Roy is called in to negotiate when hostages are taken
 Kidnappers pointed their rocket launcher
THE bodies of two British hostages who died while in Iraqi captivity
were flown home on Friday. Jason Swindlehurst from Lancashire and Jason Creswell from Glasgow were abducted two years ago while working as security guards in the country. Three others who were taken at the same time are still believed to be held in the Middle East.
It’s a depressing and tragic twist to the story, but not an uncommon one. It seems hardly a month goes by without some unfortunate being taken hostage somewhere in the world.
 And anyone can be a victim. Schoolchildren were held in siege conditions in Beslan, holidaymakers
were imprisoned by terrorists at the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel in Mumbai last November and an American Navy Captain, Richard Phillips, managed to free himself after killing the Somali pirates who had taken him prisoner.
Roy Ramm, former commander of specialist operations at New Scotland Yard and now chairman of his own security firm Commercial Security International, is one of Britain’s leading hostage negotiators. He’s been involved in dozens of operations around the world.
The 57-year-old told Steven Bowron The Honest Truth about his career in this most delicate form of diplomacy.
HOW DID you get involved in hostage negotiation?
I joined the police in London as a constable in 1970 and ended up as head of CID for Central London. I led the investigation into the poll tax riots in Trafalgar Square in 1990.
When I was a Chief Detective Inspector I went on a two-week course to become a hostage negotiator. The kind of people the course was set up to deal with were termed “offenders for cause” — the sort who took over the Iranian Embassy in London in 1980. But it also dealt with people who had mental problems who might take hostages, or criminals who held people up in a bank. We’d go to a London airport and major airlines would take part in mock hostage situations. Eventually I ran the course.
I ended up leading the Yard’s hostage response unit and trained with the FBI in West Virginia.
FIRST CASES?
It was the 1980s and there was a spate of hostage-taking purely for criminal purposes. They’d kidnap people and seek a ransom. There was another kind of blackmail where people were contaminating food and making demands. Three major dairy companies were contacted to say if they didn’t pay £500,000 the criminals would put poisoned produce on supermarket shelves.
We tried to win time and make the extortionists do something “off-plan” — it was about disrupting their schemes so investigators could track them down. It worked. We found the person who had purchased contaminants.
In 1983 I dealt with the case of supermarket boss Don Tidey who was kidnapped by the IRA. One of the first things was to find out where he was being held and he was eventually traced to a hole in the ground in Derrada Wood in Ballinamore in the Irish Republic. The police went in and there was a shoot-out during which an Irish soldier and a police cadet were killed.
WERE YOU often called to help abroad?
In the 1990s, there were a number of cases in which Brits were taken hostage while abroad. These included 90 soldiers, among them Royal Welch Fusiliers, taken hostage by Bosnian Serbs in Croatia in 1995. They’d been working with the UN.
Satellite images showed their vehicles parked in the back gardens of some houses which is how we were able to locate them. We were called to advise the UN Special Envoy on negotiation techniques.
In 1994 hostages were taken by Kashmiri rebels and a number taken in Cambodia. In Sierra Leone, two young Christian missionaries, one a Scot, were taken. In 1996, four Cambridge students were abducted in Irian Jaya, Indonesia. It was a matter
of flying out with a team of two or three to do the negotiations.
All of the hostages in these cases were released, except those in Cambodia.
WHAT DO you do when you arrive?
The first thing is to get as much information about the hostage-takers as possible, really get inside their heads.
Did they mean to take these people or are they just random victims? What do they want? If they want prisoners freed, you know that’s never going to happen so you have to try to convince the hostage takers that hurting people will harm their cause.
Another thing is to make them see their hostages as people not commodities.
Intermediaries are helpful in letting you know what’s going on and whether hostages are alive, but this makes it a long process.
At Irian Jaya for example, where anti-government rebels had grabbed students, they were holed up in the jungle and we had an emissary who offered to mediate. We’d send him off with a written message and he’d come back two or three days later and say the answer is no!
It can take months to have a dialogue and we rarely speak to hostage-takers directly. These days communication difficulties can be overcome by giving hostage-takers mobile phones but they’re wary of accepting them because they believe we’ll be able to pinpoint their whereabouts.
Any OTHER factors to consider?
You have to consider the resilience of the hostages — are they young, old, healthy or on medication?
In Irian Jaya a hostage was pregnant. We also have to take the weather into account. Is the monsoon season coming, and are they suitably dressed?
You are conscious that you have no real power and are there as advisers. Of course, we also have to work through interpreters and translators — we always use two and each is unaware of the other so we can verify messages are being passed accurately.
ADVICE TO hostages?
Don’t give your hostage-takers a problem. Talk about yourself and your family to your captors. The key is humility and calmness.
Though I would never say don’t try to escape, I’d advise anyone to think about it very carefully.
EVER BEEN in danger yourself?
I went into the jungle in Cambodia to try to make contact with the hostage-takers but the militants — former Khmer Rouge who had become a criminal gang — had rocket launchers which they pointed at our car. In this job you have to do a lot of risk assessment and I decided it wasn’t worth the risk so we
back-tracked.
THINGS THAT have gone wrong?
In Kashmir, we weren’t called in until the head of one of the hostages, a Norwegian, had been found by the side of the road.
There had been hostages taken by Kashmiri separatists from three different nationalities — British, Norwegian and American.
We were negotiating over a CB radio which meant all the country could tune in. But we could also hear the voices of the hostages, so we knew they were alive.
It ended with a shoot-out in which two policemen and one separatist was killed.
In Cambodia we knew we weren’t dealing with a political gang because they were asking for money and expensive watches and we had doubts the hostages — two Brits and an Australian — were still alive.
We kept asking questions that the captives could answer but never got satisfactory responses. It transpired they were all dead and we spent the next year recovering their remains. We were able to go to the funerals of the people who had been killed.
DO YOU spend the entire duration of the operation abroad?
We’d fly in and have a support cell back at Scotland Yard which would help us with information and analysis. We’d do three weeks or a month in the country then return and we would run the cell from Scotland Yard while other members would replace us in Cambodia or Kashmir or wherever.
The rotation meant that you were rested and alert and weren’t worried about your families back home.
SKILLS NEEDED?
Patience, discipline, the ability to take pressure. You have to measure both your words and your facial expressions.
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