Author: James Brown BEM
ISBN No: 978 0 9554523
Review date: 12/12/2025
No of pages: 386
Publisher: Bible
Year of publication: 11/09/2012
Brief:
Want to work in close protection? A manual covers all the bases - it only asks that you come with common sense.
It’s a blur as the close protection (CP) officer in a suit helps the grey-suited ‘principal’ into the back of the car, while the driver looks on. The cover of The Bodyguard’s Bible suggests that CP is fast-paced and glamourous, in a Kevin Costner movie way. But the author, CP man and trainer James Brown, wastes no time in setting things straight about the life of a bodyguard, who is suitable for CP, and arguing for CPs to be regarded as security professionals. A professional bodyguard, he argues, reassures, and keeps a level head in a crisis. In his opinion, ‘there are just not enough good bodyguards to go around’. It’s a hefty manual that covers the works – from personal security to threat assessment, to defensive (and evasive) driving, bomb awareness, walking drills, using weapons, unarmed defence, keeping notes, English law, fitness (‘you may be carrying your principal to safety’) computer security, and fire risk: “I have been amazed to discover that quite a number of CP officers have no knowledge about fire and fire safety. Often they assume that this kind of stuff is for the lowly uniformed security officer … The professional is well aware that a fire in the dead of night might well be the deadliest foe that he will ever meet.” Brown offers insights into the team dynamics of CP (mess up and you face a life of the lowliest, residence security work, ‘in the garden), and the ‘right stuff’ of a bodyguard – mother’s knee stuff such as honesty, and not being a prima donna: “Security officers and managers in a hotel might be earning a lot less than you, but they will bend over backwards,giving you not only additional, valuable manpower or camera monitoring, but the building and area knowledge they have taken months to learn.” Nor is Brown without humour. As for ransom he says: “It is rare for the bodyguard to be kidnapped alongside the principal, bodyguards are normally killed. So if your principal is kidnapped and survives the ordeal you are either dead or at best unemployed!” He offers Kroll and Control Risks as two kidnap specialists to turn to. Equally, the author tells you to call in experts if you suspect bugging: “ … do not play around with small, hand-held detectors. They just don’t do the job no matter what they promise on the box.”
Bodycover
In the chapter on bodycover – ‘placing your body between the danger and the principal’ – Brown shows there’s more to it than simply taking cover from a gun or knife, or bag of flour: if the principal’s adrenalin kicks in and he decides on flight (not fight – think John Prescott), the CP has to fly in the same direction! Brown’s done a service with this ‘definitive guide’ to CP, of use to door staff or armed services leavers thinking of making money from CP. Corporate and other security managers whose chief execs (and their children) may face the sort of threats that call for bodyguards can gen up here. Besides the exciting bits – hand-brake turns, and ramming to get through an ambush road block (‘a life or death option’), there’s the less thrilling but as important staff vetting, office and home perimeter security, counter-surveillance, building searches, record-keeping and check calls. To end as we started, Brown’s achievement is to describe CP as it should be, even down to the chapter on protocol telling CPs not to pick their noses, chew gum or ‘stink of body odour’: “I had to include it because there are still some of you that whiff and maybe you haven’t worked out why!” On SIA licences for CP, Brown says the multiple-choice exam ‘effectively means that if you can afford the course fee you can become a CP officer’. And he notes that conflict management (as in door staff and guard SIA licence training) is not the same as conflict avoidance, what a typical, low-profile CP wants.
