thedrifter
01-22-07, 08:34 AM
Intensive course on surviving crises doesn't pull punches
COPING WITH KIDNAPPERS: The chances are remote, but abductions occur even in the Bay Area. Some experts say fighting back is worth the risk, and a class in Las Vegas teaches techniques.
- Matthew B. Stannard, Chronicle Staff Writer
Monday, January 22, 2007
(01-22) 04:00 PST Las Vegas -- "What's your name?"
The words were shouted inches from my ear, heavily accented, angry.
"What do you do?"
"I'm a reporter." My words were muffled by the cloth bag over my head, the rope around my throat that tightened every time I started to straighten my duct-taped legs. My hands, wrapped in coils of rope, had lost all sensation.
"A reporter! A Jewish reporter!" the voice roared. "You work for the Zionists! Do you work for the Mossad?" And the blows rained down, not hard enough to hurt, but hard enough to make me happy when they stopped.
Then, the same voice: "Get the chain saw."
I wasn't too concerned. The voice was that of Doron Benbenisty, 37, owner and lead instructor of Las Vegas-based Crisis Response International. His threat was something of an inside joke: I had told the Israeli-born Benbenisty earlier in the day about how often people had assumed I was Jewish when I was reporting in his country and in the Palestinian territories.
The amount of muscle behind the beating was less amusing. But I had paid for this treatment: $800 for a three-day class on "Surviving Execution/Beheading/Assassination Attempts & Escaping from Captivity." That's with a holiday discount.
In part, I was here for practical reasons -- reporters, including some writing for The Chronicle, have been captured before, and while those crises ended peacefully, there was nothing to say the next one would.
But there was also curiosity, ignited by the initial e-mail advertising the course, sent by Crisis Response International some weeks before.
"This is the Only Course of its kind offered in the world!" it read. "Hostile kidnappings can happen in any part of the world, not just in Iraq, Afghanistan, Bosnia, South & Central America. Once kidnapped, the situation can go from bad to worse possibly ending in the captive being executed in some cruel manner."
Have things really reached a point where we need regular classes in avoiding beheading? How many people are likely to encounter a terrorist in their lifetime? Is this really necessary?
The 40-year-old who was abducted in San Rafael on Sunday morning and fought off his attacker probably wouldn't scoff at such training. (His harrowing ordeal is detailed in the story accompanying this report.)
And Benbenisty certainly sees the need for crisis training. His students come "from all walks of life -- doctors, lawyers, people that have their own business, people that work at McDonald's, real estate agents. Really, all walks of life," Benbenisty said in a phone interview a few days before class commenced.
Benbenisty was born in a suburb of Tel Aviv in 1969. He began practicing martial arts after seeing a Bruce Lee movie at age 4, and began studying counterterrorism in earnest when his brother survived a suicide bombing by fortuitously ducking behind the engine block of his taxi.
He served in the Israeli special forces, he said, eventually becoming a counterterrorism instructor in Israel's border police before getting married, moving to the United States in 2000 and opening a counterterrorism training school in Baton Rouge, La.
"People would laugh at me when I gave them my card. They said, 'The war on terrorism is happening in Israel, not the U.S.' I couldn't argue with them," he said.
"But in the past year and a half, something changed, because we are approached constantly. ... I think that the London bombing, the Madrid bombing, the way the war is going in Iraq, gang activity all across the country -- people realize we need to train our agencies or our troops or our police officers or our families."
Our families? Yes, said Benbenisty, who contends that there is little practical difference between being abducted by an insurgent overseas and by a robber during a home invasion.
"There's a good chance that anybody in the United States might find himself tied up, hands behind the back, watch his family tied up, and robbers ... will come with a handgun, a silencer, and start to shoot everybody in the head."
Of course, despite the fear such crimes evoke, household chores are statistically a greater hazard. I asked Benbenisty to refer me to a "regular person" who had taken his classes; he pointed me to Karen McLin, a Louisiana resident.
"It was very intense," she said. "I was totally wiped by the end of the class, but I couldn't wait to go back for the next one."
What about those who argue that the average person is never likely to encounter a violent criminal, much less a terrorist?
"It's ridiculous, because you should to the best of your ability be able to prepare yourself," McLin said. "People should know and understand a few basic moves that could help them if they're approached by an assailant with a gun or a knife. They should know a few basic things to either disarm a person or get away."
Benbenisty has taught classes in self defense, defensive driving, executive protection, tactical driving and the like for years. But in recent months, after watching Internet videos of captives being tortured and beheaded overseas, he developed a three-day customized crash course.
