Gary Noesner

Gary Noesner retired from the FBI in 2003 following a 30 year career as an investigator, instructor and negotiator. A significant focus of his career was directed toward investigating Middle East hijackings in which American citizens were victimized.

In addition, he was an FBI hostage negotiator for 23 years of his career, spending the last ten years as the Chief Negotiator for the FBI. He retired as the Chief of the FBI's Crisis Negotiation Unit, Critical Incident Response Group, the first person to hold that position. In that capacity was heavily involved in numerous crisis incidents covering prison riots, right-wing militia standoffs, religious zealot sieges, terrorist embassy takeovers, airplane hijackings and over 120 overseas kidnapping cases involving American citizens.

Following his retirement from the FBI he became a Senior Vice President with Control Risks, an international risk consultancy, assisting clients in managing overseas kidnap incidents involving their employees. He continues to do kidnap management consulting work for Control Risks part-time. He has appeared in numerous television documentaries about hostage negotiation, terrorism and kidnapping produced by the History Channel, TLC, A&E, CNN, CBS, BBC, and others. He was the subject of an interview on NPRs Fresh Air in 2010. He has written a book about his FBI negotiation career which was published by Random House on September 21, 2010, entitled: Stalling for Time: My Life as an FBI Hostage Negotiator.