Held captive: in the post 9/11 era, kidnap avoidance and survival skills are critical.

It's the nightmare scenario of every executive traveling to dangerous regions: The door bursts open and four men dressed in black clothes and hoods come in brandishing handguns, screaming, "Get your heads down on the table. Now! Do it. Don't look up. Don't you look at me."

I complied and watched out of the corner of my eye as the gunmen spread around the room, yelling, prodding black automatic weapons into people seated near me.

One huge guy came up behind me and put his pistol to my head and grabbed my neck. "Are you American? Do you have money? You have credit cards?"

"Who's an American in here?" another barked out from a few feet away.

"Okay, that's it. Stop. It's over," said Randy Spivey, who removed his hood and dropped his fake plastic pistol. "How do you feel?"

A woman seated to my right, blurted out: "How do I feel? Are you kidding? I'm sweating."

Fortunately for me and everyone else in the room, the bad guys bearing down on us weren't real hostage takers or terrorists. They were part of a daylong program conducted by Spivey and his partners at the National Hostage Survival Training Center in Spokane, Wash.

They have trained about 20 CEOs and more than 100 senior executives since starting operations last September. "The interest level among corporations is increasing dramatically," says Spivey, citing the post-9/11 era and the war in Iraq. He and business partner Roger Aldrich have also trained more than 8,000 people via satellite and small-group sessions.

One-day training sessions and intensive multiday exercises include classroom instruction, reviewing video clips from famous hostage survivors, and scenario role-playing with attendees subjected to mock situations. "Our goal is to give people practical application training," says Aldrich. "We want to expose them to the stress of a hostage situation. Once you are exposed to the stress, you have mental buy-in and you know what you need to do."

Most of the center's trainees have come from the ranks of the federal government--Departments of Defense, State, Justice and Homeland Security--but many civilians have been educated, including CEOs, teachers, security professionals, religious groups and run-of-the-mill tourists. "If the hostage survival center trains people from the FBI, they can do a lot for chief executives and other business people," says Bert Holeton, CEO of Bert Holeton Consulting, and former CEO of aerospace company Western Honeycomb, which sold products to Boeing and 125 other companies.

Holeton, who was an infantry officer for a year in Vietnam, attended the survival training in March to check out the curriculum for his clients. "These guys obviously have the best training out there," he says.

The same principles apply to corporate travelers as they do to government officials, says Spivey, who spent two decades in the military and headed up hostage survival training for the Department of Defense from 1997 to 2002. "When traveling in high-risk countries, executives need to be prepared," he says. One recent example of the dangers that lurk in dangerous travel is Jeffrey J. Ake, CEO of Equipment Express, who was kidnapped on April 11 by gunmen at a water-treatment plant in Baghdad. Ake, whose Rolling Prairie, Ind., company makes equipment used to bottle drinking water, was seen pleading for his life two days after his abduction in a videotape broadcast on Al Jazeera network.

While being taken hostage is statistically unlikely, security expert Neil C. Livingstone estimates that three-fourths of the nation's biggest companies don't have a comprehensive security and safe-travel plan. "Some companies do an excellent job, but other companies, including very large corporations, are just totally oblivious," says Livingstone, who is CEO of Global Options, a Washington, D.C.-based risk management services company. Companies that send employees into dangerous regions have both a moral responsibility--and increasingly a legal one--to protect them, he says.

The First Rule: Avoidance

The most important message security trainers hammer home during all forms of training is to be aware and avoid getting into trouble. "The best way to survive a hostage situation is to not get into one in the first place," Spivey says.

One of the most effective training exercises used at Spivey's center is the "walk to Starbucks." After being taught how to identify people conducting surveillance and learning tips to travel safely in a strange place, attendees are split into groups of two or three and sent off in waves on a five-block walk from the training center's office building to the local Starbucks. The teams are told there will be bad guys watching and that it is their assignment to identify them.

"On average, the groups pick out about half of the people we have out there," says Spivey. "We try to let them pick out some--the obvious ones--but they don't spot everybody. They miss a person across the street photographing them, people in mobile platforms (cars) and, in one scenario, two women sitting in the Starbucks store talking."

After the exercise, attendees return to the classroom to learn who was doing the surveillance and how to be more aware in real-life situations. "The surveillance walk was pretty incredible," says Gary Fievez, president and CEO of Corporate Resources, a Spokane-based consulting company. "We picked out people we thought were watching us, but it turned out they weren't. It is a strange feeling to know that somebody is watching you but you can't spot them."

