The Queen of Cuba

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

Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. This episode contains explicit language. Original's history listeners. Malcolm
Gladwell here. 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 features con

(00:38):
artists and sociopaths and spies. It talks about how drinking
affects the way we make sense of others. I spend
time with a psychologist who ran the CIA's interrogation program
and the man who spotted Bernie made off before anyone else,
and I try to get to the bottom of a
heartbreaking encounter between a police officer and a civilian which

(00:59):
resulted in the death of a young woman named Sandra
Bland in Texas. I think it's a book that will
prompt a lot of conversations and arguments, which, as you
know Fromist 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

(01:21):
storytelling that can be done through a podcast, 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

(01:42):
as an episode of revisionist history. So if 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 Jennelle Manet.

(02:02):
Scoring we even have excerpts from other audiobooks and 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,

(02:23):
I thought I would give you a special preview. So
here it is Chapter three of Talking to Strangers, done
the New way. Let's take a look at another Cuban

(02:52):
spy story. In the early nineteen nineties, thousands of Cubans
began to flee the regime of Fidel Castro. They cobbled
together crude boats made of inner tubes and metal drums
and wooden doors, and any number of other straight parts
set out on a desperate voyage across the ninety miles
of the Florida Straits to the United States. By one estimate,

(03:16):
as many as twenty fourth thousand people died attempting the journey.
It was a human rights disaster. In response, a group
of Cuban emigres in Miami founded Ermanos el Roscat 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 the air

(03:39):
and radiating their coordinates to the coast Guard. Ermanos el
Roscat saved thousands of lives. They became heroes. As time passed,
the emigres 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, already embarrassed by

(04:01):
the flight of refugees, was outraged. Tensions rose, coming to
a head on February twenty fourth, nineteen ninety six, that afternoon,
three Armanos Riscatte planes took off for the Florida Straits.
As they neared the Cuban coastline, two Cuban Air Force
MiG fighter jets shot down two of the planes out
of the sky, killing all four people aboard. The response

(04:24):
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, Ladies and gentlemen, I have
just been briefed by the National Security Adviser on the
shooting down today in broad daylight two American civilian airplanes

(04:47):
by a Cuban military aircraft. 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 hit him, cohonas we hit him,

(05:14):
we retired them cohonas we hit them. Fuckers marked the
place where we retired them. This one won't fuck with
us anymore. And then after one of them, MiG zero
did in the second Cessna Homeland or death View. Bastards
but in the midst of the controversy, the story suddenly shifted.

(05:35):
A retired US rear admiral named Eugene Carrol 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, Carol said he

(05:55):
and a small group of military analysts had met with
top Cuban officials. CNN's Katherine Callaway interviewed Carol to try
and make sense of it all. Admiral, can you tell
me what happened on your trip to Cuba, who you
spoke with, in what you were told? Then, Carol says,
we were hosted by the Ministry of Defense, General Roussalas

(06:17):
del Toro. We traveled around, inspected Cuban bases, Cuban schools,
they're partially completed nuclear power plant, and so on. In
long discussions with General Rosalas 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 the d IA 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 DA,

(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 DA take those warnings to heart?
Did they step in and stop Armanos el Rascatte from
continuing their reckless forays into Cuban airspace? Obviously not, Carroll's

(07:43):
comments ricochet around Washington d C. Policy circles. This was
an embarrassing revelation. The Cuban shootdown happened on February twenty fourth.
Carroll's warnings to the State Department and DA 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 Riscatte,
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 this perception had already sunk in. Fidel Castro wasn't

(08:30):
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,

(08:51):
the Cuban's plan a deliberate murderous 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
exactly that action. And third, that warning fortuitously puts that

(09:15):
same official the day after the attack, 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 scripted. Have

(09:37):
a seemingly neutral expert available right away to say, I
warn them. This is what a military counterintelligence analyst named
Regg 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

(09:57):
Cuban intelligence services were trying to influence American military operations.
His business, in other words, was to be alert to
the kinds of nuances, subtleties, and unexplained incidences that the
rest of us ignore. And Brown couldn't shake the feeling
that somehow the Cubans had orchestrated the whole crisis. It

(10:18):
turned out, for example, that the Cubans had a source
inside Armanos al Roscote, a pilot named Juan Pablo Rocque.
On the day before the attack, Roque had disappeared and
resurfaced at Castro's side in Havana, Cleliu Roque told his
bosses back home that Armanos al Roscote had something planned
for the twenty fourth. That made it very difficult for

(10:41):
Brown to imagine that the date of the Carrol briefing
had been chosen by chance for maximum public relations impact.
The Cubans would want their warning delivered the day before,
wouldn't they That way? The State Department and the DA
couldn't wiggle out of the problem by saying that the
warning was vague or long ago. Carol's words were right

(11:03):
in front of them on the day the pilots took
off from Miami. So who arraigned that meeting? Brown wondered
who picked February twenty third. 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
Blen Montez. Anna Montez was a star. She had been

(11:27):
selected repeatedly for promotions and special career opportunities, showered with
accolades and bonuses. Her reviews 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.

