Page 34 - Malcolm Gladwell - Talking to Strangers

Carroll: We were hosted by the Ministry of Defense. General Rosales del Toro.… We traveled
around, inspected Cuban bases, Cuban schools, their partially completed nuclear power plant,
and so on. In long discussions with General Rosales del Toro and his staff the question came
up about these overflights from U.S. aircraft—not government aircraft, but private airplanes
operating out of Miami. They asked us, “What would happen if we shot one of these down?
We can, you know.”
Carroll interpreted that question from his Cuban hosts as a thinly veiled warning. The interview
continued:
CNN: So when you returned, who did you relay this information to?
Carroll: As soon as we could make appointments, we discussed the situation…with members of
the State Department and members of the Defense Intelligence Agency.
The Defense Intelligence Agency—the DIA—is the third arm of the foreign intelligence
triumvirate in the U.S. government, along with the CIA and the National Security Agency. If Carroll
had met with the State Department and the DIA, he had delivered the Cuban warning about as high
up in the American government as you could go. And did the State Department and DIA take those
warnings to heart? Did they step in and stop Hermanos al Rescate from continuing their reckless
forays into Cuban airspace? Obviously not. 1
Carroll’s comments ricocheted around Washington, DC, policy circles. This was an embarrassing
revelation. The Cuban shoot-down happened on February 24. Carroll’s warnings to the State
Department and DIA were delivered on February 23. A prominent Washington insider met with
U.S. officials the day before the crisis, explicitly warned them that the Cubans had lost patience with
Hermanos al Rescate, and his warning was ignored. What began as a Cuban atrocity was now
transformed into a story about American diplomatic incompetence.

CNN: But what about the position that these were unarmed civilian planes?
Carroll repeated what he had been told in Havana.
Carroll: That is a very sensitive question. Where were they? What were they doing? I’ll give
you an analogy. Suppose we had the planes flying over San Diego from Mexico, dropping
leaflets and inciting against [California] Governor Wilson. How long would we tolerate these
overflights after we had warned them against it?
Fidel Castro wasn’t being invited onto CNN to defend himself. But he didn’t need to be. He had
a rear admiral making his case.

2.

The next three chapters of Talking to Strangers are devoted to the ideas of a psychologist named
Tim Levine, who has thought as much about the problem of why we are deceived by strangers as
anyone in social science. The second chapter looks at Levine’s theories through the story of Bernie
Madoff, the investor who ran the largest Ponzi scheme in history. The third examines the strange
case of Jerry Sandusky, the Pennsylvania State University football coach convicted of sexual abuse.
And this, the first, is about the fallout from that moment of crisis between the United States and
Cuba in 1996.

Does anything about Admiral Carroll and the Cuban shoot-downs strike you as odd? There are
an awful lot of coincidences here.

1. The Cubans plan a deliberate murderous attack on U.S. citizens flying in international airspace.
2. It just so happens that the day before the attack, a prominent military insider delivers a stern
warning to U.S. officials about the possibility of exactly that action.
3. And, fortuitously, that warning puts that same official, the day after the attack, in a position to
make the Cuban case on one of the world’s most respected news networks.
The timing of those three events is a little too perfect, isn’t it? If you were a public relations firm,
trying to mute the fallout from a very controversial action, that’s exactly how you’d script it. Have a