August 29, 2019 • 59 mins
On February 24, 1996, Cuban fighter jets shot down two small planes operated by Brothers to the Rescue, an organization in Florida that tried to spot refugees fleeing Cuba in boats. A strange chain of events preceded the shoot-down, and people in the intelligence business turned to a rising star in the Defense Intelligence Agency, Ana Montes. Montes was known around Washington as the “Queen of Cuba” for her insights into the Castro regime. But what Montes’ colleagues eventually found out about her shook their sense of trust to the core. (In this excerpt from Malcolm Gladwell’s forthcoming audiobook Talking to Strangers, we hear why spy mysteries do not unfold in real life like they do in the movies.)
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. This episode contains explicit language. Revision's History listeners Malcolm
glad we'll hear. I've written a new book called Talking
to Strangers, and it's about the mistakes we make in
our interactions with people we don't know. Talking to Strangers
(00:38):
features con artists and sociopaths and spies. It talks about
how drinking affects the way we make sense of others.
I spend time with the psychologist who ran the CIA's
interrogation program and the man who spotted Bernie Madoff before
anyone else, and I try to get to the bottom
of a heartbreaking encounter between a police officer and a
civilian which resulted in the death of a young woman
(01:00):
named Sandra Bland in Texas. I think it's a book
that will prompt a lot of conversations and arguments, which,
as you know from Rege History, is what I like
to do. I'm very proud of it. And there's something
else I'm proud of with Talking to Strangers. After making
four seasons of Revisionist History, I've fallen in love with
a kind of storytelling that can be done through a podcast,
(01:24):
and I decided that I wanted to bring that same
approach to the audiobook of Talking to Strangers. Normally, an
audiobook is just the author or someone the author hires,
reading into a microphone. I didn't want to do that.
I wanted to make this audiobook of Talking to Strangers
as compelling as an episode of revisionist history. So if
(01:46):
you listen to the audiobook, you'll hear the voices of
the people I interview, and if I'm describing some historical event,
you'll hear archival tape for courtroom scenes. We have actors
reimagining what happened. There's music, an extraordinary song by Jenelle
money Scoring. We even have excerpts from other audiobooks and
(02:06):
podcasts like The Fantastic Believed from NPR and Michigan Radio.
I think the result is a completely different kind of
audiobook experience, much more powerful, moving, engrossing. Anyway, rather than
describe it, I thought I would give you a special preview.
So here it is Chapter three of Talking to Strangers
(02:30):
done the New way. Let's take a look at another
(02:52):
Cuban spy story. In the early nineteen nineties, thousands of
Cubans began to flee the regime of Fidel Castro. They
cobbled together crewde boats made of inner tubes and metal
drums and wooden doors, and any number of other stray parts.
They set out on a desperate voyage across the ninety
miles of the Florida Straits to the United States. By
(03:15):
one estimate, as many as twenty four thousand people died
attempting the journey. It was a human rights disaster. In response,
a group of Cuban Emigreys in Miami founded Ermanos el
Riscat Brothers to the Rescue. They put together a makeshift
air force of single engine Cessna Skymasters and took to
the skies over the Florida Straits, searching for refugees from
(03:39):
the air and radioating their coordinates to the Coastguard. Ermanos
el Riscate saved thousands of lives. They became heroes. As
time passed, the Emigreys grew more ambitious. They began flying
into Cuban airspace, dropping leaflets on Havana, urging the Cuban
people to rise up against Castro's regime. The Cuban government,
(04:00):
already embarrassed by the flight of refugees, was outraged. Tensions rose,
coming to a head on February twenty fourth, nineteen ninety six.
That afternoon, three Armanos al riscate planes took off for
the Florida Straits. As they neared the Cuban coastline, two
Cuban Air Force meg Fighter jets shot down two of
the planes out of the sky, killing all four people aboard.
(04:24):
The response to the attack was immediate. The United States
Security Council passed a resolution denouncing the Cuban government a grave.
President Clinton held a press conference.
Speaker 2 (04:35):
Ladies and gentlemen, I have just been briefed by the
National Security Advisor on the shooting down today in broad
daylight two American civilian airplanes by a Cuban military aircraft.
Speaker 1 (04:50):
The Cuban emigrat population in Miami was furious. The two
planes had been shot down in international airspace, making the
incident tantamount to an act of war. The radio chatter
among the Cuban pilots was released to the press. We
(05:11):
hit him, Cohonis, we hit him. We retired them, Cohonis,
we hit them fuckers. Mark the place where we retired them.
This one won't fuck with us anymore. And then after
one of the MiGs zeroed in on the second Cessna
Homeland or Deathew Bastards, But in the midst of the controversy,
(05:33):
the story suddenly shifted. A retired US rear admiral named
Eugene Carroll gave an interview to CNN. Carol was an
influential figure inside Washington. He had formerly served as director
of all US Armed Forces in Europe, with seven thousand
weapons at his disposal. Just before the Armanos El Roscotte shootdown,
(05:54):
Carol said he and a small group of military analysts
had met with top Cuban officials. CNN's Katherine Callaway interviewed
Carrol to try and make sense of it all. Admiral,
can you tell me what happened on your trip to Cuba,
who you spoke with, and what you were told? Then,
Carol says, we were hosted by the Ministry Defense General
(06:16):
Rossalis del Toro. We traveled around, inspected Cuban bases, Cuban schools,
their partially completed nuclear power plant, and so on. In
long discussions with General Rosales del Toro and his staff,
the question came up about these overflights from US aircraft,
not government aircraft, but private airplanes operating out of Miami.
(06:38):
They asked US what would happen if we shot one
of those down? We can you know? Carol says he
interpreted that question from his Cuban hosts as a thinly
veiled warning. Then Callaway asks, so, when you returned, who
did you relay this information to? Carol replies, as soon
as we could make appointments, we discussed the situation with
(07:00):
members of the State Department and members of the Defense
Intelligence Agency. The Defense Intelligence Agency THEA is the third
arm of the foreign intelligence triumvirate in the US government,
along with the CIA and the National Security Agency. If
Carol had met with the State Department and the DIA,
(07:22):
he had delivered the Cuban warning about as high up
in the American government as you could go. And did
the State Department and the DiiA take those warnings to heart?
Did they step in and stop Armanos el Rascote from
continuing their reckless forays into Cuban airspace? Obviously not, Carrol's
(07:43):
comments ricochet around Washington d C. Policy circles. This was
an embarrassing revelation. The Cuban shootdown happened on February twenty fourth.
Carol's warnings to the State Department and DIA were delivered
on February twenty third. A prominent Washington insider met with
the US officials the day before the crisis explicitly warned
(08:07):
them that the Cubans had lost patients with Armanos el Riscote,
and his warning was ignored. What began as a Cuban
atrocity was now transformed into a story about American diplomatic incompetence.
By February twenty fifth, when Carol spoke with CNN, it's
clear that this perception had already sunk in. Fidel Castro
(08:30):
wasn't being invited onto CNN to defend himself, but he
didn't need to be. He had a rear admiral making
his case. Does anything about Admiral Carroll and the Cuban
shootdowns strike you as odd? There are an awful lot
of coincidences here. First, the Cubans plan a deliberate, murderous
(08:53):
attack on US citizens flying in international airspace. Second, it
just so happens that the day before the attack, a
prominent military insider delivers a stern warning to US officials
about the possibility of exacs that action. And third, that
warning frituitously puts that same official the day after the attack,
(09:18):
in a position to make the Cuban case on one
of the world's most respected news networks. The timing of
those three events is a little too perfect, isn't it.
If you were a public relations firm trying to mute
the fallout from a very controversial action, that's exactly how
you'd script it. Have a seemingly neutral expert available right
(09:40):
away to say I warned them. This is what a
military counterintelligence analyst named Reg Brown thought in the days
after the incident. Brown worked on the Latin American desk
of the Defense Intelligence Agency. His job was to understand
the ways in which the Cuban intelligence services were trying
to influence American military operations. His business, in other words,
(10:05):
was to be alert to the kinds of nuances, subtleties,
and unexplained co incidences that the rest of US ignore.
And Brown couldn't shake the feeling that somehow the Cubans
had orchestrated the whole crisis. It turned out, for example,
that the Cubans had a source inside Armanos el Roscote,
a pilot named Juan Pablo RoCE. On the day before
(10:27):
the attack, Roque had disappeared and resurfaced at Castro's side
in Havana. Clearly, Roque told his bosses back home that
Armanos al Riscote had something planned for the twenty fourth.
That made it very difficult for Brown to imagine that
the date of the Carol briefing had been chosen by
chance for maximum public relations impact. The Cubans would want
(10:51):
their warning delivered the day before, wouldn't they That way,
the State Department and the DIA couldn't wiggle out of
the problem by saying that the warning was vague or
long ago. Carol's words were right in front of them
on the day the pilots took off from Miami. So
who ragned that meeting? Brown wondered who picked February twenty third.
(11:14):
He did some digging, and the name he came up
with startled him. It was a colleague of his DIA,
a Cuba expert named Anna Balen Montes. Anna Montes was
a star. She had been selected repeatedly for promotions and
special career opportunities, showered with accolades and bonuses. Her reviews
(11:35):
were glowing. She had come to the DIA from the
Department of Justice, and in his recommendation One of her
former supervisors described her as the best employee he had
ever had. She once got a medal from George Tennant,
the director of the CIA. Her nickname inside the intelligence
community was the Queen of Cuba. Weeks past, Brown agonized
(12:00):
to accuse a colleague of treachery on the basis of
such semi paranoid speculation. Was an awfully big step, especially
when the colleague was someone of Monte's stature. Finally, Brown
made up his mind, taking his suspicions to a DIA
counterintelligence officer named Scott Carmichael.
Speaker 3 (12:19):
He came over and we walked in the neighborhoods around
there for a while during lunch hour.
Speaker 1 (12:24):
This is Carmichael talking about his first meeting with Reg Brown.
Speaker 3 (12:27):
And I think it was during that lunch hour. He
hardly even got to tamatas. I mean, most of it
was listening to him saying, oh God, he's bringing his hands,
saying I don't want to do the wrong thing. Yea, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1 (12:38):
Slowly Carmichael drew him out. Brown had more evidence. He
had written a report in the late nineteen eighties detailing
the involvement of senior Cuban officials and international drug smuggling.
Speaker 3 (12:50):
He identified specific Cuban senior Cuban officers, including I think
a general office and some lesser officers who were dirking involved,
and then provided the specifics I mean whites, the dates,
the time, to places who did walked home a whole enchilada.
Speaker 1 (13:09):
In a few days before Brown's report was released, the
Cubans rounded up everyone had mentioned in his investigation, executed
a number of them, and issued a public denial.
Speaker 3 (13:19):
I wrote one for the fuck there was a league.
Speaker 1 (13:24):
It made REDG. Brown paranoid. In nineteen ninety four, two
Cuban intelligence officers had defected and told a similar story.
