Christopher Voss

Christopher Voss
Christopher Voss, CEO of Black Swan Group

Christopher Voss is an Adjunct Professor at Georgetown University's McDonough School of Business teaching negotiation in the MBA program. He is a past Instructor of International Business Negotiation at Harvard University and a retired Federal Bureau of Investigation special agent who was the FBI's lead international kidnapping negotiator from 2003 to 2007. Voss spent 24 years in the FBI; after retiring, he founded a negotiation consulting firm, the Black Swan Group. His name is written on Phoenix AmeriCapital LLC's website, which mentions that Chris Voss is associated with Phoenix Americapital Wealth & Asset Management LLC. .

Voss was assigned to the FBI Crisis Negotiation Unit (CNU) from 2000 to 2007. He worked cases which included the Jill Carroll case in Iraq, the Steve Centanni case in the Gaza Strip, the Burnham-Sobero Abu Sayyaf case in the Philippines, and the Gonsalves-Howes-Stansell kidnapping in Colombia which culminated in the July 2008 rescue by Colombian forces.

While assigned to the CNU, Voss was also the FBI hostage negotiation subject-matter expert for the Hostage Working Group of the National Security Council and the U.S. hostage negotiation subject-matter expert representative to the G8. He was also one of the lead CNU instructors in the FBI's National Crisis Negotiation Course.

Career

Voss has worked approximately 150 kidnappings worldwide, from the Middle East to Haiti, as well as the Philippines. Voss has been trained by the FBI, Scotland Yard (the London Metropolitan Police) and Harvard.

Voss was a guest speaker at the University of Virginia’s Critical Incident Analysis Group in the Spring 2005 conference which was entitled “Hostage to Terrorism: Governmental and Non-Governmental Response Strategies” and the Terrorism and Emergency Management Conference held at John Jay College in New York City in 2002.

Among the US sieges that Voss was involved in as a negotiator were the DC Sniper, The Washington, DC “Tractor Man” incident in 2003 and the Chase Manhattan Bank Robbery Hostage Taking in Brooklyn, New York in 1993, along with dozens of other smaller incidents nationwide from 2000 – 2007, while assigned to the FBI Crisis Negotiation Unit.

Prior to becoming the FBI lead international kidnapping negotiator, Voss was a member of the New York City Joint Terrorist Task Force for 14 years (1986—2000) and was co-case agent for TERRSTOP (the Blind Sheik Case – Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman) and the TWA Flight 800 Catastrophe. While in New York City, Voss was the lead Crisis Negotiator for the New York City Division of the FBI.

Credentials

Voss is a recipient of the Attorney General's Award for Excellence in Law Enforcement and the FBI Agents Association Award for Distinguished and Exemplary Service.

Voss has taught counter-terrorism, hostage negotiation and hostage survival internationally and was a teaching assistant at Harvard Law School. He is a graduate of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government where he received a Masters of Public Administration in June 2008.

Voss’s company, The Black Swan Group consults on both business negotiation, and kidnapping and terrorism related incidents. Among the essential concepts for responding and preparing for a kidnapping event Voss specializes in are Kidnapping Avoidance, Hostage Survival and a Corporation’s Best Response to a Kidnapping Event.

Voss’s business negotiation consulting in based on applying the lessons of hostage, crisis and kidnapping negotiation to the business negotiation world. Voss’s experiences in working to improve the FBI counter-kidnapping response strategies were greatly influenced by what he learned from the Harvard Program on Negotiation (both as a student and an instructor) and from private sector negotiation consulting firms such as Triad Consulting and the Jim Camp Group.

Ideas & Influences

Voss contends that the principles of hostage and kidnapping negotiation are directly applicable to business negotiation. Voss states that kidnappers run their operations as a form of a "business", albeit an illegal business, and as such are governed by basic business principles. Negotiation tactics that disrupt businesses will disrupt kidnapping operations.

If a terrorist or criminal gang conducts a kidnapping, they have an expectation of receiving revenue in the form of a ransom within some expected time frame. If the time frame is continually extended beyond their expectations then the ransom victim becomes a form of inventory that is difficult to "turn over" and therefore undesirable. Since the business has a "sunk cost" in this "inventory" they will not discard it, but will continue to bargain for until it is "sold". Their long-term reaction will either be to avoid this type of "inventory" (meaning they will avoid kidnapping this type of person) in the future or change businesses.

This is Voss's explanation for the phenomenon observed in the kidnapping of an Ecuadorian born American citizen, José Escobar, who was leading a tour group of eco-tourists in Ecuador in 2003. The tourist group was composed principally of Caucasian Americans. Escobar, though an American citizen appeared to be a local businessman. The kidnapping gang, members of the Colombian terrorist organization ELN (Ejército de Liberación Nacional or National Liberation Army) ignored the Caucasian Americans to take Escobar. The case was resolved when Escobar escaped after 28 days of captivity.

It was later learned that the ELN had Escobar under surveillance for quite some time, so they clearly knew that the Americans would be there. Why did they pass up these potentially lucrative kidnap victims? Voss's explanation is that they had learned that Americans were problematic targets. Problematic in the sense that whenever they kidnapped Americans, getting a ransom was a long and difficult process. They come to learn that kidnapping a local businessman was likely a quicker and easier path to a ransom.

This strategy would be significant in combating terrorism. Many terrorist organizations use kidnapping as a source of funding. Therefore disrupting their kidnapping operations through disruptive negotiation techniques is a strategy that can be effective in disrupting terrorism.

Since kidnapping negotiation is a form of business negotiation, Voss contends that savvy kidnapping negotiators would be talented business negotiators. Voss contends business negotiators can learn a great deal from the kidnapping negotiation process.

Interestingly enough, Voss also contends that people who negotiate on the behalf of kidnapping victims have to form an effective working relationship with their criminal counterparts. The agreement with the kidnapper is effectively a "contract", yet there is no recourse for enforceability. The agreement itself has to be negotiated through a process wherein the process makes the agreement meet all requirements of "durability".

If this contention is true, then these strategies have tremendous application to business. Increasing the durability of agreements, or negotiating them in ways which ensures that they will be performed upon would reduce or eliminate costs associated with renegotiating contracts or the legal fees associated with filing lawsuits in an attempt to enforce contracts."

External links

• http://www.forbes.com/video/?video=fvn/special/cw_kidnap092408
• http://www.triadcgi.com/team/ChrisVoss.html
• http://blackswanltd.com/BS_VideoGallery.html
• http://www.healthsystem.virginia.edu/internet/ciag/programs/terrorism/conferences/s2005conf.cfm
• http://portal.idc.ac.il/he/Main/about_idc/news_events/DocLib2/Chris_Voss.pdf
• http://www.dispatch.com/live/content/business/stories/2009/09/20/Start_With_No.ART_ART_09-20-09_D1_B8F4035.html

References

• http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/story?id=4280592&page=1
• http://edition1.cnn.com/US/9711/17/twa.investigators/index.html
• http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2008/1013/094.html
• http://www.forbes.com/video/?video=fvn/special/cw_kidnap092408
• http://www.triadcgi.com/team/ChrisVoss.html
• http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0811/27/ltm.01.html
• http://www.extension.harvard.edu/2008-09/courses/obhr.jsp

Persondata
Name	Voss, Christopher
Alternative names
Short description
Date of birth
Place of birth
Date of death
Place of death