Get the Truth: Former CIA Officers Teach You How to Persuade Anyone to Tell All (10 page)

USING AGREEMENT TO NEUTRALIZE CONVINCING STATEMENTS

• By agreeing with Jan, you’ve conveyed that you have, without question, heard what she just told you.

• Your reaction seems counterintuitive to her, in the sense that her purpose is to put up resistance, and yet you suddenly seem to be on her side. For a moment, she thinks she may have convinced you.

• When you return to your monologue, she’s likely thinking,
Oh, my God, it didn’t work.

• The recognition that that tack was ineffective puts her on the spot, and she has to try to figure out what to do now. She may be thinking that giving you at least
some
truthful information has become an option.

• You’ve disarmed her by taking away one of her most powerful weapons. Absent any others, she’s more inclined to listen to what you’re saying. Without realizing it, she has just stepped onto the slippery slope of short-term thinking.

And then you go right back into your monologue:

“That’s why it’s so important that we resolve this, so we can get on with the business of doing what we do so well, and what so many people depend on us to do. They don’t look to us to sit in judgment of anyone, and none of us should have any inclination to do that. We just need to figure out why this happened, and fix it so we can go back to helping people.”

Jan recognizes that her game plan didn’t pan out the way she hoped it would. Trying to persuade you by influencing your perception of her got her nowhere. She has no choice but to abandon that tack.

Since Jan has to change her strategy, she may well give emotion a shot. This might take the form of crying, hitting you with an outburst of anger, or showing a flare-up of fear or panic. You certainly don’t want to ignore the emotion, but you can’t allow it to steer you away from your approach, either. If Jan starts crying, you want to acknowledge it, and then overcome it by making it clear, gently but firmly, that it’s not going to work:

“Jan, I know you’re upset. Please understand that’s not my intent—the last thing I want to do is to make this any harder for you than it has to be. And you also need to understand that it’s not going to fix anything—getting upset isn’t going to do either one of us any good.”

And then you go right back to your monologue.

Outbursts of anger or panic can be a little more difficult to handle, but they’re manageable, as long as you keep your cool. Susan once conducted a routine security reinvestigation of an Agency employee we’ll call “Stella,” a woman she had to interview four times because of the deceptive behaviors she exhibited in response to questions about her protection of classified information. Stella, who had referred to Susan as the “bleached blond goddess of torture” after the first three encounters, was having a tough time. These interviews can be difficult under any circumstances due to their inherently invasive nature, but for a person who’s trying to withhold information, they’re not only difficult, but incredibly draining. By the fourth interview, it was clear to Susan that Stella had engaged in some particularly egregious mishandling of highly classified documents, so she transitioned into elicitation mode. As Susan progressed through her monologue with calm assurances that she had seen this sort of thing many times before with other employees, her tone was caring and sympathetic. It didn’t have the desired effect. Stella started screaming at Susan that she had had enough, and that if Susan didn’t back off, she was going up to the seventh floor—the floor where the director’s suite and other high-level offices are located—and throw herself off the balcony.

Susan was unfazed. “Stella, I know how difficult this must be,” she said gently. “But the only way to fix this is to remain calm and levelheaded so that you can help us understand what has happened, and why. That way, it can be resolved, and we can get past it.” And she went right back into her monologue.

Just as in the case of neutralizing convincing statements, the message that’s conveyed is simple:
It didn’t work. You’re not going to intimidate me, you’re not going to sway me, you’re not going to influence me. You’re going to have to come up with a different plan, and I’m here to help you do that.

Although emotion can be difficult to handle, its display isn’t necessarily a bad thing. We’ve found that quite often the confession comes very soon after emotion is exhibited. Emotion, particularly anger and aggression, is often a last resort. Once you work your way through that, you’re just about there. The person realizes there’s no use in trying to keep going.

Remember that mantra we introduced earlier: If the person is lying, we don’t want his lips moving. So when resistance surfaces in the form of an attempt to voice a denial, you need to nip it in the bud. As we noted in Chapter 5, it’s important to be engaged and attentive throughout your monologue, and one of the benefits of that is that it helps you pick up on any signal that a denial is coming. Quite often, if the person intends to interrupt your monologue with a denial, he’ll signal it with a phrase like, “I already told you…” or “I’m telling you…” That’s your cue to do some quick manipulation.

If you get such an indication from Jan that she’s going to try to derail you with a denial, or if she beats you to the punch and is able to voice the denial, there are several immediate actions you can take to quash her effort. First, if you want to get a person to stop talking, a very effective way to accomplish that is with one word: the person’s name. A fascinating nuance of human communication is that when we hear our name, we have a natural inclination to switch from speaking mode to listening mode, because it’s the way people typically get our attention to tell us something—we hear our name, and our ears perk up.

The next step is to use a control phrase, like, “Jan, hold on a second,” or “Jan, give me a chance to make this clear.” That enables you to gain control of the exchange, and to ease back into your monologue. As always, it needs to be conveyed calmly, and without raising your voice—trying to control the situation by turning up your volume will create a confrontational atmosphere that will only make your job more difficult.

Third, a remarkably effective mechanism to get someone to stop talking is the universal stop sign: You hold up your hand. You do it almost as a gesture of self-defense—you’re not extending it out aggressively and shoving it into the person’s face, or doing it with attitude. It’s a visual amplification of your control phrase, and it’s more powerful than you might imagine. The reason is that this is a verbal battle, and when you get the person to stop talking, you’ve taken away his weapon. In medieval times, it was a clash of swords; in the Wild West, it was a gunfight. The knight whose sword was stricken from his hand, the cowboy whose gun was emptied of its bullets, suddenly had no choice but to raise his arms in surrender. He was helpless. That same sense of helplessness can overwhelm a person in a verbal battle if he’s unable to speak. It becomes a one-sided fight.