The Cubans had someone high inside American intelligence. So what
was he to think? Brown said to Carmichael, didn't he
have reason to be suspicious? Then he told Carmichael the
(13:46):
other thing that had happened During the Ermanos al Riscote crisis.
Montees worked at the DIA's office on Bowling Air Force
Base in the Anacostia section of Washington, d C. When
the planes were shot down, she was called into the Pentagon.
If you were one of the government's leading Cuba experts,
you were needed at the scene. The shootdown happened on
(14:08):
a Saturday. The following evening, Brown happened to telephone asking
for Montes. He sent some woman answered the phone and
told him that Anna had left. Carmichael says, earlier in
the day, Montes had gotten a phone call and afterwards
she'd been agitated. Then she told everyone in the situation
(14:29):
room that she was tired, that there was nothing going on,
that she was going home, and Reg.
Speaker 3 (14:34):
Was just absolutely incredulous. This is just so counter to
our culture that he couldn't even leave it. Everybody understands
that when a crisis occurs, you're called in because you
have some expertise you can add add to the decision
making processes.
Speaker 1 (14:51):
Here, Scott Carmichael starts thumping to make his point, Pentagon, you.
Speaker 3 (14:57):
Were available until you were dismissed. That's it's just understood.
You know, at somebody at that level calls you in
because all of a sudden, with North Koreans and launce
A Michelan San Francisco, you don't just decide to leave
when you get tired and armored. Everybody understands, and yet
she did that and was just.
Speaker 1 (15:19):
In Reg Brown's thinking, if Montez really worked for the Cubans,
they would have been desperate to hear from her. They
would want to know what was happening in the situation room.
Did she have a meeting that night with her handler.
It was all a bit far fetched, which is why
Brown was so conflicted. But there were Cuban spies. He
knew that. And here was this woman taking a personal
(15:42):
phone call and heading out the door in the middle
of what was, for a Cuba specialist, just about the
biggest crisis in a generation. And on top of that,
she's the one who wo had arrange the awfully convenient
Admiral Carrol briefing. Brown told Carmichael that the Cubans had
wanted to shoot down one of the Harmanos el Riscotte
planes for years, but they hadn't because they knew what
(16:05):
a provocation that would be. It might serve as the excuse,
you know, States needed to depose Fidel Castro or launch
an invasion. To the Cubans, it wasn't worth it unless,
that is, they could figure out some way to turn
public opinion in their favor.
Speaker 3 (16:21):
And so he looked at that one. Holy shit, I'm
looking at a kitting color and Dollan's influence operation to
spin a story, and I asked the one who led
the effort to me with the adil, Carol, what the
hell is that all about?
Speaker 1 (16:37):
Months past? Brown persisted. Finally, Scott Carmichael pulled Montez file.
She had passed her most recent polograph with flying colors.
She didn't have a secret drinking problem or unexplained sums
in her bank account. She had no red flags.
Speaker 3 (16:55):
After I had reviewed the security file of a personnel
file on her, I thought, reg Way off here, this
woman is like, she's going to be the next director
of Intelligence from DN. He's just fabulous.
Speaker 1 (17:10):
He knew that in order to justify an investigation on
the basis of speculation, he had to be meticulous. Reg Brown,
he said, was coming apart. He had to satisfy Brown's
suspicions one way or another, as he put it, to
document the living shit out of everything. Because if word
got out that Montes was under suspicion, I knew I
was going to be facing a shit storm. Carmichael called
(17:36):
monta is in. They met in a conference room at
Bowling Air Force Base. She was attractive, intelligent, slender, with
short hair and sharp, almost severe features. Carmichael thought to himself,
this woman is impressive.
Speaker 3 (17:52):
She sat down. She was sitting like almost texting to
me about that for away.
Speaker 1 (17:55):
Here Carmichael holds his hands three feet apart.
Speaker 3 (17:59):
Same side of the table, kind of thing, and she
crossed her legs. I don't think that she did it
on purpose. I don't think she didn't think she was
just getting comfortable. Happen to be lame man. She couldn't
know that. I mean, I like it. I know that
I glanced down.
Speaker 1 (18:18):
He asked her about the Admiral Carroll meeting. She had
an answer. It wasn't her idea at all. The son
of someone she knew at DIA had accompanied Carol to Cuba,
and she'd gotten a call afterward.
Speaker 3 (18:29):
I know his dad. His dad called me and he said, hey,
you know, if you want the latest scoop on, you
should go see the Admiral Carroll. And so I just
called up Admiral Carroll and we looked at our schedules
and decided twenty third of February. It was the most
convenient date that works for both of us, and that
was it.
Speaker 1 (18:43):
As it turned out, Carmichael knew the DIA employee she
was talking about He told her that he was going
to call him up and corroborate her story, and she said,
please do So what happened with the phone call in
the situation room, he asked her. She said she didn't
remember getting a phone call, and to Carmichael, it seemed
as though she was being honest. It had been a crazy,
(19:06):
hectic day nine months before. What about leaving early?
Speaker 3 (19:10):
She said, well, yeah, I did leave. Okay, So right
away she's admitting to that, and she's not denying stuff
which might be a little suspicious. She said, yeah, I
did leave early today that day, and she says, you know,
it was on a Sunday. The cafeterias were closed. I'm
a very picky eater. I have analogies, so I don't
eat stuff out of any machines. I got there around
six o'clock in the morning, about again, case black at night,
(19:31):
I'm starving to death. Nothing was going on. They didn't
really need me, so I just decaided I was just
gonna get out of there, go home and eat something.
And that rang true to me. I did.
Speaker 1 (19:43):
After the interview, Carmichael set out to double check her answers.
The date of the briefing really did seem like a coincidence.
Her friend's son had gone to Cuba with Carol.
Speaker 3 (19:54):
And I learned that, Yeah, she does a aalogy. She's
very particular about what she eats. I thought, she's there
in the Pentagon on Sunday. I've been there. The cafterias
aren't open. She went all day long without eating. She
went home. I said, well, it kind of makes sense.
Speaker 1 (20:09):
So Carmichael went back to reg Brown and told him
not to worry. He turned his attention to other matters.
Anna Montes went back to her office. All was forgotten
and forgiven until one day in two thousand and one,
five years later, when it was discovered that every night
(20:30):
Montes had gone home typed up from memory all of
the facts and insights she had learned that day at
work and sent it to her handlers in Havana. From
the day she joined the Dia, Montes had been a
Cuban spy. In the classic spy novel The Secret Agent
(20:50):
is Slippery and Devious were hoodwinked by the brilliance of
the enemy. That was the way many Cia insiders explained
the way Florentino as Piaga's revelations. Castro is a genius.
The agents were brilliant actors in truth, however, the most
dangerous spies are rarely diabolical. Aldrich Ames, maybe the most
(21:13):
damaging trader in American history, had mediocre performance reviews, a
drinking problem, and didn't even try to hide all the
money he was getting from the Soviet Union for his spying.
Anna Montes was scarcely any better. Right before she was arrested,
the DIA found the codes she used to send her
dispatches to Havana. Where did they find those codes? In
(21:35):
her purse and in her apartment? She had a short
wave radio in a shoe box in her closet. Brian Mattel,
the CIA Cuba specialist who witnessed the Espiaga disaster, knew
mont as well. He used to work as something called
a National Intelligence Officer NIO.
Speaker 4 (21:54):
She used to sit across the table from me at
meetings that I convened when I was INIO. You know,
I would try to engage her and she would always
give me these strange reactions when I would try to
pin her down at some of these meetings that I convened,
try to pen her down on you know, what do
you think is infidel what do you think Fidell's motives
are about this? You know she would fumble, you know,
(22:16):
she in a retrospect and retrospect, you know, the deer
with the headlights in his eyes, she she blocked. You know,
she would even you know, even physically, she would show
some you know, some kind of reactions that that caused
me to think, Oh, she is nervous because she's just
such a terrible analyst. She doesn't know what to say.
Speaker 1 (22:34):
One year later, Lttel says, Montez was accepted into the
CIA's Distinguished Analyst Program, a research sabbatical available to intelligence
officers from across the government. Where'd she ask to go? Cuba?
Speaker 4 (22:48):
Of course she went to Cuba funded by this program.
Can you imagine.
Speaker 1 (22:58):
If you were a Cuban spy trying to conceal your intentions,
would you request a paid sabbatical in Havana. ATel was
speaking almost twenty years after it happened, but the brazenness
of her behavior still astounded him.
Speaker 4 (23:13):
She went to Cuba as a CIA distinguished intelligence and analysts.
Of course, they were delighted to have her, especially on
our nickel, and I'm sure that they gave her all
kinds of clandestine tradecraft.
Speaker 3 (23:25):
Training while she was there.
Speaker 4 (23:27):
I suspect camp rude, but I'm pretty sure she met
with Fidel. Fidell loved to meet with his principal agents.
He loved to meet with them, to encourage them, to
congratulate them, to revel in the success that they were
having together against against the CIA.
Speaker 1 (23:43):
When Montes came back to the Pentagon, she wrote a
paper in which she didn't even bother to hide her biases.
Speaker 4 (23:49):
There should have been all kinds of red flags raised
and gongs 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 their point
of view.
Speaker 1 (24:04):
But did anyone raise those red flags? Hotel says he
never once suspected she was a spy.
Speaker 4 (24:10):
On the contrary, there were CIA officers of my rank
or close to my rank who thought she was the
best Cuban analyst there was. I never trusted her, but
for the wrong reasons, and that's one of my great regrets.
I'm always believed I was convinced that she was a
(24:31):
terrible analyst on Cuba. Well she was, wasn't she objectively?
Because she wasn't working for us she was working for.
But I never connected the dots.
Speaker 1 (24:43):
Nor did anyone else. Anna Montez had a younger brother
named Tito, who was an FBI agent. He had no idea.
Montez's 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,
(25:04):
was Latin American intelligence. His job was to go up
against spies like his girlfriend. He had no idea. When
Mantes 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
(25:24):
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 the Fifth taped to her
wall at eye level for all the world to see.
The king hath note of all that they intend by
(25:46):
interception which they dream not of. Or, to put it
a bit more plainly, the Queen of Cuba takes note
of all that the US 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
(26:06):
is that there is something wrong with us us. We'll
be back after this. We're back with more from this
excerpt of my new book, Talking to Strangers. Over the
course of his career, the psychologist Tim Levine has conducted
hundreds of versions of the same simple experiment. He invites
(26:31):
students to his laboratory and gives them a trivia test.
What's 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're given a partner, someone they've
never met before, who is unknown to them, working for Levine.
There's also an instructor in the room named Rachel. Midway
(26:53):
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
(27:15):
the desk, so it talk.
Speaker 5 (27:16):
To them whether they cheat or not, and then later
we interview them, asking Digiti.
Speaker 1 (27:21):
This is Tim Levine. He says, in about thirty percent
of cases, the research subjects do cheat. Levine's theories are
laid out in his book duped Truth, Default Theory and
the Social Science of Lying in Deception. If you want
to understand how deception works, there is no better place
to start. The number of scholars around the world who
(27:43):
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
about deception, and at the core of that theory are
the insights he gained from that first trivia quiz study.