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The exercise is designed to teach people how to be what Spivey calls "hard targets," or, in other words, difficult to abduct. Such people:

* Are aware of their surroundings and the people they encounter.

* Walk in an alert, confident manner.

* Travel in small groups.

* Travel on foot in populated, well-lit areas.

* Don't cut corners or travel through bad parts of town.

* Avoid spontaneous gatherings or demonstrations.

* Don't walk too close to the street.

In addition to becoming hard targets, the survival trainers suggest that travelers trust their instincts. If you sense that someone is following or watching you, or if a situation just doesn't seem right, trust your gut reaction and take steps to avoid contact. Spivey notes that women tend to have better instinctive radar than men. In high-risk countries, try to blend in and look like the locals. Don't wear flashy jewelry or clothing that communicates your wealth or foreigner status, and travel inconspicuously from place to place.

If the worst happens, Spivey counsels staying calm in order to de-escalate the situation as much as possible, and using the following skills:

* Make mental notes of directions, times of transit and noises to help identify location.

* When questioned, give short, to-the-point answers but don't offer additional information.

* Under interrogation, don't look captors in the eye. It can be viewed as aggressive.

* Don't be lulled by a friendly questioner; the "good guy, bad guy" technique is common.

* Avoid the emotionally charged topics of religion, economics and politics.

* Try to mentally prepare yourself for what could happen next.

* Anticipate isolation and efforts to disorient and confuse you.

* Have faith. Try to stay positive. The chances of surviving being taken hostage are generally good: The State Department estimates that 80 percent of hostages survive captivity.

CEO Fievez from Corporate Resources took security training twice to see what he could do to empower his consultants who travel to the Middle East to broker deals for clients. "I feel there is a high level of responsibility as an employer to give my employees the tools they need to travel safely," says Fievez. "I need to do everything possible to make their travel safer. If something happened to my consultants in a foreign country and I found out after the fact that I could have done something to prevent it, I couldn't tolerate it."

Fievez has a bit more experience with hostage situations than many CEOs. Two of his clients were taken hostage more than a decade ago while on assignment in Mexico and South America. Both were ransomed after being held captive, but unharmed, for several days, one for $10,000 and the other for $20,000.

Fievez is also ahead of many CEOs when it comes to institutionalizing travel safeguards. For example, his employees follow a security checklist and know what steps to take if they get in trouble, such as carrying a dummy wallet and having secret code words or phrases to alert colleagues or family if they are kidnapped.

Spivey says travel security could use more attention from the executive suite. "Companies are playing catch-up" to train their employees, he says. In mid-April, the training center had a number of proposals circulating with large companies to provide extensive company-wide training. One leading company requested a proposal for the training after its executive vice president of security attended a State Department briefing.

Some terror and travel hot spots are worthy of note in addition to Iraq and Afghanistan: Mexico (especially border areas and Mexico City), Colombia, Venezuela, Indonesia, the Philippines, Middle Eastern countries, areas of Northern Africa and other oil-producing countries. In short, CEOs going out to conquer international markets have to make sure they don't become victims themselves.

Resources

* National Hostage Survival Training Center

Spokane, Wash.

509-468-4128

hostagesurvival.com

* Kroll

New York 

212-593-1000

krollworldwide.com

* International Risk

Hong Kong/New York

212-572-9930

intl-risk.com

* Global Options

Washington, D.C.

202-293-2490

globaloptions.com

RELATED ARTICLE: Safe Travels

Here are some additional travel tips provided by the National Hostage Survival Training Center:

Carry a second wallet. It should include an expired credit card, an old driver's license or another form of identification and a nominal amount of cash--$100. Surrendering the dummy wallet can get you out of a contentious situation.

Safest place on the plane. First Class is not your safest seat. Terrorists or hijackers are attracted to wealthy people and the pilots who sit just fore of the First Class cabin. The safest place on the plane is midship or farther back--in a window seat.

Safest hotel room. Book a room on floors two through seven. Hook and ladders can reach those levels in case there is a fire. Survival trainers encourage high-risk travelers to not check into a preassigned room, but instead to request a different room upon check-in. They also say it is a good idea to change rooms during an extended stay and to vary your use of hotel entrances.

Airport precautions. Look for nervous people who maintain eye contact with others from a distance. Note behavior that isn't consistent with others. Do not linger in open public areas. Proceed through security checkpoints as soon as possible to get to a more secure area.