GET
THE
TRUTH
ALSO BY PHILIP HOUSTON,
MICHAEL FLOYD, AND SUSAN CARNICERO
Spy the Lie
GET
THE
TRUTH
FORMER CIA OFFICERS TEACH YOU HOW
TO PERSUADE ANYONE TO TELL ALL
PHILIP HOUSTON. MICHAEL FLOYD
AND SUSAN CARNICERO
Commentary by PETER ROMARY
Written by DON TENNANT
First published in the United States in 2015 by St Martin’s Press
First published in the UK in 2015 by
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ISBN: 978-184831-667-6
Text copyright © 2015 Philip Houston, Michael Floyd
and Susan Carnicero
The authors have asserted their moral rights.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by any means, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.
All statements of fact, opinion, or analysis expressed are those of the authors and do not reflect the official positions or views of the CIA or any other U.S. Government agency. Nothing in the contents should be construed as asserting or implying U.S. Government authentication of information or Agency endorsement of the authors’ views. This material has been reviewed by the CIA to prevent the disclosure of classified information.
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Printed and bound in the UK by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc
For all whose pursuit of the truth keeps us safe
CONTENTS
Preface
1.Of Espionage and Infomercials: The Extraordinary Power of Short-Term Thinking
2.The Best-Case/Worst-Case Continuum
3.Transitioning to Interrogation Mode: The DOC and the DOG
4.Uncovering a Spy: The Art of Creating the Monologue
5.How to Deliver Your Monologue
6.How to Tailor Your Monologue
7.How to Handle Resistance During Your Monologue
8.Going for the Gold: Collecting Nuggets of Information
9.Crafting a Sincere, Empathetic Monologue: Fiction As an Option
10.Do No Harm
11.An Elicitation Case Study
12.If O. J. Simpson Did It: The Interrogation That Might Have Been
13.The Elephant in the Room
Appendix IElaboration on Applying the Elicitation Model in Business, in Law, and in Everyday Life: Chapter Commentary by Peter Romary
Appendix II It All Begins with Preparation by Peter Romary
Appendix III Transcript of the Actual Initial Interview of O. J. Simpson
Glossary
Acknowledgments
Index
PREFACE
It’s still dark out—the sun won’t rise for another couple of hours. You’re standing in front of a heavily secured door that opens to a small, musty, windowless room in a nondescript building at a secret location outside the United States. On the other side of the door is a man who had been brought to the room several hours earlier, after a clandestine operation executed by U.S. military forces and intelligence operatives led to his capture. This man may have been involved in orchestrating the September 11 attacks that had changed life as you and the rest of the Western world had known it.
The man, classified by the U.S. government as a “high value detainee,” won that distinction for a reason: The knowledge he possesses could be a treasure trove of information not only about the planning and execution of the September 11 attacks, but potentially about other attacks, possibly even more heinous, that are being plotted. At this moment, there is no higher priority in the War on Terror than extracting that information from this man. The lives of what could be thousands, or even tens of thousands, of innocent people—men, women, and children—could hang in the balance. Your job is to get the man to tell you everything he knows. It’s difficult to conceive of a more daunting task, with as much at stake. What approach, what techniques, give you the best possible chance of succeeding when you walk through that door?
This book will answer that question.
At its core, it’s a book about influence. It’s about the process of exerting influence to elicit truthful information from a person who has a reason—not uncommonly, a reason that involves life-altering consequences—to want to withhold that information. Some of the techniques that in recent years have been associated with this process have sparked an intense, emotional debate in the United States and around the world. It’s especially intense and emotional when the discussion focuses on the organization to which we have largely dedicated our careers, and indeed much of our lives: the Central Intelligence Agency.
In our world, the process is commonly referred to as interrogation. Of course, it’s difficult to mention interrogation and the CIA in the same sentence without readily conjuring up preconceived notions, and disturbing mental images, of what the process must entail in our high-stakes world of counter-espionage and counterterrorism. Such preconceptions can easily be forgiven, because there has been more than sufficient public disclosure of methods that have been employed since the War on Terror was declared on September 11, 2001, to substantiate the conclusions that many have legitimately drawn. “Enhanced interrogation techniques” is the euphemism of choice among its proponents. But it remains exactly that: a euphemism.
