31 years ago this month, the nation’s capital learned the extent of its vulnerability. Have the lessons been learned?
Si Cohen was working on the seventh floor of the B’nai B’rith International building in Washington, DC, on Rhode Island Avenue at about 11 a.m. when his office received a call on March 9, 1977: There was a gunman in the building. Everyone had to get out.
Cohen and his co-workers figured somebody was robbing the gift shop on the first floor—a bit of excitement for the day, but no big deal. They gathered their coats and headed to the elevators. When an elevator door opened, they quickly realized that this was no simple stick-up.
“A guy came out with a shotgun,” said Cohen, now 84, who was then B’nai B’rith’s director of community services. “He took us to the eighth floor, where we had a conference room. It was being renovated, so there were cans of paint and telephone wires hanging all over the place. There were already more than 100 of our colleagues there, taken hostage. The men who wore neckties that day had to take them off, so the gunmen could tie their hands behind their backs. The men who didn’t have neckties had to have their hands tied with telephone wire. I was one of them. At one point, my eyeglasses were slipping down my nose and I couldn’t do anything about it. So my assistant, who was sitting next to me, moved them back in place. At that point, a gunman came over, pointed his shotgun at her and said, ‘Lady, if you do that again, I’ll blow your head off.’
“It took a while before I was permitted to go to the bathroom. When I finally went, I sat in the stall, took out the family photos in my wallet and told my wife and children goodbye. I honestly didn’t expect to see them again.”
So unfolded what’s now known as the Hanafi Muslim Siege of 1977, in which seven gunmen took over three buildings: the B’nai B’rith headquarters; the District Building, which served as Washington, DC’s city hall; and the Islamic Center. A total of 149 people were taken hostage, and two people were killed. A future mayor, Marion Barry, was a council member at the time; he was shot at the District Building just above the heart and is considered lucky to be alive today. A 24-year-old radio reporter from a local station, Maurice Williams, wasn’t so fortunate— he was shot and killed after walking out of the same building’s fifth-floor elevator as the hostage situation unfolded.
The siege lasted nearly 40 hours, from March 9 to 11, and sheds light on how disturbingly complex such incidents are. There is no template for hostage takeovers. Everyone is fueled by individual motives and personalities and deployed using different tactics in a wide variety of venues. Any one of any number of factors—the weather, the temperament of a suspect or victim, the availability of food, the demeanor of a negotiator, the patience of authorities, the willingness of a suspect to kill someone and, frankly, even boredom — can result in either success or a failure. The Hanafi incident, in retrospect, is considered a success. The vast majority of those taken hostage were freed, unharmed. The capturers were arrested. But, to secure such results, both Washington and federal law enforcement officials—and even the president of the United States at the time—needed to be flexible, to think on their feet as events dictated.
“At first, we had no idea what it was exactly that we were dealing with,” recalled Maurice Cullinane, 75, who was chief of police in Washington at the time. “Then we realized they had taken control of three buildings, with a lot of people taken hostage. That’s when we knew this was something unlike anything that’s happened before in this city. But we had a plan to get through it while minimizing casualties as best as we could hope for.”
The spark
The story of the Hanafi siege started four years before the event, in 1973.
That’s when the Washington home of Khalifa Hamaasand Abdul Khaalis was broken into and seven people were murdered, including Khaalis’ five children and a nine-day-old grandson. Khaalis was a Black Muslim. The people who killed his loved ones? They were Black Muslims, too. Before the incident, Khaalis broke with the sect and launched what he called Hanafi, or True Islam, in the 1960s. In 1972, he criticized the Black Muslim group in a letter, which apparently sparked the attack.
Khaalis was an extremely angry man and highly unstable. Even though the suspects were captured, tried and sentenced, he remained embittered. Eventually, his anger boiled to the point where he organized his own break-in and hostage event. He demanded that his family’s killers be handed over to him. Among other less coherent demands, he asked to see boxer Muhammad Ali and the banning of a movie he found offensive, Mohammad, Messenger of God. “He was asking for all kinds of things,” Cullinane said, “and he wasn’t making a whole lot of sense.”
Ironically, Bill Tafoya, an FBI special agent working in Washington at the time, had been dispatched months before the incident to write a report that would essentially provide a blueprint for such hostage takeover situations. In his research of past cases, he found that there was one key element that usually resulted in success: patience.
