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

DON’T TRY TO NEGOTIATE IN A FIREFIGHT
The moment I arrived in Manila on the Burnham-Sobero
case I was sent down to the Mindanao region, where the
Philippine military was lobbing bullets and rockets into a
hospital complex where the Abu Sayyaf and the hostages
were holed up.
This was no place for a negotiator, because it’s
impossible to have a dialogue in the middle of a firefight.
Then things got worse: when I woke up the next morning, I
learned that during the night the kidnappers had taken their
hostages and escaped.
The “escape” was the first sign that this operation was
going to be a rolling train wreck and that the Philippine
military was less than a trustworthy partner.
During debriefings following the episode, it was
revealed that during a cease-fire a military guy had collected

---

a suitcase from the thugs in the hospital, and not long after
that all the soldiers on the rear perimeter of the hospital had
been called away for a “meeting.” Coincidentally—or not—
the bad guys chose that moment to slip away.
Things really blew up two weeks later, on the
Philippines’ Independence Day, when Abu Sabaya
announced that he was going to behead “one of the whites”
unless the government called off its manhunt by midday.
We knew this meant one of the Americans and anticipated it
would be Guillermo Sobero.
We didn’t have any direct contact with the kidnappers at
the time because our partners in the Philippine military had
assigned us an intermediary who always “forgot” to make
sure we were present for his phone calls with the kidnappers
(and similarly “forgot” to tape them). All we could do was
send text messages offering to schedule a time to speak.
What ended up happening was that just before the noon
deadline, Sabaya and a member of the Philippine
presidential cabinet had a conversation on a radio talk show,
and the government conceded to Sabaya’s demand to name
a Malaysian senator as a negotiator. In exchange, Sabaya
agreed not to kill a hostage.
But it was too late to fix this atmosphere of
confrontation, distrust, and lies. That afternoon, the hostages
heard Sabaya on the phone yelling, “But that was part of the
agreement! That was a part of the agreement!” Not long
after, the Abu Sayyaf beheaded Guillermo Sobero and for
good measure the group took fifteen more hostages.

---

With none of the important moving parts anywhere near
under our control and the United States largely uninterested
in spite of Sobero’s murder, I headed back to Washington,
D.C. It seemed like there was little we could do.
Then 9/11 changed everything.
Once a minor terrorist outfit, the Abu Sayyaf was
suddenly linked to Al Qaeda. And then a Philippine TV
reporter named Arlyn dela Cruz got into the Abu Sayyaf
camp and videotaped Sabaya as he taunted the American
missionaries Martin and Gracia Burnham, who were so
emaciated they looked like concentration camp survivors.
The video hit the U.S. news media like thunder. Suddenly,
the case became a major U.S. government priority.