Former FBI hostage rescue team member rates 10 hostage-rescue scenes in movies and TV

• Former FBI HRT member Chris Whitcomb rates 10 hostage-rescue scenes in movies for realism.
• Whitcomb breaks down the tactics portrayed in "Die Hard," "Captain Phillips," and "The Dark Knight."
• Whitcomb discusses weapons and devices used in hostage rescue and how they're portrayed in films.

Following is a transcript of the video.

Christopher Whitcomb: Hi, my name is Chris Whitcomb. I'm a former FBI agent. I was a member of the Hostage Rescue Team. Been involved in dozens of high-profile operations around the world, including the siege at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, and at Waco, Texas. And today I'll be rating hostage-rescue scenes in movies.

"Captain America: The Winter Soldier" (2014)

Pirate: You want a bullet in your head?

Chris: We do have to rappel from time to time from above down to the hostages to effect a rescue. In this case, they use a technique of Australian, we used to call it Australian rappelling. Oftentimes we'd use a breach, and we'd lower down an explosive device below or something of that nature. But in this case, they go face-first. The belay device is behind you, and you would use a hand behind your back so that you could face down. And it probably works better in this type of a situation.

Anytime you have people gathered in one area, you could have hostages. So we have to prepare for all of those things. You could have a plane, you could have a high-rise building, you could have any of those things. A ship underway at sea has got to be one of the most difficult. So, we practice hostage rescue on ships, yes. You've got to get there to begin with, which is a helicopter operation. You've got to have some kind of stealth, which means night vision. You're probably above where they're keeping the hostages, and then you have to get down to them. So that would entail fighting your way down stairwells. You could go down the outside of the ship and go in from the outside.

Captain America: On my mark.

[gunfire]

Chris: Anytime you have a hostage-rescue operation, you've got a lot of moving pieces. You have to make sure they all go at the same time. You want to go in with speed, surprise, and violence of action. The sniper shots, then the door breach, and then the entry by the assaulters. So that's quite realistic. If you can get into a space without sending people inside, that's ideal. So in this case, snipers executed what we call an open-air option, which you send bullets into the space, not human beings. And that was very well done in this scene.

Shooting is a very, very important part of this job, but it's only one element of the job. The coordination is very, very important. So we would practice that day after day after day. If you're a sniper, you shoot at various distances, but you practice that coordinated shot. And it's almost like being a drummer in a band, where you just get used to the rhythm. In a training environment, you would hear, "Ready, ready, ready, ready, aim, fire." And you have to shoot on that cadence. So it is very important that the sniper shots go together.

Well, look, it's a superhero movie, right? And it's entertainment. But I think they got a lot of things right. I'd have to give it a seven.

Rating: 7/10

"Captain Phillips" (2013)

Officer: I need eyes on. Sir, they're gonna shoot him!

Commander: Execute.

[gunfire]

Chris: It's difficult to convey how difficult this job is. You have an unstable platform shooting off a ship at another unstable platform, another ship, at night, through a tiny, tiny opening in that lifeboat, that small window. Things happen so quickly, and there is no room for error. It's an incredibly difficult shot, and that's pretty accurate the way it happens. You get a very, very small window, and the consequences are life and death.

You hear a lot about sniper pairs. The Hostage Rescue Team, when I was there, we would operate in pairs, but not because one was an observer and one was a shooter. It's just so one can be on a scope and ready to shoot so the other can rest. Oftentimes it is just because the ability to take a shot can erode very, very quickly and you have to be fresh when you need to take the shot. If the shot needs to be taken, it's usually because the situation has eroded quickly and so badly that you have no other option.

Look, this is based on a real-life event. It was entertainment and built up a little bit, but based on actual events, so I've got to give it a nine.

Rating: 9/10

"Die Hard" (1988)

[helicopter whirring]

Big Johnson: Nail that sucker!

