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

OLD-SCHOOL NEGOTIATION
Hostage taking—and therefore hostage negotiating—has
existed since the dawn of recorded time. The Old Testament
spins plenty of tales of Israelites and their enemies taking
each other’s citizens hostage as spoils of war. The Romans,
for their part, used to force the princes of vassal states to
send their sons to Rome for their education, to ensure the
continued loyalty of the princes.
But until the Nixon administration, hostage negotiating
as a process was limited to sending in troops and trying to
shoot the hostages free. In law enforcement, our approach
was pretty much to talk until we figured out how to take
them out with a gun. Brute force.
Then a series of hostage disasters forced us to change.
In 1971, thirty-nine hostages were killed when the police
tried to resolve the Attica prison riots in upstate New York
with guns. Then at the 1972 Olympics in Munich, eleven
Israeli athletes and coaches were killed by their Palestinian
captors after a botched rescue attempt by the German police.
But the greatest inspiration for institutional change in
American law enforcement came on an airport tarmac in
Jacksonville, Florida, on October 4, 1971.
The United States was experiencing an epidemic of
airline hijackings at the time; there were five in one three-
day period in 1970. It was in that charged atmosphere that

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an unhinged man named George Giffe Jr. hijacked a
chartered plane out of Nashville, Tennessee, planning to
head to the Bahamas.
By the time the incident was over, Giffe had murdered
two hostages—his estranged wife and the pilot—and killed
himself to boot.
But this time the blame didn’t fall on the hijacker;
instead, it fell squarely on the FBI. Two hostages had
managed to convince Giffe to let them go on the tarmac in
Jacksonville, where they’d stopped to refuel. But the agents
had gotten impatient and shot out the engine. And that had
pushed Giffe to the nuclear option.
In fact, the blame placed on the FBI was so strong that
when the pilot’s wife and Giffe’s daughter filed a wrongful
death suit alleging FBI negligence, the courts agreed.
In the landmark Downs v. United States decision of
1975, the U.S. Court of Appeals wrote that “there was a
better suited alternative to protecting the hostages’ well-
being,” and said that the FBI had turned “what had been a
successful ‘waiting game,’ during which two persons safely
left the plane, into a ‘shooting match’ that left three persons
dead.” The court concluded that “a reasonable attempt at
negotiations must be made prior to a tactical intervention.”
The Downs hijacking case came to epitomize everything
not to do in a crisis situation, and inspired the development
of today’s theories, training, and techniques for hostage
negotiations.
Soon after the Giffe tragedy, the New York City Police

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Department (NYPD) became the first police force in the
country to put together a dedicated team of specialists to
design a process and handle crisis negotiations. The FBI and
others followed.
A new era of negotiation had begun.