Get the Truth: Former CIA Officers Teach You How to Persuade Anyone to Tell All (4 page)

Omar was nodding appreciatively, as if thinking about his own wife. Phil continued.

“Hey, I’ve met Menacians, I’ve met Chinese, I’ve met people from all over—that’s the nature of the work we do. I can’t imagine that it wouldn’t be the same way with you. So just because you might have met a Menacian at some point doesn’t mean there’s a problem, Omar. It just means we need to disclose that so that everything’s done by the book and there are no misunderstandings.”

You get the drift. After a few more minutes, Phil paused to determine where Omar’s head was by that point. It was in a different place. Omar was starting to remember. Yes, he had met a Menacian. But it was a long time ago—more than twenty years ago. Yes, Omar acknowledged, the Menacian worked for his country’s intelligence service. And yes, the Menacian had tried to recruit him. Before long, Omar delivered the coup de grâce: Yes, the Menacian had been successful.

Phil reacted as if Omar had just told him that although he had sworn himself to vegetarianism twenty years ago, he had been eating cheeseburgers all along. As Omar’s stream of admissions continued to flow, he soon fell off the worst-case end of the continuum. Omar had been recruited by the Menacian Intelligence Service (MIS) all those years ago for a very specific mission: to operate as a double agent against the CIA.

Now the scope of Phil’s monologue had narrowed again. He had to find out as much as he could about Omar’s mission, and what he had passed to the Menacians.

“Omar, listen,” Phil said, as composed as he had been from the outset. “We can’t change history. But that’s what it is, Omar—it’s history. Whatever the Menacians have asked you to do, we can’t undo that. You can’t change it, and I can’t change it. All we can do to salvage this situation is to figure out what we’re going to do from here—what’s our best course of action.”

Omar bit on it. As if seizing an opportunity that would blossom by unburdening himself, he began to methodically disclose the details of the operations he had carried out at the behest of his MIS handler. One in particular was especially unsettling.

Omar confided that he had managed to get perilously close to the local CIA operation’s two communications, or “commo,” officers. To appreciate the magnitude of that, think of these commo officers as the predecessors of present-day systems administrators. Systems administrator is the position that was held by Edward Snowden, the National Security Agency contractor who publicly disclosed details of the NSA’s highly classified counterterrorism operations, beginning in the spring of 2013. Just as in the case of systems administrators, the nature of the commo officers’ job gives them full access to all of the information stored at, and transmitted to and from, their location.

The two commo officers shared a house in the city, and Omar had scored a huge win: He had recruited the servant who worked in the house. Having eyes and ears embedded in the home of the commo officers had Omar’s MIS handler salivating at the prospects. Fortunately for U.S. interests, the threat disappeared within a month. Omar said the servant got a better offer to work at the home of an employee with one of the other foreign missions in the city—one in which the MIS had absolutely no interest. When Omar gave the news to his handler, a hulking man who had been a competitive weightlifter, the Menacian was livid. He lashed out at Omar, who didn’t grasp the enormity of the situation.

“You fool!” the Menacian seethed, shaking with rage. “Those two had gold in their heads!”

Omar’s revelations continued through the night. As dawn approached, the casual nature of the conversation was almost surreal. Omar was chatting with Phil as if he was talking about what he did on his summer vacation. He was focusing on what Phil needed him to focus on—he was in short-term thinking mode. Phil had gotten him to that place.

When it was all over, Phil gazed out of the window that Omar had approached with the towel those many hours earlier. It seemed like an eternity ago. The rush of what had transpired since then hadn’t ebbed, so he didn’t feel tired. But he was definitely ready to make up for that dinner he missed.

INTERROGATION/ELICITATION

A process that is designed to influence or persuade an individual to reveal information that he has reason to want to conceal.

3.

TRANSITIONING TO INTERROGATION MODE: THE DOC AND THE DOG

Consider the perfect burglary. It occurs when a burglar enters the target building without being detected, conducts the theft, and leaves—with no one the wiser.

