Speaker 1: Pushkin. This episode contains explicit language. Original's history listeners. Malcolm
Speaker 1: Gladwell here. I've written a new book called Talking to Strangers,
Speaker 1: and it's about the mistakes we make in our interactions
Speaker 1: with people we don't know. Talking to Strangers features con
Speaker 1: artists and sociopaths and spies. It talks about how drinking
Speaker 1: affects the way we make sense of others. I spend
Speaker 1: time with a psychologist who ran the CIA's interrogation program
Speaker 1: and the man who spotted Bernie made off before anyone else,
Speaker 1: and I try to get to the bottom of a
Speaker 1: heartbreaking encounter between a police officer and a civilian which
Speaker 1: resulted in the death of a young woman named Sandra
Speaker 1: Bland in Texas. I think it's a book that will
Speaker 1: prompt a lot of conversations and arguments, which, as you
Speaker 1: know Fromist History, is what I like to do. I'm
Speaker 1: very proud of it. And there's something else I'm proud
Speaker 1: of with Talking to Strangers. After making four seasons of
Speaker 1: Revisionist History, I've fallen in love with a kind of
Speaker 1: storytelling that can be done through a podcast, and I
Speaker 1: decided that I wanted to bring that same approach to
Speaker 1: the audiobook of Talking to Strangers. Normally, an audiobook is
Speaker 1: just the author or someone the author hires, reading into
Speaker 1: a microphone. I didn't want to do that. I wanted
Speaker 1: to make this audiobook of Talking to Strangers as compelling
Speaker 1: as an episode of revisionist history. So if you listen
Speaker 1: to the audiobook, you'll hear the voices of the people
Speaker 1: I interview, and if I'm describing some historical event, you'll
Speaker 1: hear archival tape for courtroom scenes. We have actors reimagining
Speaker 1: what happened. There's music, an extraordinary song by Jennelle Manet.
Speaker 1: Scoring we even have excerpts from other audiobooks and podcasts
Speaker 1: like The Fantastic Believed from NPR and Michigan Radio. I
Speaker 1: think the result is a completely different kind of audiobook experience,
Speaker 1: much more powerful, moving, engrossing. Anyway, rather than describe it,
Speaker 1: I thought I would give you a special preview. So
Speaker 1: here it is Chapter three of Talking to Strangers, done
Speaker 1: the New way. Let's take a look at another Cuban
Speaker 1: spy story. In the early nineteen nineties, thousands of Cubans
Speaker 1: began to flee the regime of Fidel Castro. They cobbled
Speaker 1: together crude boats made of inner tubes and metal drums
Speaker 1: and wooden doors, and any number of other straight parts
Speaker 1: set out on a desperate voyage across the ninety miles
Speaker 1: of the Florida Straits to the United States. By one estimate,
Speaker 1: as many as twenty fourth thousand people died attempting the journey.
Speaker 1: It was a human rights disaster. In response, a group
Speaker 1: of Cuban emigres in Miami founded Ermanos el Roscat Brothers
Speaker 1: to the Rescue. They put together a makeshift air force
Speaker 1: of single engine Cessna Skymasters and took to the skies
Speaker 1: over the Florida Straits, searching for refugees from the air
Speaker 1: and radiating their coordinates to the coast Guard. Ermanos el
Speaker 1: Roscat saved thousands of lives. They became heroes. As time passed,
Speaker 1: the emigres grew more ambitious. They began flying into Cuban airspace,
Speaker 1: dropping leaflets on Havana, urging the Cuban people to rise
Speaker 1: up against Castro's regime. The Cuban government, already embarrassed by
Speaker 1: the flight of refugees, was outraged. Tensions rose, coming to
Speaker 1: a head on February twenty fourth, nineteen ninety six, that afternoon,
Speaker 1: three Armanos Riscatte planes took off for the Florida Straits.
Speaker 1: As they neared the Cuban coastline, two Cuban Air Force
Speaker 1: MiG fighter jets shot down two of the planes out
Speaker 1: of the sky, killing all four people aboard. The response
Speaker 1: to the attack was immediate. The United States Security Council
Speaker 1: passed a resolution denouncing the Cuban government a grave. President
Speaker 1: Clinton held a press conference, Ladies and gentlemen, I have
Speaker 1: just been briefed by the National Security Adviser on the
Speaker 1: shooting down today in broad daylight two American civilian airplanes
Speaker 1: by a Cuban military aircraft. The Cuban emigrat population in
Speaker 1: Miami was furious. The two planes had been shot down
Speaker 1: in international airspace, making the incident tantamount to an act
Speaker 1: of war. The radio chatter among the Cuban pilots was
Speaker 1: released to the press. We hit him, cohonas we hit him,
Speaker 1: we retired them cohonas we hit them. Fuckers marked the
Speaker 1: place where we retired them. This one won't fuck with
Speaker 1: us anymore. And then after one of them, MiG zero
Speaker 1: did in the second Cessna Homeland or death View. Bastards
Speaker 1: but in the midst of the controversy, the story suddenly shifted.
Speaker 1: A retired US rear admiral named Eugene Carrol gave an
Speaker 1: interview to CNN. Carol was an influential figure inside Washington.
Speaker 1: He had formerly served as director of all US Armed
Speaker 1: Forces in Europe, with seven thousand weapons at his disposal.
Speaker 1: Just before the Armanos El Roscotte shootdown, Carol said he
Speaker 1: and a small group of military analysts had met with
Speaker 1: top Cuban officials. CNN's Katherine Callaway interviewed Carol to try
Speaker 1: and make sense of it all. Admiral, can you tell
Speaker 1: me what happened on your trip to Cuba, who you
Speaker 1: spoke with, in what you were told? Then, Carol says,
Speaker 1: we were hosted by the Ministry of Defense, General Roussalas
Speaker 1: del Toro. We traveled around, inspected Cuban bases, Cuban schools,
Speaker 1: they're partially completed nuclear power plant, and so on. In
Speaker 1: long discussions with General Rosalas del Toro and his staff,
Speaker 1: the question came up about these overflights from US aircraft,
Speaker 1: not government aircraft, but private airplanes operating out of Miami.
Speaker 1: They asked us what would happen if we shot one
Speaker 1: of those down, we can you know? Carol says he
Speaker 1: interpreted that question from his Cuban hosts as a thinly
Speaker 1: veiled warning. Then Callaway asks, so, when you returned, who
Speaker 1: did you relay this information to? Carol replies, as soon
Speaker 1: as we could make appointments, we discussed the situation with
Speaker 1: members of the State Department and members of the Defense
Speaker 1: Intelligence Agency. The Defense Intelligence Agency the d IA is
Speaker 1: the third arm of the foreign intelligence triumvirate in the
Speaker 1: US government, along with the CIA and the National Security Agency.
Speaker 1: If Carol had met with the State Department and the DA,
Speaker 1: he had delivered the Cuban warning about as high up
Speaker 1: in the American government as you could go. And did
Speaker 1: the State Department and the DA take those warnings to heart?
Speaker 1: Did they step in and stop Armanos el Rascatte from
Speaker 1: continuing their reckless forays into Cuban airspace? Obviously not, Carroll's
Speaker 1: comments ricochet around Washington d C. Policy circles. This was
Speaker 1: an embarrassing revelation. The Cuban shootdown happened on February twenty fourth.