“If you rush things, people will die,” observed Tafoya, now a professor with the Henry C. Lee College of Criminal Justice and Forensic Sciences at the University of New Haven. “Nationwide, over successive years prior to this incident, trained professionals who were willing to allow time to pass and used it to build trust were the ones who met with success, over and over again. In the beginning, hostage-takers are angry and suspicious of everyone. A person who is a skilled negotiator will bring them down from that state of mind and get them to a point where they can come to a workable agreement.”
It turned out to be the winning strategy in this case. Cullinane already had a great asset on his team, Commander Joseph O’Brien. O’Brien, now deceased, had worked closely with Khaalis in the aftermath of his family’s murders. He maintained a rapport, returning to visit Khaalis at his Washington home and taking interest in his beliefs and the Koran.
Cullinane, O’Brien and other authorities quickly established their central base of negotiations in a secured area of the Municipal Building, another city-run property with ample conference tables and telephones. Before long, authorities learned that Barry had been shot. Preparing to run for mayor, the council member was already gaining a reputation as a press magnet. But, to his credit, Barry didn’t use his injury for immediate political gain. “We spoke on the phone when he was in the hospital,” Cullinane said. “He said he would not speak to any reporters if I felt it could put the hostages in danger. I respected him for that. He could easily have died, too. The shell bounced off a couple of walls before it hit him. It was pretty much spent by the time it reached him. But, given where it landed, it would have killed him otherwise.”
Meanwhile, the hostages were holding up relatively well, demonstrating a sense of humor. On the second night, the Red Cross arranged for sandwiches to be sent over. Cohen recalled that a few were corned beef on white bread. “We said, ‘What self-respecting Jew eats corned beef on white?’” he recalled. “After the crisis was over and we got back to work, a nearby deli put up a sign saying, to the best of my recollection: ‘Welcome back, B’nai B’rith. Our corned beef is served on rye with deli mustard.’”
Endgame
President Jimmy Carter gave the DC police a huge vote of confidence when he phoned Cullinane and said he was not going to allow federal authorities to take over the scene. “We had FBI agents there to help us if we needed it,” he said. “But we were the ones in control.” O’Brien continued to rebuild his trust with Khaalis. Then, a trio of Muslim ambassadors was recruited to participate in negotiations, a highly unorthodox move.
“It’s quite unique, actually,” said Manassas, Va.-based attorney Conrad Hassel, who was involved in the 1977 takeover as an FBI special agent in the behavioral science unit. “Usually, in hostage situations, the only people who negotiate are people in law enforcement or government. You don’t let outsiders in. But it worked.”
Khaalis was worn down. “We knew it would eventually happen,” Cullinane said. “At first, he’s angry and talking about chopping people’s heads off. So we knew that we had to back off and give him time to simmer down. Eventually, he did. They always do. Just bide for time and keep ‘em talking.”
Finally, Khaalis said he’d surrender if Cullinane, O’Brien, Robert Rabe (then the deputy police chief) and the three ambassadors would meet with him unarmed. There was no decision to be made. “It was time,” Cullinane said. “There were three buildings taken over. There were threats about killing people. He was offering us a way to end this, and we took him up on it. I put my gun on the desk and all of us headed over to the B’nai B’rith building, not knowing what was going to happen.”
The hostages were freed, and Khaalis’ men were taken into custody. To abide by one of Khaalis’ terms, a court order was secured to allow him to go home, a move that angered many. “This was a negotiated term,” Cullinane said. “But we knew he was going nowhere. We had his house surrounded by rifles the entire time he was there. We had his phone wiretapped. Sure enough, he violated the terms of his release shortly after, and we got a warrant and arrested him.”
At B’nai B’rith, a special weapons team freed the hostages. The gunmen had already left by that time. The hostages said a prayer of thanksgiving in Hebrew and were taken to a nearby hospital where counselors and family members were waiting. When they walked out on the street for the first time in days, they could hear church bells ringing throughout the entire city, with congregations of all kinds rejoicing in their well-being.
“Some of us went right back to work the next week,” Cohen said. “But others never went back to work. For a year after that, any time you heard an unusual noise in the building, you jumped. A sense of normalcy eventually returned, but life never was the same again. You never took it for granted anymore. You hugged your kids more. You were kinder to people. The skies were bluer. You had gotten a second chance and you knew it.”
Dennis McCafferty is a frequent contributor to HSToday.
Lessons Learned