"Up to 10 years ago, when they captured someone, they usually held them for ransom or to advance political goals," Benbenisty said on the first day of class. "It's no longer just if you cooperate, you're going to survive."
His class of 13 included several Marines, security contractors and intelligence officers -- but also a chief of security for a Las Vegas nightclub, a young man planning to move to Israel, an aspiring journalist and a San Francisco Chronicle reporter.
None of the students could be described as an everyday citizen like McLin. But many shared McLin's belief that the need for such training extends beyond their professions.
The Chronicle was permitted to write about the class as well as attend on the condition that none of the techniques would be described in detail, for reasons that Benbenisty said also have kept him from selling DVDs of his classes.
"One of the ways terrorists learn about our strengths that after that become our weaknesses is through open sources," he said. "The advantage is that nobody knows that what we can do is possible."
Some students in the class agreed to be interviewed under a similar condition that their full names not be disclosed -- a precaution that several said reflects the dangers they face in their jobs.
"At least as of a couple years ago, there's a $100,000 to $150,000 bounty out on our heads. And ... they're encouraged to hunt us in the States," said Sean, a former Marine who said he is now working as a civilian employee for Army intelligence and was briefly captured by Macedonian forces in 2001. "You would never have to worry about the Russians in the Cold War going after you or your family back in the States. But that's a new reality."
Benbenisty cited the same "new reality" in his opening remarks -- a reality he argued also has overwhelmed the conventional wisdom that the best thing to do when facing armed attackers is to do exactly as they say.
In Israel, where hitchhiking soldiers are periodically kidnapped, it is the ones who have gone peacefully who often have been killed, he said. Benbenisty encourages students instead to follow the model of the passengers of Flight 93, who on 9/11 revolted against their kidnappers. The plane crashed, he said, but others' lives were saved. And at least they had tried.
"By now," Benbenisty said, after showing a series of gory videos of men shot or beheaded after waiting passively for the end, "I hope you understand that if you are captured, you'd better fight."
One student jotted down the critical word in inch-high letters, triple underlined with exclamation points: "SURVIVE!!!"
Over three punishing days, Benbenisty led the class through a series of exercises that seemed to come out of a book of increasingly worse-case scenarios. Grabbed by one attacker. Grabbed by two attackers. Grabbed by an attacker with a knife. An attacker with a gun. Two attackers with guns. Bound with rope. To a chair. With duct tape. Leaping from a moving car.
Along the way, Benbenisty tried to communicate something of the psychology of capture.
"Your mind is going to focus on the pain your body is experiencing, the discomfort. What you need to do is change that frame of mind for one that's more aggressive, for survival," he told his hooded, bound students during one exercise. "Your mind is your worst enemy. Your imagination."
By then, most of the pain I was feeling came from the preceding days' exercises. Benbenisty's technique involves more and harder contact than many martial arts or fitness classes, which made sense for this group of students. All had fired a weapon at some point in their lives; half carried weapons on the job, and most were in peak physical condition.
By the end of day three, class injuries included multiple scrapes and bruises, one badly sprained wrist, and a thumb -- Benbenisty's -- sliced open like a ripe tomato by the front sight of an M-16. Yet the training continued.
Some of Benbenisty's moves came from recognizable martial arts techniques, albeit with some unique modifications -- such as an escape from a choke hold that ended with an assault on the captor's throat.
"We're not allowed to do that in jujitsu," one student noted.
"This is not about competition," Benbenisty replied firmly. "This is survival."
Other lessons were based on knowing obscure characteristics of the methods and tools of capture -- guns, knives, rope, duct tape, handcuffs -- that can turn a seemingly inescapable situation into a surprisingly brief inconvenience.
Even in a room with combat veterans, some of Benbenisty's techniques caused jaws to drop.
"I can't believe they didn't teach us this," moaned Sean, the intelligence officer, during one escape demonstration. But in an interview, he said he wasn't surprised -- many of his superiors still seem to follow Cold War rules of training and operation that he thinks no longer apply.
"In the Cold War, if spies got caught, you just got rolled up, and you got held, detained, and you got exchanged," he said. "The danger now for us is if we get caught, we get our heads cut off."
John, 38, another former Marine who now trains aid workers and missionaries heading overseas, said the private sector is even further behind.
"What I appreciate most about (the training) is the currency of it. These guys are not just teaching the same old stuff that was in the handbooks 10 years ago. They're actually researching real cases -- things that really happened to real people, like this week -- and they're figuring out how to deal with it," he said.