Speaker 1: Carroll's warnings to the State Department and DA were delivered
Speaker 1: on February twenty third. A prominent Washington insider met with
Speaker 1: the US officials the day before the crisis explicitly warned
Speaker 1: them that the Cubans had lost patients with Armanos el Riscatte,
Speaker 1: and his warning was ignored. What began as a Cuban
Speaker 1: atrocity was now transformed into a story about American diplomatic incompetence.
Speaker 1: By February twenty fifth, when Carol spoke with CNN, it's
Speaker 1: clear this perception had already sunk in. Fidel Castro wasn't
Speaker 1: being invited onto CNN to defend himself, but he didn't
Speaker 1: need to be. He had a rear admiral making his case.
Speaker 1: Does anything about Admiral Carroll and the Cuban shootdowns strike
Speaker 1: you as odd? There are an awful lot of coincidences here. First,
Speaker 1: the Cuban's plan a deliberate murderous attack on US citizens
Speaker 1: flying in international airspace. Second, it just so happens that
Speaker 1: the day before the attack, a prominent military insider delivers
Speaker 1: a stern warning to US officials about the possibility of
Speaker 1: exactly that action. And third, that warning fortuitously puts that
Speaker 1: same official the day after the attack, in a position
Speaker 1: to make the Cuban case on one of the world's
Speaker 1: most respected news networks. The timing of those three events
Speaker 1: is a little too perfect, isn't it. If you were
Speaker 1: a public relations firm trying to mute the fallout from
Speaker 1: a very controversial action, that's exactly how you'd scripted. Have
Speaker 1: a seemingly neutral expert available right away to say, I
Speaker 1: warn them. This is what a military counterintelligence analyst named
Speaker 1: Regg Brown thought in the days after the incident. Brown
Speaker 1: worked on the Latin American desk of the Defense Intelligence Agency.
Speaker 1: His job was to understand the ways in which the
Speaker 1: Cuban intelligence services were trying to influence American military operations.
Speaker 1: His business, in other words, was to be alert to
Speaker 1: the kinds of nuances, subtleties, and unexplained incidences that the
Speaker 1: rest of us ignore. And Brown couldn't shake the feeling
Speaker 1: that somehow the Cubans had orchestrated the whole crisis. It
Speaker 1: turned out, for example, that the Cubans had a source
Speaker 1: inside Armanos al Roscote, a pilot named Juan Pablo Rocque.
Speaker 1: On the day before the attack, Roque had disappeared and
Speaker 1: resurfaced at Castro's side in Havana, Cleliu Roque told his
Speaker 1: bosses back home that Armanos al Roscote had something planned
Speaker 1: for the twenty fourth. That made it very difficult for
Speaker 1: Brown to imagine that the date of the Carrol briefing
Speaker 1: had been chosen by chance for maximum public relations impact.
Speaker 1: The Cubans would want their warning delivered the day before,
Speaker 1: wouldn't they That way? The State Department and the DA
Speaker 1: couldn't wiggle out of the problem by saying that the
Speaker 1: warning was vague or long ago. Carol's words were right
Speaker 1: in front of them on the day the pilots took
Speaker 1: off from Miami. So who arraigned that meeting? Brown wondered
Speaker 1: who picked February twenty third. He did some digging, and
Speaker 1: the name he came up with startled him. It was
Speaker 1: a colleague of his DIA, a Cuba expert named Anna
Speaker 1: Blen Montez. Anna Montez was a star. She had been
Speaker 1: selected repeatedly for promotions and special career opportunities, showered with
Speaker 1: accolades and bonuses. Her reviews were glowing. She had come
Speaker 1: to the DIA from the Department of Justice, and in
Speaker 1: his recommendation, one of her former supervisors described her as
Speaker 1: the best employee he had ever had. She once got
Speaker 1: a medal from George Tennant, the director of the CIA.
Speaker 1: Her nickname inside the intelligence community was the Queen of Cuba.
Speaker 1: Weeks passed, Brown agonized to accuse a colleague of treachery
Speaker 1: on the basis of such semi paranoid speculation was an
Speaker 1: awfully big step, especially when the colleague was someone of
Speaker 1: Monte's stature. Finally, Brown made up his mind, taking his
Speaker 1: suspicions to a DA counterintelligence officer named Scott Carmichael. He
Speaker 1: came over and we walked in the neighborhoods around them
Speaker 1: for a while during the lunch hour. This is Carmichael
Speaker 1: talking about his first meeting with Rech Brown, and I
Speaker 1: think it was during that lunch hour. He hardly got
Speaker 1: to Tamatus. I mean most of it was listening to
Speaker 1: him saying, oh God, I was bringing his hand saying
Speaker 1: I don't want to do the role. Slowly Carmichael drew
Speaker 1: him out. Brown had more evidence. He had written a
Speaker 1: report in the late nineteen eighties detailing the involvement of
Speaker 1: senior Cuban officials and international drug smuggling. He identified specific
Speaker 1: Cuban senior Cuban officers, including I think a general office
Speaker 1: and some lesser officers who were dirkly involved, and then
Speaker 1: provide the specifics I mean flights, the dates, time to places,
Speaker 1: who did worked home, the whole Enchilada. Then a few
Speaker 1: days before Browne's report was released, the Cubans rounded up
Speaker 1: everyone had mentioned in his investigation, executed a number of them,
Speaker 1: and issued a public denial or the fuck there was
Speaker 1: a leak. It made reg Brown paranoid. In nineteen ninety four,
Speaker 1: two Cuban intelligence officers had defected and told a similar story.
Speaker 1: The Cubans had someone high inside American intelligence. So what
Speaker 1: was he to think? Brown said to Carmichael, didn't he
Speaker 1: have reason to be suspicious? Then he told Carmichael the
Speaker 1: other thing that had happened during the Ermanos El Rascotte crisis.
Speaker 1: Montez worked at the DA's office on Bowling Air Force
Speaker 1: Base in the Anacostia section of Washington, d C. When
Speaker 1: the planes were shot down, she was called into the Pentagon.
Speaker 1: If you were one of the government's leading Cuba experts,
Speaker 1: you were needed at the scene. The shootdown happened on
Speaker 1: a Saturday day. The following evening, Brown happened to telephone
Speaker 1: asking for Montes. He sent some woman answered the phone
Speaker 1: and told him that Anna had left. Carmichael says, earlier
Speaker 1: in the day, Montes had gotten a phone call and
Speaker 1: afterwards she'd been agitated. Then she told everyone in the
Speaker 1: situation room that she was tired, that there was nothing
Speaker 1: going on, that she was going home. And Roger was
Speaker 1: just absolutely incredulous. This is just so counter to our
Speaker 1: culture that he couldn't even believe. Everybody understands that when
Speaker 1: a crisis occurs, you're called in because you have some
Speaker 1: expertise I can add to the decision making processes. Here,
Speaker 1: Scott Carmichael starts thumping to make his point, Pentagon, you
Speaker 1: were available until you were dismissed. That's a's just understood.
