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