Despite the title of the course, we never learned how to "survive beheading." Instead, the lessons focused on avoiding it -- how to use speech and body language to appear to be compliant and fearful while waiting for a chance to escape or disarm a captor, if necessary in the last seconds before the trigger or knife is pulled.
Some of the techniques work startlingly well. On the third day, most in the class succeeded in disarming and escaping from a classmate "captor" armed with a pellet gun. And without being shot, a particular relief since we bore bruises from the pellets Benbenisty shot at each of us before the exercise. "Usually, we wear thick clothes, but in this course ... I want you to feel the shot," he said. "It's not a game. It's real."
Real enough that when I managed to seize the pellet gun John pressed into my back in the subsequent scenario, I was left momentarily convinced that I could be captured, bound and beaten by a gun-wielding attacker -- and prevail.
Some of that confidence evaporated when we were introduced to a couple of the worst of the worst-case scenarios: While handcuffed, disarm a captor standing behind you with a rifle. Attack an armed captor standing 10 feet away. Disarm an attacker with a knife, then hurl the blade into a second attacker. These are situations for which even Benbenisty said his defenses were "not 100 percent."
Given the alternatives, even those odds sounded pretty good.
"I'd much rather die getting shot in the head than having my head sawed off with a dull knife," said Adam, who was head of security at a Vegas nightclub and looked the part. "At least hurt him -- make sure he can't have kids."
In the end, Benbenisty pronounced himself satisfied with our efforts.
"You really earned your certificates in this course. You have the bruises to prove it," he said. "We have to take it to the extreme. Because reality is at least as extreme as this -- if not worse."
Sean, the intelligence officer, agreed.
"Anybody here can pooh-pooh that and say it's warmongering or whatever, but we're the guys out there, and we know what we're dealing with," he said. "It's a tool. And if you don't need to use it for the rest of your life, great. But if you do need to use it and you don't have it, it could be your death, your spouse's death, your children's death. It's all very real-world."
John was more philosophical.
"It's an enabler to living a peaceful life in a happy environment. That's what we should look at it as -- an enabler, not an end in itself," he said. "We're aware, we're alert, we're capable, but we're still able to live a life."
E-mail Matthew Stannard at mstannard@sfchronicle.com.
Ellie
COPING WITH KIDNAPPERS: The chances are remote, but abductions occur even in the Bay Area. Some experts say fighting back is worth the risk, and a class in Las Vegas teaches techniques.
- Matthew B. Stannard, Chronicle Staff Writer
Monday, January 22, 2007
(01-22) 04:00 PST Las Vegas -- "What's your name?"
The words were shouted inches from my ear, heavily accented, angry.
"What do you do?"
"I'm a reporter." My words were muffled by the cloth bag over my head, the rope around my throat that tightened every time I started to straighten my duct-taped legs. My hands, wrapped in coils of rope, had lost all sensation.
"A reporter! A Jewish reporter!" the voice roared. "You work for the Zionists! Do you work for the Mossad?" And the blows rained down, not hard enough to hurt, but hard enough to make me happy when they stopped.
Then, the same voice: "Get the chain saw."
I wasn't too concerned. The voice was that of Doron Benbenisty, 37, owner and lead instructor of Las Vegas-based Crisis Response International. His threat was something of an inside joke: I had told the Israeli-born Benbenisty earlier in the day about how often people had assumed I was Jewish when I was reporting in his country and in the Palestinian territories.
The amount of muscle behind the beating was less amusing. But I had paid for this treatment: $800 for a three-day class on "Surviving Execution/Beheading/Assassination Attempts & Escaping from Captivity." That's with a holiday discount.
In part, I was here for practical reasons -- reporters, including some writing for The Chronicle, have been captured before, and while those crises ended peacefully, there was nothing to say the next one would.
But there was also curiosity, ignited by the initial e-mail advertising the course, sent by Crisis Response International some weeks before.
"This is the Only Course of its kind offered in the world!" it read. "Hostile kidnappings can happen in any part of the world, not just in Iraq, Afghanistan, Bosnia, South & Central America. Once kidnapped, the situation can go from bad to worse possibly ending in the captive being executed in some cruel manner."
Have things really reached a point where we need regular classes in avoiding beheading? How many people are likely to encounter a terrorist in their lifetime? Is this really necessary?
The 40-year-old who was abducted in San Rafael on Sunday morning and fought off his attacker probably wouldn't scoff at such training. (His harrowing ordeal is detailed in the story accompanying this report.)
