Page 38 - Malcolm Gladwell - Talking to Strangers

There should have been all kinds of red flags raised and guns that went off when her paper was
read by her supervisors, because she said things about the Cuban military that make absolutely
no sense, except from [the Cubans’] point of view.
But did anyone raise those red flags? Latell says he never once suspected she was a spy. “There
were CIA officers of my rank, or close to my rank, who thought she was the best Cuban analyst
there was,” he said. So he rationalized away his uneasiness. “I never trusted her, but for the wrong
reasons, and that’s one of my great regrets. I was convinced that she was a terrible analyst on Cuba.
Well, she was. Because she wasn’t working for us. She was working for Fidel. But I never
connected the dots.”
Nor did anyone else. Montes had a younger brother named Tito, who was an FBI agent. He had
no idea. Her sister was also an FBI agent, who in fact played a key role in exposing a ring of Cuban
spies in Miami. She had no idea. Montes’s boyfriend worked for the Pentagon as well. His specialty,
believe it or not, was Latin American intelligence. His job was to go up against spies like his
girlfriend. He had no idea. When Montes was finally arrested, the chief of her section called her
coworkers together and told them the news. People started crying in disbelief. The DIA had
psychologists lined up to provide on-site counseling services. Her supervisor was devastated. None
of them had any idea. In her cubicle, she had a quotation from Shakespeare’s Henry V taped to her
wall at eye level—for all the world to see.
The king hath note
of all that they intend,
By interception
Which they dream not of.
Or, to put it a bit more plainly: The Queen of Cuba takes note of all that the U.S. intends, by
means that all around her do not dream of.
The issue with spies is not that there is something brilliant about them. It is that there is
something wrong with us.

4.

Over the course of his career, the psychologist Tim Levine has conducted hundreds of versions of
the same simple experiment. He invites students to his laboratory and gives them a trivia test. What
is the highest mountain in Asia? That kind of thing. If they answer the questions correctly, they win
a cash prize.
To help them out, they are given a partner. Someone they’ve never met before, who is, unknown
to them, working for Levine. There’s an instructor in the room named Rachel. Midway through the
test, Rachel suddenly gets called away. She leaves and goes upstairs. Then the carefully scripted
performance begins. The partner says, “I don’t know about you, but I could use the money. I think
the answers were left right there.” He points to an envelope lying in plain sight on the desk. “It’s up
to them whether they cheat or not,” Levine explains. In about 30 percent of cases, they do. “Then,”
Levine goes on, “we interview them, asking, ‘Did you cheat?’”
The number of scholars around the world who study human deception is vast. There are more
theories about why we lie, and how to detect those lies, than there are about the Kennedy
assassination. In that crowded field, Levine stands out. He has carefully constructed a unified theory
3
about deception. And at the core of that theory are the insights he gained from that first trivia-quiz
study.
I watched videotapes of a dozen or so of those post-experiment interviews with Levine in his
office at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Here’s a typical one, featuring a slightly
spaced-out young man. Let’s call him Philip.
Interviewer: All right, so…have you played Trivial Pursuit games…before?
Philip: Not very much, but I think I have.