(28:06):
I watched videotape of a dozen or so post experiment
interviews with Levine in his office the University of Alabama
in Birmingham. Because of privacy regulations, we can't play them
for you here, but we're going to re enact them.
Here's the first. The interviewer and the subject, a slightly
spaced out young man. Let's call him Philip.
Speaker 6 (28:29):
All right, So have you played trivial pursuit games before,
not very much, but I think I have. Okay, So
in the current game, did you find the questions difficult?
Speaker 3 (28:39):
Yes? Some were?
Speaker 6 (28:42):
Yes, yes, some were.
Speaker 3 (28:44):
I was like, whoa, what is that?
Speaker 6 (28:47):
If you would scale them on one to ten? If
one was easy and ten was difficult, where do you
think you would put them?
Speaker 4 (28:53):
I would put them an eight and an eight.
Speaker 6 (28:55):
Yeah, they're pretty tricky.
Speaker 1 (28:57):
Philip is then told that he and his partner did
very well in the test. The interviewer asked him why.
Speaker 6 (29:04):
Teamwork, teamwork? Yeah, okay, all right, So now I called
Rachel out of the room briefly. When she was gone,
did you cheat?
Speaker 4 (29:14):
I guess no.
Speaker 1 (29:17):
Philip looks away.
Speaker 6 (29:18):
Are you telling the truth?
Speaker 3 (29:20):
Yes?
Speaker 6 (29:21):
Okay. So when I interview your partner and I ask Kurt,
what is she going to say?
Speaker 1 (29:25):
At this point, there's an uncomfortable silence, as if the
student is trying to get his story straight, He's obviously
thinking very hard. Levine said no.
Speaker 6 (29:36):
No, yeah, okay, all right, Well that's all I need
from you.
Speaker 1 (29:42):
Is Philip telling the truth. Levine has shown the Philip
videotape to hundreds of people, and nearly every viewer correctly
pegs Philip as a cheater. As the partner confirmed to Levine,
Philip looked inside the answer filled envelope the minute Rachel
left the room. In his exit interview, he lied. And
(30:02):
it's obvious.
Speaker 3 (30:04):
That's so like.
Speaker 7 (30:04):
Everybody gets a sky right, Yeah, a cheater. He is
no conviction, right. She can't even keep a straight face, right.
Speaker 1 (30:18):
Philip was easy, But the more tapes we looked at,
the harder it got. Here's the second case. Let's call
him Lucas. He was handsome, articulate, confident. Here he is
talking to the interviewer.
Speaker 6 (30:32):
So I have to ask, when Rachel left the room,
did I he cheating a card?
Speaker 4 (30:35):
No?
Speaker 6 (30:36):
Are you telling me the truth?
Speaker 3 (30:38):
Yes?
Speaker 4 (30:38):
I am.
Speaker 6 (30:39):
When I interview your partner and I ask her the
same question, what do you think she's gonna say?
Speaker 3 (30:43):
Same thing? Yeah?
Speaker 1 (30:46):
Yeah, he is good. It's everybody believes him, Levine said.
I believed him. Lucas was lying. Levine and I spent
the better part of the morning watching his trivia quiz videotapes.
By the end, I was ready to throw up my hands.
I had no idea what to make of anyone. The
point of Levine's research was to try and answer one
(31:06):
of the biggest puzzles in human psychology, Why are we
so bad at detecting lies? You'd think would be good
at it. Logic says, it would be very useful for
human beings to know when they're being deceived. Evolution over
many millions of years should have favored people with the
ability to pick up on the subtle signs of deception,
(31:27):
but it hasn't. In one iteration of his experiment, Levine
divided his tapes in half, twenty two liars and twenty
two truth tellers. On average, the people watching the videos
correctly identified the liars fifty six percent of the time.
Other psychologists have tried similar versions of the same experiment,
(31:48):
The average for all of them fifty four percent. Just
About everyone is terrible, police officers, judges, therapists, even CIA
officers running big spy networks. Every one why Tim Levine's
answer is called truth default theory.
Speaker 3 (32:07):
Or t d T.
Speaker 1 (32:09):
Levine's theory started with an insight that came from one
of his graduate students. He's soon park. It was right
at the beginning of Levine's research, when he was as
baffled as the rest of his profession about why we
are all so bad at something that, by rights, we
should be good at.
Speaker 5 (32:24):
Her big insight, Well, first one was in the fifty
four percent deception accuracy thing that's averaging across trust and lies,
and you come to a very different understanding if you
break out truth how much people are right on truth
(32:45):
and how much people are right on lies.
Speaker 1 (32:48):
What he means is this, If I tell you that
your accuracy rate on Levine's videos is right around fifty percent,
the natural assumption is to think that you are just
randomly guessing, that you have no idea what you're doing.
But Park's observation was that's not true. We're much better
than chance at correctly identifying the student who are telling
(33:09):
the truth, but we're much worse than chance at correctly
identifying the students who are lying. We go through all
those videos and we guess true true, true, which means
we get most of the truthful interviews right and most
of the liars wrong. We have a default to truth.
Our operating assumption is that the people that we're dealing
(33:29):
with are honest. Levine says his own experiment is an
almost perfect illustration of this phenomenon. He invites people to
play a trivia game for money. Suddenly the instructor is
called out of the room and she just happens to
leave the answers to the test in plain view on
her desk. Levine says that logically the subject should roll
(33:51):
their eyes at this point. They're college students, they're not stupid.
They've signed up for a psychological experiment. They're given a
partner whom they've never met, who is egging them on
to cheat. You would think that they might be even
a little suspicious that things are not as they seem.
Speaker 5 (34:08):
But no, so they catch that they leaving the room
might be a set up. I think they almost never
catch as that their partners.
Speaker 7 (34:18):
A suite I see, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3 (34:23):
So it's weird. It's interesting what they suspect. So they
think that there might be hidden gaps.
Speaker 5 (34:29):
Yeah right, they think it might be a set up,
because insurements are set.
Speaker 1 (34:32):
Ups, right, But this nice person they're talking and chatting to,
they never question it. To snap out of truth default
mode requires what Levine calls a trigger. A trigger is
not the same as a suspicion or the first sliver
of doubt. We fall out of truth default mode only
(34:53):
when the case against our initial assumption becomes definitive. We
do not behave. In other words, like sober minded scientists
slowly gathering evidence of the truth or falsity of something
before reaching a conclusion, we do the opposite. We start
by believing, and we stop believing only when our doubts
(35:14):
and misgivings rise to the point where we could no
longer explain them away. This proposition sounds at first that
the kind of hair splitting that social scientists loved to
engage in. It is not. It is a profound point
that explains a lot of otherwise puzzling behavior. Consider, for example,
(35:34):
one of the most famous findings in all of psychology,
Stanley Milgram's Obedience Experiment. In nineteen sixty one, Milgram recruited
volunteers from New Haven to take part in what he
said was a memory experiment. Each volunteer was met by
a somber, imposing young man named John Williams, who explained
(35:55):
that they were going to play the role of teacher
in the experiment. Williams introduced them to another volunteer, a pleasant,
middle aged man named mister Wallace. Mister Wallace, they were told,
was to be the learner. He was in an adjoining
room wired to a complicated apparatus capable of delivering electrical
shocks up to four hundred and fifty volts. If you're
(36:18):
curious about what four hundred and fifty volts feels like,
it's just shy of the amount of electrical shock that
leaves tissue damage. The teacher volunteer was instructed to give
the learner a series of memory tasks, and each time
the learner failed, the volunteer was to punish him with
an ever greater electrical shock in order to see whether
the threat of punishment affected someone's ability to perform memory tasks.
(36:43):
As the shocks escalated, Wallace would cry out in pain,
and ultimately he started hammering on the walls. But if
the teacher waivered, the imposing instructor would urge them on,
please continue. The experiment requires that you continue. It is
(37:04):
absolutely essential that you continue. You have no other choice.
It must go on. The reason the Milgrim experiment is
so famous is that virtually all of the volunteers complied.
Sixty five percent ended up administering the maximum dose to
the hapless learner. In the wake of the Second World
War and the revelations about what German guards had been
(37:27):
ordered to do in the Nazi concentration camps. Milgram's findings
caused a sensation, But to Levine, there's a second lesson
to the experiment. The volunteer shows up and meets the
imposing young John Williams. He was actually a local high
school biology teacher, chosen, in Milgram's words, because he was technical,
(37:48):
looking and dry, the type you would later see on
television in connection with the Space Program. Everything william said
during the experiment had been memorized from a script written
by Milgram himself. Mister Wallace was in fact a man
named Jim McDonough. He worked for the railroad. Molgram liked
him for the part of victim because he was mild
(38:10):
and submissive. His cries of agony were taped and played
over a loudspeaker. The experiment was a little amateur theatrical production,
and the word amateur here is crucial. The Milgrim experiment
was not produced for a Broadway stage. Mister Wallace, by
Mogram's own description, was a terrible actor, and everything about
(38:33):
the experiment was, to put it mildly, more than a
little far fetched. The electric shock machine didn't actually give shocks.
More than one participant saw the loud speaker in the
corner and wondered why Wallace's cries were coming from there,
not from behind the door to the room where Wallace
was strapped in, and if the purpose of the experiment
(38:56):
was to measure learning wyner, did William spend the entire
time with the teacher and not behind the door with
the learner. Didn't that make it obvious that what he
really wanted to do was observe the pre inflicting the pain,
not the person receiving the pain. As hoaxes go, the
Milgram experiment was pretty transparent, and just as with Levine's
(39:20):
trivia test, people fell for it. They defaulted to truth.
As one subject wrote to Mogram in a follow up questionnaire,
I actually checked the death notices in the New Haven
Register for at least two weeks after the experiment to
see if I had been involved and a contributing factor
(39:40):
in the death of the so called learner. I was
very relieved that his name did not appear another road.
Believe me, when no response came from mister Wallace with
the stronger voltage, I really believe the man was probably dead.
These are adults who were apparently convinced that a prestigious
(40:01):
institution of higher learning could run a possibly lethal torture
experiment in one of its basements. The experiment left such
an effect on me. Another wrote that I spent the
night in a cold sweat and nightmares because of the
fear that I might have killed that man in the chair.
But here's the crucial detail. Milgram's subjects weren't hopelessly gullible.
(40:24):
They had doubts, lots of doubts. In her fascinating history
of Milgram's obedience experiments, Behind the Shock Machine, Geina Perry
interviews a retired too maker named Joe Demo, who was
one of Milgram's original subjects. I thought this is bizarre,
Demo told Perry. Demo became convinced that Wallace was faking it.
(40:47):
But then mister Wallace came out of the locked room
at the end of the experiment and put on a
little act. He looked, Demo remembers, haggard and emotional. He
came in with a handkerchief in his hand, wiping his face.
