How to Recognize a Suicide Bomber: A Field Guide for New Recruits

Editor’s note: This is bonus content from the Gabriel Cohen universe. I had the idea for this document after reading Gone Tomorrow by Lee Child. The following document was written by Gabriel Cohen during his years in the sub-basement at the Agency, when he was tasked with producing training materials for incoming field personnel. It was never officially distributed. A handwritten note on the original copy reads: “Too honest for a committee.”

THREAT RECOGNITION IN CROWDED ENVIRONMENTS

Internal Document — Not for Distribution

Author: G. Cohen, Senior Analyst, Level B-4

Classification: Restricted

If you are reading this, someone decided you are smart enough to be given information that will not appear in the formal curriculum. Take that as a compliment and do not let it make you careless.

This document is about suicide bombers. Specifically, it is about how to recognize one before the recognition becomes irrelevant.

I will begin with the thing that takes most recruits several years to understand: you are not looking for a weapon. The weapon is not the threat. The weapon is already committed. What you are looking for is a person in a particular psychological state, and you have, at best, thirty seconds to read it accurately.

If you spend those thirty seconds looking for a bulge in a jacket, you are going to miss most of what matters.

The fundamental distinction

There are two categories of nervous person in a crowded space.

The first is nervous because they do not belong there. A pickpocket in a tourist area. A shoplifter in a department store. Someone who came to meet a person they should not be meeting. This person’s nervousness is situational. They are tracking exits, yes, but they are tracking exits because they want to leave. Their eyes move constantly between the crowd and the door. Their body is angled toward the fastest route out. Everything about them is oriented toward escape.

The second category is nervous because they are about to do something from which there is no escape. This is the person you are looking for.

The distinction in the body is subtle and it is reliable. The person in the first category is protecting their future. The person in the second category has already relinquished it. What this produces, if you know how to read it, is a specific quality of stillness underneath the movement. Call it resignation. Call it the look of a decision that has already been finalized. The ordinary frightened person has not made a decision yet. Their fear is open-ended. The person who has committed to an action from which they will not return has already closed every door. The fear is still there, but it sits on top of something fixed and calm.

This is what operators in the field describe as the thousand-yard stare, which is not precisely accurate. It is not a stare at a specific distance. It is a stare that passes through whatever is in front of it, because whatever is in front of it is not what the person is looking at. They are looking at something inside.

What the body does

Inappropriate dress for the environmental temperature is the entry-level indicator and the one most likely to produce false positives. If it is hot and someone is wearing a coat, that is worth noting. It is not worth acting on alone.

What you are looking for in the body is the hand. Specifically, where it goes and how often it returns there.

A person carrying a concealed, wired device cannot stop being aware of it. The body’s natural response to a foreign object is to check that it is still there, still positioned correctly, still connected. This check is often a light, brief contact with the midsection, the chest, or the lower back. The hand moves there without apparent purpose and returns to a neutral position. The person may not be aware they are doing it. They are doing it.

This is different from someone with a back problem adjusting their posture. The check is too brief and too directed. It does not massage or shift weight. It confirms a position and withdraws.

Watch also for someone who is walking without looking where they are going. Not someone distracted by a phone. Someone who is moving through a space as though the space itself is not particularly relevant to them, because in their frame, it is not. The crowd is not a crowd. It is the location of the event. They are already past the experience of being in it.

Perspiration inconsistent with environmental conditions. Lips moving without sound, which in my experience corresponds more often to prayer than to any other single cause. A deliberate, measured pace that does not vary regardless of what the crowd around them is doing.

Context and location

Threat indicators do not exist in isolation. They exist in context.

A person with two of the above indicators in an uncrowded location at 10 a.m. on a Tuesday is worth observation. The same person with the same indicators in a crowded market at noon, standing near an entrance, in a city with active threat intelligence, is a different calculation entirely.

You will not always have threat intelligence. You will sometimes be working from indicators alone. The discipline is to read what is in front of you accurately without projecting what you expect to find, because the profile of someone who commits this kind of violence is not monolithic and it has changed significantly in the past two decades.

The person in front of you may not match the profile you have been given. The profile is a statistical description of previous events. The event in front of you is not a statistic. Treat the person in front of you as a person. Read what the body is doing, not what you expected the body to do.

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What not to do

Do not approach directly unless you are prepared to act immediately and completely. Approaching and then hesitating is worse than not approaching.

Do not create a scene that produces the very crowding and confusion that increases the effectiveness of a device. The calculation in a crowded space is always a calculation about reducing casualties, not about procedure.

Do not assume a visual confirmation of a device before acting. By the time you have visual confirmation, you are inside the effective radius of it.

The actual skill

Reading people under pressure, in a short time, accurately, is a skill. It is not intuition and it is not instinct, though it can feel like both once it is developed. It is pattern recognition built from enough specific observation that the brain begins to process the relevant signals before the conscious mind has named them.

You build this by watching people who are not threats so that you know, with precision, what ordinary nervous looks like. What ordinary inattentive looks like. What ordinary fatigue and ordinary anger and ordinary grief look like in the body, because all of them will appear in a crowd and none of them are your problem.

When you have calibrated what normal looks like, the abnormal becomes visible in a way that is difficult to describe but reliable in practice. Something is not right, before you have consciously identified what is not right. That signal is worth taking seriously. In my experience, the recruits who dismiss that signal because they cannot immediately articulate it are the recruits who later write the reports explaining why they did not act.

The recruits who act on the signal and then articulate it afterward are the ones I want reading this document.

A final note

I wrote this document because the formal curriculum presents threat recognition as a checklist. A checklist is useful for equipment and procedures. It is not useful for reading people, because people do not conform to checklists. They conform to their own psychology, which is what you are actually reading.

Read the person. Not the profile. Not the checklist. Not the category.

The person.

Everything useful will come from that.

G. Cohen Tel Aviv