[gunfire]

[people screaming]

Chris: All right, first of all, one of the great movies of all time, loved it when it came out. But no. No, this is ridiculous. Hostage rescue is a very carefully coordinated, high-risk operation. We did occasionally look at the possibility of shooting from a helicopter. I've got a photograph of me doing just that. The problem is you wouldn't fire an automatic weapon from a helicopter. Certainly not with civilians standing around. If anybody fired, it would not be suppressive fire. It would be a sniper shot.

The first thing I think people need to understand is that hostage rescue is very, very highly refined. They have hostage negotiators, they have intelligence-gathering mechanisms, and the last resort is the application of the Hostage Rescue Team. Very rarely would you ever see a rapid action like depicted in this movie. They're very, very carefully coordinated, and they work with precision. None of those things you see in this movie.

I've got to rate the movie as a 10. Great entertainment. But as a depiction of a hostage rescue, I'd give it a one.

Rating: 1/10

"6 Days" (2017)

Where's Jerry? Jerry, watch the stairs. X-rays may escape down. There'll be shooting, so watch your ass.

Chris: Well, it's interesting. When this happened, I was going to school. I was in college in London, and I lived just around the corner. I was there and watched the raid.

One really great thing about this movie in showing the history of this art form, is the, what we call a kill house, a shooting house, various names, but you have to practice going into a space shooting live ammunition, door breaches in low-light conditions with all kinds of terrible things going on, explosions, people screaming, smoke, everything, and they would create an indoor space, practice over and over and over again going through that space, and it makes the odds of success that much better. You want a familiar environment, and that's what you're seeing here.

Things always go wrong. No matter how much you practice, no matter how good you are, things always go wrong. Guys get hung up, and ropes break, and explosives go off or they don't go off. You have to make alternate breaches. And I think the movie depicted pretty well what went wrong and how they rolled with that and how fluid a hostage rescue can be, because you can't stop and do it over again. Once you roll, it's on. Oftentimes you'll have an initial breach point, but you'll have alternate breach points as well. You'll have alternate plans. People get shot, people go down. You have medical emergencies, you have a million different things that can go wrong. So you have to improvise, adapt, overcome.

We always used to say, you could teach anybody to shoot, you can get anybody physically fit; it's knowing when and how to pull a trigger. It's knowing when and how to come up with a backup plan. Those things are really important. And that happened at Prince's Gate, and it's depicted well in this movie.

Hostage taker: Move! Move, move!

Chris: The SAS went in, and some of the hostage takers tried to sneak out with the hostages. Agent: We've got a room full of hostages. Stay down! Chris: When you go in with a tactical element for a hostage-rescue operation, everybody goes to the floor. You don't know who's the bad guy. It's smoke, it's violent, it's chaos. It is absolute chaos. Except for the people doing the rescue operation. This was a perfect place where the British government realized how difficult that can be. I think the most important thing to get out of some of these movies is the people, the operators that do this job, they are truly remarkable. These are people who are more than willing to run in and die if that's the case, but don't plan to. I love this movie. I thought they did a brilliant job. I'd rate it a 10.

Rating: 10/10

"The Dark Knight" (2008)

Batman: Fox, the SWATs are targeting the wrong people. The clowns are the hostages.

Chris: Batman would help in any situation. I wish we had a Batman, right?

Some elements of this are really well done. Rappelling, I guess, was pretty accurate. The weapons look pretty good. The tactics looked bad.

The lifeblood of any operation like this is intelligence. You want information, accurate information. So if they, being the command element, knew that hostages had weapons, we didn't know who was who, it would make it very, very difficult to send somebody in. This is a good example of when you don't go in. When you go into a building like this, as I said before, you have to make sure everybody is secure, because you don't know who's good and who's bad in all circumstances. If somebody is shooting at you, obviously you're gonna shoot them. If they have a weapon and you can take them to the ground, that might be a better option.

Some things are well done and plausible, but it's, listen, it's a superhero movie. I don't know. Maybe a seven?

Rating: 7/10

"The Dark Knight" (2008)

Sniper: I've got an easy shot, please advise.

Radio: Stand by.

Sniper: Roger that.

[rat bites sniper]

[sniper yelps and fires]

Chris: Things go wrong. I one time was on an operation and we had this very, very, very sensitive insertion. We couldn't get busted under any circumstances. And one of the guys in my sniper cadre, he crawled off in a ground hornets' nest and just gets hammered in what might be a life-threatening situation. Never made a sound, didn't flinch, and had to exfil for medical treatment. So things do go wrong, but you have to eat them. There's no training for that. You've got to remember that these guys are incredibly disciplined. A rat's not gonna bother anybody, no.

Tubular targets are difficult, and they're oftentimes moving. You got a car, a bus, a plane, a train, a subway car, and even if he hadn't responded to that rat and had taken a stable shot, a bullet going through a medium like glass can do a million different things. So you have to practice that too. Not just the shot, but what the bullet's gonna do in so many different circumstances. You don't want to shoot through a target, put somebody else on the other side in danger, obviously.

[gunfire]

But one thing that's really important to remember is that you always have a backup plan. So if you have a sniper shot, it is going to be followed up with an assault component as well. And if that assault component is ready to go, they would have stormed the train immediately and resolved it in a different way. So the planning and the execution of this raid would not have gone this way, because we would have some immediate action, an emergency assault if necessary, had a shot gone wrong for whatever reason. And I think the scene makes sense in a lot of different ways, but a rat crawling up a sniper's leg is not going to have this impact, no.

Rating: 5/10

"Patriots Day" (2016)

Chris:Well, I've gotta say, I'm kind of partial to this movie. First of all, the director, Peter Berg, is a very good friend of mine for 35 years or something like that. He put me in the movie kind of as a cameo thing, like, play the commander of that hostage-rescue-team component right there. He's putting on a door breach right now. And this is a slap charge, which is basically a piece of rubber with some plastic explosive. You have the overall Hostage Rescue Team, then you have smaller components. At that time, the teams were about seven men on a team, and that's what you see.

[door explodes]

HRT Commander: Go, go, go, go! Get out, get out!

Chris: Anybody can blow open a door. You wanna blow open the door so it doesn't bounce off the backstop. So there's an art to the explosive breaching in these enterprises, and that's what we're showing right here. HRT went up to try and assist everybody in the Boston operation. And when they got there, there were so many cops and so many people involved, they couldn't get any rental cars. So they flew up and they had to rent minivans. So the HRT operation for the Boston Marathon bombing that you see depicted in the movie, the guys actually arrived in minivans. So you do what you have to do from time to time.

I just want to point out, the weapons you use in these types of situations, I always looked at guns as tools. A carpenter can't build a house with a screwdriver, so you have different weapons. And what you see right here is a typical assault rifle. I personally had 17 different weapons for different situations. Everything from a .50 caliber, a long gun for sniper applications, to something like this. This might be used as a door breach. It's not your primary weapon, but you might need to go to it. So your primary weapon might be something small and compact like this. If that weapon goes down, for whatever reason, you could go with a backup weapon, which would be some handgun, this is a 9 millimeter, which oftentimes we would use.

In a case like this, you might carry three or four different weapons. What you use for weapons really can make a difference, especially in closed spaces like this.

Well, obviously I'm prejudiced, but Pete Berg did a brilliant job here. And although a very, very simple operation, this is the way it would go down in real life, the way it did go down in real life, so I've got to give it a 10.

Rating: 10/10

"NCIS" S7E9 (2009)

Got it.

She'll miss.

What's the probability of that?

Based on the temperature and humidity, no wind, half moon, good light, 97.6%.

Chris: A shot from any gun is simple physics. You got a pellet going through the air. It's pulled out by gravity, and it's impacted in its trajectory. A short shot has fewer variables. A long shot has greater variables. In this case, you're talking about a handgun at, what, maybe 20 feet, something like that. Humidity, light, all of those things are not gonna have much of an impact. A longer shot, it's gonna have a huge impact. Move, or I'll do it. Take it.

[gunshot]

- Mom?

- Oh, baby.

