Speaker Spotlight—Gavriel Schneider

International Director of Dynamic Alternatives, Gavriel Schneider’s session topic will explore how to protect yourself and your business when operating in Third World countries. Gavriel specializes in unarmed combat and defensive tactics and has had over 25 years of practical experience in this field. He has worked or trained on five continents and presented training to presidential protection units, special forces, operational close protection operatives, law enforcement personnel, reaction teams, and various other security operators. According to Gavriel, many Westerners fashion an illusion of security for themselves that can be quite damaging to their personal safety. For those security professionals responsible for protecting their employees when overseas, his session is a must.

Gavriel, what does the company you work for, Dynamic Alternatives, do?

We are a specialized security consulting and training business. Based out of South Africa, we operate in about 22 African countries. We also have an office in India and an office in the Asia-Pacific region, based out of Australia. We got started in South Africa training body guards, military, and police units and that expanded into provisional security services on request, particularly on the high-end of close protection and executive protection. That further expanded into designing tailor-made training packages for clients operating in South Africa and Africa, particularly in the corporate sector. As a result we got into quite a few different industries, ranging from oil and gas to banking and finance, tailoring security solutions that would work for our clients in third world environments, particularly South Africa, which exhibits first- and third-world characteristics. Now with the current crime rate sitting at about 59 murders a day, I think there are about 630 cases of armed robbery a day. The environment has a massive toll on business. What we focus on doing then is giving our clients skills and protective services that enable them to minimize those risks. This is usually facilitated by provision of security or through an education initiative.

What would provision of a security package look like?

Usually we only look after senior managers, celebrities or political figures, but I’ll give you a good example. If you have a U.S. exec traveling into Nigeria, what we would usually do is deploy in advance a South African executive protection planning officer that will coordinate and set up all the logistics for the trip. We will then fly in another executive protection officer with the client and his/her group and we’ll take advantage of local manpower and resources to facilitate the whole trip and to ensure that it is not only safe but also as efficient as possible. If there should be requirements for training interventions, briefings and in extreme circumstances for evacuations out of that country or medical emergencies, we will take into account all of those issues.

So what’s the gist of your presentation?

It’s “Protecting Business and People in Third World Environments.” It’s covering the realities of operating in third-world environments, considerations that you need to take into account to successfully operate in those environments. Those are obviously wide ranging from political to geographical concerns, factoring in managing corruption. The core concept is how do you give your clients a realistic appraisal of the situation on the ground and create a safe environment for them to do business in.

Africa is a huge continent, filled with multiple problems, but generally what’s the main problem you run into?

The primary problem we face if you compare Africa to many other hostile environments is that we’re facing ongoing criminal threats—ranging from petty to violent crime—whereas in many other countries, the concept of terrorism is the biggest threat in everyone’s minds. But the reality is we have a higher civilian murder rate than places like Iraq and Afghanistan. To be honest, some of the biggest problems we face, which we try to steer clients through, is finding a balance between what works and what doesn’t and actually trying to educate them on the realities of what’s going on in the environment. The problem we find is that a lot of businesspeople are well-traveled and because they haven’t been exposed to problems before, they perceive the environment to be safe. And in many cases, it’s obviously not the case. Unfortunately by the time people realize that, it’s already too late.

Do you find a lot of these guys take unnecessary risks?

I definitely think so.

And what would those unnecessary risks be?

I think very often, many international travelers have quite a blasé attitude. Now there’s the perception that most people from first-world countries believe a lot of other countries have the same infrastructure capacity, so they can just fly into a place and catch a taxi to the nearest hotel, catch cabs to their various meetings, and catch a cab and fly out. When they land in a lot of the third-world countries we operate in, they start to get hit by the corruption from the second they land. Request for bribes often start at the airport. There is the likelihood that they get into a cab and they’ll probably be robbed before they even get to the hotel.

You spoke of violent crime. How often in Africa is violence perpetuated by street criminals as opposed to organized syndicates?

One of the biggest issues people don’t take into consideration is that organized crime is now almost a global problem. I’ll give a simple example. You’ve got Nigerian drug syndicates running much of the drug trade in South Africa. You got people smuggling operations running through various African countries into different parts of Asia and Eastern Europe. Syndicated organized crime is actually a worldwide problem. And then you get different degrees of it in the African context, where you might get four or five guys who actually do think out and plan what they are going to do because they were ex-soldiers. Yes, petty crime is a problem but more often than not, tourists are falling prey to well-run, well-organized syndicated criminal operations. You can see that in places like West Africa, for example, where kidnapping of foreign expats is a big business.

Let’s talk politics. How often does local legislation influence how you do your job? And how does it make it difficult?

I like to look at that from a micro and a macro level. The micro level is obviously you as a security provider and the people who work for you. Are they complying with local legislation and what are the consequences to a business trying to set up in a country utilizing various service providers? South Africa is a great example of that. Kenya just followed suit with various legislation whereby the end user could be held liable if an incident occurred and the security personnel they were using are not registered, or trained, and were not accredited with the correct government bodies. In many cases, people don’t realize the consequences of that. Say Bill Gates came to South Africa, his driver, who is providing body guard services, crashes and kills somebody. They can actually find Bill Gates guilty of contravention of the security industry regulatory act for using unqualified, untrained, and unregistered personnel. That would be the micro level.