If we think of Omar’s case as a burglary, he was well on his way to committing the perfect crime. He escaped detection when he entered. He conducted his pilferage for years without being discovered. But when he sat down with Phil in that hotel suite, he hadn’t succeeded in his mission, because he had yet to make an undetected getaway.

The two were engaged in a complex mental showdown. Omar was evaluating Phil, just as Phil was evaluating Omar. Phil had been in that position plenty of times before, and he was well aware of the weapons his opponent possessed to use against him. Looming largest was Omar’s willingness and determination to deceive. There was, in addition, Omar’s ability at some level to disguise that deception. And then there was, no doubt, some degree of confidence that he would be able to accomplish his aim.

Phil’s plan of attack began with an assault on Omar’s confidence. That entailed sending him a very clear message:
Your mission has failed. Everything you have done up to this point to accomplish your mission—the hidden path to success that you thought you were on—has ended in failure, because you didn’t get out. You were caught on the inside, committing the act. You have no choice now but to change your strategy.

Phil and Omar were each in a position to help the other. Phil needed information and cooperation from Omar; Omar needed a new game plan, because his old one failed. Phil’s task was to offer him a replacement strategy in a way that didn’t cause Omar to throw up his defenses, and that didn’t alert him to the fact that at that moment, Phil was switching from interview mode to interrogation mode. What marked the switch—and what initiated the message—is what we call the
transition statement
.

The transition statement is the first sentence or two of the monologue. It takes the form of a
direct observation of concern
(DOC), a
direct observation of guilt
(DOG), or some variant that falls between the two.

The DOC lies at one end of what you might think of as your own confidence spectrum. Imagine you’re the manager at a pharmacy, and the pharmacist has informed you that several dozen oxycodone tablets are missing. You’re interviewing one of the pharmacy technicians—we’ll call her “Jan”—about the missing tablets, and she appears to be having a problem. Some of the behaviors she exhibits—perhaps some inconsistencies in her story, perhaps instances of evasiveness—lead you to determine that it’s time to go into interrogation mode. At this point you have your suspicions about Jan, but you realize there’s a lot you still don’t know. You decide to convey a DOC, which might go something like this:

“Jan, I want you to know that your cooperation is very helpful, and I really do appreciate it. The thing is, some of what you’re saying just isn’t adding up, and I need you to help me understand what I’m missing.”

Now, let’s say that after speaking with the pharmacist and reviewing the dispensing records and time sheets, it’s clear that despite her denials, the only person who could have taken the oxycodone is Jan. Your confidence level is over on the high end of the spectrum, so your transition statement becomes a DOG:

“Jan, I have to tell you, based on our conversation, based on the inquiry we’ve conducted, based on all the facts we’ve collected, there’s no doubt that you’re the person who took the oxycodone.”

As we mentioned, your transition statement might be a variant that falls somewhere in between the two, depending on your level of confidence. Let’s say all indications are that Jan is the one who took the oxycodone, but you have just enough doubt to be compelled to leave the door open to the possibility that she didn’t do it. In that case, your transition statement might be something along these lines:

“Jan, at this point we know the
what.
We also know the
who
. But what we don’t know is the
why
. And that’s what you and I need to talk about.”

Jan got the message—she’s pretty much busted. But you’ve delivered it without being as direct, and with just enough wiggle room to back out if you need to. Bear in mind that in all three cases, even though the language changes, the statements are delivered in precisely the same manner—your tone is low-key, your voice is soft, and your pace is unrushed. By the very nature of the circumstances, you’re in an adversarial position. But you’re pulling the rug out from under that fact with your delivery.

Note, as well, that the words you use to convey your message need to be well chosen. In the DOG, you referred to an “inquiry,” not an investigation. You said she “took” the oxycodone, she didn’t “steal” it. Those nuances help to keep Jan in short-term thinking mode. It’s important to use language that doesn’t trigger consequential thoughts—like the prospect of getting fired, or serving jail time.

