AMONG UNKNOWN HOSTAGES relates the experiences of American civilians who were rounded up by the Nazis and held in Internment Camps once the U.S. entered WWII. Among these thousands of men, women, and children, gentiles and Jews, whose stories have not yet been told was John Tomczyk, whose unusual adventures before and during internment provide a look into an American’s life in occupied Poland. Photos are included which demonstrate the unconquerable spirit of American patriots while inside a Nazi prison. Accounts of John’s relatives escaping a partitioned Poland, tragic stories of immigrant life in his native Chicago, and the hand fate dealt him after repatriation will show the reader a family’s journey spanning a very turbulent century.
The explosive book that sparked a congressional investigation is now in paperback and updated with new testimony from key participants. Naval veteran Gary Sick was the principal White House aide for Iran during the hostage crisis of 1979-81 and is the author of All Fall Down: America's Tragic Encounter with Iran. Photographs.
This volume presents in translation 100 previously unknown letters of Ippolita Maria Sforza (1445–1488), daughter of the Duke of Milan, who was sent at age twenty to marry the son of the infamously brutal King Ferrante of Naples. Sforza’s letters display the adroit diplomacy she used to strengthen the alliance between Milan and Naples, then the two most powerful states in Italy, amid such grave crises as her brother’s assassination in Milan and the Turkish invasion of Otranto. Still, Ippolita lived as a hostage at the Neapolitan court, subject not only to the threat of foreign invasion but also to her husband’s well-known sexual adventures and her father-in-law’s ruthlessness. Soon after Ippolita’s mysterious death in 1488, the fraught Naples-Milan alliance collapsed.
In "Out of Captivity, " Gonsalves, Stansell, and Howes recount for the first time their amazing tale of survival, friendship, and, ultimately, rescue, tracing their five and a half years as hostages of the FARC--a Colombian terrorist and Marxist rebel organization.
Scholarly, multidisciplinary, and iconoclastic, this book provides a comprehensive study of human behaviour in organisational setting, discusses the theory and principles of self-organisation, elaborates the strengths of self-organisation over command organisation, and gives a complete roadmap to set up and sustain in any culture and society an exceptionally capable hostage rescue force specialising in mass hostage rescue. However, its numerous valuable insights, relying not on technology but people and employing the force of their intrinsic motivation, are not relevant to the niche of special forces and wider military context alone but can be employed across all occupational settings to build highly efficient organisations where people work voluntarily and deliver responsibly without the supervision and control of command element. Beyond formal organisations, all fields of human activities, including the private lives of individuals too can immensely benefit from radical ideas and useful information contained in it. Besides discussing the deeper questions of life as a whole, of organisational life in general, of mass hostage rescue in particular, and of character, culture, environment, leadership, and communication, it also elaborately explains how we make decisions in crisis, who is an expert and how one can become an expert, how do we learn and how we can learn better, what makes us commit errors and mistakes, what lies behind our failures, and how we can deal with errors and failures both as individuals and organisations. About Author: Avichal is an Indian police officer who has been associated with the world of special forces as a practitioner, instructor, designer, administrator, institution builder, and adviser for over two decades and has operated and trained in many countries of the world.
This book is about the role of negotiation in resolving terrorist barricade hostage crises. What lessons can be learned from past deadly incidents so that crisis negotiators and decision makers can act with greater effectiveness in the future? What are the lessons the terrorists are learning and how will they affect the dynamics of future incidents? What can we learn about the terrorist threat, and about preventing the escalation of future terrorist hostage-taking situations? While there are many trained crisis negotiators around the world, almost none of them has ever had contact with a terrorist hostage-taking incident. Further, the entire training program of most hostage negotiators focuses on resolving crises that do not take into consideration issues such as ideology, religion, or the differing sets of strategic objectives and mindsets of ideological hostage takers. This is especially true with regard to the terrorists of the new breed, who have become less discriminate, more lethal, and more willing to execute hostages and die during the incident. Further, many of the paradigms and presumptions upon which the contemporary practice of crisis negotiation is based do not reflect the reality of the new terrorists. The main focus of this book is on the detailed reconstruction and analysis of the two most high-profile cases in recent years, the Moscow theater and the Beslan school hostage crises, with a clear purpose of drawing lessons for hostage negotiation strategies in the future. This is an issue of top priority. Terrorist manuals from countries such as Saudi Arabia and Iraq reveal that terrorist organizations are very closely observing and analyzing the lessons learned from these two incidents, suggesting that we are likely to see this type of new terrorist hostage taking involving large numbers of suicide fighters and executions of hostages at some point in the future. This raises a wide array of questions about appropriate responses and negotiation strategies. From the first glance, it is clear that we are not prepared.
Examines the problems governments face or are likely to face in handling a hostage situation. The book seeks to address the specialized subject of crisis management when applied to hostage/siege incidents and concentrates, in particular, on the techniques used in siege negotiations.
The study presents a critical examination of the political relations between Rome and Near Eastern kingdoms and principalities during the age of civil war from Caesar’s death in 44 until the Battle of Actium in 31 BC.