He came up to me and he offered his hand
to shake hands with me, and he said I want
to thank you for stopping it. When he came in,
(41:08):
I thought, Wow, maybe it really was true. Demo was
pretty sure that he was being lied to. But all
it took was for one of the liars to extend
the pretense a little longer, look a little upset, and
mop his brow with a handkerchief, and Demo folded his cards.
(41:29):
Here are the full statistics from the Milgrim experiment. Fifty
six point one percent I fully believed the learner was
getting painful shocks. Twenty four percent, although I had some doubts,
I believe the learner was probably getting the shocks six
point one percent. I just wasn't sure whether the learner
(41:50):
was getting the shocks or not. Eleven point four percent.
Although I had some doubts, I thought the learner was
probably not getting the shocks. Two point four percent. I
was certain the learner was not getting the shocks. Over
forty percent of the volunteers picked up on something odd,
(42:13):
something that suggested the experiment was not what it seemed,
But those doubts just weren't enough to trigger them out
of truth. Default. That's Levine's point. You believe someone not
because you have no doubts about them. Belief is not
the absence of doubt. You believe someone because you don't
have enough doubts about them. Just think about how many
(42:36):
times you have criticized someone else in hindsight for their
failure to spot a liar. You should have known there
were all kinds of red flags you had doubts. Levine
would say, that's the wrong way to think about what happened.
The right question is were there enough red flags to
push you over the threshold of belief. If there weren't,
(43:00):
then by defaulting to truth, you were only being human
more After this, we're back with chapter three of Talking
to Strangers. Anna Berlin Montes grew up in the affluent
suburbs of Baltimore. Her father was a psychiatrist. She attended
(43:24):
the University of Virginia, then received a master's degree in
foreign affairs from Johns Hopkins University. She was a passionate
supporter of the Marxist Sandinista government in Nicaragua, which the
US government was then working to overthrow, and her activism
attracted the attention of a recruiter for Cuban intelligence. In
(43:46):
nineteen eighty five, she made a secret visit to Havana.
Her new compatriots encouraged her to apply for work in
the US intelligence community. That same year, she joined the DIA,
and from there her assent was swift. Montes arrived at
her office first thing in the morning, ate lunch at
her desk, and kept to herself. She lived alone in
(44:08):
a two bedroom condo in the Cleveland Park neighborhood of Washington.
She never married. In the course of his investigation, Scott Carmichael,
the DIA counterintelligence officer, collected every adjective used by Montes's
co workers to describe her. It is an impressive list, shy, quiet,
(44:29):
aloof cool, independent, self reliant, standoffish, intelligent, serious, dedicated, focused,
hard working, sharp, quick, manipulative, venomous, unsociable, ambitious, charming, confident, businesslike,
no nonsense, assertive, deliberate, calm, mature, unflappable, capable, and competent.
(44:54):
Anna Montes assumed that the reason for her meeting with
Carmichael was that he was performing a routine security check.
All intelligence officers are periodically vetted so that they can
continue to hold a security clearance. She was presque because.
Speaker 3 (45:10):
When she first came in, she started blowing off, you know,
by telling me and it was true. She had just
been named as an acting division chief. She had a
ton of responsibilities and meetings and things to do, and
she just didn't have a lot of time.
Speaker 1 (45:22):
Carmichael is a disarmingly boyish man with fair hair and
a substantial stomach. He looks, by his own estimation, like
the late comedian and actor Chris Farley. She must have
thought she could bully him.
Speaker 3 (45:35):
And so I just dealt with the way you normally do.
The first time, you just kind of ignore it, just
acknowledge it. I mean, the first thing you use, you acknowledge, say,
oh I understand, yeah, I heard that. That congratulation's great,
I understand. You got a living in amount of time.
And then you just kind of ignore it, because if
it takes you twelve days, it takes twelve days. You
don't let him go. But then she hit me with
it again, and she really me appointed it. I mean,
I hadn't settled in yet, and she said, oh, but seriously,
(45:58):
I got to leap by two or something like that
because I got all these things to do, and I'm like,
what the fuck? You know? I asked what I'm thinking?
And so when she did that, I lost I lose
my temper, but I lost my patience. That's why I
hit her. Be twenty eyes look on, I have reasons
to suspect that you might be involved in the car
and velo and simple as operational. We need to sit
(46:19):
down and talk about this.
Speaker 1 (46:20):
Montes had been by that point a Cuban spy for
nearly her entire government career. She had met with her
handlers at least three hundred times, handing over so many
secrets that she ranks as one of the most damaging
spies in US history. She had secretly visited Cuba on
several occasions. After her arrest, it was discovered that Fidel
(46:42):
Castro had personally given her a medal. Through all of that,
there hadn't been even a whiff of suspicion. And suddenly,
at the start of what she thought was a routine
background check, a funny looking Chris Farley character was pointing
the finger at her. She sat there in shock.
Speaker 3 (47:02):
She would just looking at me like I'm sure, looking
at the headlines, waiting for say, another word, just waiting.
Speaker 1 (47:12):
When Carmichael looked back on that meeting years later, he
realized that was the first clue he had missed her
reaction made no sense.
Speaker 3 (47:20):
I just didn't pick up on She never said, what
are you talking about? Nothing like that. She didn't see
a freaking word. She just sat down and listening. And
you know, if i'd been a stute, I picked up
on that. No denial, no confusion, no anger. Anybody who's
(47:47):
told the suspective of murder or something the completely and
it's like, wait a minute, you just accused me of
so I don't want to know what the fuck this
is all about. And eventually they'll get in your face,
you know, they'll really get in your face. I didn't
do a freaking thing and stept sit there.
Speaker 1 (48:03):
Like Carmichael had doubts right from the beginning, But doubts
triggered disbelief only when you can't explain them away, and
he could easily explain them away. She was the Queen
of Cuba, for goodness sake. How could the Queen of
Cuba be a spy? Sure, Carmichael told her, I have
reason to suspect that you might be involved in a
(48:25):
counterintelligence influence operation, but he later admitted he said that
only because he wanted her to take the meeting seriously.
Speaker 3 (48:34):
I was anxious to get into it and get to
the next step. And like I said, I just panted
myself in the back and I worked. I'd shut her up,
not to hear anymore of that crap anymore. Now, let's
get do this, get this done. That's why I missed.
Speaker 1 (48:52):
They talked about the Admiral Carroll briefing. She had a
good answer. They talked about why she abruptly left the
Pentagon that day. She had an answer. She was being flirty,
a little playful. He began to relax. He looked down
at her legs again, and.
Speaker 3 (49:09):
She's bouncing her toe like that. I don't know if
it was conscious, but what I do know is that
catches your eye. And we got more comfortable with one another,
and she became just a little bit more flirty.
Speaker 1 (49:25):
They talked about the phone call the day the plane
was shot down. She said she never got a phone call,
or at least she didn't remember getting one. It should
have been another red flag. The people who were with
her that day in the situation room distinctly remembered her
getting a phone call. But then again, it had been
a long and stressful day. They'd all been in the
(49:45):
middle of an international crisis. Maybe they just confused her
with someone else. There was one other thing, another moment
when Carmichael saw something in her reaction that made him wonder.
Near the end of the interview, he asked Montez a
series of questions about what happened after she left the
Pentagon that day. It was a standard investigative procedure. He
(50:08):
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.
Speaker 3 (50:29):
I said, okay, well, so what'd you do? You can
park the car and you walked across the street while
I'm doing this is when changed the demeanor keeven in mine.
I'd been talking to her for almost two hours, and
by that time, Anna and I were almost like buddies. Okay,
not that close, but where we have a great rapport going.
(50:50):
She's actually joking about stuff or making funny remarks every
once in a while about stuff. It's that casual, and
then all of a sudden it's huge. Change came over
and you could see it, and one minute she's just
almost flirting stuff. We were having a good time at that. Oh,
all of a sudden, it's like at was handing the
(51:13):
cookie jar and his back and monsters you have. She
was looking at me like and denying, but looking at
me with that looked like, what do you know?
Speaker 1 (51:26):
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 the following
morning at a pre arranged site. That night, when she
(51:49):
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.
Speaker 3 (52:07):
She's scared the fucking dam and she thought I knew
it and I didn't. I mean, I had no idea,
I didn't know what I had. I knew I had something.
I knew there was something, And long after the interview,
I looked back at that, and what did I do?
I did the same thing every other human, I mean does,
But I rationalized it away. I thought, well, maybe she
(52:28):
was maybe she's been seeing a married guy and she
hooked up with her merriat and she didn't want to
tell me. Or maybe she's a lesbian or something and
she was hooking up with a girlfriend she doesn't want
us to know. She's worried about that. I started thinking
about all these other possibilities, and I accepted just enough
(52:48):
so that I wouldn't keep going crazy. Accepted it.
Speaker 1 (52:53):
Anna 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
(53:16):
assumption that Anna Montes was telling the truth, and, almost
without realizing it, work 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, as
(53:38):
Tim 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
(54:01):
an affair, and he says no, and you believe him.
Your default is that he is telling the truth, and
whatever little inconsistency as you spot in his story, you
explained away. But three months later you happen to notice
an unusual hotel charge on his credit card bill, and
the combination of that and weeks of unexplained absences and
(54:22):
mysterious phone calls pushes you over the top. That's how
lies are detected. This is 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
(54:43):
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 it.
Speaker 3 (54:56):
Just you know, I realized what it looks like to you.
I understand your reasoning that you think that this is
a deliberate influence operation. Look see what if it was.
I can't a finger at on to say she was
part of delivery efforts.
Speaker 1 (55:13):
In the end, he says he just had to close
out the case. Four years after Scott Carmichael's interview with
Anna Montes, one of his colleagues the DA met an
analyst for the National Security Agency at an interagency meeting.
The NSA is the third arm of the US intelligence network,
(55:36):
along with the CIA and the DA. They are the codebreakers,
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
(55:57):
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 analysts 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
(56:20):
Agent S had an interest in something called a safe system,
and Agent S had apparently visited the American base at
Guantanamo Bay in the two week time frame from July
fourth to July eighteenth, nineteen ninety six. The man from
the DIA was alarmed. Safe was the name of the
(56:43):
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.
Speaker 3 (57:00):
He said, two and a half years, how many DIA
employees have gone on there. You've never opened up. They've
never told me they open a freaking case on DII
in boy Old Mother Farmers.
Speaker 1 (57:11):
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 Guantanamo Bay
needs to get approval. They need to send two messages
through the Pentagon system, asking first for permission to travel
(57:33):
and then for permission to talk to whomever they wished
to interview at the base. Okay, so two messages. Carmichael said.
He guessed that the earliest anyone traveling to Guantanamo Bay
in July would apply for their clearances was April, so
he had his search parameters travel authority and security clearance
(57:53):
requests from DIA employees regarding Guantanamo Bay made between April
first and July eighteenth, nineteen ninety six. He told his
co worker Gator Johnson to run the same search simultaneously.
Two heads will be better than one. They began searching
to the safe system.
Speaker 3 (58:14):
I thought, I'm gonna go through this real quick and
just see something jumps on it. And that's when I
hit That's when I'm pretty sure it was the twenty
four hit me and it was Hannabi Montes and the
game was fucking over. And I mean it was over
in a heart, and I was really stunned, speechless, stunned.