Sometimes, when the task at hand is to describe what something is, it’s helpful to describe what it isn’t. This book is not a position paper on interrogation techniques employed by the Central Intelligence Agency, or any other agency or institution. It is not a vehicle for the delivery of an argument, nor an apology for anything that anyone sees as warranting an apology, nor is it an attempt to stifle any debate. But to the extent that the debate will continue over the interrogation techniques that we as a nation should be prepared to employ in the interest of protecting our national security, it is a debate that will continue outside these pages. Simply put, that’s not our call.
All we can do is speak from our own experiences, drawn from careers that, in essence, were built around a single, quantifiable, yet extraordinarily challenging goal: getting people to tell the truth. We’ve pursued that goal for decades, along career paths that intersected in a way that has enabled us to learn from each other, and to meld our individual experiences into a comprehensive, cohesive body of work. It is upon that body of work that our activities as a team, and specifically our methodology for getting to the truth, have been established.
Perhaps the creation and sophistication of that methodology can best be described as a team sport, with Phil Houston acting as the player-coach. Phil, who served in senior positions within the Office of Security during the course of his twenty-five years at the Agency, is widely considered by his peers, and by some senior officials in the U.S. government, to be among the best interrogators the CIA has ever had. Indeed, his track record includes successes in some of the highest-profile cases in the Agency’s history. Michael Floyd, meanwhile, parlayed his experience and reputation as one of the nation’s foremost polygraph authorities to become a key resource in the fields of interviewing and interrogation not only in the CIA, but in the National Security Agency, as well. Susan Carnicero’s CIA career began as an operative under deep cover in the Agency’s Directorate of Operations, now known as the National Clandestine Service. Susan’s unique skill set, including her expertise in criminal psychology, would prove to be an invaluable asset in establishing her as one of the Agency’s most accomplished interrogators and screening specialists.
Our team was, to be sure, a formidable one. And smart enough to draft an ideal new player when the opportunity arose. That new player is Peter Romary, a seasoned trial attorney, educator, and internationally recognized expert in mediation and negotiation. Peter has devoted his career to service that is ultimately best encapsulated as pursuing the same goal as that of the rest of the team: getting people to tell the truth. With the team in place, then, the story of what we do and how we do it, and of how it can be practiced by anyone in any situation that involves eliciting truthful information from someone else, can be fully shared.
We took a similar tack in our previous book, Spy the Lie: Former CIA Officers Teach You How to Detect Deception, authored by the original trio of Phil, Michael, and Susan. In that book, we shared our methodology for determining whether or not someone is lying, and showed how it can be applied in everyday life. Those skills, as immensely valuable as they are, constitute a separate set of tools that need not be acquired in order to understand and apply our methodology for getting someone to tell you the truth. In other words, while it would be helpful, reading Spy the Lie is not a prerequisite for reading Get the Truth. That said, readers of Spy the Lie will recognize several familiar characters when they read this book. In that book, we showed how we determined that those characters were lying. In this one, the stories will revolve around how we got them to tell us the truth.
There’s another connection that’s worth mentioning. In Spy the Lie, we dispelled quite a few myths, and challenged widespread presumptions, that have long been relied upon to spot deception. In short, we shared our own real-life experiences, which have shown that a lot of the techniques people rely upon to determine whether someone is lying simply aren’t as reliable as they would have us believe. The interrogation methodology we will share in this book may come as an even more surprising challenge to conventional wisdom. In the minds of many, interrogation, almost by definition, is a harsh, confrontational encounter. In truth, that’s more likely to define a failed interrogation. Perhaps an apt analogy is the difference between war and diplomacy: You can seek your objective by means of trampling the enemy, or you can opt instead for the art of negotiation and influence. We’ve found the latter option to be overwhelmingly more effective.
Over the years, we’ve had to defend that position under some pretty intense circumstances. But there’s one thing we’ve never had to do: We’ve never had to come up with a socially or politically palatable euphemism for what it is we’re engaged in. The following pages will explain why. More important, they will explain how what we do can be adapted, with remarkable effectiveness, by anyone, in any capacity, whose aim is to get the truth.
I do not like that man. I must get to know him better.
—ABRAHAM LINCOLN
1.
