Author: Christian West, Brian Jantzen, Ivor Terret and Jared Van Driessche, edited by Terry Dunne
ISBN No: 9781732802100
Review date: 20/04/2024
No of pages: 310
Publisher: AS Solution
Publisher URL:
https://assolution.com/
Year of publication: 31/01/2020
Brief:
price
£$34.95
This book, sub-titled: An introduction to protective security for high net worth individuals and family offices, is welcome for at least two reasons, writes Mark Rowe.
First, so few books are around, about bodyguarding in general and the close protection (CP) of ‘high net worth individuals’ in particular. And yet – second reason – CP of the rich and famous, and doing it well and to the satisfaction of those clients, is so necessary.
Rather than digest the book, and as a way of passing judgement on it, let me put it this way; like a reader of so many books, I began by flicking through to see if there were any photographs. There were none. I turned to the back of the book, to see what names were in the index. There was no index, which is a pity in any book. But from actually reading the book I can confirm that there are no clients or anyone named or identified. This is an important test that the book passes.
At most, the authors give anonymised short stories as moral tales, first about ‘Bob’, the tech guy who no more set out to be extremely wealthy than he set out to require protective security for himself and his family; and ‘Tom’, the security man ‘with a stellar background’ who got a job as security director for a ‘very prominent family’ who however did not fit in with other staff and who was duly let go (in other words, not the concierge or the gardeners who had the family’s trust).
To quote the final two paragraphs of that short cautionary story (page 100), to give a taste of the book’s good sense throughout: “The protective security industry is all about people. Everyone from the newest residential agent to the security director can enjoy the principal’s good graces one minute and be out of a job the next. We’ve made our own fair share of mistakes and have learned the importance of cultural fit the hard way.
“In our experience, a security director has 100 days to make a positive or negative impression with the principals. Tom didn’t last 100 days. It’s common that principals new to the game do not know exactly what they are looking for in a security director or security agents and discover this incrementally by finding out what they are NOT looking for. Better advice during the recruitment of new personnel definitely helps. But ultimately, it’s up to the principal to decide whom they enjoying working with and whom they don’t.”
A third anonymised story, about an agent called ‘Paul’, covers the ethical and practical troubles when one of a CP team becomes a favourite of the wife of the principal, only for the principal to have a mistress and the principal’s marriage dissolves into divorce.
Rather than seek to digest this wise and well-written book, you can learn something from Christian West and Brian Jantzen of Danish firm AS Solution, two of the four authors, who with others also blog: visit https://assolution.com/. Christian West was a speaker yesterday at Phelim Rowe’s (no relation) executive forum for CP in central London.
On the other two authors, Ivor Terret was also a speaker at the forum, about the differences between overt, low-profile and covert close protection (‘covpro’), and incidentally he has a Leicester MSc; and Jared van Driessche has a long, American and international, background in CP for CEOs and celebrities.
Instead of a digest, which cannot do justice to the book or the subject, let’s consider who it’s aimed at: those ‘high net worth’ men and women who may require security for their homes and work (hence the ‘family offices’), even if they wish they didn’t have to; and for those security people who may be curious about that line of work and may want to try it.
The book merits a far wider readership within private security. For consider the 24-hour nature of the guarding of a high net worth individual. If a business chief, he may be at a hotel (to sleep, and for meetings – what of the risk of corporate espionage?), an airport (business travel security is a subject in itself); maybe at a stadium concert, or the opening night at a museum or art gallery that his business is sponsoring. He or his wife may stop by a shopping mall; or, his firm may own the mall. His children may well go to a university. In other words, executive protection may touch on most other sectors of security, quite apart from corporate security. The corporate head of security and indeed CISO may be expected to have some knowledge of, and an opinion on, CP.
For consider also – as covered at Phelim’s forum, his fifth annual event for executive CP protection – the sorts of security and products required to secure high net worth individuals: TCSM (technical counter surveillance measures, sweeping for bugs for short), managing of social media so that profiles do not over-share and give away details best kept private, such as home address, or travel itinerary; which leads on to cyber generally; and in the physical world, gates, fences, intercom, intruder alarms and access control for home and grounds. The photo on the book’s front cover of a couple and girl also tells its own story. All three are casually dressed and walking naturally with eyes only for each other; they do not want to be looking over their shoulder, they want to live a normal life without security cramping it.
Much else follows from that, as set out in the book – recruiting the right CP agents, dealing with paparazzi, staying safe on holiday, what to do if the worst happens. While the book, like the private individuals so protected, are international in outlook and travel, the authors do note that the UK’s Security Industry Authority for its CP badge requires a minimum of 140 hours (‘which we think is a reasonable minimum’).
To leave the book, to appreciate the gap it has ably filled, let’s go over what other similar books are out there. Kevin Horak the Shropshire-based man in his time in CP wrote The New Bodyguard. Other CP people have written memoirs rather than ‘how to’ works. The reason for my checking for photographs and for an index is that so often CP people publish about their job – to be blunt – out of vanity. Look at me, alongside (insert name of pop singer or actor)! They cannot resist telling stories of who they have worked for, just as (to the exasperation of at least one speaker at Phelim’s forum) CP agents keep taking and posting selfies of themselves, usually somewhere warm and exciting-sounding, despite the risk of being unprofessional and compromising the person or family they are working for.
Just as anyone working in English football in the 1970s and 1980s had a story about manager Brian Clough, and countless stories have been told, so it seems that every CP person who publishes a memoir has a story about working for Victoria Beckham, who by all accounts is a nice and normal person. The most famous book of this type is The Bodyguard’s Story: Diana, the Crash and the Sole Survivor, by Trevor Rees-Jones, which indeed covers Diana, Princess of Wales’ fatal crash in Paris in August 1997, and details the personal protection beforehand. While before the age of selfies, suffice to say it wasn’t as glamorous as you might think, no more than the selfies of an acquaintance at her restored French farmhouse are the whole story.
Some day maybe someone will work in celebrity and CEO protection who has the gifts to become a proper novelist and will write the CP equivalent of This Sporting Life by David Storey, and do for bodyguards what that book (and film starring Richard Harris) did for professional team sport. Rather than, let’s say, The Bodyguard, the film starring Whitney Houston and Kevin Costner, and more recently musical.
Public Figures: Private Lives, published in 2018, will never be set to music; but with authority it positions protective security for high net worth individuals squarely within the spectrum of private security – as a service, ‘a people business’.
