On Dangerous Ground
World-class protective specialists understand the dynamics of ambush situations. Leo VI, the Byzantine emperor also referred to as “Leo the Wise”, composed The Taktika (Tactics) around AD 900, in which he instructed, “When the enemy sees you making a habit of [manoeuvres], he will inevitably take the opportunity of setting a trap, into which you will fall. A single pattern of behaviour soon becomes known; he who varies his practice will embarrass his opponent and keep him in a permanent state of uncertainty.”
In 1995, Macedonian President Kiro Gligorov was killed when a remote-controlled car bomb exploded as his armoured Mercedes drove by, ripping it apart. Besides Gligorov, his driver, his bodyguard and three pedestrians perished in the blast. His route to the office was well known and his car often slowed at the location of the bomb. In a way, the terrorists did not pick Gligorov’s kill zone, he did!
Gary Stubblefield and Mark Monday advise: “the most dangerous area for the executive is the 200 yards around his home or office.” In 1987, following the assassination of George Besse, president of the Renault car company, French police conducted an intensive investigation to capture the Direct Action terrorists who were responsible. They raided a farmhouse and discovered over sixty video tapes of Besse and other prominent French businesspeople. All the tapes showed the executives going about their daily routines around two locations: their home and their office. The terrorists were clearly looking at a group of potential targets and narrowed down the list to Besse as being the most appropriate to their cause, the most accessible and the most predictable.
Ambushes need not be elaborate or complicated to set up. In 1998, two boys of ages eleven and thirteen – dressed in camouflage and armed with rifles and pistols – waited in the bushes outside their school in Jonesboro, Arkansas, while a friend pulled a fire alarm in the school. When their fellow classmates were evacuated into the planned kill zone, they opened fire, killing four of them and one teacher, and wounding ten others.
One of the best examples of ambush tactics is the 1978 Red Brigade kidnapping of Aldo Moro, a high-profile Italian politician and former prime minister. He was considered to be a candidate for the presidency. Like many public figures, Moro was either careless or naive about his safety. He travelled the same route to the parliament each day in an un-armoured vehicle and his driver had no special training in counter-ambush techniques. Moro’s chief bodyguard had served him for more than a dozen years but lacked any specific training in executive protection and served more as an aide. An un-armoured follow-up car containing three bodyguards escorted Moro’s limo.
Shortly after 9 a.m., after stopping at a nearby church for communion, Moro was en route to the parliament in his dark blue Fiat 130, accompanied by his bodyguard and chauffeur. His three security guards followed in a white Alfa Romeo. He had established an easy-to-follow pattern by going to the same church every morning at the same time. As the cars approached an intersection, a car bearing diplomatic licence plates pulled ahead of theFiat and stopped suddenly in the intersection. Moro’s chauffeur applied his brakes so abruptly that the follow-up car hit Moro’s car in the rear.
The driver and passenger from the blocking car got out as if to check for damage. Approaching Moro’s car from both sides, they pulled out pistols and shot the driver and bodyguard, killing them instantly. Prior to this, four men dressed in Alitalia airline uniforms had been standing at the intersection as though waiting for a bus. As the action commenced, they walked to the follow-up car, pulled automatic weapons out of their flight bags and opened fire, killing two of the three officers immediately. The third officer rolled out of the car and fired three shots at his attackers before he was neutralized by a fatal shot from a sniper on a nearby rooftop. The bodyguards in the follow-up car had an automatic weapon, but it was kept in the trunk. The revolver carried by Moro’s chief bodyguard was rusted shut from lack of maintenance.
The Red Brigade terrorist team consisted of eleven men and one woman, and utilized five vehicles and a motorcycle. The use of the rooftop sniper was a brilliant idea that enabled the terrorists to control the kill zone. The terrorists transferred Moro, along with a briefcase containing official documents and a briefcase containing medications, to another blue Fiat. His kidnapping took approximately forty-five seconds! When it no longer served their purpose to hold him hostage, the terrorists killed him and left his body in the trunk of a stolen car.
