Pistols to Press:
Lessons on Communication from an FBI Agent and Spokesman
Jeff Lanza
Communication Dynamics Publishing
Mission, Kansas
Copyright © 2011 by Jeff Lanza
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Communication Dynamics, LLC.
ISBN 978-0-615-45459-7
Printed in United States of America
Cover design by Melanie Rutherford
First Edition
To Pam, my wife, and our two children,
Christopher and Angela
Contents
Introduction
Chapter 1 Pistols to Press
Chapter 2 The Sound Bite
Chapter 3 Preparation
Chapter 4 The George Brett Incident
Chapter 5 Vigilance
Chapter 6 Is this an FBI Matter?
Chapter 7 Connie Chung’s Terrible Show
Chapter 8 Noise Reduction
Chapter 9 The Media Relationship
Chapter 10 It’s a Control Thing
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Authors Note
Introduction
During my twenty-year career as a Special Agent for the FBI, I had the delightful opportunity on many occasions to speak to groups about my job. Whether they were kids or adults, the audiences that I spoke to always had a lot of questions. In fact, three of the most common questions which I was asked over the years were these:
“Have you ever been shot?”
“Have you ever shot anyone?”
“Did J. Edgar Hoover really wear a red dress?”
Permit me to answer these questions, in case you were wondering. The answers, in order, are:
No, no, and no comment.
Well, actually these weren’t the most common questions, but they have definitely been asked. And since you will be reading in this book that you should never to say “no comment,” my answer to question three is also no. The story about J. Edgar Hoover, who was the Director of the FBI for 48 years, has been widely discredited, as it came from a mob associate and convicted perjurer who was most likely attempting to undermine the FBI’s credibility.
I loved talking to groups about the FBI, and in 1990 I learned something else that I could talk about. I received a phone call from a person at FBI Headquarters in Washington, D.C. who told me that the badge I carried had also been carried by Agent Frank Smith, who was present during the Kansas City Massacre in 1933. This was a historic event in law enforcement history which gave rise to the modern FBI. I was deeply honored to carry this badge throughout my FBI career.
I was honored again in 1990 when I was assigned the collateral duty as a spokesman for the Kansas City Division of the FBI. Geographically, this responsibility extended over a swath of land that covers all of Kansas and about two-thirds of Missouri. It was a busy place for law enforcement. The next eighteen years provided me with an inordinate number of opportunities to work with the press and to learn many lessons on communication.
Notice that I didn’t say lessons on communication with the media. That would be too restrictive. Media communication is a large part of my experience, but the lessons described in this book can be applied in a general way to various types of communication across many industries and professions. They can be used for internal and external communication; in corporate America, non-profits and government; by executives, managers, front line employees, human resource professionals and, of course, law enforcement professionals.
There are especially important lessons pertaining to crisis situations. How an entity experiencing a crisis is perceived in the long term is often dependent not on the crisis itself, but rather on how information about the incident is communicated to various stakeholders, including employees, customers and the general public. This is of particular importance in an age where traditional journalists no longer totally control the flow of information about an incident. You don’t need a degree in journalism, a satellite dish or a newspaper production facility to convey information to the public. Essentially, all that is required to communicate knowledge (be it right or wrong) to large amounts of people is a cellphone and a thumb.
As for media communication, there seems to be no shortage of preventable errors in how information is communicated to the press. Communicators who treat the media like an enemy, who lack preparation or vigilance, who make impromptu comments or who show little or no empathy to the plight of their audience are just asking for communication failure. If there was any doubt whether or not Tony Heyward, the former CEO of BP, should have kept his job following the crisis at Deep Water Horizon, that doubt, as well as public confidence in the company, was removed following his comments about the disastrous oil spill caused by his company. He showed no empathy to the people affected by the crisis (“There is no one who wants this over more than I do. I would like my life back”). He also tried to minimize the gravity of the situation (“It’s relatively tiny compared to the very big ocean”).
Humanizing your organization with a sincere display of empathy before you begin to tell them what you know makes it easier for an audience to accept your further communications. Teddy Roosevelt captures this sentiment perfectly with the quote, “No one cares how much you know until they know how much you care.”
We have all seen examples where impromptu comments can have a lingering aftereffect on a community. Recently, the Sheriff in Polk County, Florida was asked by the press why his deputies had shot a man sixty-eight times. His response: “Because that is all the ammunition that we had.”
In 2010, we saw the Toyota Corporation break a basic rule of good communication by not being the first and most credible source of information about their crisis with faulty accelerator pedals.
Sometimes, even when people think they are doing the right thing, they take it too far. A colleague of mine in New York City told me that the head of the New York FBI field office had once come up with what he thought was a great sound bite for a press conference that had do with a criminal case against some mob figures. The FBI agent told the press that “the FBI is twisting the tourniquet on the tentacles of organized crime.” The metaphor might have worked, except that an Associated Press reporter wrote his story with the FBI agent quoted as saying, “The FBI is twisting the tourniquet on the testicles of organized crime.” That is a metaphor most would choose not to envision.
I can point to the mistakes of others, but I too have pulled some big ones in my time and learned some important lessons in the process. This book is about those experiences and others I have had in working with the media for eighteen years. It is my desire that this experience and these lessons will help you in becoming a more effective communicator.
Chapter 1
Pistols to Press
A person watching nationally televised commercial programming on a Sunday evening in 1968 between the hours of 8:00 p.m. and 9:00 p.m. had three choices: The Ed Sullivan Show on CBS, Disney’s Wonderful World of Color on NBC and The F.B.I. on ABC. My choice at age eleven was to watch men in really nice suits catching bad guys, week after week, in sixty-minute episodes based on real FBI cases. I wanted to be just like them, nice suits included. In one episode, the show’s central figure, FBI Inspector Erskine, played by Efrem Zimbalist, Jr., returned a kidnap victim safely to her overjoyed parents. The idea of being in an occupation that provided that type of reward thrilled me, and it sparked my interest in becoming a FBI Special Agent.
