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With more than twenty-five years of service in the FBI, Clint Van Zandt, one of the seminal figures in the formation of the FBI's Hostage Negotiation Program, has been party to such unsettling and high-profile conflicts as the Waco siege, the Oklahoma City bombing, and the Unabomber case. His expertise-both as a crisis negotiator and as an FBI insider-has, since his retirement from the FBI, made h... More

With more than twenty-five years of service in the FBI, Clint Van Zandt, one of the seminal figures in the formation of the FBI's Hostage Negotiation Program, has been party to such unsettling and high-profile conflicts as the Waco siege, the Oklahoma City bombing, and the Unabomber case. His expertise-both as a crisis negotiator and as an FBI insider-has, since his retirement from the FBI, made him a fixture in the media; since his retirement from the FBI, he has been called upon more than three thousand times to provide insight and analysis when high-profile hostage situations arise. In Facing Down Evil Van Zandt recounts his most memorable cases-some televised in every living room across the country, and many others that took place beneath the radar of all but those individuals involved whose lives were permanently altered.

From blue-collar beginnings in the Midwest, Clinton Van Zandt fulfilled his childhood dream when he took an entry-level job in the Federal Bureau of Investigation as a clerk in J. Edgar Hoover's FBI, eventually playing a leading roll in the FBI's groundbreaking work in hostage negotiation. In the years that followed, Agent Van Zandt rose through the ranks, helping to form the FBI's Hostage rose through the ranks, helping to form the FBI's Hostage Negotiation and Behavioral Science Program, where he would encounter madmen like Timothy McVeigh, David Koresh, and Ted Kaczynski.

Van Zandt draws the reader into his private world of hostage negotiations, taking us inside the criminal mind, the impossibly high-stress situations, the ticking of the clock before SWAT is brought in, the art of calling a hostage-taker's bluff, and the despair over a botched operation or a nonnegotiable situation. It is both a gripping page-turner and a thoughtful examination of our nation's most powerful law enforcement agency through the eyes of someone on the front line of many of the FBI's most famous and infamous cases.

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