His fellow police officers used to call him "Bring 'Em Out alive" Bolz. As founder and coordinator of the New York Police Departments' Hostage Program, Captain Frank Bolz was the chief negotiator in 285 crisis situations, and succeeded in rescuing more than 850 hostages without losing a single one.
His success rate, he believes, is partially due to the nature of the hostage crises he handled. "In the domestic situation, there's just me and the perpetrator. I (as the negotiator) can look stupid--it doesn't matter. The goal is just to save lives, including that of the perpetrator."
"But in the international arena," he said, "the rules are different. The perception by the world is important. The country can't be made to look foolish. The future safety of our citizens depends upon how we are perceived."
Bolz pointed out that "in local law enforcement, there is no acceptable casualty rate, while in military operations there is."
"And international terrorism is a form of warfare," he emphasized. "It is necessary to keep up U.S. image and safety in the world."
In spite of these differences between local and international considerations, however, Bolz found that there are many principles of negotiating that can and should be used on the international scene.
Consider the disastrous handling of the terrorist attack at the 1972 Olympic Games at Munich, where West German officials "were concerned about keeping overt security arrangements to a minimum" in order to counterbalance the world community's memory of the last Olympic Games in Germany in 1936, which were a virtual paean to the Third Reich, orchestrated by Adolf Hitler.
Bolz points out that at the previous Olympics, in 1968 in Mexico City, two black American athletes had raised black-gloved firsts skyward during the National Anthem.
"The ICO (International Committee for the Olympics) should have learned at least this much from the Smith-Carlos affair." Bolz writes in his book, Hostage Cop, "in an age of satellite communication, the chance to reach a billion or more people in a single act of protest would be very tempting for anyone with a message for the world."
"And of course," he went on, "no group posed as obvious a threat as the assortment of pro-Palestinian terrorist groups that had already demonstrated a predilection for violent, eye-catching stunts on behalf of their cause.
The fact that there were no contingency plans for such an attack, in retrospect, was the biggest mistake of all, Bolz said.
Criticizing what he termed "Israeli intransigence" during that tragedy, again for the sake of "how the world will perceive us," he wrote, "The idea at Munich was not to refight biblical wars, it was to save lives then and there."
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