The Red Brigade had originally planned to kidnap the First Secretary of the Italian Communist Party, Enrico Berlinguer. However, their intelligence revealed that he regularly used an armoured vehicle and was accompanied by bodyguards in two armoured escort cars, and that his bodyguards were highly trained in counter-terrorist techniques and used different routes each day. The terrorists changed their plans and chose a softer target in Moro. Even though they were involved in a high-risk activity, they succeeded because they were able to surprise Moro’s detail, because the detail members failed to take action once the ambush was launched, and because the terrorists had accurately predicted Moro’s movements.
There is a warped form of math that I call the “1 + 1 = 3” Syndrome. In this twisted form of logic, the thinking goes that as nothing happened the first day of the assignment, and nothing happened the second day, nothing will happen the third day. Moro and his detail fell into the velvet-lined coffin of complacency and believed “it can’t happen to me.” Like many of their deceased colleagues, they fell victim to the “1 + 1 = 3” Syndrome, and it was an equation for their demise.
Lying in Wait
“Terrorism is easy to carry out if you work at it,” observed Lawrence Snowden, a former Marine commander who helped investigate a 1983 series of bombings in Beirut which killed nearly 300 Americans.
We can take measures to limit access by some people, but a real clever terrorist will study a long time before they do something. They learn traffic patterns in and out. They learn everything they need to know to carry it out. As long as we have those kind of people, it’s very difficult to totally guard against and to prevent the loss of life.
“Don’t have days when you are careless,” states the seventeenth-century author Baltasar Gracián, explaining how the ambusher explores the weaknesses of the security team. “Sometimes luck likes to play a practical joke, and it will seize any opportunity to catch you off guard. Intelligence, prudence, courage, and even wisdom have to be ready for the test.” He concludes:
The day they [security] feel most confident will be the day they are most discredited. Caution is always most lacking when it is most needed. Those who observe us carefully use this stratagem, catching our perfections off guard as they scrutinize and take stock of us. They know the days on which we display our gifts; on those days cunning pays no heed. They choose the day we least expect to put us to the test. Know your unlucky days, for they exist … Don’t risk your reputation on one roll of the dice … You aren’t always at your best, and not every day is yours. So let there be a second attempt to make up for the first.
In 1986, Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme dismissed his security officers for the evening and took his wife to a movie. Afterwards, while walking home, he was shot in the back and killed, and his wife was wounded. Surveillance on Palme had prompted the gunman to carry out the attack in the evening, when his security team was not present. The Swedish secret police had asked Palme to beef-up his security in 1982, but he scoffed at their suggestion. Palme should have heeded the warning of Vegetius, who wrote that “of all the precautions the most important is to keep entirely secret which way or by what route the army is to march. For the security of the expedition depends on the concealment of all motions from the enemy … On finding the enemy has notice of your designs, you must immediately alter your plan of operations.”
The public figure attacker’s most important tool is not his knife or gun, but the element of surprise. To the world-class protective specialist, surprises are never welcome outside the context of birthday
parties. Since the assassin chooses the time and place of the attack, he enjoys a psychological advantage, being the only one who knows the plan. An eighteenth-century French work on guerrilla warfare stated, “The right way to fight advantageously against regular troops is the ambush. The man who lies in wait for his enemy is doubly strong, especially when he has an assured line of retreat.”