I could have fallen out of my chair, and I
(58:36):
literally backed up, you know, I was on wheels. I
was literally distancing myself from this bad news.
Speaker 1 (58:47):
Carmichael said, Oh shit,
Pushkin. This episode contains explicit language. Revision's History listeners Malcolm
glad we'll hear. I've written a new book called Talking
to Strangers, and it's about the mistakes we make in
our interactions with people we don't know. Talking to Strangers
(00:38):
features con artists and sociopaths and spies. It talks about
how drinking affects the way we make sense of others.
I spend time with the psychologist who ran the CIA's
interrogation program and the man who spotted Bernie Madoff before
anyone else, and I try to get to the bottom
of a heartbreaking encounter between a police officer and a
civilian which resulted in the death of a young woman
(01:00):
named Sandra Bland in Texas. I think it's a book
that will prompt a lot of conversations and arguments, which,
as you know from Rege History, is what I like
to do. I'm very proud of it. And there's something
else I'm proud of with Talking to Strangers. After making
four seasons of Revisionist History, I've fallen in love with
a kind of storytelling that can be done through a podcast,
(01:24):
and I decided that I wanted to bring that same
approach to the audiobook of Talking to Strangers. Normally, an
audiobook is just the author or someone the author hires,
reading into a microphone. I didn't want to do that.
I wanted to make this audiobook of Talking to Strangers
as compelling as an episode of revisionist history. So if
(01:46):
you listen to the audiobook, you'll hear the voices of
the people I interview, and if I'm describing some historical event,
you'll hear archival tape for courtroom scenes. We have actors
reimagining what happened. There's music, an extraordinary song by Jenelle
money Scoring. We even have excerpts from other audiobooks and
(02:06):
podcasts like The Fantastic Believed from NPR and Michigan Radio.
I think the result is a completely different kind of
audiobook experience, much more powerful, moving, engrossing. Anyway, rather than
describe it, I thought I would give you a special preview.
So here it is Chapter three of Talking to Strangers
(02:30):
done the New way. Let's take a look at another
(02:52):
Cuban spy story. In the early nineteen nineties, thousands of
Cubans began to flee the regime of Fidel Castro. They
cobbled together crewde boats made of inner tubes and metal
drums and wooden doors, and any number of other stray parts.
They set out on a desperate voyage across the ninety
miles of the Florida Straits to the United States. By
(03:15):
one estimate, as many as twenty four thousand people died
attempting the journey. It was a human rights disaster. In response,
a group of Cuban Emigreys in Miami founded Ermanos el
Riscat Brothers to the Rescue. They put together a makeshift
air force of single engine Cessna Skymasters and took to
the skies over the Florida Straits, searching for refugees from
(03:39):
the air and radioating their coordinates to the Coastguard. Ermanos
el Riscate saved thousands of lives. They became heroes. As
time passed, the Emigreys grew more ambitious. They began flying
into Cuban airspace, dropping leaflets on Havana, urging the Cuban
people to rise up against Castro's regime. The Cuban government,
(04:00):
already embarrassed by the flight of refugees, was outraged. Tensions rose,
coming to a head on February twenty fourth, nineteen ninety six.
That afternoon, three Armanos al riscate planes took off for
the Florida Straits. As they neared the Cuban coastline, two
Cuban Air Force meg Fighter jets shot down two of
the planes out of the sky, killing all four people aboard.
(04:24):
The response to the attack was immediate. The United States
Security Council passed a resolution denouncing the Cuban government a grave.
President Clinton held a press conference.
Speaker 2 (04:35):
Ladies and gentlemen, I have just been briefed by the
National Security Advisor on the shooting down today in broad
daylight two American civilian airplanes by a Cuban military aircraft.
Speaker 1 (04:50):
The Cuban emigrat population in Miami was furious. The two
planes had been shot down in international airspace, making the
incident tantamount to an act of war. The radio chatter
among the Cuban pilots was released to the press. We
(05:11):
hit him, Cohonis, we hit him. We retired them, Cohonis,
we hit them fuckers. Mark the place where we retired them.
This one won't fuck with us anymore. And then after
one of the MiGs zeroed in on the second Cessna
Homeland or Deathew Bastards, But in the midst of the controversy,
(05:33):
the story suddenly shifted. A retired US rear admiral named
Eugene Carroll gave an interview to CNN. Carol was an
influential figure inside Washington. He had formerly served as director
of all US Armed Forces in Europe, with seven thousand
weapons at his disposal. Just before the Armanos El Roscotte shootdown,
(05:54):
Carol said he and a small group of military analysts
had met with top Cuban officials. CNN's Katherine Callaway interviewed
Carrol to try and make sense of it all. Admiral,
can you tell me what happened on your trip to Cuba,
who you spoke with, and what you were told? Then,
Carol says, we were hosted by the Ministry Defense General
(06:16):
Rossalis del Toro. We traveled around, inspected Cuban bases, Cuban schools,
their partially completed nuclear power plant, and so on. In
long discussions with General Rosales del Toro and his staff,
the question came up about these overflights from US aircraft,
not government aircraft, but private airplanes operating out of Miami.
(06:38):
They asked US what would happen if we shot one
of those down? We can you know? Carol says he
interpreted that question from his Cuban hosts as a thinly
veiled warning. Then Callaway asks, so, when you returned, who
did you relay this information to? Carol replies, as soon
as we could make appointments, we discussed the situation with
(07:00):
members of the State Department and members of the Defense
Intelligence Agency. The Defense Intelligence Agency THEA is the third
arm of the foreign intelligence triumvirate in the US government,
along with the CIA and the National Security Agency. If
Carol had met with the State Department and the DIA,
(07:22):
he had delivered the Cuban warning about as high up
in the American government as you could go. And did
the State Department and the DiiA take those warnings to heart?
Did they step in and stop Armanos el Rascote from
continuing their reckless forays into Cuban airspace? Obviously not, Carrol's
(07:43):
comments ricochet around Washington d C. Policy circles. This was
an embarrassing revelation. The Cuban shootdown happened on February twenty fourth.
Carol's warnings to the State Department and DIA were delivered
on February twenty third. A prominent Washington insider met with
the US officials the day before the crisis explicitly warned
(08:07):
them that the Cubans had lost patients with Armanos el Riscote,
and his warning was ignored. What began as a Cuban
atrocity was now transformed into a story about American diplomatic incompetence.
By February twenty fifth, when Carol spoke with CNN, it's
clear that this perception had already sunk in. Fidel Castro
(08:30):
wasn't being invited onto CNN to defend himself, but he
didn't need to be. He had a rear admiral making
his case. Does anything about Admiral Carroll and the Cuban
shootdowns strike you as odd? There are an awful lot
of coincidences here. First, the Cubans plan a deliberate, murderous
(08:53):
attack on US citizens flying in international airspace. Second, it
just so happens that the day before the attack, a
prominent military insider delivers a stern warning to US officials
about the possibility of exacs that action. And third, that
warning frituitously puts that same official the day after the attack,
(09:18):
in a position to make the Cuban case on one
of the world's most respected news networks. The timing of
those three events is a little too perfect, isn't it.
If you were a public relations firm trying to mute
the fallout from a very controversial action, that's exactly how
you'd script it. Have a seemingly neutral expert available right
(09:40):
away to say I warned them. This is what a
military counterintelligence analyst named Reg Brown thought in the days
after the incident. Brown worked on the Latin American desk
of the Defense Intelligence Agency. His job was to understand
the ways in which the Cuban intelligence services were trying
to influence American military operations. His business, in other words,
(10:05):
was to be alert to the kinds of nuances, subtleties,
and unexplained co incidences that the rest of US ignore.
And Brown couldn't shake the feeling that somehow the Cubans
had orchestrated the whole crisis. It turned out, for example,
that the Cubans had a source inside Armanos el Roscote,
a pilot named Juan Pablo RoCE. On the day before
(10:27):
the attack, Roque had disappeared and resurfaced at Castro's side
in Havana. Clearly, Roque told his bosses back home that
Armanos al Riscote had something planned for the twenty fourth.
That made it very difficult for Brown to imagine that
the date of the Carol briefing had been chosen by
chance for maximum public relations impact. The Cubans would want
(10:51):
their warning delivered the day before, wouldn't they That way,
the State Department and the DIA couldn't wiggle out of
the problem by saying that the warning was vague or
long ago. Carol's words were right in front of them
on the day the pilots took off from Miami. So
who ragned that meeting? Brown wondered who picked February twenty third.
(11:14):
He did some digging, and the name he came up
with startled him. It was a colleague of his DIA,
a Cuba expert named Anna Balen Montes. Anna Montes was
a star. She had been selected repeatedly for promotions and
special career opportunities, showered with accolades and bonuses. Her reviews
(11:35):
were glowing. She had come to the DIA from the
Department of Justice, and in his recommendation One of her
former supervisors described her as the best employee he had
ever had. She once got a medal from George Tennant,
the director of the CIA. Her nickname inside the intelligence
community was the Queen of Cuba. Weeks past, Brown agonized
(12:00):
to accuse a colleague of treachery on the basis of
such semi paranoid speculation. Was an awfully big step, especially
when the colleague was someone of Monte's stature. Finally, Brown
made up his mind, taking his suspicions to a DIA
counterintelligence officer named Scott Carmichael.
Speaker 3 (12:19):
He came over and we walked in the neighborhoods around
there for a while during lunch hour.
Speaker 1 (12:24):
This is Carmichael talking about his first meeting with Reg Brown.
Speaker 3 (12:27):
And I think it was during that lunch hour. He
hardly even got to tamatas. I mean, most of it
was listening to him saying, oh God, he's bringing his hands,
saying I don't want to do the wrong thing. Yea, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1 (12:38):
Slowly Carmichael drew him out. Brown had more evidence. He
had written a report in the late nineteen eighties detailing
the involvement of senior Cuban officials and international drug smuggling.
Speaker 3 (12:50):
He identified specific Cuban senior Cuban officers, including I think
a general office and some lesser officers who were dirking involved,
and then provided the specifics I mean whites, the dates,
the time, to places who did walked home a whole enchilada.
Speaker 1 (13:09):
In a few days before Brown's report was released, the
Cubans rounded up everyone had mentioned in his investigation, executed
a number of them, and issued a public denial.
Speaker 3 (13:19):
I wrote one for the fuck there was a league.
Speaker 1 (13:24):
It made REDG. Brown paranoid. In nineteen ninety four, two
Cuban intelligence officers had defected and told a similar story.
The Cubans had someone high inside American intelligence. So what
was he to think? Brown said to Carmichael, didn't he
have reason to be suspicious? Then he told Carmichael the
(13:46):
other thing that had happened During the Ermanos al Riscote crisis.
Montees worked at the DIA's office on Bowling Air Force
Base in the Anacostia section of Washington, d C. When
the planes were shot down, she was called into the Pentagon.
