Risky Business

If anyone can prepare civilians working in hot zones for possible abduction, it's ex-soldiers. But can they run their own consulting companies?

John Proctor had just finished the first part of his lecture when a familiar thump shook the Canadian embassy in Afghanistan. "Everyone knows what it is," Proctor recalled. A car bomb had gone off and hit an American convoy on the route the former soldier had just travelled in an armoured sports utility vehicle. It was 2009 and Proctor had come from Ottawa to give survival tips to a room full of diplomats in Kabul.

Without missing a beat, he made the explosion part of the presentation.

The envoys, many of them young bureaucrats on their first overseas assignments, had plenty of in-house security - but this lesson was about what to do should they ever be captured outside the wire. "We explained that a car bomb is often just a precursor to something else," he says. "Once the bomb goes off, everyone just leaps out of their cars - you're vulnerable now. It doesn't mean there aren't other people out there who aren't going to grab you."

Potential threats occur on the streets of Kabul about as often, and as quickly, as Proctor can come up with ways to mitigate them. He served 20 years in the British and Canadian military, devoting much of that time to imagining worst-case scenarios for top brass and senior bureaucrats. Though he's no longer a soldier, Proctor is still doing it today.