The beauty of the transition statement is that it immediately conveys to the individual that nothing she has done up to that point to try to beat you has worked, yet that painful message is delivered below the radar, where it doesn’t trigger her defenses and create an adversarial relationship. Now she’s thinking, since what she’s been doing has been unsuccessful, where does she go from here? How should she handle it? Should she give you a little bit? Should she try to blame it on someone else? She’s trying to rethink her game plan, and guess what. You’re right there to give her some other things to think about. Since everything she was thinking about before just blew up in her face, what you give her to think about might just sound pretty good—especially when it’s delivered in such a low-key, nonconfrontational manner.

That’s why a shift into interrogation mode that involves launching into a fist-pounding, vein-popping rant as a means of getting a person to tell you something he wants to conceal is so fundamentally counterproductive. You’ve given him something else to think about, all right. You’ve motivated him to draw the battle lines, identify you as the enemy, and entrench himself in resistance. Your job has just become exponentially more difficult.

Beyond that, a person who’s being deceptive is incentivized to do everything in his power to try to get the spotlight off of himself, and onto someone else. Since you’re a natural, and very convenient, target of the attempted shift, you need to recognize that if you start getting aggressive and verbally abusive, the deceptive person is likely to try to twist that to his advantage. Suddenly, he’s interviewing you about why you’re mistreating him, and you’re getting nowhere. If you remain unruffled and soft-spoken, you take that option off the table, and you remain in control.

* * *

Now, let’s go back and look at Phil’s encounter with Omar. When Phil asked that fateful question about whether Omar had ever worked for another intelligence service, the reality was that it was an extremely broad question. So when Omar responded with what Phil identified as deceptive behavior, now it was Phil who was being presented with a question to be answered: What part of that broad question was troubling Omar?

When confronted with the task of narrowing down the possibilities, there’s a tendency to start to think about what the problem might be. Often, the natural inclination is to ask more questions to try to pinpoint where the issue lies on the best-case/worst-case continuum. But there’s an inherent danger in that, as Phil had learned the hard way when he interviewed Mary: Trying to do any pinpointing before the shift into interrogation mode can backfire, big-time. During the interview, we determine from the person’s behavior what it is he wants to hide, and we begin to narrow down the likely parameters we’re dealing with along the continuum. It’s only in the course of the interrogation that we’re able to determine where, within those parameters, the situation falls.

When he decided the pivotal moment had come to shift into interrogation mode, Phil delivered a transition statement in the form of a DOC that kept the parameters wide open: “Omar, there’s clearly something here that you’re not telling me, that we need to talk about.” At that moment, Phil had no idea whether the issue he was dealing with was something on the order of Omar’s son hanging out with some unsavory characters who may have had a connection to another intelligence service, or Omar working as an operative against U.S. interests at the behest of the MIS. But he did know that his DOC covered both possibilities. No doubt, because of what he understood to be Omar’s unblemished record, Phil’s head was at the best-case end of the continuum. But the methodology saved him by ensuring that his interrogation covered the full range of possibilities across the spectrum.

The methodology also has a valuable confirmatory element to it. When Phil said there was “something” Omar wasn’t telling him, that unspecified “something” likely caused Omar to selectively orient himself to what the real problem was. So when it was time for Omar to talk, there was a high probability that Phil would be able to identify the issue, or to at least collect enough clues to enable him to confirm its location on the spectrum.

One more thing: It’s essential to remember that Omar’s reaction might not have equaled the face value of the question. That is, if Omar had been clean rather than dirty, for example, any deceptive behavior he exhibited in response to Phil’s question about working for another intelligence service would have been something that was relatively inconsequential, like that he had failed to mention being approached by someone he suspected of working for the bad guys. By interrogating to the full length of the spectrum, Phil would likely be successful in getting Omar to admit that failure. If he discovered that was the extent of the problem, Phil would probably say something like this: