Hostage Rescue Gone Wrong

by John Thompson

November 4, 2002

I submachine-gunned each of my bound hostages before their rescuers got in: But I was using blank cartridges, and so was the rescue team of Canadian paratroopers.

At the end of a series of exercises in hostage rescue techniques, the score was about even: The Canadian Airborne Regiment team came in fast and hard enough to rescue the hostages about half the time. If this had been real, most of the hostages would have been killed or wounded by their captors.

Hostage rescue when saving the captives of a terrorist group is never easy. The best soldiers in the world — the British SAS and their counterparts in the American Delta Force, Israel’s most select Paratroopers, the Russian Alpha Units — practice hostage rescue all the time; often with live ammunition in rooms with real "hostages" sitting in them. (Members of the British Royal Family sometimes go through confidence building exercises by sitting still as SAS troopers fire live ammunition into dummy terrorists inches away from them). Yet even the most select troops with the best equipment need luck for a successful hostage rescue mission.

Soldiers are used to making their own luck -- if time permits. Careful planning, exacting reconnaissance and realistic rehearsals can improve the chances of a successful rescue. The problem is that war is the realm of chaos and the law of that land is Murphy’s. Worse, terrorists know about rescue tactics too.

Hostage rescue technique arose in the 1970s in response to an epidemic of aircraft hijacking. The 1976 Israeli raid to rescue of hijacked passengers at Entebbe in Uganda was a thrilling display of daring precision, although this didn’t stop the raid commander from being killed by a sniper. The German police group GSG-9 impressed the world with the rescue of a hijacked Lufthansa jet at Mogadishu. Both the Israelis and Germans took little comfort from success -- they knew much could have gone horribly wrong.

There have been badly botched rescues too: Amateurism explains the disaster during the attempted rescue of the Olympic athletes in the 1972 Munich games; but the Egyptians badly bungled the rescue of a hijacked aircraft in 1985. There are almost as many examples of failure or partial success as there are of victory.

Terrorists love taking hostages. It can put them in the media spotlight for days… or weeks. It lets them watch governments squirm as all sorts of concessions are extracted under duress, and lets their gunmen lord it over their captives and gain prestige among their fellows. The problem is that it is difficult to take hostages and stay alive long enough to exercise bragging rights afterwards.

The Chechen terrorists who took a whole theatre hostage in Moscow came prepared for success. It was a mass attack: Knocking out a handful of terrorists is a relatively easy proposition for most hostage-rescue groups, knocking out dozens before they start killing hostages is much more difficult. The Chechens placed suicide bombers with explosive vest packs amid their captives to kill everyone around them as soon as a rescue was attempted. They also announced that they had rigged demolition charges so that they kill all the hostages as soon an attempt looked like it would succeed.

In short, the Chechens had looked at everything that makes a hostage rescue attempt difficult, and combined three features that would make it next to impossible. The Russian Alpha Units knew this. They had placed fiber-optic pinhole cameras through holes that had been silently drilled in the walls, and they knew how many terrorists they were facing and approximately where they were.

Most Western observers who have seen the Russian Alpha teams at work know them to be on a par with their counterparts in the Western world — they are very well equipped, very well trained, and know how to make their own luck. Unfortunately, the Chechens had just ‘raised the bar’ on hostage taking tactics. Faced with defeat (which would then invite other groups around the world to copy the Chechen example) and/or the deaths of hundreds of hostages; the Russians ‘raised the bar’ too.

When confronted with a difficult situation, the Russian military has always been willing to use sledgehammers to crack walnuts. Flooding a whole auditorium with enormous concentrations of the anesthetic gas halothane was an enormously risky tactic — as the deaths of 115 hostages can attest. But risky tactics are what hostage rescue is all about; especially when terrorists are prepared to kill all of their hostages in a few seconds.

John Thompson is President of the Mackenzie Institute which studies political instability and terrorism. He can be reached at: institute@mackenzieinstitute.com

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