Speaker 1: You know, if somebody that Lowell calls you man because
Speaker 1: all of a sudden with North Karins had launched some
Speaker 1: mischiell aunt San Francisco, you don't just decide to leave
Speaker 1: when you get tired, armored everybody. And yet she did that.
Speaker 1: And just in reg Brown's thinking, if Montez really worked
Speaker 1: for the Cubans, they would have been desperate to hear
Speaker 1: from her. They would want to know what was happening
Speaker 1: in the situation room. Did she have a meeting that
Speaker 1: night with her handler. It was all a bit far fetched,
Speaker 1: which is why Brown was so conflicted. But there were
Speaker 1: Cuban spies. He knew that. And here was this woman
Speaker 1: taking a personal phone call and heading out the door
Speaker 1: in the middle of what was, for a Cuba specialist,
Speaker 1: just about the biggest crisis in a generation. And on
Speaker 1: top of that, she's the one who would arrange the
Speaker 1: awfully convenient Admiral Carrol briefing. Brown told Carmichael that the
Speaker 1: Cubans had wanted to shoot down one of the Harmono's
Speaker 1: l Rascotte Plains for years, but they hadn't because they
Speaker 1: knew what a provocation that would be. It might serve
Speaker 1: as the excuse the States needed to depose Fidel Castro
Speaker 1: or launch an invasion. To the Cubans, it wasn't worth
Speaker 1: it unless, that is, they could figure out some way
Speaker 1: to turn public opinion in their favor. That's why you
Speaker 1: looked at that one. Holy shit, I'm looking at a
Speaker 1: Cuban color and tone was influence operation to spin a
Speaker 1: story and asked the one who led the effort to
Speaker 1: me with ADL. Carroll, what the hell's that at all about?
Speaker 1: Months past? Brown persisted. Finally, Scott Carmichael pulled montez file.
Speaker 1: She had passed her most recent polygraph with flying colors.
Speaker 1: She didn't have a secret drinking problem or unexplained sums
Speaker 1: in her bank account. She had no red flags. After
Speaker 1: I had reviewed the scurifiles a personnel file on her,
Speaker 1: I thought, redg well off, pase here. This woman is like,
Speaker 1: she's gonna be the next director of Intelligence Ford. She's
Speaker 1: just fabulous. He knew that in order to justify an
Speaker 1: investigation on the basis of speculation, he had to be meticulous.
Speaker 1: Reg Brown, he said, was coming apart. He had to
Speaker 1: satisfy Brown's suspicions one way or another, as he put it,
Speaker 1: to document the living shit out of everything. Because if
Speaker 1: word got out that Montes was under suspicion, I knew
Speaker 1: I was going to be facing a shit storm. Carmichael
Speaker 1: called Montez in. They met in a conference room at
Speaker 1: Bowling Air Force Space. She was attractive, intelligent, slender, with
Speaker 1: short hair and sharp, almost severe features. Carmichael thought to himself,
Speaker 1: this woman is impressive. She said down she was sitting
Speaker 1: like almost mexting me about that. For a way, here
Speaker 1: Carmichael holds his hands three feet apart, same side of table,
Speaker 1: kind of thing, and she crossed her ways. I don't
Speaker 1: think that she did have a purpose. She didn't, you
Speaker 1: just getting comfortable. I happened to be a lame man.
Speaker 1: She couldn't know that. I mean, I like and I
Speaker 1: know that I glanced now. He asked her about the
Speaker 1: Admiral Carrol meeting. She had an answer. It wasn't her
Speaker 1: idea at all. The son of someone she knew at
Speaker 1: DA had a company carol to Cuba, and she'd gotten
Speaker 1: a call afterward, I know his dad. His dad called
Speaker 1: me and he said, hey, you know, if you want
Speaker 1: the latest scoope, you should go see the Admiral Carroll.
Speaker 1: And so I just called up Admiral Carrol and we
Speaker 1: looked at our schedules and decided the twenty third of February.
Speaker 1: It was the most convenient date that works for both
Speaker 1: of us. And as it turned out, Carmichael knew the
Speaker 1: DA employees she was talking about. He told her that
Speaker 1: he was going to call him up and corroborate her story,
Speaker 1: and she said, please do So what happened with the
Speaker 1: phone call in the situation room, he asked her. She
Speaker 1: said she didn't remember getting a phone call, and to Carmichael,
Speaker 1: it seemed as though she was being honest. It had
Speaker 1: been a crazy, hectic day nine months before. What about
Speaker 1: leaving early? She said, well, yeah, I did leave. Okay,
Speaker 1: So right away she's admitting to that. Is she not
Speaker 1: denying stuff which might be a little suspicious. She said, yeah,
Speaker 1: I did leave early today that day, and she said,
Speaker 1: you know, it was on a Sunday. Cafeterias were closing.
Speaker 1: A very picky eater. I have allergies, so I don't
Speaker 1: eat stuff out of any machines. I cat the around
Speaker 1: six o'clock in the morning. Again days block at night,
Speaker 1: I'm starving at death. Nothing was going on. They didn't
Speaker 1: really need me, so I just decided I was gonna
Speaker 1: get out there, go home and eat something. And that
Speaker 1: rang true to me. I did. After the interview, Carmichael
Speaker 1: set out to double check her answers. The date of
Speaker 1: the briefing really did seem like a coincidence. Her friend's
Speaker 1: son had gone to Cuba with Carol, and I learned that, yeah,
Speaker 1: she does avalogies. She's very particular about what she eats.
Speaker 1: I thought she's there in the Pentagon on Sunday. I've
Speaker 1: been there that cafeterias are open. She went all day
Speaker 1: long without eating. She went home so well, it kind
Speaker 1: of made sense. So Carmichael went back to REDG. Brown
Speaker 1: and told him not to worry. He turned his attention
Speaker 1: to other matters. Annamantes went back to her office. All
Speaker 1: was forgotten and forgiven until one day in two thousand
Speaker 1: and one, five years later, when it was discovered that
Speaker 1: every night Montes had gone home typed up from memory
Speaker 1: all of the facts and insids she had learned that
Speaker 1: day at work and sent it to her handlers in Havana.
Speaker 1: From the day she'd joined DA Montes had been a
Speaker 1: Cuban spy. In the classic spy novel The Secret Agent
Speaker 1: is Slippery and Devious were hoodwinked by the brilliance of
Speaker 1: the enemy. That was the way many Cia insiders explained
Speaker 1: the way Florentino Aspiaga's revelations. Castro is a genius, The
Speaker 1: agents were brilliant actors. In truth, however, the most dangerous
Speaker 1: spy are rarely diabolical. Aldrich aims maybe the most damaging
Speaker 1: traitor in American history, had mediocre performance reviews, a drinking problem,
Speaker 1: and didn't even try to hide all the money he
Speaker 1: was getting from the Soviet Union for his spying. Anamantez
Speaker 1: was scarcely any better. Right before she was arrested, the
Speaker 1: DA found the codes she used to send her dispatches
Speaker 1: to Havannah. Where did they find those codes? In her
Speaker 1: purse and in her apartment? She had a short wave
Speaker 1: radio in a shoe box in her closet. Brian Littell,
Speaker 1: the CIA Cuba specialist who witnessed the Spiaga disaster new
Speaker 1: Mont as well. He used to work as something called
Speaker 1: a National Intelligence Officer NIO. She used to sit across
Speaker 1: the table from me at meetings that I can beaned
Speaker 1: when I was in IO. You know, I would try
Speaker 1: to engage her and she would always give me these
Speaker 1: strange reactions when I would try to pin her down
Speaker 1: at some of these meetings that I can beaned, try
Speaker 1: to tend her down on you know, what, what do
Speaker 1: you think is Infradel? What do you think Fidel's motives
Speaker 1: are about this? You know, she would fumble, you know,
Speaker 1: she in a retrospect. In retrospect you know, the deer
Speaker 1: with the headlights in his eyes. She blocked. You know,
Speaker 1: she would even, you know, even physically, she would show
Speaker 1: some you know, some kind of reactions that had caused
Speaker 1: me to think, oh, she's nervous because she's just such
Speaker 1: a terrible analyst. She doesn't know what to say. One
Speaker 1: year later, Lttel says, Montees was accepted into the CIA's
Speaker 1: Distinguished Analyst Program, a research sabbatical available to intelligence officers
Speaker 1: from across the government. Where did she ask to go? Cuba?