On the macro level, South Africa’s a great example of that too. We just had a change in government and many of the contracts and the guys who are able to do things in the past government, because of various police and military connections, no longer have those connections at all.

So you’re talking about political patronage?

Political patronage in terms of the open and honest ways of doing things and also the out and out corruption, where in certain West African countries when we provide operations, we pay police to escort us, because they’re not getting paid enough by the government. So that’s corruption, but it’s also business.

Are they generally on-duty or off-duty when this is going on?

Totally varies. In some countries it is legal; in others, not

Are people really that ignorant that they can get a security briefing and they think they’ll be okay?

Absolutely. To be honest, we have expats that arrive in countries that don’t even have the briefings. We also get a lot of guys who come on holiday to various third-world destinations and perceive because they’ve been there on holiday, they now know it. In a lot of places, and I’ll reference South Africa again, the central business district, which is where the stock exchange and foreign banks are situated, is directly across the freeway from one of the biggest slums and local townships. So you’ve got 1.4 million people, many of them harboring criminal intent, one direct kilometer away from the wealthiest people in the country. If you don’t know your way around, you’re just as likely to take the wrong freeway off ramp and never come back as you are to get to where you want to go to.

So many of these guys don’t contact local security practitioners on the ground before they get there?

It’s not quite that simple. Very often when guys come in they’re being hosted by another business. And very often those businesses want to create the perception that everything is safe. So a lot of times when they do that, they opt to try and ignore security and just hope nothing goes wrong. We don’t agree with going the other way either: you know, having a four-car convoy with 16 guys is going to attract more attention than not. There has to be some kind of balance in the middle. I think it’s interesting to see, like for example in India, after the Mumbai attacks in November, a lot of companies just literally doubled their security. So instead of having ten untrained, unqualified, and unmotivated guards, they now had 20. All you then get is a massive amount of people that don’t know what they are doing standing around blocking each other and should there be any type of crisis, these are the guys who are least likely to deal with it effectively.

So what you’re saying when it comes to security for traveling businessman is to go deeper?

Absolutely. Do your homework. And that’s a two-fold process. It’s one thing to sit behind your computer, Google the various country travel advisories, call up a buddy that went there a couple of months ago. It’s another thing to get in touch with guys who are on the ground and actually operate on a regular basis in that country and get their feedback and then compile your recommendations from there. I think it’s really hard for a security manager sitting in the states, his executives are now flying into a country he’s never heard of and all he has to go on is what other people are telling him. That’s a very difficult process. We found that the combination of oversight with local knowledge is the way to go.

What’s your advice for companies to do that when they don’t have a lot of resources to spend? What are the crucial steps that they need to take to protect themselves without going as far to hire someone like you?

There are a lot of different things you can do. Generally, spending the time searching local Web sites of various security providers will give you an idea if you know what to look for. If you’re looking through security provider Web sites and 400 pop up for a country, you have an idea that security and crime is a problem there. On the flip-side, if nothing pops up at all, you have to wonder if that country’s so backwards that there is no Internet structure or marketing capacity. Generally what we find is you have tools like the Internet and tools like your local embassy, organizations like ASIS. You just need to go through members based in those countries and you can get good advice. You don’t have to through all the work of hiring a firm like us, you can phone us up for a chat, which is free, and base your opinions on that.

You spoke about doing online research, but if I went by the States, thousands of security providers would come up. Is it always safe to make that assumption?

Not at all, that’s why I say that should be your starting platform just to determine if there’s a security risk or threat. If you reckon it is, you really have no choice but to rely on people who have feet on the ground to give you an assessment. The unfortunate part about that, even if you took the U.S., from one state to the next state is a totally different environment, climate, legislative structure. So you might get someone who googles the U.S., references one state, and thinks that they are now prepped on the entire country. They might even think they can carry a gun when they’re there and then find out things are totally different. That concept is even more appropriate in places like Africa. In India, it’s even worse. When we operate there, we find that every 25 kilometers there is a different dialect.

What is always distressing when talking about security is that there always seems to be a threat lurking around every corner.

In my opinion, I generally find the opposite. In most countries, people are friendly and willing to help, provided you take certain things into account and you’re doing things the right way.

What’s your advice for a businessman on how to look when traveling to a Third World country?

On one of my first international deployments, we deployed to a West African country and we ended up doing protection work for the president of that country and quite literally we were the only two white faces in a sea of thousands. No matter how hard we tried, we couldn’t blend in. Generally speaking, and this is a basic security concept, the term is, “If you carry yourself with confidence, you are far less likely to be a victim.” Unfortunately, confidence is something you can’t fake. Confidence comes with knowledge, understanding, and forward thinking of what you would do and how you would do things in different situations. Generally, if you know you can’t blend in, getting a local to assist you is the best thing you can do.