If you were one of the government's leading Cuba experts,
you were needed at the scene. The shootdown happened on
(14:08):
a Saturday. The following evening, Brown happened to telephone asking
for Montes. He sent some woman answered the phone and
told him that Anna had left. Carmichael says, earlier in
the day, Montes had gotten a phone call and afterwards
she'd been agitated. Then she told everyone in the situation
(14:29):
room that she was tired, that there was nothing going on,
that she was going home, and Reg.
Speaker 3 (14:34):
Was just absolutely incredulous. This is just so counter to
our culture that he couldn't even leave it. Everybody understands
that when a crisis occurs, you're called in because you
have some expertise you can add add to the decision
making processes.
Speaker 1 (14:51):
Here, Scott Carmichael starts thumping to make his point, Pentagon, you.
Speaker 3 (14:57):
Were available until you were dismissed. That's it's just understood.
You know, at somebody at that level calls you in
because all of a sudden, with North Koreans and launce
A Michelan San Francisco, you don't just decide to leave
when you get tired and armored. Everybody understands, and yet
she did that and was just.
Speaker 1 (15:19):
In Reg Brown's thinking, if Montez really worked for the Cubans,
they would have been desperate to hear from her. They
would want to know what was happening in the situation room.
Did she have a meeting that night with her handler.
It was all a bit far fetched, which is why
Brown was so conflicted. But there were Cuban spies. He
knew that. And here was this woman taking a personal
(15:42):
phone call and heading out the door in the middle
of what was, for a Cuba specialist, just about the
biggest crisis in a generation. And on top of that,
she's the one who wo had arrange the awfully convenient
Admiral Carrol briefing. Brown told Carmichael that the Cubans had
wanted to shoot down one of the Harmanos el Riscotte
planes for years, but they hadn't because they knew what
(16:05):
a provocation that would be. It might serve as the excuse,
you know, States needed to depose Fidel Castro or launch
an invasion. To the Cubans, it wasn't worth it unless,
that is, they could figure out some way to turn
public opinion in their favor.
Speaker 3 (16:21):
And so he looked at that one. Holy shit, I'm
looking at a kitting color and Dollan's influence operation to
spin a story, and I asked the one who led
the effort to me with the adil, Carol, what the
hell is that all about?
Speaker 1 (16:37):
Months past? Brown persisted. Finally, Scott Carmichael pulled Montez file.
She had passed her most recent polograph with flying colors.
She didn't have a secret drinking problem or unexplained sums
in her bank account. She had no red flags.
Speaker 3 (16:55):
After I had reviewed the security file of a personnel
file on her, I thought, reg Way off here, this
woman is like, she's going to be the next director
of Intelligence from DN. He's just fabulous.
Speaker 1 (17:10):
He knew that in order to justify an investigation on
the basis of speculation, he had to be meticulous. Reg Brown,
he said, was coming apart. He had to satisfy Brown's
suspicions one way or another, as he put it, to
document the living shit out of everything. Because if word
got out that Montes was under suspicion, I knew I
was going to be facing a shit storm. Carmichael called
(17:36):
monta is in. They met in a conference room at
Bowling Air Force Base. She was attractive, intelligent, slender, with
short hair and sharp, almost severe features. Carmichael thought to himself,
this woman is impressive.
Speaker 3 (17:52):
She sat down. She was sitting like almost texting to
me about that for away.
Speaker 1 (17:55):
Here Carmichael holds his hands three feet apart.
Speaker 3 (17:59):
Same side of the table, kind of thing, and she
crossed her legs. I don't think that she did it
on purpose. I don't think she didn't think she was
just getting comfortable. Happen to be lame man. She couldn't
know that. I mean, I like it. I know that
I glanced down.
Speaker 1 (18:18):
He asked her about the Admiral Carroll meeting. She had
an answer. It wasn't her idea at all. The son
of someone she knew at DIA had accompanied Carol to Cuba,
and she'd gotten a call afterward.
Speaker 3 (18:29):
I know his dad. His dad called me and he said, hey,
you know, if you want the latest scoop on, you
should go see the Admiral Carroll. And so I just
called up Admiral Carroll and we looked at our schedules
and decided twenty third of February. It was the most
convenient date that works for both of us, and that
was it.
Speaker 1 (18:43):
As it turned out, Carmichael knew the DIA employee she
was talking about He told her that he was going
to call him up and corroborate her story, and she said,
please do So what happened with the phone call in
the situation room, he asked her. She said she didn't
remember getting a phone call, and to Carmichael, it seemed
as though she was being honest. It had been a crazy,
(19:06):
hectic day nine months before. What about leaving early?
Speaker 3 (19:10):
She said, well, yeah, I did leave. Okay, So right
away she's admitting to that, and she's not denying stuff
which might be a little suspicious. She said, yeah, I
did leave early today that day, and she says, you know,
it was on a Sunday. The cafeterias were closed. I'm
a very picky eater. I have analogies, so I don't
eat stuff out of any machines. I got there around
six o'clock in the morning, about again, case black at night,
(19:31):
I'm starving to death. Nothing was going on. They didn't
really need me, so I just decaided I was just
gonna get out of there, go home and eat something.
And that rang true to me. I did.
Speaker 1 (19:43):
After the interview, Carmichael set out to double check her answers.
The date of the briefing really did seem like a coincidence.
Her friend's son had gone to Cuba with Carol.
Speaker 3 (19:54):
And I learned that, Yeah, she does a aalogy. She's
very particular about what she eats. I thought, she's there
in the Pentagon on Sunday. I've been there. The cafterias
aren't open. She went all day long without eating. She
went home. I said, well, it kind of makes sense.
Speaker 1 (20:09):
So Carmichael went back to reg Brown and told him
not to worry. He turned his attention to other matters.
Anna Montes went back to her office. All was forgotten
and forgiven until one day in two thousand and one,
five years later, when it was discovered that every night
(20:30):
Montes had gone home typed up from memory all of
the facts and insights she had learned that day at
work and sent it to her handlers in Havana. From
the day she joined the Dia, Montes had been a
Cuban spy. In the classic spy novel The Secret Agent
(20:50):
is Slippery and Devious were hoodwinked by the brilliance of
the enemy. That was the way many Cia insiders explained
the way Florentino as Piaga's revelations. Castro is a genius.
The agents were brilliant actors in truth, however, the most
dangerous spies are rarely diabolical. Aldrich Ames, maybe the most
(21:13):
damaging trader in American history, had mediocre performance reviews, a
drinking problem, and didn't even try to hide all the
money he was getting from the Soviet Union for his spying.
Anna Montes was scarcely any better. Right before she was arrested,
the DIA found the codes she used to send her
dispatches to Havana. Where did they find those codes? In
(21:35):
her purse and in her apartment? She had a short
wave radio in a shoe box in her closet. Brian Mattel,
the CIA Cuba specialist who witnessed the Espiaga disaster, knew
mont as well. He used to work as something called
a National Intelligence Officer NIO.
Speaker 4 (21:54):
She used to sit across the table from me at
meetings that I convened when I was INIO. You know,
I would try to engage her and she would always
give me these strange reactions when I would try to
pin her down at some of these meetings that I convened,
try to pen her down on you know, what do
you think is infidel what do you think Fidell's motives
are about this? You know she would fumble, you know,
(22:16):
she in a retrospect and retrospect, you know, the deer
with the headlights in his eyes, she she blocked. You know,
she would even you know, even physically, she would show
some you know, some kind of reactions that that caused
me to think, Oh, she is nervous because she's just
such a terrible analyst. She doesn't know what to say.
Speaker 1 (22:34):
One year later, Lttel says, Montez was accepted into the
CIA's Distinguished Analyst Program, a research sabbatical available to intelligence
officers from across the government. Where'd she ask to go? Cuba?
Speaker 4 (22:48):
Of course she went to Cuba funded by this program.
Can you imagine.
Speaker 1 (22:58):
If you were a Cuban spy trying to conceal your intentions,
would you request a paid sabbatical in Havana. ATel was
speaking almost twenty years after it happened, but the brazenness
of her behavior still astounded him.
Speaker 4 (23:13):
She went to Cuba as a CIA distinguished intelligence and analysts.
Of course, they were delighted to have her, especially on
our nickel, and I'm sure that they gave her all
kinds of clandestine tradecraft.
Speaker 3 (23:25):
Training while she was there.
Speaker 4 (23:27):
I suspect camp rude, but I'm pretty sure she met
with Fidel. Fidell loved to meet with his principal agents.
He loved to meet with them, to encourage them, to
congratulate them, to revel in the success that they were
having together against against the CIA.
Speaker 1 (23:43):
When Montes came back to the Pentagon, she wrote a
paper in which she didn't even bother to hide her biases.
Speaker 4 (23:49):
There should have been all kinds of red flags raised
and gongs 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 their point
of view.
Speaker 1 (24:04):
But did anyone raise those red flags? Hotel says he
never once suspected she was a spy.
Speaker 4 (24:10):
On the contrary, there were CIA officers of my rank
or close to my rank who thought she was the
best Cuban analyst there was. I never trusted her, but
for the wrong reasons, and that's one of my great regrets.
I'm always believed I was convinced that she was a
(24:31):
terrible analyst on Cuba. Well she was, wasn't she objectively?
Because she wasn't working for us she was working for.
But I never connected the dots.
Speaker 1 (24:43):
Nor did anyone else. Anna Montez had a younger brother
named Tito, who was an FBI agent. He had no idea.
Montez's 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,
(25:04):
was Latin American intelligence. His job was to go up
against spies like his girlfriend. He had no idea. When
Mantes 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
(25:24):
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 the Fifth taped to her
wall at eye level for all the world to see.
The king hath note of all that they intend by
(25:46):
interception which they dream not of. Or, to put it
a bit more plainly, the Queen of Cuba takes note
of all that the US 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
(26:06):
is that there is something wrong with us us. We'll
be back after this. We're back with more from this
excerpt of my new book, Talking to Strangers. Over the
course of his career, the psychologist Tim Levine has conducted
hundreds of versions of the same simple experiment. He invites
(26:31):
students to his laboratory and gives them a trivia test.
What's 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're given a partner, someone they've
never met before, who is unknown to them, working for Levine.
There's also an instructor in the room named Rachel. Midway
(26:53):
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
(27:15):
the desk, so it talk.
Speaker 5 (27:16):
To them whether they cheat or not, and then later
we interview them, asking Digiti.
Speaker 1 (27:21):
This is Tim Levine. He says, in about thirty percent
of cases, the research subjects do cheat. Levine's theories are
laid out in his book duped Truth, Default Theory and
the Social Science of Lying in Deception. If you want
to understand how deception works, there is no better place
to start. The number of scholars around the world who
(27:43):
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
about deception, and at the core of that theory are
the insights he gained from that first trivia quiz study.
(28:06):
I watched videotape of a dozen or so post experiment
interviews with Levine in his office the University of Alabama
in Birmingham. Because of privacy regulations, we can't play them
for you here, but we're going to re enact them.
Here's the first. The interviewer and the subject, a slightly
spaced out young man. Let's call him Philip.