Speaker 1: Of course she went to Cuba funded by this program.
Speaker 1: Can you imagine if you were a Cuban spy trying
Speaker 1: to conceal your intentions, would you request a paid sabbatical
Speaker 1: in Havana. Ltel was speaking almost twenty years after it happened,
Speaker 1: but the brazenness of her behavior still astounded him. She
Speaker 1: went to Cuba as a CIA distinguished Intelligence analysts. Of course,
Speaker 1: they were delighted to have her, especially on our nickel.
Speaker 1: And I'm sure that they gave her all kinds of
Speaker 1: clandestine tradecraft training while she was there. I suspect camp proved,
Speaker 1: but I'm pretty sure she met with Fidell. Fidel loved
Speaker 1: to meet with this principal agency. Loved to meet with them,
Speaker 1: to encourage them, to congratulate them, to revel in the
Speaker 1: success that they were having together against the CIA. When
Speaker 1: Montez came back to the Pentagon, she wrote a paper
Speaker 1: in which she didn't even bother to hide her biases.
Speaker 1: There should have been all kinds of red flags raised
Speaker 1: and gongs that went off when her paper was read
Speaker 1: by her supervisors, because she said things about the Cuban
Speaker 1: military that make absolutely no sense except from their point
Speaker 1: of view. But did anyone raise those red flags? Hotel
Speaker 1: says he never once suspected she was a spy. On
Speaker 1: the contrary, they were CI officers at my rank or
Speaker 1: close to my rank, who thought she was the best
Speaker 1: Cuban analyst there was. I never trusted her, but for
Speaker 1: the wrong reasons, and that's one of my great regrets.
Speaker 1: I'm always believed I was convinced that she was a
Speaker 1: terrible analyst on Cuba. Well she was, wasn't she objectively
Speaker 1: because she wasn't working for us, she was working for
Speaker 1: Fidel But I never connected the dots, nor did anyone else.
Speaker 1: Annamantez had a younger brother named Tito, who was an
Speaker 1: FBI agent. He had no idea. Monte's sister was also
Speaker 1: an FBI agent, who in fact played a key role
Speaker 1: in exposing a ring of Cuban spies in Miami. She
Speaker 1: had no idea. Montes's boyfriend worked for the Pentagon as well.
Speaker 1: His specialty, believe it or not, was Latin American intelligence.
Speaker 1: His job was to go up against spies. Like his girlfriend,
Speaker 1: he had no idea. When Montes was finally arrested, the
Speaker 1: chief of her section called her co workers together and
Speaker 1: told them the news. People started crying in disbelief. The
Speaker 1: DA had psychologists lined up to provide on psych counseling services.
Speaker 1: Her supervisor was devastated. None of them had any idea.
Speaker 1: In her cubicle, she had a quotation from Shakespeare's Henry
Speaker 1: the Fifth taped to her wall at eye level for
Speaker 1: all the world to see. The king hath note of
Speaker 1: all that they intend by interception, which they dream not of. Or,
Speaker 1: to put it a bit more plainly, the Queen of
Speaker 1: Cuba takes note of all that the US intends, by
Speaker 1: means that all around her do not dream of. The
Speaker 1: issue would spies? Is not that there is something brilliant
Speaker 1: about them. It is that there is something wrong with us.
Speaker 1: We'll be back after this. We're back with more from
Speaker 1: this excerpt of my new book, Talking to Strangers. Over
Speaker 1: the course of his career, the psychologist Tim Levine has
Speaker 1: conducted hundreds of versions of the same simple experiment. He
Speaker 1: invites students to his laboratory and gives them a trivia test.
Speaker 1: What's the highest mountain in Asia? That kind of thing.
Speaker 1: If they answer the questions correctly, they win a cash prize.
Speaker 1: To help them out. They're given a partner, someone they've
Speaker 1: never met before, who is unknown to them, working for Levine.
Speaker 1: There's also an instructor in the room named Rachel. Midway
Speaker 1: through the test, Rachel suddenly gets called away. She leaves
Speaker 1: and goes upstairs. Then the carefully scripted performance begins. The
Speaker 1: partner says, I don't know about you, but I could
Speaker 1: do the money. I think the answers were left right there.
Speaker 1: He points to an envelope lying in plain sight on
Speaker 1: the desk, So it's up to them whether they cheat
Speaker 1: or not. And then later we interviewed them, asking did
Speaker 1: you get this is Tim Levine? He says, in about
Speaker 1: thirty percent of cases, the research subjects do cheat. Levine's
Speaker 1: theories are laid out in his book duped Truth, Default Theory,
Speaker 1: and the Social Science of Lying in Deception. If you
Speaker 1: want to understand how deception works, there is no better
Speaker 1: place to start. The number of scholars around the world
Speaker 1: who study human deception is vast. There are more theories
Speaker 1: about why we lie and how to detect those lies
Speaker 1: than there are about the Kennedy assassination. In that crowded field,
Speaker 1: Levine stands out. He has carefully constructed a unified theory
Speaker 1: about deception, and at the core of that theory are
Speaker 1: the insights he gained from that first trivia quiz study.
Speaker 1: I watched videotape of a dozen or so post experiment
Speaker 1: interviews with Levine in his office the University of Alabama
Speaker 1: in Birmingham. Because of privacy regulations, we can't play them
Speaker 1: for you here, but we're going to reenact them. Here's
Speaker 1: the first. The interviewer and the subject, a slightly spaced
Speaker 1: out young man, let's call him Philip. All right, So
Speaker 1: have you played trivial pursuit games before? Not very much,
Speaker 1: but I think I have. Okay, So in the current game,
Speaker 1: did you find the questions difficult? Yes, some were yes, yes, somewhere.
