Video Transcript
Diego C. Asencio—Bogota 1980:
I was at the National Day celebration of the Dominican Republic. It was a noon day affair, and I was in the process of trying to say my farewells, because I had a luncheon date. Bogotá was reasonably tense at that moment, because the M-19, a paramilitary terrorist organization, had tunneled into an arsenal and had gotten away with a substantial amount of weapons. Sort of a “state of exception” was declared by the government. They wound up picking up some 300, some odd, political prisoners. Things had gotten pretty tough, so there was a tense atmosphere. Anyway, I was on my way to the door, when the Venezuelan ambassador intercepted me, because he had some questions he wanted to try out on me. And suddenly a bunch of people came in through the front door, and began shooting up the ceiling. And a shootout started between the people who came in through the front door and some policemen who happened to be in the neighborhood, a shootout that lasted for some time – and where I later estimated that well over a hundred rounds had been expended. So it was a rather nasty, difficult situation. At the time, I always say that I produced the most sincere act of contrition of my life up until that moment. And I found in fact that that helped, despite the fact that there were bodies lying around who’d been hit, some dead. And that I was forced to go to the front door to ask for a cease fire. I nevertheless felt a certain amount of calm, in the sense that I really believed that there was very little likelihood of me getting out of there, so therefore there were no options. I must say that fear had returned after the negotiations started, because then I could see the possibilities of a solution, but also the possibilities of some accidental outcome that could involve a number of people getting killed, so I was concerned about that.
Response
Essentially the terrorist commander read us his negotiating instructions, and I took him aside, and said, “You can’t possibly enter into a negotiation with the Colombian government with those instructions.” And he looked at me and said, “Well, what do you mean? You think that you can do it better than I can?” I said, “I’m a negotiator. This is what I do for a living. I can put your demands in language that would be acceptable to the other side. Otherwise I would anticipate that they would say you’re a savage. And besides they’re written in this turgid Marxist jargon that nobody understands. And they’re going to come in here and kill. And ordinarily I wouldn’t really care, but since you said that if anything goes wrong, you’re going to shoot me first, I prefer almost any other alternative.” And he said, “Well, can you give me a draft?” And I said, “Sure.” And so I got the Mexican ambassador and the Brazilian ambassador, and I said, “Come along. We’re going to rewrite the terrorist communiqué and their negotiating instructions, and put them in some sort of semblance of diplomatic parlance that would be acceptable to the Colombian government.” And, of course, the Colombian government were listening, and then they saw that my draft had emerged, they responded positively. So that at that point, when they came away from the negotiating table, which was in an open car parked in front of the Dominican embassy, the terrorist commander said, “What do we do next?” I said, “OK, now for the next session.” And slowly we intruded ourselves into the negotiations, to the point that eventually we actually turned the terrorist negotiator, who had basically come to the conclusion that our approach was going to get us out of there in one piece, whereas if she listened to the commander we weren’t going to get out of there. So slowly – I’m a slow talker, so it took sixty-one days – but slowly we took over the negotiations and it got to the point where we were able to walk out of there. All of us.
Personal Qualities
I had absolutely no training in this area. However, I did have a bit of experience. When I was the DCM in Caracas, William Niehaus, the local representative of Owens Illinois, was kidnapped, and I worked extensively on that case in terms of trying to find out where he was, and whether a negotiation was possible. And I had dealings with a number of people who were sent down, who in fact were what you would call anti-kidnapping practitioners. And also I was interested in the literature of this particular segment – I guess for not only professional reasons but, I guess, personal reasons, also. And I was particularly struck by a book that I would recommend to any aspiring Foreign Service Officer and that’s Sir Jeffrey Jackson, the British ambassador to Uruguay, who in 1972 was kidnapped by the Tupamaros. And it’s called “Surviving the Long Night.”
He wrote it in his mind and was able then, when he got out, to dictate the book. And it was really a very, very interesting book. The other thing that he established in my mind was that it was important to establish one’s humanity. That is, when you look at an act of terrorism, it’s essentially the manipulation of symbols. And when you look at an embassy, it’s somewhat the same thing. You got the flag pole with the eagle on it, the Marine Guards outside. But you’re just talking about an office building. There’s nothing exceptional about it except symbolically. It’s very easy to blow up a symbol, or to kill it or to crush it. It’s a little more difficult to kill a human being. And so it was important to establish one’s humanity in terms of one’s captors. There are other segments, too. For instance, I’ve always been a negotiator.
At one point the terrorist commander said, “They’re not really responding to our overtures. I think we’re probably going have to start killing people one by one until they do.” I didn’t think that that was a desirable course of action, so I suggested that essentially that what the Colombian government was doing was trying to wait them out, trying to make them sweat. And the people they were dealing with were by definition idiots. They had absolutely no power of decision. They were not empowered to decide anything at all. All they could do was bring out what had been posed and then come back with an answer from the government. There’s a Spanish word which is obscene in some societies, but just vulgar in others, called “pendejo.” I said, “What they’re doing is that they’re acting as “pendejos” and if you don’t realize that, you really are a “pendejo” yourself.” And that caused a great deal of laughter among the terrorists, and I figured, “Well, maybe obscenity or strong words have their uses.”
Advice
Definitely read Jeffrey’s Jackson’s book – very, very important – “Surviving the Long Night.” He wrote another one that I’ve ordered, but I haven’t read yet, called “The People’s Prison.” I would think that both of those would be essential baggage for any aspiring diplomat. The other aspect I would think would be, as I said, his thought of living in your mind. If you need external stimuli to get your engine running and you’re in one of these situations, you’re in trouble. You really are going to suffer, I think, psychic damage that might be long-lasting. The other aspect is – an argument again that I’ve had continually with the State Department – is that I was getting resistance from the State Department for what I was doing, that is intruding myself into the negotiations, because of something called the “Stockholm syndrome.” And essentially this syndrome holds that the hostages tend to side with their captors for any number of reasons, which I think is absolute nonsense. I really believe it only applies in very, very distinct and definite cases. I mean Patty Hearst might be one of these cases, but I don’t think it really applies to superannuated American ambassadors or diplomats. So the assumption was – listen to this – after twenty-some odd years of service, that I had flipped and gone over to the other side, and therefore anything that I wanted or wanted to do was resisted. So what I’m telling you is that it’s important to read the literature and be prepared to handle these things by a case by case basis as you face these situations. And not to accept the conventional wisdom.