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

AVOID A SHOWDOWN
No two ways about it, my return to the United States was a
time of reckoning. I questioned—I even doubted—some of
what we were doing at the FBI. If what we knew wasn’t
enough, we had to get better.
The real kick in the pants came after my return, when I
was reviewing information about the case, a lot of which we
hadn’t had in the field. Among the piles of information was
one fact that totally blew my mind.
Martin Burnham had been overheard on a phone call to
someone. I wondered what in God’s name our hostage was
doing talking on the phone without us knowing. And with
whom was he talking? There’s only one reason a hostage
ever gets on a phone. It’s to provide proof of life. Someone
else had been trying to ransom the Burnhams out.
It turned out to be someone working for a crooked
Philippine politician who’d been running a parallel
negotiation for the Burnhams’ release. He wanted to buy the
hostages out himself in order to show up Philippine
president Arroyo.
But it wasn’t so much that this guy was going behind our
backs that bothered me. As is pretty clear already, there

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were a whole lot of underhanded things going on. What
really ate at me was that this schmuck, who wasn’t an FBI-
trained hostage negotiator, had pulled off something that I
hadn’t been able to.
He’d gotten to speak to Martin Burnham on the phone.
For free.
That’s when I realized that this crooked pol’s success
where we had failed was a kind of metaphor for everything
that was wrong with our one-dimensional mindset.
Beyond our problems with the Philippine military, the
big reason we had no effective influence with the
kidnappers and hostages was that we had this very tit-for-tat
mentality. Under that mentality, if we called up the bad guys
we were asking for something, and if they gave it to us we
had to give them something back. And so, because we were
positive that the Burnhams were alive, we’d never bothered
to call and ask for proof of life. We were afraid to go into
debt.
If we made an “ask” and they granted it, we’d owe. Not
making good on a debt risked the accusation of bad-faith
negotiation and bad faith in kidnappings gets people killed.
And of course we didn’t ask the kidnappers to talk
directly to the hostage because we knew they’d say “no”
and we were afraid of being embarrassed.
That fear was a major flaw in our negotiating mindset.
There is some information that you can only get through
direct, extended interactions with your counterpart.
We also needed new ways to get things without asking

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for them. We needed to finesse making an “ask” with
something more sophisticated than closed-ended questions
with their yes-no dynamic.
That’s when I realized that what we had been doing
wasn’t communication; it was verbal flexing. We wanted
them to see things our way and they wanted us to see it their
way. If you let this dynamic loose in the real world,
negotiation breaks down and tensions flare. That whole
ethos permeated everything the FBI was doing. Everything
was a showdown. And it didn’t work.
Our approach to proof-of-life questions embodied all
these problems.
At the time, we proved that our hostages were alive by
devising questions that asked for a piece of information only
the hostage could know. Computer-security-style questions,
like, “What’s the name of Martin’s first dog?” or “What’s
Martin’s dad’s middle name?”
This particular type of question had many failings,
however. For one thing, it had sort of become a signature of
law enforcement in the kidnapping world. When a family
starts asking a question of that type, it’s a near certainty that
the cops are coaching them. And that makes kidnappers
very nervous.
Even beyond the nerves, you had the problem that
answering questions like those required little, if any, effort.
The bad guys go and get the fact and give it to you right
away, because it’s so easy. Bang, bang, bang! It happens so
fast that you didn’t gain any tactical advantage, any usable

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information, any effort on their part toward a goal that
serves you. And all negotiation, done well, should be an
information-gathering process that vests your counterpart in
an outcome that serves you.
Worst of all, the bad guys know that they have just given
you something—a proof of life—which triggers this whole
human reciprocity gene. Whether we like to recognize it or
not, a universal rule of human nature, across all cultures, is
that when somebody gives you something, they expect
something in return. And they won’t give anything else until
you pay them back.
Now, we didn’t want to trigger this whole reciprocity
thing because we didn’t want to give anything. So what
happened? All of our conversations became these paralyzed
confrontations between two parties who wanted to extract
something from each other but didn’t want to give. We
didn’t communicate, out of pride and fear.
That’s why we failed, while numbskulls like this crooked
Philippine politician just stumbled in and got what we so
desperately needed. That is, communication without
reciprocity. I sat back and wondered to myself, How the hell
do we do that?