If the hostages’ deaths were going to mean something,
we would have to find a new way to negotiate,
communicate, listen, and speak, both with our enemies and
with our friends. Not for communication’s sake, though.
No. We had to do it to win.
AVOID A SHOWDOWN
No two ways about it, my return to the United States was a
time of reckoning. I questioned—I even doubted—some of
what we were doing at the FBI. If what we knew wasn’t
enough, we had to get better.
The real kick in the pants came after my return, when I
was reviewing information about the case, a lot of which we
hadn’t had in the field. Among the piles of information was
one fact that totally blew my mind.
Martin Burnham had been overheard on a phone call to
someone. I wondered what in God’s name our hostage was
doing talking on the phone without us knowing. And with
whom was he talking? There’s only one reason a hostage
ever gets on a phone. It’s to provide proof of life. Someone
else had been trying to ransom the Burnhams out.
It turned out to be someone working for a crooked
Philippine politician who’d been running a parallel
negotiation for the Burnhams’ release. He wanted to buy the
hostages out himself in order to show up Philippine
president Arroyo.
But it wasn’t so much that this guy was going behind our
backs that bothered me. As is pretty clear already, there