Speaker 1: I was like, well, what is that? If you would
Speaker 1: scale them on one to ten, if one was easy
Speaker 1: and ten was difficult, where do you think you would
Speaker 1: put them? I would put them in eight an eight. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they're pretty tricky. Philip is then told that he and
Speaker 1: his partner did very well in the test. The interviewer
Speaker 1: asked him why, teamwork, teamwork? Yeah, okay, all right, So
Speaker 1: now I called Rachel out of the room briefly. When
Speaker 1: she was gone, did you cheat? I guess no? Philip
Speaker 1: looks away. Are you telling the truth? Yes? Okay. So
Speaker 1: when I interview your partner and I asked her, what
Speaker 1: is she going to say? At this point, there's an
Speaker 1: uncomfortable silence, as if the student is trying to get
Speaker 1: his story straight. He's obviously thinking very hard. Levine said no, no, yeah, okay,
Speaker 1: all right, Well that's all I need from you. Is
Speaker 1: Philip telling the truth? Levine has shown the Philip videotape
Speaker 1: to hundreds of people, and nearly every viewer correctly pegs
Speaker 1: Philip as a cheater. As the partner confirmed to Levine,
Speaker 1: Philip looked inside the answer filled envelope. The minute Rachel
Speaker 1: left the room. In his exit interview, he lied and
Speaker 1: it's obvious. So like everybody, Yeah, he is no conviction
Speaker 1: right version. He can't even keep a straight face, right,
Speaker 1: Philip was easy. But the more tapes we looked at,
Speaker 1: the harder it. God, here's a second case. Let's call
Speaker 1: him Lucas. He was handsome, articulate, confident. Here he is
Speaker 1: talking to the interviewer, say, have to ask when Rachel
Speaker 1: left the room today't cheating a car? No? Are you
Speaker 1: telling me the truth? Yes, I am. I want to
Speaker 1: interview your partner and ask her the same question. What
Speaker 1: do you think she's going to say? Same thing? Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: he's good. Everybody believes him, Levin said. I believed him.
Speaker 1: Lucas was lying. Levin and I spent the better part
Speaker 1: of a morning watching his Chivia quiz videotapes. By the end,
Speaker 1: I was ready to throw up my hands. I had
Speaker 1: no idea what to make of anyone. The point of
Speaker 1: Levine's research was to try and answer one of the
Speaker 1: biggest puzzles in human psychology. Why are we so bad
Speaker 1: at detecting lies? You'd think would be good at it.
Speaker 1: Logic says it would be very useful for human beings
Speaker 1: to know when they're being deceived. Evolution over many millions
Speaker 1: of years should have favored people with the ability to
Speaker 1: pick up on the subtle signs of deception, but it hasn't.
Speaker 1: In one iteration of his experiment, Levine divided his tapes
Speaker 1: in half, twenty two liars and twenty two truth tellers.
Speaker 1: On average, the people watching the videos correctly identified the
Speaker 1: liars fifty six percent of the time. Other psychologists have
Speaker 1: tried similar versions of the same experiment, the average for
Speaker 1: all of them fifty four percent. Just About everyone is terrible,
Speaker 1: police officers, judges, therapists, even CIA officers running big spy networks.
Speaker 1: Every one why Tim Levine's answer is called truth default theory,
Speaker 1: or ted T. Levine's theory started with an insight that
Speaker 1: came from one of his graduate students. He soon park
Speaker 1: it was right at the beginning of Levine's research, when
Speaker 1: he was as baffuled as the rest of his profession
Speaker 1: about why we are all so bad at something that,
Speaker 1: by rights we should be good at. Her big insight,
Speaker 1: the first one was in the fifty four percent deception
Speaker 1: accuracy thing that's averaging across trus and wise and you
Speaker 1: come to a very different understanding if you break out truth,
Speaker 1: how much people are right on truth and how much
Speaker 1: people are right on lies. What he means is this,
Speaker 1: If I tell you that your accuracy rate on Levine's
Speaker 1: videos is right around fifty percent, the natural assumption is
Speaker 1: to think that you are just randomly guessing, that you
Speaker 1: have no idea what you're doing. But Park's observation was
Speaker 1: that's not true. We're much better than chance at correctly
Speaker 1: identifying the student who are telling the truth, but we're
Speaker 1: much worse than chance at correctly identifying the students who
Speaker 1: are lying. We go through all those videos and we
Speaker 1: guess true true, true, which means we get most of
Speaker 1: the truthful interviews right and most of the liars wrong.
Speaker 1: We have a default to truth. Our operating assumption is
Speaker 1: that the people that we're dealing with are honest. Levine
Speaker 1: says his own experiment is an almost perfect illustration of
Speaker 1: this phenomenon. He invites people to play a trivia game
Speaker 1: for money. Suddenly the instructor is called out of the room,
Speaker 1: and she just happens to leave the answers to the
Speaker 1: test in plain view on her desk. Levine says that logically,
Speaker 1: the subject should roll their eyes at this point. They're
Speaker 1: college students, they're not stupid. They've signed up for a
Speaker 1: psychological experiment. They're given a partner whom they've ever met,
Speaker 1: who is egging them on to cheat. You would think
Speaker 1: that they might be even a little suspicious that things
Speaker 1: are not as they seem. But no, so they catch
Speaker 1: that the leaving the room might be a set up.
Speaker 1: The thing they almost never catch is that their partners
Speaker 1: a suite. Oh let's see, yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: So it's weird, it's interesting what they suspect. So they
Speaker 1: think that there might be hidden gamuts. Yeah right, They
Speaker 1: think it might be a set up, because insurements are
Speaker 1: set ups, right, But this nice person they're talking and
Speaker 1: chatting to, they never question it. To snap out of
Speaker 1: truth default mode requires what Levine calls a trigger. A
Speaker 1: trigger is not the same as a suspicion or the
Speaker 1: first sliver of doubt. We fall out of truth default
Speaker 1: mode only when the case against our initial assumption becomes definitive.
Speaker 1: We do not behave In other words, like sober minded
Speaker 1: scientists slowly gathering evidence of the truth or falsity of
Speaker 1: something before reaching a conclusion, we do the opposite. We
Speaker 1: start by believing, and we stop believing only when our
Speaker 1: doubts and misgivings rise to the point where we could
Speaker 1: no longer explain them away. This proposition sounds at first
Speaker 1: like the kind of hair splitting that social scientists love
Speaker 1: to engage in. It is not. It is a profound
Speaker 1: point that explains a lot of otherwise puzzling behavior. Consider,
Speaker 1: for example, one of the most famous findings in all
Speaker 1: of psychology, Stanley Milgram's Obedience experiment. In nineteen sixty one,
Speaker 1: Milgram recruited volunteers from New Haven to take part in
Speaker 1: what he said was a memory experiment. Each volunteer was
Speaker 1: met by a somber, imposing young man named John Williams,
Speaker 1: who explained that they were going to play the role
Speaker 1: of teacher in the experiment. Williams introduced them to another volunteer,
Speaker 1: a pleasant, middle aged man named mister Wallace. Mister Wallace,
Speaker 1: they were told, was to be the learner. He was
Speaker 1: in an adjoining room wired to a complicated apparatus capable
Speaker 1: of delivering electrical shocks up to four hundred and fifty volts.
Speaker 1: If you're curious about what four hundred and fifty volts
Speaker 1: feels like it's just shy of the amount of electrical
Speaker 1: shock that leaves tissue damage. The teacher volunteer was instructed
Speaker 1: to give the learner a series of memory tasks, and
Speaker 1: each time the learner failed, the volunteer was to punish
Speaker 1: him with an ever greater electrical shock in order to
Speaker 1: see whether the threat of punishment affected someone's ability to
Speaker 1: perform memory tasks. As the shocks escalated, Wallace would cry
Speaker 1: out in pain, and ultimately he started hammering on the walls.
