A Kind Heart Is No Longer Enough: Preparing Humanitarians for the Realities of Crisis Zones - Reflections from the field

Check Freedman, Chief Operations Officer of Captive Audience, has decades of operational experience in executive protection, surveillance, maritime and air operations, and SERE (survival, evasion, resistance, escape). Since 1995, he has trained local, state, and federal law enforcement in counter-terrorism, security, and defensive tactics, while also serving as a subject matter expert on homicide, human trafficking, and drug trafficking. His investigative work has influenced operational policies and improved prevention strategies, including analyzing links between narcotics and human trafficking networks. Over the past decade, he has specialized in personnel recovery and hostage negotiation, applying cross-cultural and unconventional approaches to crisis resolution. With over 500 Critical Incident Stress Management responses, he integrates crisis intervention, negotiation, and operational tradecraft. Freedman holds extensive technical and security qualifications across aviation, investigation, emergency response, and martial arts. He is a former Senior Program Manager for CISM and Resiliency in the U.S. Air Force Auxiliary and a published author on survival, resilience, and crisis response.

Check Freedman

c.freedman@captiveaudienceptrt.com

703-625-7279

I have worked cases all over the world. In 2017, my colleague and I started a company called Captive Audience to address kidnappings for ransom, extortion and terrorism in the non-governmental space. We serve non-profits, missionaries, local volunteers, NGOs, government organizations, journalists, humanitarian aid workers and more to help prevent and respond to these kinds of crisis events. Perhaps one of the biggest things we have seen is that many non-profits deploying to crisis zones are often untrained or unprepared to deal with the potential for their people to get kidnapped or unlawfully detained. In most cases groups rely on outdated HEAT (Hostile Environment Anti-Terrorism) training or no security training at all. In every case we have worked, we have encountered criminal organizations (gangs, cartels, mafia, etc.), opportunists, terrorist organizations, and con artists. Criminal networks conduct their most lucrative business during crises and we have noticed increases in drug trafficking, human trafficking, kidnappings, extortion, rape, robbery, and many other violent crimes. A kind heart is no longer enough. Training in surveillance detection, advanced first aid skills, navigation, escaping civil unrest, and hostage survival is more important than ever.

For the first six months of 2022, we set up pipelines for Ukrainians to leave Russian-controlled territories and for Americans and American allies to leave Ukraine. We had a zero dollar budget. We wound up organizing exits for almost 50 people with no financial backing at all. 24 of those people we got into guaranteed living situations for the next two years. We set up pipelines all over Europe, North America, and South America. We got the US military involved to fly a large shipment of medical supplies from the United States to Poland and then we arranged for a Christian humanitarian aid group to drive the shipment across the border and into Ukraine. We taught classes to Ukrainian citizens on convoy operations and SIGINT and TCCC (Tactical Combat Casualty Care) focusing on all the medical response capabilities that came from a roll of duct tape, bath towels, and bedsheets. Sometimes that was all they had. We called our mission Operation Caffeinated Vikings. We worked under the Captive Audience banner but it was the largest operation we ever did on the most nonexistent budget.
I have a ton of stories to tell. We were contacted a number of years ago by the US Department Of State. Luca Tochetto, an Italian citizen, and Edith Blais, a Canadian citizen, had been traveling together in Africa when they disappeared in Burkina Faso. It was a presumed kidnapping but there was no intelligence. The international couple was heading to Mali to spend a year doing humanitarian aid work. They decided to leave a month early, buy a car, and travel around the African continent before arriving in Mali to work. My business partner had worked historically in North Africa and I also had strong connections there. 

We reached into our existing networks and asked questions. We obtained really solid intelligence. The more we asked, the more we got. We planned and directed all the intelligence collection efforts. The Canadian and Italian governments were amazed at the intelligence we were providing. They continuously tried to get us to reveal our sources but we elected not to do that. Many lives were at risk and we wanted to protect our people and preserve those relationships for the future. There were many days when we were on the phone with the Canadian government, the Italian government, the government of Burkina Faso and the government of Mali all at the same time. From our humble office just outside Washington, D.C., we organized intelligence, ran operations, and arranged for the recovery of these two American allies. The State Department asked us to take the lead because we had the necessary networks. We provided intelligence to the RCMP in Ottawa, the Carabiniere in Rome, the US embassy in Mali, the Burkinabe government, and the US State Department. We mobilized our networks from Burkina Faso to Bamako, Mali and reported very specific details about the location, movements, and status of Tochetto and Blais and the networks holding them captive. Eventually, those two citizens returned home. It was not a short ordeal. It lasted several years. It highlighted the value of trusted and vetted networks and that’s really what makes our job possible.

I would say the first is that there is power in networking and learning who is who working throughout the space. We have been able to coordinate responses and support others on many occasions from our office without deploying. We have gotten very good at leveraging networks and getting things done with friends who have already deployed. There is so much that can be done to support a crisis relief effort from a home office if you are willing to work through those who are there.
Another big lesson learned is that Zoom, MS Teams, and many other video teleconference platforms along with Starlink and other satellite internet services have created a means to deliver critical training to people who need it within hours, instead of months. We taught complex medical tasks to volunteers in Ukraine hours after receiving their requests. In turn those skills were used to save lives within hours of the training.

Captive Audience was formed in 2017 to answer a problem we were encountering in our military and government careers. We worked on personnel recovery cases for Americans and American allies, but we noticed that very few of those people worked for the military or the government when they were kidnapped. Most of them had gone into a crisis area of the world precisely because a crisis was unfolding there. These people included missionaries, journalists, and humanitarian aid workers. They all had gigantic and amazing hearts and took off to serve somewhere that really needed them, without the training or the knowledge base to handle the problems they might encounter. We began by setting up two initiatives simultaneously. Captive Audience is our for-profit company. Under that banner, one initiative was to offer crisis management services (hostage recovery) for the people that were already in trouble. The other initiative was to set up training courses to train people before they headed into a crisis area so that they would not become a statistic. After working 85% pro bono cases, we realized we truly needed to start a nonprofit. We had spent over 9 years personally funding all the requests that came to us because we have an ethos not to say no to people in need. That was when we started the Center for Resilience & Freedom. That is the nonprofit version of Captive Audience, which has all the same operational capabilities but also includes the ability to fundraise and take donations.