In The Art of War, Sun Tzu placed great emphasis on the use of surprise: “Attack him where he is unprepared, appear where you are not expected … He will win who, prepared himself, waits to take the enemy unprepared … Rapidity is the essence of war; take advantage of the enemy’s unreadiness, make your way by unexpected routes, and attack unguarded spots. If the enemy leaves the door open, you must rush in.” General Waldemar Erfurth wrote an authoritative manuscript prior to the Second World War on the importance of surprise: “Luck and art must combine to catch the enemy by surprise. In war, the unexpected is the most successful. Thus, surprise is the key to victory.” He added:
War should erupt suddenly, as a thunderstorm develops in the mountains or as an earthquake occurs, not preceded by warning signals … Surprise does not depend upon lack of care or complete ignorance on the part of the enemy. To achieve surprise, it is by no means necessary that the enemy dreams or sleeps, but that one undertakes an operation which he does not expect … Without giving the opponent the slightest cause for apprehension beforehand, the aggressor must strike with all his forces and with extreme violence at a previously determined day and at a pre-arranged hour. The mortal blow must be struck before the enemy even knows that war is on.
Carl von Clausewitz, who wrote On War in the early nineteenth century, noted that “the backbone of surprise is fusing speed with secrecy.”
If the security force is properly trained, as soon as the attack is launched a barrier will pop up, blocking it, and the protectee will be simultaneously whisked away to a place of safety. But in those several seconds, fate will interject herself in a cruel display of chance, guiding bullets, jamming weapons and snagging clothing. As James Shirley (1596–1666) states in his poem The Contention of Ajax and Ulysses:
The glories of our blood and state
Are shadows, not substantial things;
There is no armour against fate;
Death lays his icy hand on kings.
Murphy’s Law states that anything that can go wrong will go wrong, and Mr Murphy loves assassinations. Out of the uncertainties of public figure protection, one thing is certain: Mr Murphy is a mischievous lad and sometimes he plays on the side of the bodyguards and sometimes he chooses the assassin. As occurred in the shooting of President Reagan – where one of six bullets glanced off the armoured limo and passed between the door and car body at the same instant that Reagan did, striking him in the side – it is possible to hit the jackpot even if the odds are a million-to-one. The Russians have a proverb cautioning that Death carries a fat Czar on his shoulders as easily as a lean beggar. “Kings have long arms,” stated Benjamin Franklin, “but misfortune longer; let none think themselves out of reach.”
The Big Bang Approach
Public figures are most vulnerable when they are in or around their cars. In 1998, BMW developed a factory-produced, lightly armoured car with run-flat tyres that public figures could purchase for about $80,000. The 540i was designed to defeat the most common threats faced from small arms weapons wielded by car-jackers, kidnappers, stalkers and other criminals. But even the solid Mercedes – originally reported as being armoured – could not protect the life of Princess Diana from the devastation of a high-speed collision with a support pillar in the Alma Tunnel. Vehicle armour will allow the protectee to stay alive a few seconds longer in an ambush with small arms fire, but the person will usually not survive the blast of a wellplaced bomb of sufficient force.
Four Red Army Faction terrorists, one a woman, set up a camp in a densely wooded area overlooking an intersection on a highway outside of Heidelberg, Germany, in 1981. Their target was US General Frederick Kroesen. They remained camped out for several days, planning the attack and awaiting their opportunity. Finally, they spotted the general’s motorcade approaching the traffic lights at the intersection. A German civil police “sweep” car went by, but the officers didn’t spot the ambush. Kroesen and his wife were riding in the back of an armoured Mercedes with a German police driver. They were followed by an unmarked car carrying two US Military Police (MP) bodyguards. As the general’s car stopped at the light, the terrorists fired two RPG-7 anti-tank grenades and a burst of HK53 fire. The first grenade struck the top of the trunk and passed through, exiting the right rear side, shattering the back window and spraying the Kroesens with glass. The second grenade missed, exploding beyond the car. Four HK rounds hit the Mercedes, but didn’t penetrate the armour. Four more rounds struck the MP car, but caused no injuries. The MPs jumped out with handguns, but didn’t return fire. The general’s driver shut off the ignition as soon as the car was hit – possibly thinking he had been struck by another vehicle – but Kroesen ordered him to drive on and they escaped with only scratches. Despite the inept reaction by all of the security forces, the vehicle armour bought them enough time to react and escape. The terrorists escaped in a stolen car.
