Personal Safety While Traveling Abroad on Business:
Part 1
By David S. Katz
Each year, several hundred thousand men and women take business trips. They travel to virtually every corner of the globe, often to places presenting real dangers to their safety. Perhaps the most disturbing fact is that the majority of such corporate travelers have never received any training in how to protect themselves. This year alone, hundreds of executives will be robbed, assaulted, kidnapped, and murdered. Most of these incidents could have been prevented by adherence to basic rules of personal safety.
Basic security principles of personal safety are easy to understand and implement and will greatly reduce the likelihood that you will become a victim. You must understand and accept the fact that all of us are potentially at risk. We live in a dangerous world. News is not merely something that happens to other people. It can happen to anyone, anywhere, at anytime. Once that reality sinks in, you can begin to modify your behavior in a way that will make you less vulnerable.
Increase Your Awareness
The first and most important thing you can do is to learn vigilance and develop proper observational skills. Fortunately, this is easier than it sounds. All you need to do is to learn how to pay attention to your surroundings, make observations, and draw appropriate conclusions from those observations. Learn to key on the unusual or on someone or something that seems out of place. Many of us seem to operate on autopilot most of the time. We daydream as we go about our business, perhaps dwelling on a difficult situation at work or on a personal problem. In this state you are not paying attention to your surroundings. This is the state in which you are most likely to be victimized.
In order to make any meaningful difference in your level of personal security, you must be aware of your surroundings at all times. This is not paranoia. It is the state of relaxed alertness. You are simply aware of your surroundings and pay attention to anything that seems out of place. Perhaps you see an unfamiliar car parked on your street or someone that seems to be paying attention to you. You learn to notice these things and thereby gain the ability to detect a problem or threat before it materializes. This is the appropriate condition to be in when you are out and about. Virtually every other security measure you should be following is predicated on your ability to spot potential dangers while there is still time to avoid them.
Reduce Your Visibility
One of the best pieces of advice given by security professionals is to simply keep a low profile. This is even more important while traveling abroad.
Dress and behave conservatively. This is just simple common sense. If you are traveling to a country where $100 represents a month's salary, it is simply a bad idea to flaunt affluence. Wearing expensive clothing and jewelry makes you attractive to the local criminal element looking for a quick and easy score.
Avoid routine patterns. Terrorists and criminals often select targets with regular and predictable schedules. This makes it very easy for them to plan a crime or attack. Most people leave the house for work at the same time every morning. They leave the office and return to their car at the same time every night. And, unless they are attempting to avoid a particular problem with traffic, they take the exact same route to and from work. Anyone intent on assaulting you has a relatively easy time in setting up his or her ambush because of your unvaried routine.
You need to train yourself to vary your route as well as the time you travel. This is also true even while traveling abroad on short business trips. If you leave the hotel for the local office at the same time each morning, even if you are only in country for a few days, you have settled into a pattern that makes it too easy for someone to select you as a target. Each day, simply leave at a different time and vary the route you take. You can turn this practice into something positive. Leave a bit early and get a cup of coffee or breakfast at a local place of interest. If you are taking a taxi, ask the driver to take you a different way so you can see the sights. Just don't walk out of the hotel and get into a car or taxi at the same time every morning.
If you use a company vehicle for transportation, it is a good idea to routinely and randomly exchange vehicles with your coworkers. This will prevent someone targeting you from ever being certain that you will be driving a particular car at a particular time.
Avoid western gathering places. If you are traveling to a region designated as high risk by the U.S. Department of State, there are additional measures that should be considered. Often, terrorists will seek to identify and attack a location that will be certain to have a high concentration of Americans or other westerners present at a specific time. For example, a horrific practice, which has long been used by terror groups, is to arget religious services at houses of worship frequented by westerners. The reason is obvious. A Christian church serving the international community will provide them a target, which is certain to be filled every Sunday morning at 9:00 a.m. This presents a tough choice for an individual to whom church service is an important part of life. The same is true for nightclubs and other locations catering to Americans and western Europeans. If the State Department suggests avoiding such places in a country you are traveling to, heed their warning.
By the way, wherever you go it is always a good practice to immediately identify all emergency exits and make sure they are actually functional. Many foreign countries do not have fire codes that mandate identifiable emergency exits in all public establishments. You need to make sure you know how to get out of any place you decide to go into.
