Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
who is targeting you. In addition, your alert demeanor will not be lost on
anyone evaluating you as a potential target. Merely by becoming more
conscious of your environment and alert to things out of the ordinary, it
is likely that you will cause a potential assailant to move on to an easier
target.
When David attended the security overseas seminar put on by the
State Department, he heard an interesting story. A U.S. Army sergeant
had been marked for kidnapping by terrorists while serving overseas.
They knew that he had been selected because a raid on a terrorist safe
house turned up a list of individuals targeted by this group. The sergeant's
name had been scratched off the top of the list. Next to the name there
was a notation indicating that he was a security-conscious individual who
had a practice of looking up and down the street every morning before
he left the house. Embassy security agents talked to the sergeant because
they wanted to learn what extraordinary steps he was taking that actually
dissuaded a dangerous group of terrorists from carrying out their plot.
The sergeant was perplexed. He told the agents that he hadn't been doing
anything unusual that he could recall. He did explain, however, that he
had been having some problems with local kids throwing his early morn-
ing newspaper in unusual places. He said he checked outside every morn-
ing to see where those kids had hidden the paper. An amusing story. But
think about it. The simple action taken by this man to look around out-
side every morning, despite the fact that it had nothing to do with antiter-
rorism, was enough to dissuade his potential attackers. They perceived
him to be security conscious and alert and decided to move on to the next
guy, who wasn't paying attention to security. Unfortunately, they did so
with tragic results. The basic lesson that must not be overlooked is that
even the mere appearance of taking security precautions often is enough
to prevent an attack. Human nature is a funny thing. People, including
bad guys and terrorists, often see what they expect to see. Terrorists plan-
ning an attack or abduction don't see a man looking for his newspaper.
Instead, they see a soldier obviously well trained in counterterror tech-
niques. Don't miss the point here. This story reminded David of some of
his undercover deals as an agent. He would meet a bad guy and get his
pager number to set up the deal. Later, when he paged the guy to com-
plete the deal, he received no response. His first thought was that he blew
it. Something he said or did made the dealer suspicious. David's senior
partner told him to relax. Bad guys need to go to the bathroom, too. Point
being, there were a thousand reasons why someone wouldn't call right
