murdered. The kidnappers wanted huge money—around $10 million.
While his parents had a taste for adventure, they were also careful and meticulous. Ollie discovered that tucked into a travel insurance policy obtained through his father’s work was a clause that provided kidnapping and ransom insurance. “It was incredibly lucky, really,” Ollie acknowledged.
Through the policy, two security consultants from Control Risks were assigned to the case. “That’s when the government said ‘you have to make a choice,’” Ollie recalled. “‘It’s either us or them.’” He found the security consultants to be sober professionals. They explained how the negotiations would work, and that the sole focus would be on getting his mother back alive. “They were very much like, we do this every day, and this is expected in this part of the world, and this is our pattern for what a Somali kidnap looks like,” he said.
Meanwhile, the government representatives explained that the British government did not pay ransom, and could not countenance any arrangement that put money in the hands of terrorists. This was a problem. While the identity of the kidnappers was murky, the line between Al Shabaab militants, pirates, and criminals in Somalia was a fluid one. The best British officials could offer the family was to essentially walk away—to put what they called “clear water” between the government and any negotiations. Their rather charitable interpretation was that since the kidnappers were demanding money they had to be criminals.
As an only child, Ollie was the family’s point person in the negotiations. He moved into his parents’ home and over the next six months negotiations were carried out around the kitchen table. They were surprisingly orderly. Following each phone call, the kidnappers would make an appointment for a follow up conversation. Generally, they kept their appointments. A Control Risks security consultant would brief him on what to say, and sit by his side. A representative from the Metropolitan Police monitored the discussions, but did not participate and did not interfere.
The Tebbutts were a comfortable middle-class family, but did not have millions of dollars. Ollie found the kidnappers had a pretty good sense of the value of their hostage, and over the next few months, under the guidance of the Control Risks negotiator, their demands steadily dropped. They finally agreed to accept a ransom of around £600,000. The only way Ollie was able to come up with that sum was to use the death benefits he received following his father’s murder.
Ollie and the negotiator traveled to Nairobi for the final arrangements in March 2012. Control Risks contracted a pilot to drop the money, but there were some tense moments when the authorities that controlled the local airstrip outside the town of Adabo demanded a larger cut. Once that was worked out, and the kidnappers indicated they were prepared to release their hostage, things changed. “At that point, the security consultant drove me to a crossroads in Nairobi,” he recalled. “On one side there was a jeep with the British Foreign Office guys in it and I just crossed the road and got in their car. That was the last time I saw anyone from Control Risks.”
From that point on, the British government was back in the game. British officials traveled to the Nairobi airport to collect Jude, and then took her to the British High Commission, where she was reunited with her son. Jude spent several days being cared for before she returned home. Eventually, the full amount of the £600,000 ransom that Ollie had paid was reimbursed under the terms of the K & R policy.
On the one hand, Ollie is grateful that the British government stepped aside and allowed him to pay a ransom despite the fact that his mother’s kidnappers may have been linked to Al Shabaab. (A British researcher told me that he visited the FCO office to discuss the case while Jude was being held, and was told the government was not interested in hearing any information about the terrorist ties of the kidnappers.) On the other hand, his experience caused him to focus on what he sees as the hypocrisy and heartlessness of the government’s position. In order to apply pressure, Jude’s kidnappers were depriving her of food, slowly starving her to death. If negotiations had dragged on a few more months, “she would have died for sure,” Ollie believes.
Ollie is soft-spoken and understated. His voice does not rise, and there is no anger. But he is confused. “The government, their policy is so crazy,” he told me. “It makes absolutely no sense. I don’t believe for a second that the kidnappers are checking passports or trying to figure out who is from where. They just grab whoever they can. I don’t think the British policy protects people in a way that they claim it does, but they are so entrenched in this idea. The idea that they get to choose who’s a terrorist group is based on pretty flimsy reasons sometimes. Whereas at the same time, governments sell weapons or trade with regimes that are incredibly bad.” The logic of the no concessions policy, he believes, is that a certain number of hostages must die in order for the government to show its resolve. If the British government had designated Jude Tebbutt’s kidnappers as terrorists, he says, “my Mum would not have come home.”