Speaker 1: But if the teacher wavered, the imposing instructor would urge
Speaker 1: them on, please continue. The experiment requires that you continue.
Speaker 1: It is absolutely essential that you continue. You have no
Speaker 1: other choice. Must go on. The reason the Milgram experiment
Speaker 1: is so famous is that virtually all of the volunteers complied.
Speaker 1: Sixty five percent ended up administering the maximum dose to
Speaker 1: the hapless learner. In the wake of the Second World
Speaker 1: War and the revelations about what German guards had been
Speaker 1: ordered to do in the Nazi concentration camps, Milgram's findings
Speaker 1: caused a sensation. But Ti Levine, there's a second lesson
Speaker 1: to the experiment. The volunteer shows up and meets the
Speaker 1: imposing young John Williams. He was actually a local high
Speaker 1: school biology teacher, chosen, in Milgram's words, because he was technical,
Speaker 1: looking and dry, the type you would later see on
Speaker 1: television in connection with the Space Program. Everything william said
Speaker 1: during the experiment had been memorized from a script written
Speaker 1: by Milgram himself. Mister Wallace was in fact a man
Speaker 1: named Jim McDonough. He worked for the railroad. Milgram liked
Speaker 1: him for the part of victim because he was mild
Speaker 1: and submissive. His cries of agony were taped and played
Speaker 1: over a loudspeaker. The experiment was a little amateur theatrical production,
Speaker 1: and the word amateur here is crucial. The Milgram experiment
Speaker 1: was not produced for a Broadway stage. Mister Wallace, by
Speaker 1: Milgram's own description, was a terrible actor, and everything about
Speaker 1: the experiment was, to put it mildly, more than a
Speaker 1: little far fetched. The electric shock machine didn't actually give shocks.
Speaker 1: More than one participant saw the loudspeaker in the corner
Speaker 1: and wondered why Wallace's cries were coming from there, not
Speaker 1: from behind the door to the room where Wallace was
Speaker 1: strapped in, and if the purpose of the experiment was
Speaker 1: to measure learning, why on earth did William spend the
Speaker 1: entire time with the teacher and not behind the door
Speaker 1: with the learner. Didn't that make it obvious that what
Speaker 1: he really wanted to do was observed the inflicting the pain,
Speaker 1: not the person receiving the pain. As hoaxes go, the
Speaker 1: Milgram experiment was pretty transparent, and just as with Levine's
Speaker 1: trivia test, people fell for it. They defaulted to truth.
Speaker 1: As one subject wrote to Mulgram in a follow up questionnaire,
Speaker 1: I actually checked the death notices in the New Haven
Speaker 1: Register for at least two weeks after the experiment to
Speaker 1: see if I had been involved and a contributing factor
Speaker 1: in the death of the so called learner. I was
Speaker 1: very relieved that his name did not appear another road.
Speaker 1: Believe me, when no response came from mister Wallace with
Speaker 1: the stronger voltage, I really believe the man was probably dead.
Speaker 1: These are adults who were apparently convinced that a prestigious
Speaker 1: institution of higher learning could run a possibly lethal torture
Speaker 1: experiment in one of its basements. The experiment left such
Speaker 1: an effect on me. Another wrote that I spent the
Speaker 1: night in a cold sweat and nightmares because of the
Speaker 1: fear that I might have killed that man in the chair.
Speaker 1: But here's the crucial detail. Milgram's subjects weren't hopelessly gullible.
Speaker 1: They had doubts, lots of doubts. In her fascinating history
Speaker 1: of Milgram's obedience experiments Behind the Shock Machine, Gina Parry
Speaker 1: interviews a retired two maker named Joe Dimo, who was
Speaker 1: one of Milgram's original subjects. I thought this is bizarre,
Speaker 1: Dimo told Parry. Dimo became convinced that Wallace was faking it.
Speaker 1: But then mister Wallace came out of the locked room
Speaker 1: at the end of the experiment and put on a
Speaker 1: little act. He looked, Dimo remembers haggard and emotional. He
Speaker 1: came in with a handkerchief in his hand, wiping his face.
Speaker 1: He came up to me and he offered his hand
Speaker 1: to shake hands with me, and he said, I want
Speaker 1: to thank you for stopping it. When he came in,
Speaker 1: I thought, wow, maybe it really was true. Demo was
Speaker 1: pretty sure that he was being lied to. But all
Speaker 1: it took was for one of the liars to extend
Speaker 1: the pretense a little longer, look a little upset, and
Speaker 1: mop his brow with a handkerchief, and Demo folded his cards.
Speaker 1: Here are the full statistics from the Milgrim experiment. Fifty
Speaker 1: six point one percent I fully believe the learner was
Speaker 1: getting painful shocks. Twenty four percent, although I had some doubts,
Speaker 1: I believe the learner was probably getting the shocks. Six
Speaker 1: point one percent I just wasn't sure whether the learner
Speaker 1: was getting the shocks or not. Eleven point four percent.
Speaker 1: Although I had some doubts, I thought the learner was
Speaker 1: probably not getting the shocks. Two point four percent I
Speaker 1: was certain the learner was not getting the shocks. Over
Speaker 1: forty percent of the volunteers picked up on something odd,
Speaker 1: something that suggested the experiment was not what it seemed,
Speaker 1: But those doubts just weren't enough to trigger them out
Speaker 1: of truth default. That's Levine's point. You believe someone not
Speaker 1: because you have no doubts about them. Belief is not
Speaker 1: the absence of doubt. You believe someone because you don't
Speaker 1: have enough doubts about them. Just think about how many
Speaker 1: times you have criticized someone else in hindsight for their
Speaker 1: failure to spot a liar. You should have known there
Speaker 1: were all kinds of red flags you had doubts. Levine
Speaker 1: would say, that's the wrong way to think about what happened.
Speaker 1: The right question is were there enough red flags to
Speaker 1: push you over the threshold of belief? If there weren't,
Speaker 1: then by defaulting to truth, you were only being human more.
Speaker 1: After this, we're back with chapter three of Talking to Strangers.
Speaker 1: Anna Berlin Montes grew up in the affluent suburbs of Baltimore.
Speaker 1: Her father was a psychiatrist. She attended the University of Virginia,
Speaker 1: then received a master's degree in foreign affairs from Johns
Speaker 1: Hopkins University. She was a passionate supporter of the Marxist
Speaker 1: Sandinista government in Nicaragua, which the US government was then
Speaker 1: working to overthrow, and her activism attracted the attention of
Speaker 1: a recruiter for Cuban intelligence. In nineteen eighty five, she
Speaker 1: made a secret visit to Havana. Her new compatriots encouraged
Speaker 1: her to apply for work in the US intelligence community.
Speaker 1: That same year she joined the da and from there
Speaker 1: her assent was swift. Montes arrived at her office first
Speaker 1: thing in the morning, ate lunch at her desk and
Speaker 1: kept to herself. She lived alone in a two bedroom
Speaker 1: condo in the Cleveland Park neighborhood of Washington. She never married.