A sniper in HRT one time took a shot at a guy who had a child taped to his back and had a woman in front of him with a shotgun to her head. So the child's head, I think it was almost touching his, and an HRT sniper had to take that shot, moving from left to right. It is difficult to explain to people how difficult it is to shoot another human being under all of the various circumstances. I'm just going to say that it is plausible. The dialogue was reasonably well done. They're things that I would have thought about, so I'd probably give it an eight, I think.

Rating: 8/10

"The Siege at Ruby Ridge" (1996)

Agent: The sniper observers will secure the perimeter.

Chris: I don't know what that building is. That wasn't at Ruby Ridge. I don't know what that is.

Agent: We'll have the gold team backing up the blue team position.

Chris: It's infuriating to me. I was one of those guys. There were seven of us, not a roomful of us. We were standing in ghillie suits in the pouring rain. It was 32 degrees or something like that. The rules of engagement were a little bit different. I testified before the Senate, we've had all kinds of investigations over the years, and we were going up under totally different circumstances. So there's nothing even remotely realistic about what you just saw.

Well, there were seven of us up there on that hill. I was lying behind a sniper rifle, had the whole thing in my scope, I watched everything from beginning to end, and I can tell you that is the most ridiculous, false representation of what happened I could possibly state. The fact that a sniper would be standing up behind a tree, which is absurd.

The only thing that's accurate about that entire clip, Lon Horiuchi's shot did go through the door, the pane of glass in the door, through a curtain, and the door looked similar to that door. So the curtain and the door look similar. The circumstances are not remotely accurate. They didn't come up and have a conversation standing on a rock. None of that happened. It is complete and utter fiction

Bottom line is we were at a holding area in a valley down below the ridge. We land-navigated our way up through appalling weather conditions, and we set up a perimeter, a partial perimeter around the cabin. And I had just laid down behind my sniper rifle, and I was just trying to get an idea of what was going on. And our job was to send information back to the command element, because we didn't know what was going on up there. It happened very, very quickly.

Way below zero. It's just, it makes me so angry to think that people would watch that and think that happened. It's absurd.

Rating: 0/10

"Waco" S1E6 (2018)

Negotiator: The siege is over now! The gas you will be smelling is a nonlethal tear gas.

Chris: I was, I think, one of the first two or three people that arrived at Waco. The only thing about this movie I like is it's incredible how accurately they recreated that building. I mean, absolutely unbelievable. So I'm not gonna talk about what they did right and what they did wrong. I'm going to say that it was a very, very violent resolution, and it went terribly wrong for all parties involved.

[gunfire] [children crying]

Chris: In this particular case, they sent us in to try and get the kids out. We considered the children and the unwilling Branch Davidians inside the building as hostages, and our job was to get them out alive. We thought it would have made great sense if we'd gone in that night, doing what we as a Hostage Rescue Team did very, very well. And we thought we could have saved everybody. They'd been in a firefight, they were wounded, they were on their heels. We thought we could have resolved it. That did not happen.

What happened is we put a fence around the place, essentially, and waited until that last day when the attorney general decided to send us in. By that time, the odds were so heavily stacked against us, I don't know that anybody ever really thought we had much of a chance. But obviously it didn't go well then either.

Once Washington, DC, made the decision to go in, the plan was to insert a chemical irritant, tear gas, for lack of a better term, into the building. So we had what looked like tanks, they were tanks, that had nozzles on the front. In order to get the gas in the building, you have to inject it in the building. So the tanks drove up, injected gas into the building. So we went with armored vehicles, inserted the gas, tore some of the walls open to allow people to get out, and it went precipitously downhill from there.

And I think this was a horrible misrepresentation of what happened. It may have represented what the negotiators did, but it had little to do with the reality of what I experienced when I was there. And I thought it was appallingly bad. Ultimately, we want to save people's lives, and this movie did not accurately depict that in any way. Well, this is a personal thing for me, but I would rate it a zero. It makes me ill.

Rating: 0/10

Chris: Hostage rescue's not really just guys going in through doors with machine guns and black outfits on. It's really about an entire process. And the end result, when nothing else works, is to send people through a door breach. You want to avoid that if possible. If you need to do that, you need to be prepared and understand the consequences.