OF ESPIONAGE AND INFOMERCIALS: THE EXTRAORDINARY POWER OF SHORT-TERM THINKING
The headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency in Langley, Virginia, has changed a lot over the years. But the original headquarters building, designed in the 1950s by the same New York architectural firm that designed the United Nations building in New York, is a massive concrete structure that hadn’t changed much at all by the early 1980s, when Phil Houston began his assignment as a polygraph examiner in the Office of Security’s Polygraph Division. The compartmented nature of the work of the CIA meant that few employees had routine access to any work area in the building beyond their own departments, so there was only one work area in which virtually all employees would have occasion to find themselves at one time or another. That area was the Polygraph Division.
The workload of the Agency’s polygraph examiners was, as a natural consequence, consistently heavy. Between the screening of job applicants, the routine reinvestigation of Agency employees, and the occasional investigation of alleged improper or criminal conduct, the days had precious little downtime.
For Phil, the pace was as exhilarating as the work itself. A relatively junior employee in those early years, he was finding that despite his lack of tenure he was getting good at this stuff, and he loved the opportunity that each encounter provided to hone his skills. He welcomed the assignment he received one morning to conduct a routine reinvestigation of a CIA employee we’ll call “Mary,” just as he did every other assignment that came his way. There appeared to be nothing out of the ordinary in this particular case, but that was okay. Phil recognized that handling the run-of-the-mill cases was part of the job.
Mary was a midlevel manager who had spent at least one tour overseas, a somewhat plain woman who had never been married, and who had likely turned few heads in her travels. She had been through the polygraph drill before, so she was familiar with the process, and seemed comfortable as Phil began running through the standard list of questions in the pretest. But any comfort she was feeling was short-lived. When Phil got to the requisite question about whether she had ever worked for a foreign intelligence service, Mary’s behavior indicated that the question troubled her for some reason. Sure enough, when Phil asked her the question during the polygraph examination, it was clear there was an issue.
It was equally clear that if there was one issue that required immediate resolution, it was a bad response to the “have you ever worked for the bad guys” question. As critical as the situation was, Phil’s sense was that whatever was causing Mary’s concern with the question was unlikely to be anything monumental. After all, Mary appeared to fit the mold of a reserved spinster much more readily than that of a cloak-and-dagger temptress. In his naturally low-key, easygoing, North Carolinian style, Phil began the process of getting to the root of the problem.
“Mary, this happens all the time with people we talk to, because they’ll have something in their mind that’s no big deal, but, for any number of reasons, the more they think about it, the more they’re bothered by it,” Phil assured her. “Sometimes it’s just a harmless oversight, sometimes it’s just a minor lapse in judgment that we blow out of proportion because we’re so concerned about doing the right thing.”
Mary nodded.
“I think that’s it. There was a security violation,” she said. Mary went on to explain that during her recent overseas tour, she had used government resources to do an unauthorized favor for one of the locals. After she recounted the details of the incident, Phil was relieved. No doubt, what Mary had done was a blatant violation of regulations. But Phil knew it happens far more frequently than U.S. government employees working overseas would care to admit. Still, the matter needed to be fully resolved.
“I understand,” Phil nodded consolingly. “You’re not the first one to do that.” He smiled. “Let’s talk about it so we can get it completely off your chest, okay? Was this local an acquaintance of yours?”
Yes, he was an acquaintance, Mary said. And there was more. Much more. The conversation led to a series of admissions that would leave Phil stunned. This acquaintance, whom we’ll call “Charmer,” happened to work for the local government. As the interview progressed, Mary confided to Phil that Charmer, in fact, worked for the local government as an intelligence officer. The revelations became steadily more serious as the hours passed. By the end of the second day, Mary had admitted that she and Charmer had become romantically involved.
Phil now recognized that he was sitting across from a midlevel CIA manager who had been in bed with a foreign intelligence officer. What might she have shared with Charmer during their intimate moments? Phil knew it was essential to get Mary to share anything that she might have divulged to Charmer. Mary’s embarrassment by that point was obvious, and she was crying. Phil did his best to make it as painless for her as he could.
“Mary,” Phil said gently, “let’s not lose sight of what we’re dealing with here. It’s not like you’re a spy. It’s not like you gave him everything. If there was some pillow talk, we just need to talk about it so we can clear this up.”
