Page 158 - Malcolm Gladwell - Talking to Strangers

Chapter Three: The Queen of Cuba

“Homeland or death, you bastards”: Transcript taken from the documentary Shoot Down,
directed by Cristina Khuly (Palisades Pictures, 2007). That Juan Roque was the Cubans’ source
inside Hermanos al Rescate is also from the documentary.
The U.S. government was aware of growing Cuban anger about the Hermanos al Rescate
missions for some time before the shoot-down occurred and had alerted the organization, mainly by
communicating directly with its leader, Jose Basulto. Through the summer and fall of 1995, the
State Department and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) made public statements and
cautioned the organization that no flight plan to Cuba was acceptable. At one point the FAA tried to
revoke Basulto’s pilot license. Government warnings slowed in the fall of 1996, however, because
officials felt that further alerts were “more likely to provoke Basulto than to quiet him down.” By
this period, the Clinton administration and Hermanos al Rescate were at odds because of Clinton’s
1995 “wet feet, dry feet policy,” which forced Cuban rafters to repatriate.
The State Department knew about the shoot-down threat after meeting with Rear Admiral
Eugene Carroll on the 23rd, but the government did not contact Hermanos al Rescate. Instead, the
State Department warned the FAA the night before the attack that “it would not be unlikely that
[Hermanos al Rescate would] attempt an unauthorized flight into Cuban airspace tomorrow.” In
response, the FAA arranged for radar centers to pay special attention to flights over the Florida
Straits. However, when radar monitors spotted the MiGs on the 24th, still no warning was issued to
the pilots. Despite the fact that F-15 fighter jets were ready for action, the go-ahead to protect the
planes never came. The U.S. government later blamed communication issues for its failure to
protect the Hermanos al Rescate pilots. Basulto, who survived the incident, suggested the attack was
the result of a conspiracy between Cuban leaders and the U.S. government. This account is taken
from Marifeli Pérez-Stable, The United States and Cuba: Intimate Enemies (New York: Routledge,
2011), p. 52.
This was an embarrassing revelation: Scott Carmichael, True Believer: Inside the Investigation
and Capture of Ana Montes, Cuba’s Master Spy (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2007), p. 5.
“CNN Interview with Admiral Eugene Carroll—U.S. Navy Rear Admiral (Ret.),” CNN, February
25, 1996, Transcript #47-22,
http://www.hermanos.org/CNN%20Interview%20with%20Admiral%20Eugene%20Carroll.htm.
Montes’s nickname was the “Queen of Cuba”; DIA found codes in her purse and radio in her
closet; and postmortem quote “Her handlers…work for Havana” are all from Jim Popkin, “‘Queen
of Cuba’ Ana Montes did much harm as a spy. Chances are you haven’t heard of her,” Washington
Post, April 8, 2013.
For a complete list of Tim Levine’s deception experiments, see “Deception and Deception
Detection,” https://timothy-levine.squarespace.com/deception, accessed March 7, 2019.
For video of “Philip” and other interview subjects, see T. R. Levine, NSF funded cheating tape
interviews (East Lansing, Mich.: Michigan State University, 2007–2011).

Levine had people watch twenty-two liars and twenty-two truth-tellers. The viewers correctly
identified the liars 56 percent of the time. See Experiment 27 in Chapter 13 of Timothy R. Levine,
Duped: Truth-Default Theory and the Social Science of Lying and Deception (Tuscaloosa, AL:
University of Alabama Press, 2019). The average for similar versions of the same experiment by
other psychologists is 54 percent. C. F. Bond, Jr. and B. M. DePaulo, “Accuracy of deception
judgments,” Review of Personality and Social Psychology 10 (2006): 214–34.
Tim Levine’s answer is called the “Truth-Default Theory”: Timothy Levine, “Truth-Default
Theory (TDT): A Theory of Human Deception and Deception Detection,” Journal of Language and
Social Psychology 33, no. 4 (2014): 378–92.
Stanley Milgram’s obedience experiment: Stanley Milgram, “Behavioral Study of Obedience,”
Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 64, no. 4 (1963): 371–78.