The use of explosives in terrorist attacks is becoming more and more prevalent. Although the total number of attacks has gone down in recent years, terrorists are using bigger bombs and seeking higher casualties. They want more bang for their buck. Terrorists commonly use the “Trojan Horse” ploy, secreting the bomb in an innocent container: a package, knapsack, briefcase, U-Haul truck and so on. The bomb that blew up Pan Am 103 was secreted in a stereo cassette player. But in order to take out the protectee with a bomb, the terrorist must know what route the protectee will use and what moment in time he will use it.
In 1992, the Sicilian Mafia learned that Judge Giovanni Falcone would be flying into the airport near Palermo and motorcading to his home in the city. They used a small aeroplane to spot and follow his motorcade as it left the airport. Falcone was driving his armoured Fiat in a three-car convoy. When the motorcade crossed a drainage culvert, the terrorists set off a powerful bomb hidden in the culvert. Falcone’s car was thrown 300 yards, killing him, his wife and three bodyguards. Nine others were wounded. The terrorists must have learned of his plans well in advance in order to set up the attack.
There was no more famous (or hunted!) public figure in the world than former Pope John Paul II. Terrorists and fanatics went after him as though they were big-game hunters and he was the last white rhino on Earth. He was shot in 1981 and the deadliest plots to get him were a planned sniper attack while he was in Austria in 1988, a plot to target his motorcade with a remote-controlled bomb in the Philippines in 1995 and a planned missile attack while he was in Lebanon in 1997. During the Pope’s 1997 visit to Sarajevo, police discovered and defused twenty-three landmines under a bridge along his motorcade route just hours before his arrival. Many of the attempts and plots utilized plans for a bomb, but all were unsuccessful. Modern-day popes travel by motorcade all over the world. His visits are preceded by massive amounts of publicity about his arrival plans and his schedule. In many cases, there are only one or two routes available to take from Point A to Point B. So why did these attempts fail? The answer is that the papal security element maintains strict control of the route. It is cleared and swept prior to the Pope using it. The result is a splendid ballet of armoured titans in a carefully choreographed presentation. A truly secure motorcade is a work of art that precludes the opportunity of a successful attack.
In most cases, a public figure’s arrival and departure plans and schedule will not be widely known. This makes it more difficult for the terrorists, so they have to conduct surveillance on the dignitary to determine his vulnerabilities. Say the mayor is observed to leave the mansion at 8:00 every morning, turn right and take the same route to City Hall. The terrorists will therefore park a car bomb along his route, follow him when he pulls out of the gate
and ignite the bomb when he drives by; or they’ll take him out after he parks in his reserved spot at City Hall and gets out of the car and so on.
In 1993, a roadside bomb in a tractor exploded as Saddam Hussein’s black armoured limo drove by, wounding one of his bodyguards. He was en route to a secret meeting, and the only people who knew about it were members of his cabinet and his security detail. In order to place the bomb, his opponents had to know his route and when he would take it. This fact was not lost on Saddam. He may have been the leader of Iraq, but he would never have been voted Boss-of-the-Year. Questioning sixty of his own officials, he ruthlessly executed twenty of them.
Vehicle armour might discourage or defeat many kidnappers who need to take the VIP alive, but the roadside bomb is the weapon of choice for the terrorist who wants to assassinate the hard target. In 1989, Alfred Herrhausen, chairman of the Deutsche Bank, left his home in Bonn, Germany, for his routine trip to the office. He was riding in the back seat of an armoured Mercedes, escorted by two bodyguards in a lead car and two bodyguards in a follow-up car. They had travelled about 300 yards when a roadside bomb exploded at precisely the instant that Herrhausen’s right door was adjacent to the bomb. The blast blew in the armoured door as though it was paper, killing Herrhausen and wounding his driver.
The Mammoth Book of Hard Bastards (Mammoth Books) Page 38