Suddenly, Mary stopped crying, and she looked up. “Phil, you don’t understand,” she whispered. “I did give him everything.”
Those words hit Phil squarely in the gut, instantly evoking a mix of emotions that must be close to what a first responder feels when he arrives at the scene of some tragic event. As the enormity of the task at hand presents itself, instinct takes over, emotions are pushed aside, and the safety and security of others becomes paramount. In Phil’s job, it was a matter of tapping what psychologists call ideational fluency—the ability to shift one’s thinking instantaneously as the situation warrants. Phil’s fluency seemed inborn.
“Okay, well, let’s talk about that,” Phil said. He began what would be several days of debriefing, and the admissions from Mary spilled unabated into the open. She had indeed given Charmer the whole works. She had identified every station officer. She had disclosed every operation. She had taken and handed over photos of the entire station complex. And she had passed along the identities and photos of every human asset she was aware of. There was only one word for the activity she had engaged in: espionage.
In all, Phil spent eight days working with Mary. One of those days was spent on the question of what Charmer had given her in return for the information. Mary admitted to receiving “a few pieces of jewelry” from him, but would go no further. She failed the polygraph on the question of additional compensation.
The Agency’s counterintelligence team was kept fully briefed throughout the process, as was the FBI. As Phil spoke with Mary, dots were being connected in the background. Although Mary never admitted it, Charmer, it turned out, wasn’t just working for the local intelligence operation. He was an agent for the hostile intelligence service of another foreign government. And it got worse. During Mary’s assignment at that overseas location, one of the Agency’s assets there had been killed. The Agency had no doubt that the killing was intelligence-related, but no one at the time could figure out how the operation had been compromised. Mary admitted to Phil that that was one of the operations she had disclosed to Charmer.
Phil hated Mary for that. Whether those feelings were right or wrong, when Phil learned of her betrayal—not just of the Agency, but of every man, woman, and child in the country—he absolutely despised Mary. Yet as the debriefing continued, Phil’s gentleness never faltered. At the end of the eighth day, when it was all over, Mary approached Phil, and hugged him.
“Thank you, Phil,” she said. “Thank you for understanding.”
The enormity of the case was lost on no one at the FBI, least of all the Bureau’s assistant director for intelligence. The day after Mary admitted that she had given “everything” to Charmer, the assistant director was in the office of William Kotapish, the CIA’s director of security, being briefed by Phil. When Phil recounted what Mary had admitted to having passed to Charmer, the FBI assistant director was ready to take over what he saw as a clear-cut espionage case. A senior Agency counterintelligence officer, who was also in the meeting, chimed in that Phil’s debriefing of Mary was ongoing.
“For whatever reason, she likes talking to him,” the counterintelligence officer said. Phil didn’t appreciate the slight, lowly employee or not. “Hey, I can hear you,” he muttered to himself. It was hardly a matter of Mary liking her conversations with Phil. It was that Phil had followed a meticulously choreographed process to get her to that point.
The counterintelligence officer proclaimed that another issue stood in the way of the Bureau taking over the case: The admissions that Phil had elicited from Mary were classified. And declassifying any of it was out of the question.
Kotapish suggested the Bureau conduct its own investigation, a suggestion the FBI assistant director readily embraced. He picked up the gray line—the secure telephone line linking government agencies—and called the Bureau’s Washington field office. He arranged for two FBI agents to interview Mary at her home that evening.
As it turned out, the FBI’s investigation was over almost before it began. The two agents who interviewed Mary got nowhere. It was probably the worst of all possible outcomes: Yes, she told the Agency all of those things, Mary said. But she had made it all up. None of it was true. She agreed to a polygraph examination by the Bureau, and, naturally, she failed it. But with no evidence against her, and with the Agency unable to declassify the information Phil had elicited from her, the Bureau had no choice but to cut Mary loose.
When Phil learned of that outcome, he was very much aware of what had gone wrong. He had worked tirelessly to keep Mary firmly in what we call “short-term thinking mode.” That is, he interacted with her in a way that kept her focused where he wanted her. He had kept the number of factors in her decision making as narrow, and as immediate, as he possibly could. When Mary spoke with the two FBI agents, those decision-making factors expanded dramatically, and were radically reprioritized. She had switched into long-term thinking mode. Now, other factors were influencing her—like the prospect of prison and the end of life as she knew it.