Speaker 6 (28:29):
All right, So have you played trivial pursuit games before,
not very much, but I think I have. Okay, So
in the current game, did you find the questions difficult?
Speaker 3 (28:39):
Yes? Some were?
Speaker 6 (28:42):
Yes, yes, some were.
Speaker 3 (28:44):
I was like, whoa, what is that?
Speaker 6 (28:47):
If you would scale them on one to ten? If
one was easy and ten was difficult, where do you
think you would put them?
Speaker 4 (28:53):
I would put them an eight and an eight.
Speaker 6 (28:55):
Yeah, they're pretty tricky.
Speaker 1 (28:57):
Philip is then told that he and his partner did
very well in the test. The interviewer asked him why.
Speaker 6 (29:04):
Teamwork, teamwork? Yeah, okay, all right, So now I called
Rachel out of the room briefly. When she was gone,
did you cheat?
Speaker 4 (29:14):
I guess no.
Speaker 1 (29:17):
Philip looks away.
Speaker 6 (29:18):
Are you telling the truth?
Speaker 3 (29:20):
Yes?
Speaker 6 (29:21):
Okay. So when I interview your partner and I ask Kurt,
what is she going to say?
Speaker 1 (29:25):
At this point, there's an uncomfortable silence, as if the
student is trying to get his story straight, He's obviously
thinking very hard. Levine said no.
Speaker 6 (29:36):
No, yeah, okay, all right, Well that's all I need
from you.
Speaker 1 (29:42):
Is Philip telling the truth. Levine has shown the Philip
videotape to hundreds of people, and nearly every viewer correctly
pegs Philip as a cheater. As the partner confirmed to Levine,
Philip looked inside the answer filled envelope the minute Rachel
left the room. In his exit interview, he lied. And
(30:02):
it's obvious.
Speaker 3 (30:04):
That's so like.
Speaker 7 (30:04):
Everybody gets a sky right, Yeah, a cheater. He is
no conviction, right. She can't even keep a straight face, right.
Speaker 1 (30:18):
Philip was easy, But the more tapes we looked at,
the harder it got. Here's the second case. Let's call
him Lucas. He was handsome, articulate, confident. Here he is
talking to the interviewer.
Speaker 6 (30:32):
So I have to ask, when Rachel left the room,
did I he cheating a card?
Speaker 4 (30:35):
No?
Speaker 6 (30:36):
Are you telling me the truth?
Speaker 3 (30:38):
Yes?
Speaker 4 (30:38):
I am.
Speaker 6 (30:39):
When I interview your partner and I ask her the
same question, what do you think she's gonna say?
Speaker 3 (30:43):
Same thing? Yeah?
Speaker 1 (30:46):
Yeah, he is good. It's everybody believes him, Levine said.
I believed him. Lucas was lying. Levine and I spent
the better part of the morning watching his trivia quiz videotapes.
By the end, I was ready to throw up my hands.
I had no idea what to make of anyone. The
point of Levine's research was to try and answer one
(31:06):
of the biggest puzzles in human psychology, Why are we
so bad at detecting lies? You'd think would be good
at it. Logic says, it would be very useful for
human beings to know when they're being deceived. Evolution over
many millions of years should have favored people with the
ability to pick up on the subtle signs of deception,
(31:27):
but it hasn't. In one iteration of his experiment, Levine
divided his tapes in half, twenty two liars and twenty
two truth tellers. On average, the people watching the videos
correctly identified the liars fifty six percent of the time.
Other psychologists have tried similar versions of the same experiment,
(31:48):
The average for all of them fifty four percent. Just
About everyone is terrible, police officers, judges, therapists, even CIA
officers running big spy networks. Every one why Tim Levine's
answer is called truth default theory.
Speaker 3 (32:07):
Or t d T.
Speaker 1 (32:09):
Levine's theory started with an insight that came from one
of his graduate students. He's soon park. It was right
at the beginning of Levine's research, when he was as
baffled as the rest of his profession about why we
are all so bad at something that, by rights, we
should be good at.
Speaker 5 (32:24):
Her big insight, Well, first one was in the fifty
four percent deception accuracy thing that's averaging across trust and lies,
and you come to a very different understanding if you
break out truth how much people are right on truth
(32:45):
and how much people are right on lies.
Speaker 1 (32:48):
What he means is this, If I tell you that
your accuracy rate on Levine's videos is right around fifty percent,
the natural assumption is to think that you are just
randomly guessing, that you have no idea what you're doing.
But Park's observation was that's not true. We're much better
than chance at correctly identifying the student who are telling
(33:09):
the truth, but we're much worse than chance at correctly
identifying the students who are lying. We go through all
those videos and we guess true true, true, which means
we get most of the truthful interviews right and most
of the liars wrong. We have a default to truth.
Our operating assumption is that the people that we're dealing
(33:29):
with are honest. Levine says his own experiment is an
almost perfect illustration of this phenomenon. He invites people to
play a trivia game for money. Suddenly the instructor is
called out of the room and she just happens to
leave the answers to the test in plain view on
her desk. Levine says that logically the subject should roll
(33:51):
their eyes at this point. They're college students, they're not stupid.
They've signed up for a psychological experiment. They're given a
partner whom they've never met, who is egging them on
to cheat. You would think that they might be even
a little suspicious that things are not as they seem.
Speaker 5 (34:08):
But no, so they catch that they leaving the room
might be a set up. I think they almost never
catch as that their partners.
Speaker 7 (34:18):
A suite I see, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3 (34:23):
So it's weird. It's interesting what they suspect. So they
think that there might be hidden gaps.
Speaker 5 (34:29):
Yeah right, they think it might be a set up,
because insurements are set.
Speaker 1 (34:32):
Ups, right, But this nice person they're talking and chatting to,
they never question it. To snap out of truth default
mode requires what Levine calls a trigger. A trigger is
not the same as a suspicion or the first sliver
of doubt. We fall out of truth default mode only
(34:53):
when the case against our initial assumption becomes definitive. We
do not behave. In other words, like sober minded scientists
slowly gathering evidence of the truth or falsity of something
before reaching a conclusion, we do the opposite. We start
by believing, and we stop believing only when our doubts
(35:14):
and misgivings rise to the point where we could no
longer explain them away. This proposition sounds at first that
the kind of hair splitting that social scientists loved to
engage in. It is not. It is a profound point
that explains a lot of otherwise puzzling behavior. Consider, for example,
(35:34):
one of the most famous findings in all of psychology,
Stanley Milgram's Obedience Experiment. In nineteen sixty one, Milgram recruited
volunteers from New Haven to take part in what he
said was a memory experiment. Each volunteer was met by
a somber, imposing young man named John Williams, who explained
(35:55):
that they were going to play the role of teacher
in the experiment. Williams introduced them to another volunteer, a pleasant,
middle aged man named mister Wallace. Mister Wallace, they were told,
was to be the learner. He was in an adjoining
room wired to a complicated apparatus capable of delivering electrical
shocks up to four hundred and fifty volts. If you're
(36:18):
curious about what four hundred and fifty volts feels like,
it's just shy of the amount of electrical shock that
leaves tissue damage. The teacher volunteer was instructed to give
the learner a series of memory tasks, and each time
the learner failed, the volunteer was to punish him with
an ever greater electrical shock in order to see whether
the threat of punishment affected someone's ability to perform memory tasks.
(36:43):
As the shocks escalated, Wallace would cry out in pain,
and ultimately he started hammering on the walls. But if
the teacher waivered, the imposing instructor would urge them on,
please continue. The experiment requires that you continue. It is
(37:04):
absolutely essential that you continue. You have no other choice.
It must go on. The reason the Milgrim experiment is
so famous is that virtually all of the volunteers complied.
Sixty five percent ended up administering the maximum dose to
the hapless learner. In the wake of the Second World
War and the revelations about what German guards had been
(37:27):
ordered to do in the Nazi concentration camps. Milgram's findings
caused a sensation, But to Levine, there's a second lesson
to the experiment. The volunteer shows up and meets the
imposing young John Williams. He was actually a local high
school biology teacher, chosen, in Milgram's words, because he was technical,
(37:48):
looking and dry, the type you would later see on
television in connection with the Space Program. Everything william said
during the experiment had been memorized from a script written
by Milgram himself. Mister Wallace was in fact a man
named Jim McDonough. He worked for the railroad. Molgram liked
him for the part of victim because he was mild
(38:10):
and submissive. His cries of agony were taped and played
over a loudspeaker. The experiment was a little amateur theatrical production,
and the word amateur here is crucial. The Milgrim experiment
was not produced for a Broadway stage. Mister Wallace, by
Mogram's own description, was a terrible actor, and everything about
(38:33):
the experiment was, to put it mildly, more than a
little far fetched. The electric shock machine didn't actually give shocks.
More than one participant saw the loud speaker in the
corner and wondered why Wallace's cries were coming from there,
not from behind the door to the room where Wallace
was strapped in, and if the purpose of the experiment
(38:56):
was to measure learning wyner, did William spend the entire
time with the teacher and not behind the door with
the learner. Didn't that make it obvious that what he
really wanted to do was observe the pre inflicting the pain,
not the person receiving the pain. As hoaxes go, the
Milgram experiment was pretty transparent, and just as with Levine's
(39:20):
trivia test, people fell for it. They defaulted to truth.
As one subject wrote to Mogram in a follow up questionnaire,
I actually checked the death notices in the New Haven
Register for at least two weeks after the experiment to
see if I had been involved and a contributing factor
(39:40):
in the death of the so called learner. I was
very relieved that his name did not appear another road.
Believe me, when no response came from mister Wallace with
the stronger voltage, I really believe the man was probably dead.
These are adults who were apparently convinced that a prestigious
(40:01):
institution of higher learning could run a possibly lethal torture
experiment in one of its basements. The experiment left such
an effect on me. Another wrote that I spent the
night in a cold sweat and nightmares because of the
fear that I might have killed that man in the chair.
But here's the crucial detail. Milgram's subjects weren't hopelessly gullible.
(40:24):
They had doubts, lots of doubts. In her fascinating history
of Milgram's obedience experiments, Behind the Shock Machine, Geina Perry
interviews a retired too maker named Joe Demo, who was
one of Milgram's original subjects. I thought this is bizarre,
Demo told Perry. Demo became convinced that Wallace was faking it.
(40:47):
But then mister Wallace came out of the locked room
at the end of the experiment and put on a
little act. He looked, Demo remembers, haggard and emotional. He
came in with a handkerchief in his hand, wiping his face.
He came up to me and he offered his hand
to shake hands with me, and he said I want
to thank you for stopping it. When he came in,
(41:08):
I thought, Wow, maybe it really was true. Demo was
pretty sure that he was being lied to. But all
it took was for one of the liars to extend
the pretense a little longer, look a little upset, and
mop his brow with a handkerchief, and Demo folded his cards.
(41:29):
Here are the full statistics from the Milgrim experiment. Fifty
six point one percent I fully believed the learner was
getting painful shocks. Twenty four percent, although I had some doubts,
I believe the learner was probably getting the shocks six
point one percent. I just wasn't sure whether the learner
(41:50):
was getting the shocks or not. Eleven point four percent.
