Page 45 - Malcolm Gladwell - Talking to Strangers

just had to close out the case.”

6.

Four years after Scott Carmichael’s interview with Ana Montes, one of his colleagues at the DIA
met an analyst for the National Security Agency at an interagency meeting. The NSA is the third
arm of the U.S. intelligence network, along with the CIA and the DIA. They are the code-breakers,
and the analyst said that her agency had had some success with the codes that the Cubans were
using to communicate with their agents.
The codes were long rows of numbers, broadcast at regular intervals over shortwave radio, and
the NSA had managed to decode a few snippets. They had given the list of tidbits to the FBI two
and a half years before, but had heard nothing back. Out of frustration, the NSA analyst decided to
share a few details with her DIA counterpart. The Cubans had a highly placed spy in Washington
whom they called “Agent S,” she said. Agent S had an interest in something called a “safe” system.
And Agent S had apparently visited the American base at Guantánamo Bay in the two-week time
frame from July 4 to July 18, 1996.
5
The man from the DIA was alarmed. “SAFE” was the name of the DIA’s internal computer-
messaging archive. That strongly suggested that Agent S was at the DIA, or at least closely
affiliated with the DIA. He came back and told his supervisors. They told Carmichael. He was
angry. The FBI had been working on a spy case potentially involving a DIA employee for two and a
half years, and they hadn’t told him? He was the DIA’s counterintelligence investigator!
He knew exactly what he had to do—a search of the DIA computer system. Any Department of
Defense employee who travels to Guantánamo Bay needs to get approval. They need to send two
messages through the Pentagon system, asking first for permission to travel and then for permission
to talk to whomever they wish to interview at the base.
“Okay, so two messages,” Carmichael said.
He guessed that the earliest anyone traveling to Guantánamo Bay in July would apply for their
clearances was April. So he had his search parameters: travel-authority and security-clearance
requests from DIA employees regarding Guantánamo Bay made between April 1 and July 18, 1996.
He told his coworker, “Gator” Johnson, to run the same search simultaneously. Two heads would be
better than one.
What [the computer system] did back in those days, it would set up a hit file. It would
electronically stack up all your messages and tell you, “You’ve got X number of hits.” I can hear
Gator over there…I can hear him tapping away and I knew he hadn’t even finished his query yet
and I already had my hit file to go through, so I thought, I’m going through them real quickly,
just to see if any [name] pops out at me, and that’s when I’m pretty sure it was the twentieth one
hit me. It was Ana B. Montes. The game was fucking over, and I mean it was over in a heartbeat.
…I was really stunned—speechless stunned. I could have fallen out of my chair. I literally
backed up—I was on wheels—I was literally distancing myself from this bad news.…I literally
backed up all the way to the end of my cubicle and Gator is still going dink-pink-tink-tink.
I said, “Oh shit.”

1 The State Department had informed Hermanos al Rescate, through official channels, that any flight plan with Cuba as a
destination was unacceptable. But clearly those warnings weren’t working.
CNN: Admiral, the State Department had issued other warnings to Brothers to the Rescue about this, haven’t they?
Carroll: Not effective ones.…They know that [Brothers] have been filing flight plans that were false and then going to Cuba, and
this was part of the Cuban resentment, was that the government wasn’t enforcing its own regulations.
2 This was in fact true. Montes strictly controlled her diet, at one point limiting herself to “eating only unseasoned boiled
potatoes.” CIA-led psychologists later concluded she had borderline OCD. She also took very long showers with different types
of soap and wore gloves when she drove her car. Under the circumstances, it’s not surprising that people would explain away
their suspicions about her often-strange behavior.
3 Levine’s theories are laid out in his book, Duped: Truth-Default Theory and the Social Science of Lying and Deception
(Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2019). If you want to understand how deception works, there is no better place
to start.
4 In my book Blink, I wrote of Paul Ekman’s claim that a small number of people are capable of successfully detecting liars.