Pre-travel Research
Security planning must begin long before you get on the plane. You need to research the following:
- The status of travel warnings for your destination and the surrounding region.
- The level of local political stability.
- The activity of terrorist organizations.
- The risks posed by local criminal activity.
- The nature of local emergency medical care.
How can you find this information?
Your first stop should be to the State Department website (www.travel.state.gov). In addition to providing basic information about every country in the world, the State Department will also post advisories and alerts for anywhere in the world that may have a developing situation that could pose a danger to American citizens. If there is an alert for the area that you are going to, you should take it seriously. Pay particular attention as well to the section relative to local emergency health.
The State Department site also provides information about the vaccinations that you should take if you travel to certain parts of the world. Contact your insurance company and make sure you are covered while overseas.
Are you planning to drive in-country? The single greatest danger to Americans traveling abroad is being involved in an auto accident. More Americans are killed abroad in traffic accidents than by terrorism and criminal acts combined. An indispensable resource in this regard is the website maintained by the Association for Safe International Road Travel (ASIRT). The site, www.asirt.org, gives you some of the best available information on local road conditions, traffic patterns, and local accident statistics and traffic fatalities.
Travel Arrangements
Most business travelers have a secretary or travel agency take care of flight arrangements and hotel reservations. This may be convenient, but it is not the way to make the right travel decisions from a security standpoint.
Know your airlines' safety record. Whoever books your flight needs to check the safety record of your intended carrier. Obviously, take flights on airlines with good safety records.
Fly on a wide-bodied jet like a Boeing 747 whenever possible. Hijackers tend to avoid targeting wide bodies because of the tactical problem of covering so many passengers and three rows of seating instead of two.
Try to schedule direct flights. Besides the fact that it is certainly more convenient, there are two security-related reasons for this practice.
The first is the fact that most airline accidents occur during the takeoff and landing. It therefore stands to reason that if your flight is not making many of these, you have a statistically lower chance of being in an accident. The second is to minimize the risk of being involved in a hijacking. Despite the success that the 9/11 hijackers enjoyed while commandeering American planes flying out of domestic airports, the usual points of infiltration by hijackers are the less secure airports at which many connecting flights must stop. Terrorist hijackers are well aware of which airports they can operate in and which they cannot. If you must take a connecting flight, make sure you are not transferring in an airport that has a history of poor safety practices or is in a high-risk area.
Avoid airport lobbies. In most countries, with the notable exception of Israel, most airport lobbies are open to the public and are not secure. The secure area is beyond the screening booths and no one should be in that area unless they have a ticket and have passed through security. Once you check in, move directly to the secure part of the airport. Virtually all of the terror attacks at airports have occurred in the unsecured common ticketing area.
Prearrange transportation from the airport. Upon arrival at your destination, you will require transportation to your hotel. Whenever possible, try to arrange transportation before you go. Many hotels have their own transportation vans, which make regular runs between the hotel and the airport. If you cannot make prior arrangements, use only properly marked and identifiable commercial vehicles. Do not accept the services of local residents using personal vehicles to take fares from the airport.
This article will be concluded in the next issue.
EDITOR'S NOTE: For those wishing to have a more concise document containing some of the important points covered in this article, the author has posted a security checklist on the Internet. Go to www.globalsecuritygroup.com and click on Travel Safety Checklist. You can download it in PDF format.
David S. Katz is a former senior special agent for the Drug Enforcement Administration and an expert in conducting complex international criminal investigations, high-risk arrests, undercover operations, physical and technical surveillance, and intelligence analysis. A recognized authority in the field of law enforcement arrest and defensive tactics, Katz spent four years as an instructor at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia, and has provided instruction to law enforcement officers around the world. He is currently the president and chief executive officer of Global Security Group, Inc., a company specializing in security consulting, crisis and risk management, specialized training, protective services, investigations, and counter-terrorism. He is the co-author of "Executive's Guide to Personal Security" (Wiley & Sons, Inc. June/2003).
Katz will be the speaker at the Executive Travel Safety & Personal Security Seminar on February 10, 2004 in New York City. Visit www.globalsecuritygroup.com for more information. He may be contacted at david.katz@globalsecuritygroup.com.
This article previously appeared in the September/October issue of Loss Prevention Magazine.
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