CHAPTER 7
CREATE THE ILLUSION OF CONTROL
A month after I’d finished working the case of Jeffrey Schilling in May 2001, I got orders from headquarters to head back to Manila.
The same bad guys who’d taken Schilling, a brutal group of radical Islamists named the Abu Sayyaf, had raided the Dos Palmas private diving resort and taken twenty hostages, including three Americans: Martin and Gracia Burnham, a missionary couple from Wichita, Kansas; and Guillermo Sobero, a guy who ran a California waterproofing firm.
Dos Palmas was a negotiator’s nightmare from the start. The day after the kidnappings, the recently elected Philippine president, Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, set up the most confrontational, nonconstructive dynamic possible by publicly declaring “all-out war” on the Abu Sayyaf.
Not exactly empathetic discourse, right?
It got a lot worse.
The Philippine army and marines had a turf war in the midst of the negotiations, pissing off the kidnappers with several botched raids. Because American hostages were involved, the CIA, the FBI, and U.S. military intelligence were all called in and we too squabbled among ourselves. Then the kidnappers raped and killed several hostages, 9/11 happened, and the Abu Sayyaf was linked to Al Qaeda.
By the time the crisis concluded in an orgy of gunshots in June 2002, Dos Palmas had officially become the biggest failure in my professional life. To call it a train wreck would be generous, if you know what I mean.
But failures plant the seeds of future success, and our failure in the Philippines was no exception.