Several investigators from a sheriff’s department in California who had undergone our training several years ago later got in touch with us to share the story of how they had recently broken up a gang-related theft ring. They did it by getting one of the gang members, whom we’ll call “Carl,” to admit that the gang had broken into a warehouse and stolen over $100,000 worth of desktop computer systems.

The investigators’ supervisor had contended that it would be pointless to interview Carl, because he was one of the more hardened gang members, and there was no way he was going to talk. The supervisor relented when the investigators insisted that it was worth a shot. After they got the confession, the stunned supervisor wanted to know how they did it. They went back into the interview room and asked Carl what prompted him to confess.

“As soon as I saw your hand come up, and you wouldn’t let me lie to you,” Carl said, “I knew it was game over.” Without being able to say anything, it was like he had brought a knife to a gunfight. He had no chance.

* * *

Resistance varies not only in the form it takes, but in the timing of its appearance. Often, it appears before the engagement even begins. If a person has made up his mind that he’s going to resist the process, whether it’s a screening interview, a criminal questioning, or some other encounter, his aim will likely be to try to delay or control the situation. That was certainly the case with a senior executive with a Fortune 500 company, whom we’ll call “Norman.”

Early in his career at the Agency, Phil was assigned to a case related to the selection of Norman’s company for a government contract. The sensitive nature of the work that was to be performed under the contract was such that several executives within the company, including Norman, were required to obtain security clearances. The problem in Norman’s case was that his background investigation had revealed that he had a foreign associate whom he had not disclosed to the government as required. It was a serious situation: Norman had lied on a government form about his association with a foreign national. Phil’s job was to get Norman to acknowledge the association, ascertain the nature of the relationship, and determine why Norman had failed to disclose it.

A neutral observer could have been forgiven for seeing the matchup as grossly unbalanced. Phil, young and relatively inexperienced, was up against this much older, seasoned executive, who was no doubt used to issuing directives and having them followed. Asserting his control in any business encounter was second nature. Phil knew the moment Norman entered the room that he had his hands full.

Phil introduced himself, and asked Norman to have a seat. With a silent, dismissive glance, Norman turned and spotted a hanger on a hook on the back of the door. He walked slowly back toward the door, making an elaborate, deliberate effort of taking off his suit coat, hanging it up, and finally sitting down. He looked at Phil. “I don’t have a lot of time for this,” Norman said, in stark contraposition to his plodding, protracted entrance.

Norman had obviously elected to take an adversarial approach to the engagement with Phil, and to pursue that approach with what we call an “access control” strategy. His aim was to control Phil’s access to him by delaying it: The less time Phil had to work with Norman, the reasoning went, the lower his chances for success. That told Phil that Norman’s level of concern was extremely high. He was probably scared to death.

Phil knew it was highly likely that Norman’s situation involved one of two scenarios: The undisclosed foreign associate was either a woman with whom he was romantically involved, or an international business contact. He also knew that given Norman’s high level of concern, it was more likely the former: Norman was married, and the idea of having to acknowledge that he had a foreign girlfriend was more consistent with his behavior than that of simply having to identify a foreign business associate. Phil was prepared to go down both paths, but he picked the girlfriend scenario first.

The problem in this scenario wasn’t that Norman was married and had a foreign girlfriend—it was that he had failed to be up front about it, and to disclose it. Phil was well equipped with the tools he needed to address that situation, and to get the truth. His monologue was classic:

“Norman, first of all, it’s important to understand that this sort of thing happens a lot. And when I say, ‘a lot,’ I don’t mean just in terms of the number of people we see in this situation. I also mean it in terms of it being across the board, regardless of how high or low the person falls on the org chart. The fact is, there’s no one who’s immune from this situation—it’s a human issue, a relationship issue, and it’s a very difficult issue for people to talk about. Believe it or not, we talk to people who are willing to jeopardize their positions, and avoid telling us about the situation, because of their assumption that we’re going to begin to make judgments that we’re not even legally allowed to make. We’re in absolutely no position to make a moral judgment, Norman—it’s none of our business. What we do have to understand are the counterintelligence implications. And let me tell you, very rarely in situations like this is there a counterintelligence issue. I’ll tell you, if I was in Las Vegas, I’d give at least eighty percent odds that whatever that person sitting there is worried about, he has no reason to be worried about it.”

Norman was listening intently, processing what he was hearing. Phil’s calming, sympathetic voice, and his compassionate tone, provided a source of comfort.

“Listen, I’m not accusing you of anything, Norman. I’m just trying to sort these things out. If the director of the CIA were to come in here right now and ask me what I know for sure about this situation, I have to tell you, the one thing I know for sure is that as this issue has surfaced, there’s something on your mind that’s bothering you.”

That was Phil’s means of testing the water—if he got no resistance to that statement, he’d know two things: First, that he was right about the girlfriend. And second, that he was going to get a confession. If Norman didn’t resist the premise that he was concealing something, it was pretty much all over.

Norman slowly nodded. “Yeah,” he said.

“Tell me what’s bothering you, Norman. Let’s clear this up so we can finish up the clearance process,” Phil said reassuringly. Norman told Phil about the foreign girlfriend.

• Convincing statements

• Emotion

• Denials

• Use the person’s first name

• Articulate a control phrase

• Hold up your hand

Phil, despite his youth and relative inexperience, and Norman’s sophistication and well-honed situational management skills, had accomplished his task. The fact that Norman was so completely outgunned was something Phil was still trying to wrap his head around. He knew it wasn’t so much him, but rather the power of this emerging process, that yielded the successful outcome. He was awed by it. To this day, that awe has yet to subside.