Hostage Nation by Victoria Bruce

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 officialexplanation 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