And Benbenisty certainly sees the need for crisis training. His students come "from all walks of life -- doctors, lawyers, people that have their own business, people that work at McDonald's, real estate agents. Really, all walks of life," Benbenisty said in a phone interview a few days before class commenced.
Benbenisty was born in a suburb of Tel Aviv in 1969. He began practicing martial arts after seeing a Bruce Lee movie at age 4, and began studying counterterrorism in earnest when his brother survived a suicide bombing by fortuitously ducking behind the engine block of his taxi.
He served in the Israeli special forces, he said, eventually becoming a counterterrorism instructor in Israel's border police before getting married, moving to the United States in 2000 and opening a counterterrorism training school in Baton Rouge, La.
"People would laugh at me when I gave them my card. They said, 'The war on terrorism is happening in Israel, not the U.S.' I couldn't argue with them," he said.
"But in the past year and a half, something changed, because we are approached constantly. ... I think that the London bombing, the Madrid bombing, the way the war is going in Iraq, gang activity all across the country -- people realize we need to train our agencies or our troops or our police officers or our families."
Our families? Yes, said Benbenisty, who contends that there is little practical difference between being abducted by an insurgent overseas and by a robber during a home invasion.
"There's a good chance that anybody in the United States might find himself tied up, hands behind the back, watch his family tied up, and robbers ... will come with a handgun, a silencer, and start to shoot everybody in the head."
Of course, despite the fear such crimes evoke, household chores are statistically a greater hazard. I asked Benbenisty to refer me to a "regular person" who had taken his classes; he pointed me to Karen McLin, a Louisiana resident.
"It was very intense," she said. "I was totally wiped by the end of the class, but I couldn't wait to go back for the next one."
What about those who argue that the average person is never likely to encounter a violent criminal, much less a terrorist?
"It's ridiculous, because you should to the best of your ability be able to prepare yourself," McLin said. "People should know and understand a few basic moves that could help them if they're approached by an assailant with a gun or a knife. They should know a few basic things to either disarm a person or get away."
Benbenisty has taught classes in self defense, defensive driving, executive protection, tactical driving and the like for years. But in recent months, after watching Internet videos of captives being tortured and beheaded overseas, he developed a three-day customized crash course.
"Up to 10 years ago, when they captured someone, they usually held them for ransom or to advance political goals," Benbenisty said on the first day of class. "It's no longer just if you cooperate, you're going to survive."
His class of 13 included several Marines, security contractors and intelligence officers -- but also a chief of security for a Las Vegas nightclub, a young man planning to move to Israel, an aspiring journalist and a San Francisco Chronicle reporter.
None of the students could be described as an everyday citizen like McLin. But many shared McLin's belief that the need for such training extends beyond their professions.
The Chronicle was permitted to write about the class as well as attend on the condition that none of the techniques would be described in detail, for reasons that Benbenisty said also have kept him from selling DVDs of his classes.
"One of the ways terrorists learn about our strengths that after that become our weaknesses is through open sources," he said. "The advantage is that nobody knows that what we can do is possible."
Some students in the class agreed to be interviewed under a similar condition that their full names not be disclosed -- a precaution that several said reflects the dangers they face in their jobs.
"At least as of a couple years ago, there's a $100,000 to $150,000 bounty out on our heads. And ... they're encouraged to hunt us in the States," said Sean, a former Marine who said he is now working as a civilian employee for Army intelligence and was briefly captured by Macedonian forces in 2001. "You would never have to worry about the Russians in the Cold War going after you or your family back in the States. But that's a new reality."
Benbenisty cited the same "new reality" in his opening remarks -- a reality he argued also has overwhelmed the conventional wisdom that the best thing to do when facing armed attackers is to do exactly as they say.
In Israel, where hitchhiking soldiers are periodically kidnapped, it is the ones who have gone peacefully who often have been killed, he said. Benbenisty encourages students instead to follow the model of the passengers of Flight 93, who on 9/11 revolted against their kidnappers. The plane crashed, he said, but others' lives were saved. And at least they had tried.
"By now," Benbenisty said, after showing a series of gory videos of men shot or beheaded after waiting passively for the end, "I hope you understand that if you are captured, you'd better fight."
One student jotted down the critical word in inch-high letters, triple underlined with exclamation points: "SURVIVE!!!"
