Author: Glenn P McGovern
ISBN No: 9781 4398 517
Review date: 07/12/2025
No of pages: 0
Publisher: CRC Press
Year of publication:
Brief:
Here’s an American’s book on how to keep subjects safe - a judge, corporate head, or politician or other VIP - in a hostile situation.
Much of what Glenn P McGovern covers does not apply to private security in the UK – such as training in use of shotguns and sub-machine-guns, and countering snipers, booby-traps, and motorcycle or car attackers. However, with more coverage of cases outside the United States than is usual in a book by an American, McGovern shows that kidnap and shootings can be against businessmen in Mexico City, Mumbai or Moscow; or, mentioned by McGovern, the assassination of the British military attache in Athens in 2000. The author stresses the need for training – ‘you can only learn to properly search a vehicle by doing it’ – and attention to detail. For instance, have you thought that if you make a fake bomb, with a pipe, tape, wires and an old mobile phone, you ought to mark it clearly as ‘inert’?! McGovern has studied some 1000 attacks over the last 60 years, published in 2010 as Targeted Violence. For example, given that many attacks are ‘drive-bys’, the protective team need to train to respond to such a threat from inside their own vehicle. Do they have weapons that they can handle inside a car? Without sweeping the gun barrel across your colleagues’ bodies?! And: “It is no use to train in a large roomy sport utility vheicle, if only sedans are used on details.” Much of what McGovern covers – with a US AIr Force police and US marshal background – applies to close protection, especially in high-risk places. Throughout, when discussing personal safety, countering surveillance, and planning routes and safe-houses, McGovern stresses taking a regular hard look at what your likely adversary may do, and what you do – because even your procedures could become compromised, if they become routine. McGovern is writing about hostile attacks, which as he says at the end most people will not have to face. If you do, however, ‘you will be in for the fight of your life’. You train for the worst-case scenario in case it becomes reality. “Remember, in this deadly game, there is no second place.”
