VETERANS SPOTLIGHT
No One Left Behind
In the middle of an Iraqi night, Peter Ford led a recovery mission for a man kidnapped by a local gang
I
t’s one o’clock in the morning in Baghdad, Iraq in 2008. Three drones hover above the city, hidden in the dark night’s sky. A team of 30 American Special Forces soldiers move silently as they disperse through a residential community, waiting for the moment to strike. Quickly the team goes into action, barging into five different houses at once, hoping that their calculations will be correct and the target they are looking for is still there. Four houses come up empty, but in the fifth there is a minor commotion. The residents claim innocence, saying that everyone present is part of the family. Only they’re lying. One of the individuals isn’t part of the family. In fact, this one individual is a captive, kidnapped by the criminal gang-residents with the sole intent to sell him and his knowledge to Al Qaeda. The man is a high ranking Iraqi official with knowledge of the country’s chemical weapons program. Just a few days earlier, he had been rear ended on his way to work. As he got out of his car to assess the damage, the gang had kidnapped him, tied him up and threw him in their trunk before driving off. For days, Peter Ford, then the Director of the Office of Hostage Affairs (OHA) for the United States, with the help of the U.S. military, G4S Director, Northeast Regoin, G4S Corporate Risk Services U.S. State Department, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), has been attempting to track the man down. Using the man’s cell phone location, which his captors have been using, Ford has managed to track his phone to his location. The team quickly went into action, understanding the reward was worth the risk. “I was concerned,” said Ford, now a Director with G4S Corporate Risk Services. “Many minutes passed where I thought they weren’t
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going to find him. It seemed like an eternity, but once we saw him on the screen, we had our guy, that was great.” Ford, a former member of the U.S. Army Reserves for 32 years, understood in that moment that time was fleeting. He had dealt with numerous hostage situations and knew all the ways a rescue mission could go wrong. But he also knew that he wasn’t going to get a better opportunity to make a move. “There’s so many things that could go wrong. I was concerned about the kidnappers killing the hostage, I was worried about the U.S. forces and the harm that could happen to them. We had to take the calculated risk, we had reliable intel. We weren’t 100% sure he was there, but there was a high probability he was.” Following the man’s release, Ford drove to the Special Forces compound to pick up the scientist for reintegration, ensuring that he was not a threat to the United States or in any further harm. In total, Ford spent 18 months working at the OHA, the first six of which were with the military before he volunteered to stay for another year with the State Department’s Diplomatic Security Service, where he continued searching for kidnapped victims. “Kidnapping is a horrendous crime if you do it for political or monetary purposes,” said Ford. “When you defeat the kidnappers, there is some personal satisfaction that you are able to get the person back to their loved ones.” As a Director with G4S, Ford uses many of the skills he gathered at the OHA, creating solutions to client’s issues and helping conduct Crisis Management Exercises for employees. “While talking to clients, I tell them the same thing: for your business to be prepared, you need to brief and train your people.” While Ford is now removed from Iraq, he is still involved with hostage operations, working with Hostage U.S., a Washington, D.C.-based organization that helps the families of hostages, further proof that he believes in hostage-recovery efforts. “(The OHA) was a mission I believed in,” said Ford. “I was able to make a difference, that’s why I extended there for another year. I could’ve left but I believed in the mission and making a difference. It was the right thing to do.”
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G4S Military Outreach Initiatives, Awards, Recognition & Statistics Most Valuable Employer (MVE) for Military by CivilianJobs.com - 2014
26%
12,822
Number of veterans hired by G4S since August 2011 in conjunction with the White House’s “Joining Forces” campaign
Estimated number of G4S employees in the U.S. are military veterans
Military Employer of the Year Transition Assistance Online
23%
Percent of our security officers have military experience
4,900
Number of veterans hired between April 2015 and April 2016
VetJobs Outstanding Military Employer - 2014