Put your wrists together in front of you, palms facing, like you’re about to be handcuffed. Now imagine three fast wraps of duct tape cinching them tight. Most people, in that moment, feel something go cold in the chest. The body understands before the mind does: you are no longer the one deciding what happens next.
I spent two days in a room off Fremont Street in Las Vegas learning to undo that feeling. The course was billed as spy and survival skills, taught by a former CIA officer named Jason Hanson and a rotating crew of instructors, and it covered a sprawl of subjects: lock picking, lie detection, knife work, home defense. But the heart of it, the part that kept resurfacing across both days, was counter-custody. The unglamorous, deeply practical art of not staying caught.
It’s a strange thing to train. Nobody plans to be restrained. But the statistics don’t care about your plans, and neither do the people who do this for a living.
Why Duct Tape
The first lesson is humbling, because it has nothing to do with you and everything to do with how cheap the materials are. Duct tape is the most common restraint used by criminals worldwide — not handcuffs, not rope, not zip ties. Tape. It’s a few dollars at any hardware store, it weighs nothing, and it wraps a pair of wrists in about 4 seconds. Criminals, Hanson reminded us more than once, are lazy and in a hurry. They are not going to tie the elaborate knot a Boy Scout would. They’re going to do the fast thing, the simple thing, and get you into a vehicle.
That laziness is the opening. In what the instructors called an “express kidnapping,” the wrists go in front, two to four wraps, because hands in front let someone drag you quickly. Behind the back is slower and more awkward, so it’s rarer than the movies suggest. And front-wrapped tape, it turns out, is a geometry problem, not a strength contest.
The technique they taught us they called the magic angle, and it works for anyone regardless of size. You raise your taped hands high above your head, almost like a steeple. Then, you drive your arms down and apart hard, elbows flaring out, as if you’re throwing both elbows at someone standing behind you. The motion has to start from the top. The mistake nearly everyone makes, the one I made on my first try, is dropping the hands to chest level and then pulling. No human is strong enough to tear tape that way. Started from overhead, the tape splits like it was waiting for permission.
I taped a partner. He taped me. We took turns failing and then suddenly not failing, and the cold feeling in the chest got a little less cold each time.
The Clock Starts Immediately
The single most repeated piece of advice across the whole two days was about time. If you are taken, you try to escape within the first 24 hours.
The reasoning is grim and clean. Early on, you are physically closest to the place you were grabbed, which makes you easier to find and easier to flee toward something familiar. You are also stronger, better fed, and better rested than you will ever be again in that situation. Captors feed hostages poorly, if at all. Every hour that passes, the math tilts further against you. The version of you most capable of getting free is the one that exists in the first day.
If escape isn’t possible, the instruction turns toward leaving a trail. Bleed if you can. Leave hair, leave saliva, leave DNA in the vehicle and in the rooms you pass through, anything that gives investigators something to follow. It is bleak material to sit with on a folding chair in Las Vegas, and the room got quiet for it. But there’s a strange comfort in being handed something to do, even in the worst imaginable circumstance. Helplessness is the real enemy. The training is, at its heart, an argument against helplessness.
A Cord, a Chair, a Way Out
The deeper into the curriculum we went, the more the lessons rewarded a single idea: preparation beats improvisation. The people who get out are usually the people who set themselves up to get out before anything happened.
Consider the friction saw. A length of genuine American-made 550 paracord, around 7 feet, ends melted so they won’t fray, carried as a pre-made loop. Threaded between bound wrists so it rests against the tape and not the skin, with a loop slipped over each foot, it becomes a saw. You lie back and bicycle your legs, and the cord cuts through tape or rope in 10 to 20 seconds. The catch, and there’s always a catch, is that you have to be carrying the cord in the first place. The instructors wore it as shoelaces. They kept it in travel pouches. The tool is useless in the drawer at home.
The same logic ran through the chair escapes, the scenario from a hundred home-invasion stories: taped to a kitchen chair while the house gets ransacked. We drilled the forward jolt, driving the head down toward the knees to change the tape’s angle and burst it, and a separate move for the ankles, rotating the knees and toes outward into a hard V before dropping fast. None of it is exotic. All of it is the same principle as the magic angle, applied to a body in a chair. Speed and angle over muscle.
A word of caution that the instructors hammered, and that I’ll pass along: a partner held the chair steady every single time someone practiced the jolt. The technique works. It also puts your skull on a fast trajectory toward the floor. Train it with a spotter, on a clear surface, and not from some precarious perch.
Tales from the Field
What made the two days stick wasn’t the techniques alone. It was the way Hanson wrapped each one in a story, and the way the stories all seemed to carry the same small piece of wisdom: the people who do this work professionally win through patience and misdirection, almost never through force.
He described an operation to grab a cartel figure in a South American town, a man so beloved locally that the townspeople were his security. No shootout. The team staged a car crash at the exact moment the target stepped out of his vehicle, and while every eye, including the bodyguards’, snapped toward the wreck, they moved. A distraction. The whole thing turned on a distraction.
That became a lesson about ordinary life. Hanson told us about a woman approaching him in a grocery store parking lot asking for $5 for gas, and how his first instinct was to check behind himself, because the small ask is sometimes the setup. The professionals exploit attention. Knowing that, you guard yours. Check your six. Treat the convenient distraction as a question rather than an answer.
Even his warnings about staying free for good carried it. To truly disappear, he said, a person has to abandon every habit that makes them themselves, because habits are exactly what trackers hunt. The yoga class, the gun store, the particular coffee. People get found because they drift back to what’s comfortable. Whether you’re evading a surveillance team or just trying to not be predictable to the wrong person, the principle holds: Your routines are a map someone else can read.
Walking Out
I went into those two days as someone who’s spent a career thinking about how to survive when the systems we lean on fail, whether that’s a forest, a flood, or the slow grind of a long emergency. I came out thinking that counter-custody belongs on that same shelf, next to fire and water and shelter. Not because any of us expects to be taken. Because the cost of the skill is so low and the cost of needing it and not having it is everything.
You don’t have to attend a class in Las Vegas. Buy a roll of duct tape. Have someone wrap your wrists, in front, three times. Then raise your arms over your head and bring them down hard, and feel the tape give. It takes one afternoon to learn, and it rearranges something. The next time you imagine your wrists bound, the chest stays a little warmer. You know something now. You know you can get free.
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