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

CREATE A SUBTLE EPIPHANY
I was a natural for the Schilling case. I had spent some time

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in the Philippines and had an extensive background in
terrorism from my New York City days assigned to the Joint
Terrorism Task Force (JTTF).
A few days after Schilling became a hostage, my partner
Chuck Regini and I flew to Manila to run the negotiations.
Along with Jim Nixon, the FBI’s highest official in Manila,
we conferred with top Philippine military brass. They agreed
to let us guide the negotiations. Then we got down to
business. One of us would take charge of the negotiation
strategy for the FBI and consequently for the U.S.
government. That became my role. With the support of my
colleagues, my job was to come up with the strategy, get it
approved, and implement it.
As a result of the Schilling case, I would become the
FBI’s lead international kidnapping negotiator.
Our principal adversary was Abu Sabaya, the rebel leader
who personally negotiated for Schilling’s ransom. Sabaya
was a veteran of the rebel movement with a violent past. He
was straight out of the movies, a terrorist-sociopath-killer.
He had a history of rape, murder, and beheadings. He liked
to record his bloody deeds on video and send them to the
Philippine media.
Sabaya always wore sunglasses, a bandana, a black T-
shirt, and camo pants. He thought it made him a more
dashing figure. If you look for any photos of Abu Sayyaf
terrorists from this period, you always see one in sunglasses.
That’s Sabaya.
Sabaya loved, loved, loved the media. He had the

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Philippine reporters on speed dial. They’d call him and ask
him questions in Tagalog, his native tongue. He would
answer in English because he wanted the world to hear his
voice on CNN. “They should make a movie about me,” he
would tell reporters.
In my eyes, Sabaya was a cold-blooded businessman
with an ego as big as Texas. A real shark. Sabaya knew he
was in the commodities game. In Jeffrey Schilling, he had
an item of value. How much could he get for it? He would
find out, and I intended it to be a surprise he wouldn’t like.
As an FBI agent, I wanted to free the hostage and bring the
criminal to justice.
One crucial aspect of any negotiation is to figure out
how your adversary arrived at his position. Sabaya threw
out the $10 million ransom based on a business calculation.
First, the United States was offering $5 million for
information leading to the arrest of any of the remaining
fugitives from the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.
Sabaya reasoned that if the United States would pay $5
million to get its hands on someone it didn’t like, it would
pay much more for a citizen.
Second, a rival faction of the Abu Sayyaf had just
reportedly been paid $20 million for six Western European
captives. Libyan strongman Muammar Gaddafi had made
the payment as “development aid.” This absurdity had been
compounded by a significant portion of the ransom being
paid in counterfeit bills. It was an opportunity for Gaddafi to
both embarrass Western governments and get money over-

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the-table to groups with whom he sympathized. I’m sure he
laughed about that episode until the day he died.
Regardless, a price had been set. Sabaya did the math
and figured Schilling was worth $10 million. Problem was,
Jeff Schilling came from a working-class family. His mother
could come up with $10,000, perhaps. The United States
wasn’t about to pay one dollar. But we would allow a
payment to be made if it could be run as a “sting” operation.
If we could draw Sabaya into an offer-counteroffer
bargaining situation, we had a bargaining system that
worked every time. We could beat him down to where we
wanted him, get the hostage out, and set up the “sting.”
For months Sabaya refused to budge. He argued that
Muslims in the Philippines had suffered five hundred years
of oppression, since Spanish missionaries had brought
Catholicism to the Philippines in the sixteenth century. He
recited instances where atrocities had been committed
against his Islamic forebears. He explained why the Abu
Sayyaf wanted to establish an Islamic state in the southern
Philippines. Fishing rights had been violated. You name it,
he thought it up and used it.
Sabaya wanted $10 million in war damages—not
ransom, but war damages. He held firm in his demand and
kept us out of the offer-counteroffer system we wanted to
use against him.
And he occasionally dropped in threats that he was
torturing Jeff Schilling.
Sabaya negotiated directly with Benjie, a Filipino

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military officer. They talked in Tagalog. We reviewed
transcripts translated to English and used them to advise
Benjie. I rotated in and out of Manila and oversaw the talks
and strategy. I instructed Benjie to ask what Schilling had to
do with five hundred years of bad blood between Muslims
and Filipinos. He told Sabaya that $10 million was not
possible.
No matter what approach we took to “reason” with
Sabaya over why Schilling had nothing to do with the “war
damages,” it fell on deaf ears.
Our first “that’s right” breakthrough actually came when
I was negotiating with Benjie. He was a true Filipino patriot
and hero. He was the leader of the Philippine National
Police’s Special Action Force and had been in his share of
firefights. On many occasions, Benjie and his men had been
sent on rescue missions to save hostages, and they had a
sterling record. His men were feared, for good reason. They
rarely took handcuffs.
Benjie wanted to take a hard line with Sabaya and speak
to him in direct, no-nonsense terms. We wanted to engage
Sabaya in dialogue to discover what made the adversary
tick. We actually wanted to establish rapport with an
adversary. To Benjie that was distasteful.
Benjie told us he needed a break. We had been working
him nearly twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week for
several weeks. He wanted to spend some time with his
family in the mountains north of Manila. We agreed, but
only on the condition that we could accompany him and

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spend several hours both on Saturday and Sunday working
on negotiation strategy.
That Saturday night we sat in the library of the American
ambassador’s summer residence working on the strategy. As
I was explaining to Benjie the value of establishing a
rapport-based, working relationship, even with an adversary
as dangerous as Sabaya, I could see a snarl coming over his
face. I realized I needed to negotiate with Benjie.
“You hate Sabaya, don’t you?” I said, leading with a
label.
Benjie unloaded on me. “I tell you I do!” he said. “He
has murdered and raped. He has come up on our radio when
we were lobbing mortars on his position and said ‘these
mortars are music to my ears.’ I heard his voice come on
our radio one day and celebrate that he was standing over
the body of one of my men.”
This outburst was Benjie’s equivalent of “that’s right.”
As he acknowledged his rage, I watched him get control of
his anger and calm down. Though he had been very good
up to that point, from that moment forward Benjie became a
superstar. He blossomed into a truly talented negotiator.
This “negotiation” between Benjie and me was no
different than any other negotiation between colleagues who
disagree on a strategy. Before you convince them to see
what you’re trying to accomplish, you have to say the things
to them that will get them to say, “That’s right.”
The “that’s right” breakthrough usually doesn’t come at
the beginning of a negotiation. It’s invisible to the

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counterpart when it occurs, and they embrace what you’ve
said. To them, it’s a subtle epiphany.