Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as if Your Life Depended on It

CHAPTER 6
BEND THEIR REALITY
O
ne Monday morning in Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince, a
call came in to the FBI office from the nephew of a
prominent Haitian political figure. He spoke so fast he had
to repeat his story three times before I understood. But
finally I got the basics: kidnappers had snatched his aunt
from her car, and their ransom demand was $150,000.
“Give us the money,” the kidnappers told him, “or your
aunt is going to die.”
In the lawless, chaotic wake of the 2004 rebellion that
toppled President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, Haiti surpassed
Colombia as the kidnap capital of the Americas. In fact, with
between eight and ten people abducted every day in the
Caribbean nation of eight million, Haiti earned the dubious
honor of having the highest kidnapping rate in the world.
During this onslaught of abductions and death threats, I
was the FBI’s lead international kidnapping negotiator. And
I had never seen anything like it. Reports of abductions—
increasingly bold, daylight attacks right in Port-au-Prince—
seemed to roll into the office hourly: fourteen students
abducted on their school bus; American missionary Phillip
Snyder shot in an ambush and seized along with a Haitian

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boy he was taking to Michigan for eye surgery; prominent
Haitian politicians and businessmen bundled from their
homes in broad daylight. No one was spared.
Most of the abductions went down the same way: ski-
mask-clad kidnappers surrounded a house or a car, forced
entry with a gun, and snatched a vulnerable victim—usually
a woman, child, or elderly person.
Early on, there was the possibility that the kidnappings
were driven by politically aligned gangs seeking to
destabilize Haiti’s new government. This proved to be
wrong. Haitian criminals are famous for employing brutal
means for political ends, but when it came to kidnappings, it
was almost always all business.
Later on, I’ll get to how we pieced together the clues to
discover who the perpetrators were and what they really
wanted—invaluable information when it came to negotiating
with and destabilizing these gangs. But first I want to
discuss the crystallizing feature of high-stakes, life-and-
death negotiating: that is, how little of it is on the surface.
When that Monday ransom call came in to the
politician’s nephew, the guy was so petrified he could only
think of doing one thing: paying the thugs. His reaction
makes sense: when you get a call from brutal criminals who
say they’ll kill your aunt unless you pay them immediately,
it seems impossible to find leverage in the situation. So you
pay the ransom and they release your relative, right?
Wrong. There’s always leverage. Negotiation is never a
linear formula: add X to Y to get Z. We all have irrational

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blind spots, hidden needs, and undeveloped notions.
Once you understand that subterranean world of
unspoken needs and thoughts, you’ll discover a universe of
variables that can be leveraged to change your counterpart’s
needs and expectations. From using some people’s fear of
deadlines and the mysterious power of odd numbers, to our
misunderstood relationship to fairness, there are always
ways to bend our counterpart’s reality so it conforms to
wh at we ultimately want to give them, not to what they
initially think they deserve.