Speaker 1: In the course of his investigation, Scott Carmichael, the DIA
Speaker 1: counterintelligence officer, collected every adjective used by Montes's co workers
Speaker 1: to describe her. It is an impressive list, shy, quiet,
Speaker 1: aloof cool, independent, self reliant, standoffish, intelligent, serious, dedicated, focused,
Speaker 1: hard working, sharp, quick, manipulative, venomous, unsociable, ambitious, charming, confident, businesslike,
Speaker 1: no nonsense, assertive, deliberate, calm, mature, unflappable, capable, and competent.
Speaker 1: Anamantes assumed that the reason for her meeting with Carmichael
Speaker 1: was that he was performing a routine security check. All
Speaker 1: intelligence officers are periodically vetted so that they can continue
Speaker 1: to hold a security clearance. She was brusque because when
Speaker 1: she first came in, she tried to blow me off,
Speaker 1: you know, by telling me and it was true. She
Speaker 1: had just been named as an acting division chief. She
Speaker 1: had a tone of responsibilities and meetings and things to do,
Speaker 1: and she just didn't have a lot of time. Carmichael
Speaker 1: is a disarmingly boyish man with fair hair and a
Speaker 1: substantial stomach. He looks by his own estimation, like the
Speaker 1: late comedian and actor Chris Farley. She must have thought
Speaker 1: she could bully him, and so I just don't like
Speaker 1: the way you normally do. The first time, you just
Speaker 1: kind of ignored it, just acknowledge it. I'm the first
Speaker 1: thing you used to acknowledge, saying, oh, I understand, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I heard that. That. Congratulations, great, I understanding. Got a
Speaker 1: living amount of time. And then you just kind of
Speaker 1: ignore it because if it takes to twelve days, it
Speaker 1: takes twelve days. You don't let him go. But then
Speaker 1: she hit me with it again, and she really made
Speaker 1: appointed it. I mean I hadn't even settled in yet,
Speaker 1: and she said, oh but seriously, I got a lead
Speaker 1: by two or something like that, because I got all
Speaker 1: these things to do, and I'm like, what the fuck
Speaker 1: you know? I mean, that's what I'm thinking. And so
Speaker 1: when she did that, I lost. I lose my temper,
Speaker 1: but I lost my patience. That's why I hit her
Speaker 1: be twenty yards. Look on, I have a reason to
Speaker 1: suspect you might be involved in the carr And development.
Speaker 1: Simful of operational. We need to sit out and talk
Speaker 1: about this. Montez had been by that point a Cuban
Speaker 1: spy for nearly her entire government career. She had met
Speaker 1: with her handlers at least three hundred times, handing over
Speaker 1: so many secrets that she ranks as one of the
Speaker 1: most damaging spies in US history. She had secretly visited
Speaker 1: Cuba on several occasions. After her arrest, it was discovered
Speaker 1: that Fidel Castro had personally given her a medal. Through
Speaker 1: all of that, there hadn't been even a whiff of suspicion,
Speaker 1: and suddenly, at the start of what she thought was
Speaker 1: a routine background check, a funny looking Chris Farley character
Speaker 1: was pointing the finger at her. She sat there in shock.
Speaker 1: She would just look at emulate sued for headlines, waiting
Speaker 1: to say another word, just waiting. When Carmichael looked back
Speaker 1: on that meeting years later, he realized that was the
Speaker 1: first clue he had missed. Her reaction made no sense.
Speaker 1: I just didn't pick up on. She never said, what
Speaker 1: are you talking about, nothing like that. She didn't see
Speaker 1: a freaking word. She just sat down. I was listening,
Speaker 1: and you know, if i'd been astute. I picked up
Speaker 1: on that. No denial, no confusion, no anger. Anybody who's
Speaker 1: who's told the suspect of them murder or something, they're
Speaker 1: completely in and it's like, wait a minute, you just
Speaker 1: accused me of so I don't know what the fuck
Speaker 1: this is all about. And eventually they'll get in your face,
Speaker 1: you know, they'll really get in your face. I didn't
Speaker 1: do a freaking things. Sit there, like Carmichael had doubts
Speaker 1: right from the beginning, but doubts triggered disbelief only when
Speaker 1: you can't explain them away, and he could easily explain
Speaker 1: them away. She was the Queen of Cuba, for goodness sake.
Speaker 1: How could the queen of Cuba be a spy? Sure,
Speaker 1: Carmichael told her, I have reason to suspect that you
Speaker 1: might be involved in a counterintelligence influence operation, but he
Speaker 1: later admitted he said that only because he wanted her
Speaker 1: to take the meeting seriously. I was anxious to get
Speaker 1: into it and get the next step. And like I said,
Speaker 1: I'll just patted myself in the bag and I worked.
Speaker 1: I shut her up, like they hear anymore that crap anymore.
Speaker 1: Let's get through this, get this done. That's why I missed.
Speaker 1: They talked about the Admiral Carroll briefing. She had a
Speaker 1: good answer. They talked about why she abruptly left the
Speaker 1: Pentagon that day. She had an answer. She was being flirty,
Speaker 1: a little playful. He began to relax. He looked down
Speaker 1: at her legs again, and she bounce, bouncing her toe that.
Speaker 1: I don't know if it was conscious or What I
Speaker 1: do know is that catches your eye. And we got
Speaker 1: more comfortable with one another, and she became just a
Speaker 1: little bit more flirty. They talked about the phone call
Speaker 1: the day the plane was shot down. She said she
Speaker 1: never got a phone call, or at least she didn't
Speaker 1: remember getting one. It should have been another red flag.
Speaker 1: The people who were with her that day in the
Speaker 1: situation room distinctly remembered her getting a phone call. But
Speaker 1: then again, it had been a long and stressful day.
Speaker 1: They had all been in the middle of an international crisis.
Speaker 1: Maybe they just confused her with someone else. There was
Speaker 1: one other thing, another moment when Carmichael saw something in
Speaker 1: her reaction that made him wonder. Near the end of
Speaker 1: the interview, he asked Montez a series of questions about
Speaker 1: what happened after she left the Pentagon that day. It
Speaker 1: was a standard investigative procedure. He just wanted as complete
Speaker 1: a picture as possible of her movements that evening. He
Speaker 1: asked her what she did after work. She said she
Speaker 1: drove home. He asked her where she parked. She said
Speaker 1: in the lot across the street. He asked her if
Speaker 1: she saw anyone else as she was parking. Did she
Speaker 1: say hello to anyone? She said no. I said, okay,
Speaker 1: boll so what'd you do? You can parked the car
Speaker 1: and you walked across the street. And while I'm doing this,
Speaker 1: one changed the command. Steven Mine. I've been talking to
Speaker 1: for almost two hours, and by that time, Arna and
Speaker 1: I were almost like buddies. Okay, not that close, but
Speaker 1: we have a great rapport going. She's actually joking about stuff.
Speaker 1: We're making funny remarks every once in a while about stuff.
