Page 44 - Malcolm Gladwell - Talking to Strangers

just wanted as complete a picture as possible of her movements that evening.
He asked her what she did after work. She said she drove home. He asked her where she parked.
She said in the lot across the street. He asked her if she saw anyone else as she was parking. Did she
say hello to anyone? She said no.
I said, “OK, well, so what’d you do? You parked your car and you walked across the street”—
and while I’m doing this is when the change of demeanor occurred. Keep in mind, I’d been
talking to her for almost two hours and by that time, Ana and I were almost like buddies, not that
close, but we have a great rapport going. She’s actually joking about stuff and making funny
remarks every once in a while about stuff—it’s that casual and that warm, if you will.
Then all of a sudden, this huge change came over her. You could see it, one minute she’s just
almost flirting and stuff, having a good time.…All of a sudden she changed. It’s like a little kid
who has been caught with his hand in the cookie jar, and he’s got it behind his back, and Mom
says, “What do you have?” She was looking at me and denying, but…with that look like, “What
do you know? How do you know? Are you going to catch me? I don’t want to get caught.”

After her arrest, investigators discovered what had really happened that night. The Cubans had an
arrangement with her: if she ever spotted one of her old handlers on the street, it meant that her
spymasters urgently needed to talk to her in person. She should keep walking and meet them the
following morning at a prearranged site. That night, when she got home from the Pentagon, she saw
one of her old handlers standing by her apartment building. So when Carmichael asked her,
pointedly, “Who did you see? Did you see anyone as you came home?” she must have thought that
he knew about the arrangement—that he was on to her.
She was scared to fucking death. She thought I knew it and I didn’t. I had no idea, I didn’t know
what I had. I knew I had something, I knew there was something. After the interview, I would
look back on it…and what did I do? I did the same thing every human being does.…I
rationalized it away.
I thought, Well, maybe she’s been seeing a married guy…and she didn’t want to tell me. Or
maybe she’s a lesbian or something and she was hooking up with a girlfriend that she doesn’t
want us to know [about], and she’s worried about that. I started thinking about all these other
possibilities and I sort of accepted it, just enough so that I wouldn’t keep going crazy. I accepted
it.
Ana Montes wasn’t a master spy. She didn’t need to be. In a world where our lie detector is set to
the “off” position, a spy is always going to have an easy time of it. And was Scott Carmichael
somehow negligent? Not at all. He did what Truth-Default Theory would predict any of us would
do: he operated from the assumption that Ana Montes was telling the truth, and—almost without
realizing it—worked to square everything she said with that assumption. We need a trigger to snap
out of the default to truth, but the threshold for triggers is high. Carmichael was nowhere near that
point.
The simple truth, Levine argues, is that lie detection does not—cannot—work the way we expect
it to work. In the movies, the brilliant detective confronts the subject and catches him, right then and
there, in a lie. But in real life, accumulating the amount of evidence necessary to overwhelm our
doubts takes time. You ask your husband if he is having an affair, and he says no, and you believe
him. Your default is that he is telling the truth. And whatever little inconsistencies you spot in his
story, you explain away. But three months later you happen to notice an unusual hotel charge on his
credit-card bill, and the combination of that and the weeks of unexplained absences and mysterious
phone calls pushes you over the top. That’s how lies are detected.
This is the explanation for the first of the puzzles, why the Cubans were able to pull the wool
over the CIA’s eyes for so long. That story is not an indictment of the agency’s competence. It just
reflects the fact that CIA officers are—like the rest of us—human, equipped with the same set of
biases to truth as everyone else.
Carmichael went back to Reg Brown and tried to explain.
I said, “Reg, I realize what it looks like to you, I understand your reasoning that you think that
this is a deliberate influence operation. Looks like it. But if it was, I can’t point a finger [to] it to
say she was part of a deliberate effort. It just doesn’t make any sense.…At the end of the day, I