Not everyone who has worked with security consultants has had a positive experience. The most common complaint I heard is that since the consultants are generally made available through the K & R policy the clients have little choice and little recourse if they are assigned someone without local knowledge and experience. Security companies are also businesses. Sometimes they promise more than they deliver. They also charge a lot for their services, so much that average families who don’t have insurance generally can’t afford them. This also creates resentment.
I interviewed about a dozen hostage negotiators from around the world for this book, and they all told me that they prefer to work closely with law enforcement, so long as the client agrees, which happens in the vast majority of cases. Their first priority is the safety of the hostage, but they also want to see justice done. They also recognize that negotiations can yield intelligence that is useful for ongoing operations and to prevent future crimes. “I do not like the idea of having to give money to criminals,” one negotiator acknowledged to me. “That is not something that pleases me at all.”
Governments tend to keep security consultants at arm’s length. Partly this is a question of creating deniability in sensitive cases, but can also reflect a lack of trust. “The FBI has an institutional culture that emphasizes discretion,” a former agent told me. “They are not good at sharing. It makes it frustrating for the families.”
Security consultants and private negotiators fill a critical role in hostage recovery, and have an undeniable record of success in criminal cases. They tend to have a lot of experience, and they can provide more intensive support and flexibility for families and businesses undergoing a crisis. They can also front for the family, and do some things that governments can’t, such as credibly claim limited resources as a strategy to get the price down. Governments, of course, can’t plead poverty. It was only when the Canadian government stepped aside, and the families of Amanda Lindhout and Nigel Brennan brought in a private negotiator, that their case was resolved. Even the French government is beginning to see the advantages, and has instituted a process for licensing private negotiators.
The whole system, as imperfect as it is, breaks down in terrorism-related cases. If the victim is from a no concessions country, security consultants can offer only limited support. If the victim is from a country that negotiates, the private security consultant is generally asked to step aside while national intelligence agencies take over. While the security consultants are pleased to see their clients come home, they are not happy about the massive payouts.
“The market is now too inflated,” said one experienced security consultant. “Governments have deep pockets and are basically unable to do what a traditional K & R consultant would do, which is to put up resistance, to claim an inability to pay, to bargain, to try and disincentivize the crime.”
While such arguments may seem self-serving, they are borne out in my own research. David Rohde tried to argue with his captors, who were demanding $25 million and the release of fifteen prisoners. He told them they were out of touch. They countered that the French had recently paid $38 million for the release of an aid worker, and that an Italian journalist had been ransomed for $15 million and the release of several prisoners. Quickly capitulating to high ransom demands—as some European and Asian governments have done—makes kidnapping more attractive and lucrative around the world. While governments might make a distinction between proscribed and criminal groups, kidnappers don’t. And so the markets are inextricably linked. If a European government pays millions of dollars in ransom to release a hostage held by a terrorist group, then a criminal group that kidnaps a hapless tourist will expect a similar payout from a family of modest means that may not have insurance or the help of a security consultant.
Of course the benefits that security consultants provide—including to governments—are only available if people have access to kidnapping and ransom insurance. Governments should work with the industry to develop innovative ways to extend coverage to vulnerable groups. K & R coverage can be tucked into travel insurance policies—that was why the Tebbutts had coverage—or provided through employers whose staffs operate internationally. For high-risk groups, such as freelance journalists and volunteer aid workers in conflict zones, the challenge is more difficult. But governments can work with the industry to develop specialized products, even if these require public subsidies. Finally, the families of kidnapping victims who lack insurance should be given access to security consultants in extraordinary circumstances, such as in national security cases. This can be done by creating an industrywide pro-bono standard, whereby the security companies increase their volunteer services. It could also be done through some sort of government pool that needy families can access if certain standards are met.
For Doug Milne, who after all is in the business of selling such insurance, a fundamental impediment to extending coverage to high-risk groups is the no concessions framework, which compels insurers to make distinctions between criminal and terrorism cases. In this regard, he believes that the British government’s policy is shortsighted. “I strip away the corporate and government stuff and bring it back to the individual,” Milne told me. “The right to life is a fundamental human right and if you take away the ability to make concessions you are essentially condemning the person to die. By refusing to allow concessions you drive the negotiations underground so the intelligence you might otherwise get following the case disappears. The families feel they could potentially be prosecuted. And the government becomes the enemy.”