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It's dangerous. It's risky. And people's lives are literally on the line. Their words can mean the difference between life and death.

This is the job of the hostage negotiator. The negotiator's job is to defuse a crisis situation and calm the hostage taker down.

He or she must quickly learn what words to use and more importantly, which ones not to use.

In a previous episode, we covered Tony Carritzis, a hostage taker whose 63-hour standoff with police was dramatized in the Wondery Series American hostage.

Hostage negotiation is not something I specialized in during my time at the FBI. I wanted you to get an insider's point of view on how the CIRG, the FBI critical incident response group and the CNU, the Crisis Negotiation Unit, actually work.

So I called up my friend Mark Thundercloud. He is a retired FBI supervisory special agent from the critical incident response group at Quantico, Virginia.

He was one of several supervisory special agents who responded to critical incidents in the United States and in foreign countries such as hostage situations, barricaded individuals and kidnapping cases.

Mark and the critical negotiation unit co-workers also managed the FBI Crisis Negotiator Program and the approximately 375 special agent negotiators throughout the country.

He organized many instructional courses and trained thousands of FBI agents, domestic and foreign police officers, military and other personnel throughout the United States and the world in hostage crisis negotiation and suicide prevention.

During his long career, Mark responded to major incidents including the Ruby Ridge standoff in Idaho, the Freemann incident in Montana, the Boston Marathon bombings and the Standing Rock North Dakota Oil Pipeline Conflict.

He was also deployed with the FBI hostage rescue team and assisted in negotiations of kidnapped Americans overseas.

When Mark retired in 2011, he received the FBI Director's Maritorious Achievement Award for negotiations conducted during the piracy-related hijacking of the Mariske Alabama commercial vessel near the coast of Somalia.

So that being said, I think he's qualified to educate us about hostage negotiations and I look forward to sharing my interview with him with you.

From Wondery and Tree Fort, I'm Candace D'Long and this is Killer Psychie.

I've spent five decades studying people's minds through my work as an FBI profiler and psychiatric nurse.

I've interviewed lots of murderers including serial killers and the question of why they did it is what I get asked time and time again.

It's difficult to get a satisfying answer without diving deep into their mindsets.

So that's what we're doing and I will give you my best analysis in this series of what made them do what they did.

This episode is an interview with Mark Thundercloud.

Mark, thanks for joining us. I'm always happy to talk to a retired FBI agent but I'm really looking forward to chatting with you because your career was so specialized.

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