Over three punishing days, Benbenisty led the class through a series of exercises that seemed to come out of a book of increasingly worse-case scenarios. Grabbed by one attacker. Grabbed by two attackers. Grabbed by an attacker with a knife. An attacker with a gun. Two attackers with guns. Bound with rope. To a chair. With duct tape. Leaping from a moving car.
Along the way, Benbenisty tried to communicate something of the psychology of capture.
"Your mind is going to focus on the pain your body is experiencing, the discomfort. What you need to do is change that frame of mind for one that's more aggressive, for survival," he told his hooded, bound students during one exercise. "Your mind is your worst enemy. Your imagination."
By then, most of the pain I was feeling came from the preceding days' exercises. Benbenisty's technique involves more and harder contact than many martial arts or fitness classes, which made sense for this group of students. All had fired a weapon at some point in their lives; half carried weapons on the job, and most were in peak physical condition.
By the end of day three, class injuries included multiple scrapes and bruises, one badly sprained wrist, and a thumb -- Benbenisty's -- sliced open like a ripe tomato by the front sight of an M-16. Yet the training continued.
Some of Benbenisty's moves came from recognizable martial arts techniques, albeit with some unique modifications -- such as an escape from a choke hold that ended with an assault on the captor's throat.
"We're not allowed to do that in jujitsu," one student noted.
"This is not about competition," Benbenisty replied firmly. "This is survival."
Other lessons were based on knowing obscure characteristics of the methods and tools of capture -- guns, knives, rope, duct tape, handcuffs -- that can turn a seemingly inescapable situation into a surprisingly brief inconvenience.
Even in a room with combat veterans, some of Benbenisty's techniques caused jaws to drop.
"I can't believe they didn't teach us this," moaned Sean, the intelligence officer, during one escape demonstration. But in an interview, he said he wasn't surprised -- many of his superiors still seem to follow Cold War rules of training and operation that he thinks no longer apply.
"In the Cold War, if spies got caught, you just got rolled up, and you got held, detained, and you got exchanged," he said. "The danger now for us is if we get caught, we get our heads cut off."
John, 38, another former Marine who now trains aid workers and missionaries heading overseas, said the private sector is even further behind.
"What I appreciate most about (the training) is the currency of it. These guys are not just teaching the same old stuff that was in the handbooks 10 years ago. They're actually researching real cases -- things that really happened to real people, like this week -- and they're figuring out how to deal with it," he said.
Despite the title of the course, we never learned how to "survive beheading." Instead, the lessons focused on avoiding it -- how to use speech and body language to appear to be compliant and fearful while waiting for a chance to escape or disarm a captor, if necessary in the last seconds before the trigger or knife is pulled.
Some of the techniques work startlingly well. On the third day, most in the class succeeded in disarming and escaping from a classmate "captor" armed with a pellet gun. And without being shot, a particular relief since we bore bruises from the pellets Benbenisty shot at each of us before the exercise. "Usually, we wear thick clothes, but in this course ... I want you to feel the shot," he said. "It's not a game. It's real."
Real enough that when I managed to seize the pellet gun John pressed into my back in the subsequent scenario, I was left momentarily convinced that I could be captured, bound and beaten by a gun-wielding attacker -- and prevail.
Some of that confidence evaporated when we were introduced to a couple of the worst of the worst-case scenarios: While handcuffed, disarm a captor standing behind you with a rifle. Attack an armed captor standing 10 feet away. Disarm an attacker with a knife, then hurl the blade into a second attacker. These are situations for which even Benbenisty said his defenses were "not 100 percent."
Given the alternatives, even those odds sounded pretty good.
"I'd much rather die getting shot in the head than having my head sawed off with a dull knife," said Adam, who was head of security at a Vegas nightclub and looked the part. "At least hurt him -- make sure he can't have kids."
In the end, Benbenisty pronounced himself satisfied with our efforts.
"You really earned your certificates in this course. You have the bruises to prove it," he said. "We have to take it to the extreme. Because reality is at least as extreme as this -- if not worse."
Sean, the intelligence officer, agreed.
"Anybody here can pooh-pooh that and say it's warmongering or whatever, but we're the guys out there, and we know what we're dealing with," he said. "It's a tool. And if you don't need to use it for the rest of your life, great. But if you do need to use it and you don't have it, it could be your death, your spouse's death, your children's death. It's all very real-world."
John was more philosophical.
"It's an enabler to living a peaceful life in a happy environment. That's what we should look at it as -- an enabler, not an end in itself," he said. "We're aware, we're alert, we're capable, but we're still able to live a life."
E-mail Matthew Stannard at mstannard@sfchronicle.com.
Ellie