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 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.
The man from the DIA was alarmed. “SAFE”5 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. For more on the Ekman-Levine debate, see the extended commentary in the Notes.
5 SAFE stands for Security Analyst File Environment. I love it when people start with the acronym and work backward to create the full name.
Chapter Four
The Holy Fool
1.
In November 2003, Nat Simons, a portfolio manager for the Long Island–based hedge fund Renaissance Technologies, wrote a worried email to several of his colleagues. Through a complicated set of financial arrangements, Renaissance found itself with a stake in a fund run by an investor in New York named Bernard Madoff, and Madoff made Simons uneasy.
If you worked in the financial world in New York in the 1990s and early 2000s, chances are you’d heard of Bernard Madoff. He worked out of an elegant office tower in Midtown Manhattan called the Lipstick Building. He served on the boards of a number of important financial-industry associations. He moved between the monied circles of the Hamptons and Palm Beach. He had an imperious manner and a flowing mane of white hair. He was reclusive, secretive. And that last fact was what made Simons uneasy. He’d heard rumors. Someone he trusted, he wrote in the group email, “told us in confidence that he believes that Madoff will have a serious problem within a year.”
He went on: “Throw in that his brother-in-law is his auditor and his son is also high up in the organization, and you have the risk of some nasty allegations, the freezing of accounts, etc.”