Stalling for Time by Gary Noesner Read Free Book Online

we were pretty certain could help us locate the robber. Practically before he had sat down, the agent was accusing him of lying and covering for his friend. I felt my frustration rise as the witness clammed up—I was certain I could have gotten what we needed from him with a more subtle approach.
    Carol and I enjoyed our two years in South Carolina and even bought our first house there, but “first office” agents get transferred, and in1978, the FBI summoned me back to the Washington Field Office and assigned me to the Foreign Counterintelligence Squad. It was great to return as an agent, though I made sure to treat the clerks with the respect that they deserved. I began my new Washington life as an agent developing evidence in espionage cases, while also working contacts to recruit defectors from hostile nations as counterspies for us. But the previous years had seen the challenges facing the FBI evolve. A series of crises would awaken it to the threat of international terrorism and to the need for a more rigorous approach toward handling major incidents. Both of these things would become the focus of my work in the years to come.
    During the Munich Olympics in the summer of 1972, eight members of the Palestinian Black September terrorist organization seized and ultimately killed eleven Israeli athletes. Despite the tensions rising in the Middle East since the 1967 Six-Day War between Egypt and Israel—and the fact that at least one West German forensic psychologist had predicted this hostage event almost exactly as it played out—there was no armed security for the Munich games, no checkpoints. When the hostage taking began, there was no federal authority in place to deal with it, which left local and regional police to make do as best they could. They had no radios, woefully inadequate firepower, and too few snipers to be effective, and they relied on flawed tactics that put police forces in danger from their own cross fire. Once the action began, decision making was mostly ad hoc and cumbersome, with one tactician sharing responsibility with two politicians. For many law enforcement officials, the Munich siege of 1972 was a wake-up call. Before that time, when subjects took hostages, responding police would simply demand that the perpetrator come out and surrender. If the hostage taker refused, the police would then mount an assault. Sadly, that rigid and inflexible approach often resulted in loss of life. Even when it did not, the outcomes depended more on luck than on the application of a well-established set of procedures. In New York City, just one week before the events in Munich, police had bumbled through the botched bank robbery and hostage taking that was later depicted in the Al Pacino film
Dog Day Afternoon
. The actual fourteen-hour siege became a spectacle on live television, and it drew a crowd of three thousand people to thestreet corner in Brooklyn where the bank was located. Fortunately, the hostages were eventually rescued, and loss of life was limited to one of the perpetrators. But to all observers, it was clear that the NYPD and assisting FBI lacked an effective response. A more egregious example of the state of police crisis procedures (demand compliance, go in if your demand is refused) had been the Attica prison riot, also in New York State, which had taken place only one year earlier. When negotiations failed to bring results, the State Police moved in with tear gas and shotguns, the net result of which was the death of ten inmates and twenty-eight correctional officers. A Special Commission of the State of New York later described it as “the bloodiest one-day encounter between Americans since the Civil War,” excepting perhaps the Indian massacres of the late nineteenth century.
    The New York police would lead the way as law enforcement sought to respond to these kinds of crises. Shortly after the Munich and
Dog Day Afternoon
events, New York police commissioner Patrick Murphy established