My attraction to a career at the Bureau continued to grow long after the last of The F.B.I.’s two hundred and forty-one episodes aired. I earned my undergraduate degree in Criminal Justice, but when I graduated, I had not met the minimum age requirement to be a Special Agent, which is twenty-three. I continued in school and earned a Master’s Degree two years later, at which time I met the age requirement, but did not have the required work experience (which is two years for someone with a graduate degree). So I entered the corporate workforce at Xerox Corporation, doing a job I really enjoyed as a computer systems analyst. But I never took my eyes off the Bureau.
My corporate career at Xerox offered good pay and many opportunities for advancement. But it just did not offer the possibilities and excitement of the job I dreamed of as kid and the opportunity to save kidnapped children, investigate the mafia or to go undercover. (Not to mention the nice suits).
During my time at Xerox, I paid attention to news about the FBI, and my interest in a career as an FBI agent was further enhanced by stories about important FBI cases and the high-profile arrests they made of mobsters and other thugs. In early 1987, I decided to see if I could fulfill the dream that was sparked by a television show many years before. So, I walked into the local FBI office and applied to be an agent.
Almost one year later, after numerous interviews, an extensive investigation into my past, a battery of fitness tests and a probing physical exam, I received an offer of a position as a Special Agent for the FBI. A few weeks after that, I walked into the door at The FBI Training Academy in Quantico, Virginia to begin new agent training.
My training began on a Sunday evening in February, in a classroom with fifty other men and women, collectively labeled as New Agent Class 88-5, which indicated that we would be the fifth group of new FBI agents to graduate in 1988. Shortly after 8:00 p.m., we all raised our right hands and swore to protect the Constitution of the United States against all enemies. After completing the FBI oath of office, we sat down in our chairs and began three months of training after which we would officially be issued a badge and a gun and receive orders to report to one of the fifty-six FBI field offices in the United States. As I sat down, the thought entered my mind that during that same hour, on a Sunday evening in 1968, exactly twenty years prior, I had been watching The F.B.I. on television and dreaming of the moment that this would happen.
New agent training at the FBI Academy consisted of many hours of classroom training on such topics as organized crime, drug cartels, undercover operations, white collar crime, counterintelligence, counterterrorism, interviewing and interrogation and a plethora of other topics that we would need to know in order to carry out our mandate as federal law enforcement officers.
Outside the classroom, we spent many hours in defensive tactics training, preparing for confrontations and arrests. In the gym we trained physically for the FBI fitness test, which required that each of us, in order to graduate, meet certain standards in various physical endeavors.
On the gun range, each new agent in training fired over four thousand rounds of ammunition using various weapons on which we needed to be proficient in order to become an agent. We would be issued a gun to carry with us at all times while on-duty.
About halfway through the training program, a much-anticipated day arrived. It was the day all of us were going to be issued our official orders assigning us to one of the FBI field offices in the United States. The standard protocol was to have agents begin their careers in one of the forty-four small- to medium-size FBI offices (measured in number of agents). Unless you wanted be assigned to one of the twelve biggest FBI offices, you had absolutely no choice in where you would be sent. If you preferred a big city, such as New York City, Washington, D.C., or one of the other larger offices, you were allowed to list these cities in your order of preference. Their high cost of living made them more difficult to staff, so the Bureau was happy to take volunteers for these cities. Most agents, however, preferred to begin their careers in smaller cities, where a lower cost of living made life on a government salary more acceptable.
A young lady and future agent that sat next to me in our classroom at Quantico was a New Yorker through and through. She grew up there, her family was there and she couldn’t imagine living or working anywhere other than the center of her universe. Besides that, she wasn’t about to let somebody she didn’t know at the FBI decide where she was going to live and work. So naturally, she listed New York City as her number one choice for assignment and fully expected to receive her orders to that location, as it was the most difficult FBI office to staff.
The FBI made a big to-do of the whole process on the day agents got their orders. Each person, one at a time, was called up in front of the entire class and handed an envelope containing an official letter which designated the person’s field office of assignment. Each person had to first tell the entire group where they thought they would be assigned and then open the envelope and read their actual designated office of assignment.
In the case of our new agent class, the day we each learned about our office of assignment happened to occur on April 1st. As I waited my turn to receive my orders, the New Yorker who sat next to me was called up and handed an envelope. Her smug expression indicated that she thought the pomp and circumstance was unnecessary in her case because, perish the thought of another place, she was going to be assigned to New York City. Stating what most of her classmates had heard many times before, “I think I am going to be assigned to New York City,” she opened the envelope with a barely perceptible eye roll, indicating her boredom with the inevitability of the whole affair.
She pulled out the letter and started to read. “I have been assigned to…,” there was two seconds of silence before she continued, “LITTLE ROCK!” At this point it sounded to me like she used a profanity, but I couldn’t tell for sure because of the collective mixture of an empathetic groan and laughter coming from the class.
There is nothing wrong with Little Rock; it is just that she had her heart and mind set on New York City. She dejectedly walked back to her seat next to mine. She turned in my direction and asked, “Where the hell is Little Rock?”
“I believe it is outside of the New York metropolitan area,” I responded.
In retrospect, it didn’t surprise me that our class counselors used the opportunity to pull an April Fool’s Day joke on the New York trainee. What was remarkable was that they let the joke go on for so long. Several other agents were called up to get their orders while she sat next to me and visibly stewed. Finally, they called her back up and gave her official orders to New York City, much to both her relief and mine, because I had to sit next to her until graduation, still six weeks away.