Speaker 1: It's that casual. And then all of a sudden, it's
Speaker 1: huge change came over and you could see it and mean,
Speaker 1: one minute, she's just almost flirting stuff. We were having
Speaker 1: a good time by that wall. All of it. It's
Speaker 1: like a little cute handle. The cookie Jarneys had his
Speaker 1: back and monsays, what you have? She was looking at
Speaker 1: me like and denying, but looking at me with that
Speaker 1: looked like, what do you know? After her arrest, investigators
Speaker 1: discovered what had really happened that night. The Cubans had
Speaker 1: an arrangement with her. If she ever spotted one of
Speaker 1: her old handlers on the street, it meant that her
Speaker 1: spymasters urgently needed to talk to her in person. She
Speaker 1: should keep walking and meet the following morning at a
Speaker 1: pre arranged sight. That night, when she got home from
Speaker 1: the Pentagon, she saw one of her old handlers standing
Speaker 1: by her apartment building. So when Carmichael asked her pointedly,
Speaker 1: who did you see? Did you see anyone as you
Speaker 1: came home? She must have thought that he knew about
Speaker 1: the arrangement, that he was on to her, and she
Speaker 1: was scared fucking that And she thought I knew it
Speaker 1: and I didn't. I mean, I had no idea, I
Speaker 1: didn't know why I had. I knew I had something.
Speaker 1: I knew there was something, And long after the interview,
Speaker 1: I looked back in that and what did I do?
Speaker 1: I did the same thing every other human du But
Speaker 1: I rationalized it away. I thought, well, maybe she was
Speaker 1: maybe she's been seeing a merry guy, and she hooked
Speaker 1: up at her marriage and she didn't want to tell me.
Speaker 1: Or maybe maybe she's a lesbian or something, and she
Speaker 1: was hooking up with a girlfriend. She doesn't want us
Speaker 1: to know. She's worried about that. I started thinking about
Speaker 1: all these other possibilities, and I accepted just enough so
Speaker 1: that I wouldn't keep going crazy. Accept Anna Montez wasn't
Speaker 1: a master spy. She didn't need to be. In a
Speaker 1: world where our lie detector is set to the off position,
Speaker 1: a spy is always going to have an easy time
Speaker 1: of it. And was Scott Carmichael somehow negligent? Not at all.
Speaker 1: He did what truth default theory would predict any of
Speaker 1: us would do. He operated from the assumption that Anamantez
Speaker 1: was telling the truth, and, almost without realizing it, work
Speaker 1: to square everything she said with that assumption. We need
Speaker 1: a trigger to snap out of the default to truth,
Speaker 1: but the threshold for triggers is high. Carmichael was nowhere
Speaker 1: near that point. The simple truth, as Tim Levine argues,
Speaker 1: is that lie detection does not cannot work the way
Speaker 1: we expect it to work in the movies. The brilliant
Speaker 1: detective confronts the subject and catches him right then and
Speaker 1: there in a lie. But in real life, accumulating the
Speaker 1: amount of evidence necessary to overwhelm our doubts takes time.
Speaker 1: You ask your husband if he is having an affair,
Speaker 1: and he says no, and you believe him. Your default
Speaker 1: is that he is telling the truth, and whatever little
Speaker 1: inconsistency as you spot in his story, you explained away.
Speaker 1: But three months later you've happened to notice an unusual
Speaker 1: hotel charge on his credit card bill, and the combination
Speaker 1: of that and weeks of unexplained absences and mysterious phone
Speaker 1: calls pushes you over the top. That's how lies are detected.
Speaker 1: This is why the Cubans were able to pull the
Speaker 1: wool over the CIA's eyes for so long. That story
Speaker 1: is not an indictment of the agency's competence. It just
Speaker 1: reflects the fact that CIA officers are like the rest
Speaker 1: of us human equipped with the same set of biases
Speaker 1: to truth as everyone else. Carmichael went back to REDG.
Speaker 1: Brown and tried to explain so reg it just, you know,
Speaker 1: I realized what it looks like to you. I understand
Speaker 1: your reasoning that you think that this is a deliberate
Speaker 1: influence operation looks like it. Whatever was, I can't point
Speaker 1: to finger it out to say she was part of deliberative.
Speaker 1: Just shut in the end, he says, he just had
Speaker 1: to close out the case. Four years after Scott Carmichael's
Speaker 1: interview with Anna Montez, one of his colleagues, the DA
Speaker 1: met an analyst for the National Security Agency at an
Speaker 1: interagency meeting. The NSA is the third arm of the
Speaker 1: US intelligence network, along with the CIA and the DA.
Speaker 1: They are the codebreakers, and the analysts said that her
Speaker 1: agency had had some success with the codes that the
Speaker 1: Cubans were using to communicate with their agents. The codes
Speaker 1: were long rows of numbers broadcast at regular intervals over
Speaker 1: shortwave radio, and the NSA had managed to decode a
Speaker 1: few snippets. They had given the list of tibbits to
Speaker 1: the FBI two and a half years before, but had
Speaker 1: heard nothing back. Out of frustration, the NSA analyst acided
Speaker 1: to share a few details with her DIA counterpart. The
Speaker 1: Cubans had a highly placed spy in Washington whom they
Speaker 1: called Agent S. She said Agent S had an interest
Speaker 1: in something called a safe system, and Agent S had
Speaker 1: apparently visited the American base at Guantanamo Bay in the
Speaker 1: two week time frame from July fourth to July eighteenth,
Speaker 1: nineteen ninety six. The man from the DIA was alarmed.
Speaker 1: Safe was the name of the DIA's internal computer messaging
Speaker 1: archive that strongly suggested that agents was at the DA,
Speaker 1: or at least closely affiliated with the DIA. He came
Speaker 1: back and told his supervisors. They told Carmichael he was angry.
Speaker 1: So well, twenty a half years, how many DA employees
Speaker 1: are going on there? You've never opened up? You've never
Speaker 1: told me. They opened up a freaking case. Id im
Speaker 1: boy old mother Parker's. He was the DIA's counterintelligence investigator.
Speaker 1: He knew exactly what he had to do, a search
Speaker 1: of the DIA computer system. Any Department of Defense employee
Speaker 1: who travels to Guantanamo Bay needs to get approval. They
Speaker 1: need to send two messages through the Pentagon system asking
Speaker 1: first for permission to travel and then for permission to
Speaker 1: talk to whomever they wished to interview at the base. Okay,
Speaker 1: so two messages. Carmichael said he guessed that the earliest
Speaker 1: anyone traveling to Guantanamo Bay in July would apply for
Speaker 1: their clearances was April, so he had his search parameters,
Speaker 1: travel authority and security clearance requests from DIA employees regarding
Speaker 1: Guantanamo Bay made between April first and July eighteenth, nineteen
Speaker 1: ninety six. He told his co worker Gator Johnson to
Speaker 1: run the same search simultaneously. Two heads will be better
Speaker 1: than one. They began searching to the safe system, so
Speaker 1: I thought, I'm gonna go through this real quick and
Speaker 1: just need something jumped on it. And that's when I
Speaker 1: hit That's when I'm pretty sure it was the twenty
Speaker 1: one hit me and it was Hanna be Montess and
Speaker 1: the game was fucking over. I mean it was over
Speaker 1: in a heart, and I was really stunned, speechless, stunned,
Speaker 1: and I could have fallen out of my chair, and
Speaker 1: I literally backed up, you know, I was on wheels.
Speaker 1: I was literally distancing myself from this bad news. Carmichael said,
Speaker 1: Oh shit,