The way it all played out can’t be disclosed, but we can share one dimension of the outcome. One evening during that eight-day span, Phil was at home, and the phone rang. It was the Agency’s Security Duty Office.
“Phil, do you know a woman by the name of Mary Smith?” the officer asked. Phil said he did, and the officer continued.
“She called us a little while ago and claimed that she has been in a polygraph conversation with you, and that we should call you. She said she had left some valuables in the ladies’ restroom this afternoon before she left the building. She said to call you, and you would authorize us to release it to her.”
The officer went on to explain that he had gone up to retrieve the valuables, which turned out to be a large bag of jewelry. He said Mary told him that she had been keeping the bag in her safe at work because some of it was extremely valuable, and she felt it would be safer there. Phil got in touch with Bill Kotapish, the director of security, and filled him in. The two agreed that most, if not all, of the jewelry was likely the booty she had received from Charmer, and that now she wanted to hide it. In the end, there was no need. The CIA’s Office of the General Counsel determined that the Agency had no right to confiscate it. The jewelry was returned to Mary.
For Phil, Mary’s case was by no means the total debacle it might have been. Through it, he gained insights that would serve him and others in the Agency and beyond extremely well in the years that followed. Perhaps most significantly, it helped to crystallize a concept that would be a critical underpinning of our interrogation methodology: the psychology of short-term thinking.
To fully appreciate the power—and the ubiquity—of the concept, consider a contrivance that most of us probably see more frequently than we might acknowledge, or perhaps even realize: the infomercial.
Almost all of us have watched our fair share of them—earnest, often unapologetically kitschy productions, touting products we never knew we needed, from blankets with sleeves to weights you shake. Why do these pitches work? Why do so many people find themselves picking up the phone to buy a little putting green to use while sitting on the toilet? The reason is that these marketers take full advantage of the psychology of short-term thinking to influence our decision making in a way that compels us to do what they want us to do—buy a product that we wouldn’t necessarily be inclined to buy.
To accomplish that, the marketers capitalize on four factors that propel us into short-term thinking mode: our inherent vulnerability to influence; repetition; loss of independent thinking; and a lack of immediately identifiable consequences. Let’s take a look at how that works.
Inherent vulnerability to influence
When we’re watching an infomercial, we’re at a disadvantage in that there’s a one-way flow of information. We have no means of asking any questions or challenging any claims. Consequently, the marketer’s message is our sole source of data upon which to base our decision.
Repetition
It’s a psychological truism that the higher the number of instances we hear something, the greater the likelihood we’ll accept it, or at least open the door to the possibility of accepting it. A fundamental characteristic of infomercials is the repetition of visual imagery that illustrates application of the product under various circumstances, or by various individuals.
Loss of independent thinking
How frequently do you make the conscious decision to turn on the TV for the purpose of watching an infomercial so you can purchase a product you’ve never even heard of? Probably not all that frequently. The very act of viewing the infomercial is one that likely wasn’t actively chosen of your own accord.
Lack of immediately identifiable consequences
There’s a reason why these marketers don’t tell you to take out your checkbook, or to get your credit card number handy. All they ask you to do is make a telephone call. What harm is there in that? In fact, if you call in the next ten minutes, they’ll double the offer! Where’s the downside?
What’s happening here is that you have any number of reasons why you wouldn’t want to buy, say, a pair of plastic sandals with built-in exfoliating brushes. But you’re introduced to multiple reasons why you might be interested in buying them. The marketers are working to make the reasons you wouldn’t want to buy them go away, or to at least reprioritize them so that the reasons you might want to buy them go up on top. Before you know it, you have a snazzy new pair of plastic exfoliating sandals sitting in your closet.
Successfully bringing those four factors to bear compels people to do whatever it is we want them to do. It involves temporarily replacing the factors they’re inclined to focus on with those we want them to focus on, or to at least reprioritize them so the ones we want them to focus on are on top. That’s the concept of short-term thinking. We tap the very same principle in any interrogation scenario we encounter, whether the aim is to get a terrorist to disclose the details of a bomb plot, a serial killer to confess to a murder, a job applicant to share his drug-related indiscretions, or a child to admit she didn’t do her homework.