Few however make them like outgoing Assistant Commissioner Mark Murdoch has done in the full blaze of publicity with the eyes of the world watching. Not once but twice.

First there was the terrifying collar-bomb hoax and then the Lindt Cafe siege.

Ironically for being in the centre of the spotlight, this is a man who, coming from a police family and committed to the job, shuns publicity.

Murdoch, 59, broke his silence last week to reveal lessons from the Lindt siege and the moment he had to tell Maddie Pulver and her parents that he could not guarantee she would live when he made the decision that the elaborate device around her neck had to be removed.

‘He’s one of the most professional guys in the force. He’s a machine,” one of his contemporaries said last week of Murdoch, who retires in a few weeks.

In August 2011, Maddie Pulver had been at her Mosman home studying for her HSC at Wenona High School when a balaclava-clad man broke in and put the fake collar bomb around her neck.

The teenager’s parents, Bill and Belinda Pulver, recalled what had happened in America when a collar bomb locked around the neck of a man ordered to carry out an armed robbery had started to beep and then exploded, killing him.

Like the note left with the US bomb hostage, the document left with Maddie Pulver warned her to “ACT NOW, THINK LATER” or the bomb would go off.

After 10 tense hours as the drama was followed moment by moment on TV screens around the world, Murdoch, in charge of the delicate operation as commander of Sydney’s Central Metropolitan Region, made the call to remove the black box around the teenager’s neck.

Specialist police and bomb disposal experts had confirmed the device contained mechanical and electrical components but said there were no explosives in the black box. Still, no-one could be 100 per cent sure.

“We hadn’t encountered anything like this before. We didn’t know if the device was real,” the 37-year police veteran told The Saturday Telegraph last week.

It was impossible to open the box without cutting it off Maddie so they decided on the safest way to remove it.

“I told Maddie’s parents were going to do it and their question was one of the hardest questions I have had to answer,” Murdoch said.

“They said they had seen what had happened in America and they asked if we could guarantee that it wasn’t going to happen here.

“I told them no, I couldn’t guarantee that was not going to happen but we couldn’t leave it on.

“Let’s just say I held my breath as the box was cut off Maddie.”

He said the real heroes were Maddie and the police officer who helped keep her calm, Senior Constable Karen Lowden, who earlier this month received the prestigious Star of Courage.

Paul Douglas Peters, who had no links to the Pulver family, was arrested two weeks later in the home he shared with his ex-wife in Louisville, Kentucky, and extradited to NSW.

He was jailed for a maximum of 13 ½ after he was tracked via an email account he had created for the bomb hoax which was traced through an IP address linked to Chicago’s O’Hare airport and was accessed at 4:09pm at Kincumber library and at 5:25pm and 5:51pm at an Avoca video store.

With a dad, Eric, who had been a police sergeant, and a son in the police, Murdoch said he was “immensely proud” of what he had achieved and the men and women he worked with.

In July 2014, while he was the NSW Police force’s official corporate sponsor for domestic and family violence, Murdoch was elevated to head of the elite Counter Terrorism and Special Tactics command. It was on his watch that two months later the National Terrorism Public Alert Level was raised from medium to high, meaning an attack was “likely”.

Early on December 15 that year, Murdoch and his team had made a significant arrest as part of Operation Appleby which targeted a radical group of 18 young men willing to carry out an Islamic State-ordered murder.

By just after 9.57am, 12 minutes after the first radio call went out about the siege at the Lindt Cafe, Murdoch along with the rest of the police hierarchy, was on alert.

Once the siege with 18 hostages and gunman Man Monis was declared a terrorist incident, Murdoch took over as commander at the Police Operations Centre from then-Assistant Mick Fuller, now the state’s police commissioner.

Once again, the eyes of the world were on Sydney. It was the first time anyone affiliated with IS had undertaken a hostage-type situation anywhere in the world, the first time social media was used to post messages and videos on social media from inside the stronghold.

The outcome was not one anyone wanted with two hostages dead.

“While we could say we saved 16, we lost two. It was not a good outcome,” Murdoch said last week.

When he handed over command at about 9.30pm that day to Assistant Commissioner Mark Jenkins, FBI-trained Murdoch still believed that a policy of contain and negotiate would work.

It was not to be.

But last week he revealed how the Lindt siege had immediately impacted on the world’s response to terrorism. While it took almost three years for NSW to complete an inquest into the siege and look at whether police should have stormed the cafe earlier, less a month later in Paris, French police had already thrown the policy of negotiating out of the window.

When an IS gunman linked to the Charlie Hebdo massacre took hostages in a Jewish supermarket, police negotiated just long enough to put their plan into action and attack the supermarket.

“They didn’t pull any punches in telling us that they had seen what we did and it didn’t work so they were going to do it differently,” Murdoch said.

“We make decisions in the firm belief that they are right and we never make them lightly.”