Although I had some doubts, I thought the learner was
probably not getting the shocks. Two point four percent. I
was certain the learner was not getting the shocks. Over
forty percent of the volunteers picked up on something odd,
(42:13):
something that suggested the experiment was not what it seemed,
But those doubts just weren't enough to trigger them out
of truth. Default. That's Levine's point. You believe someone not
because you have no doubts about them. Belief is not
the absence of doubt. You believe someone because you don't
have enough doubts about them. Just think about how many
(42:36):
times you have criticized someone else in hindsight for their
failure to spot a liar. You should have known there
were all kinds of red flags you had doubts. Levine
would say, that's the wrong way to think about what happened.
The right question is were there enough red flags to
push you over the threshold of belief. If there weren't,
(43:00):
then by defaulting to truth, you were only being human
more After this, we're back with chapter three of Talking
to Strangers. Anna Berlin Montes grew up in the affluent
suburbs of Baltimore. Her father was a psychiatrist. She attended
(43:24):
the University of Virginia, then received a master's degree in
foreign affairs from Johns Hopkins University. She was a passionate
supporter of the Marxist Sandinista government in Nicaragua, which the
US government was then working to overthrow, and her activism
attracted the attention of a recruiter for Cuban intelligence. In
(43:46):
nineteen eighty five, she made a secret visit to Havana.
Her new compatriots encouraged her to apply for work in
the US intelligence community. That same year, she joined the DIA,
and from there her assent was swift. Montes arrived at
her office first thing in the morning, ate lunch at
her desk, and kept to herself. She lived alone in
(44:08):
a two bedroom condo in the Cleveland Park neighborhood of Washington.
She never married. In the course of his investigation, Scott Carmichael,
the DIA counterintelligence officer, collected every adjective used by Montes's
co workers to describe her. It is an impressive list, shy, quiet,
(44:29):
aloof cool, independent, self reliant, standoffish, intelligent, serious, dedicated, focused,
hard working, sharp, quick, manipulative, venomous, unsociable, ambitious, charming, confident, businesslike,
no nonsense, assertive, deliberate, calm, mature, unflappable, capable, and competent.
(44:54):
Anna Montes assumed that the reason for her meeting with
Carmichael was that he was performing a routine security check.
All intelligence officers are periodically vetted so that they can
continue to hold a security clearance. She was presque because.
Speaker 3 (45:10):
When she first came in, she started blowing off, you know,
by telling me and it was true. She had just
been named as an acting division chief. She had a
ton of responsibilities and meetings and things to do, and
she just didn't have a lot of time.
Speaker 1 (45:22):
Carmichael is a disarmingly boyish man with fair hair and
a substantial stomach. He looks, by his own estimation, like
the late comedian and actor Chris Farley. She must have
thought she could bully him.
Speaker 3 (45:35):
And so I just dealt with the way you normally do.
The first time, you just kind of ignore it, just
acknowledge it. I mean, the first thing you use, you acknowledge, say,
oh I understand, yeah, I heard that. That congratulation's great,
I understand. You got a living in amount of time.
And then you just kind of ignore it, because if
it takes you twelve days, it takes twelve days. You
don't let him go. But then she hit me with
it again, and she really me appointed it. I mean,
I hadn't settled in yet, and she said, oh, but seriously,
(45:58):
I got to leap by two or something like that
because I got all these things to do, and I'm like,
what the fuck? You know? I asked what I'm thinking?
And so when she did that, I lost I lose
my temper, but I lost my patience. That's why I
hit her. Be twenty eyes look on, I have reasons
to suspect that you might be involved in the car
and velo and simple as operational. We need to sit
(46:19):
down and talk about this.
Speaker 1 (46:20):
Montes had been by that point a Cuban spy for
nearly her entire government career. She had met with her
handlers at least three hundred times, handing over so many
secrets that she ranks as one of the most damaging
spies in US history. She had secretly visited Cuba on
several occasions. After her arrest, it was discovered that Fidel
(46:42):
Castro had personally given her a medal. Through all of that,
there hadn't been even a whiff of suspicion. And suddenly,
at the start of what she thought was a routine
background check, a funny looking Chris Farley character was pointing
the finger at her. She sat there in shock.
Speaker 3 (47:02):
She would just looking at me like I'm sure, looking
at the headlines, waiting for say, another word, just waiting.
Speaker 1 (47:12):
When Carmichael looked back on that meeting years later, he
realized that was the first clue he had missed her
reaction made no sense.
Speaker 3 (47:20):
I just didn't pick up on She never said, what
are you talking about? Nothing like that. She didn't see
a freaking word. She just sat down and listening. And
you know, if i'd been a stute, I picked up
on that. No denial, no confusion, no anger. Anybody who's
(47:47):
told the suspective of murder or something the completely and
it's like, wait a minute, you just accused me of
so I don't want to know what the fuck this
is all about. And eventually they'll get in your face,
you know, they'll really get in your face. I didn't
do a freaking thing and stept sit there.
Speaker 1 (48:03):
Like Carmichael had doubts right from the beginning, But doubts
triggered disbelief only when you can't explain them away, and
he could easily explain them away. She was the Queen
of Cuba, for goodness sake. How could the Queen of
Cuba be a spy? Sure, Carmichael told her, I have
reason to suspect that you might be involved in a
(48:25):
counterintelligence influence operation, but he later admitted he said that
only because he wanted her to take the meeting seriously.
Speaker 3 (48:34):
I was anxious to get into it and get to
the next step. And like I said, I just panted
myself in the back and I worked. I'd shut her up,
not to hear anymore of that crap anymore. Now, let's
get do this, get this done. That's why I missed.
Speaker 1 (48:52):
They talked about the Admiral Carroll briefing. She had a
good answer. They talked about why she abruptly left the
Pentagon that day. She had an answer. She was being flirty,
a little playful. He began to relax. He looked down
at her legs again, and.
Speaker 3 (49:09):
She's bouncing her toe like that. I don't know if
it was conscious, but what I do know is that
catches your eye. And we got more comfortable with one another,
and she became just a little bit more flirty.
Speaker 1 (49:25):
They talked about the phone call the day the plane
was shot down. She said she never got a phone call,
or at least she didn't remember getting one. It should
have been another red flag. The people who were with
her that day in the situation room distinctly remembered her
getting a phone call. But then again, it had been
a long and stressful day. They'd all been in the
(49:45):
middle of an international crisis. Maybe they just confused her
with someone else. There was one other thing, another moment
when Carmichael saw something in her reaction that made him wonder.
Near the end of the interview, he asked Montez a
series of questions about what happened after she left the
Pentagon that day. It was a standard investigative procedure. He
(50:08):
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.
Speaker 3 (50:29):
I said, okay, well, so what'd you do? You can
park the car and you walked across the street while
I'm doing this is when changed the demeanor keeven in mine.
I'd been talking to her for almost two hours, and
by that time, Anna and I were almost like buddies. Okay,
not that close, but where we have a great rapport going.
(50:50):
She's actually joking about stuff or making funny remarks every
once in a while about stuff. It's that casual, and
then all of a sudden it's huge. Change came over
and you could see it, and one minute she's just
almost flirting stuff. We were having a good time at that. Oh,
all of a sudden, it's like at was handing the
(51:13):
cookie jar and his back and monsters you have. She
was looking at me like and denying, but looking at
me with that looked like, what do you know?
Speaker 1 (51:26):
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 the following
morning at a pre arranged site. That night, when she
(51:49):
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.
Speaker 3 (52:07):
She's scared the fucking dam and she thought I knew
it and I didn't. I mean, I had no idea,
I didn't know what I had. I knew I had something.
I knew there was something, And long after the interview,
I looked back at that, and what did I do?
I did the same thing every other human, I mean does,
But I rationalized it away. I thought, well, maybe she
(52:28):
was maybe she's been seeing a married guy and she
hooked up with her merriat and she didn't want to
tell me. Or maybe she's a lesbian or something and
she was hooking up with a girlfriend she doesn't want
us to know. She's worried about that. I started thinking
about all these other possibilities, and I accepted just enough
(52:48):
so that I wouldn't keep going crazy. Accepted it.
Speaker 1 (52:53):
Anna 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
(53:16):
assumption that Anna Montes was telling the truth, and, almost
without realizing it, work 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, as
(53:38):
Tim 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
(54:01):
an affair, and he says no, and you believe him.
Your default is that he is telling the truth, and
whatever little inconsistency as you spot in his story, you
explained away. But three months later you happen to notice
an unusual hotel charge on his credit card bill, and
the combination of that and weeks of unexplained absences and
(54:22):
mysterious phone calls pushes you over the top. That's how
lies are detected. This is 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
(54:43):
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 it.
Speaker 3 (54:56):
Just you know, I realized what it looks like to you.
I understand your reasoning that you think that this is
a deliberate influence operation. Look see what if it was.
I can't a finger at on to say she was
part of delivery efforts.
Speaker 1 (55:13):
In the end, he says he just had to close
out the case. Four years after Scott Carmichael's interview with
Anna Montes, one of his colleagues the DA met an
analyst for the National Security Agency at an interagency meeting.
The NSA is the third arm of the US intelligence network,
(55:36):
along with the CIA and the DA. They are the codebreakers,
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
(55:57):
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 analysts 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
(56:20):
Agent S had an interest in something called a safe system,
and Agent S had apparently visited the American base at
Guantanamo Bay in the two week time frame from July
fourth to July eighteenth, nineteen ninety six. The man from
the DIA was alarmed. Safe was the name of the
(56:43):
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.
Speaker 3 (57:00):
He said, two and a half years, how many DIA
employees have gone on there. You've never opened up. They've
never told me they open a freaking case on DII
in boy Old Mother Farmers.
Speaker 1 (57:11):
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 Guantanamo Bay
needs to get approval. They need to send two messages
through the Pentagon system, asking first for permission to travel
(57:33):
and then for permission to talk to whomever they wished
to interview at the base. Okay, so two messages. Carmichael said.
He guessed that the earliest anyone traveling to Guantanamo Bay
in July would apply for their clearances was April, so
he had his search parameters travel authority and security clearance
(57:53):
requests from DIA employees regarding Guantanamo Bay made between April
first and July eighteenth, nineteen ninety six. He told his
co worker Gator Johnson to run the same search simultaneously.
Two heads will be better than one. They began searching
to the safe system.
Speaker 3 (58:14):
I thought, I'm gonna go through this real quick and
just see something jumps on it. And that's when I
hit That's when I'm pretty sure it was the twenty
four hit me and it was Hannabi Montes and the
game was fucking over. And I mean it was over
in a heart, and I was really stunned, speechless, stunned.
I could have fallen out of my chair, and I
(58:36):
literally backed up, you know, I was on wheels. I
was literally distancing myself from this bad news.
Speaker 1 (58:47):
Carmichael said, Oh shit,
Host
Malcolm Gladwell
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