(11:51):
Her nickname inside the intelligence community was the Queen of Cuba.
Weeks passed, Brown agonized 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

(12:14):
suspicions to a DA counterintelligence officer named Scott Carmichael. He
came over and we walked in the neighborhoods around them
for a while during the lunch hour. This is Carmichael
talking about his first meeting with Rech Brown, and I
think it was during that lunch hour. He hardly got
to Tamatus. I mean most of it was listening to
him saying, oh God, I was bringing his hand saying

(12:36):
I don't want to do the role. 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. He identified specific
Cuban senior Cuban officers, including I think a general office

(12:57):
and some lesser officers who were dirkly involved, and then
provide the specifics I mean flights, the dates, time to places,
who did worked home, the whole Enchilada. Then a few
days before Browne's report was released, the Cubans rounded up
everyone had mentioned in his investigation, executed a number of them,
and issued a public denial or the fuck there was

(13:22):
a leak. It made reg 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 El Rascotte crisis.
Montez worked at the DA'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 day. 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

(14:28):
situation room that she was tired, that there was nothing
going on, that she was going home. And Roger was
just absolutely incredulous. This is just so counter to our
culture that he couldn't even believe. Everybody understands that when
a crisis occurs, you're called in because you have some
expertise I can add to the decision making processes. Here,

(14:52):
Scott Carmichael starts thumping to make his point, Pentagon, you
were available until you were dismissed. That's a's just understood.
You know, if somebody that Lowell calls you man because
all of a sudden with North Karins had launched some
mischiell aunt San Francisco, you don't just decide to leave
when you get tired, armored everybody. And yet she did that.

(15:16):
And just 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

(15:37):
Cuban spies. He knew that. And here was this woman
taking a personal 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 would arrange the
awfully convenient Admiral Carrol briefing. Brown told Carmichael that the

(15:58):
Cubans had wanted to shoot down one of the Harmono's
l Rascotte Plains for years, but they hadn't because they
knew what a provocation that would be. It might serve
as the excuse the 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

(16:19):
to turn public opinion in their favor. That's why you
looked at that one. Holy shit, I'm looking at a
Cuban color and tone was influence operation to spin a
story and asked the one who led the effort to
me with ADL. Carroll, what the hell's that at all about?
Months past? Brown persisted. Finally, Scott Carmichael pulled montez file.

(16:44):
She had passed her most recent polygraph with flying colors.
She didn't have a secret drinking problem or unexplained sums
in her bank account. She had no red flags. After
I had reviewed the scurifiles a personnel file on her,
I thought, redg well off, pase here. This woman is like,
she's gonna be the next director of Intelligence Ford. She's

(17:09):
just fabulous. 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

(17:30):
I was going to be facing a shit storm. Carmichael
called Montez in. They met in a conference room at
Bowling Air Force Space. She was attractive, intelligent, slender, with
short hair and sharp, almost severe features. Carmichael thought to himself,
this woman is impressive. She said down she was sitting

(17:53):
like almost mexting me about that. For a way, here
Carmichael holds his hands three feet apart, same side of table,
kind of thing, and she crossed her ways. I don't
think that she did have a purpose. She didn't, you
just getting comfortable. I happened to be a lame man.
She couldn't know that. I mean, I like and I

(18:16):
know that I glanced now. He asked her about the
Admiral Carrol meeting. She had an answer. It wasn't her
idea at all. The son of someone she knew at
DA had a company carol to Cuba, and she'd gotten
a call afterward, I know his dad. His dad called
me and he said, hey, you know, if you want
the latest scoope, you should go see the Admiral Carroll.
And so I just called up Admiral Carrol and we

(18:38):
looked at our schedules and decided the twenty third of February.
It was the most convenient date that works for both
of us. And as it turned out, Carmichael knew the
DA employees 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

(18:59):
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, hectic day nine months before. What about
leaving early? She said, well, yeah, I did leave. Okay,
So right away she's admitting to that. Is she not
denying stuff which might be a little suspicious. She said, yeah,

(19:19):
I did leave early today that day, and she said,
you know, it was on a Sunday. Cafeterias were closing.
A very picky eater. I have allergies, so I don't
eat stuff out of any machines. I cat the around
six o'clock in the morning. Again days block at night,
I'm starving at death. Nothing was going on. They didn't
really need me, so I just decided I was gonna
get out there, go home and eat something. And that

(19:40):
rang true to me. I did. 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, and I learned that, yeah,
she does avalogies. She's very particular about what she eats.
I thought she's there in the Pentagon on Sunday. I've

(20:01):
been there that cafeterias are open. She went all day
long without eating. She went home so well, it kind
of made sense. So Carmichael went back to REDG. Brown
and told him not to worry. He turned his attention
to other matters. Annamantes went back to her office. All

(20:22):
was forgotten and forgiven until one day in two thousand
and one, five years later, when it was discovered that
every night Montes had gone home typed up from memory
all of the facts and insids she had learned that
day at work and sent it to her handlers in Havana.
From the day she'd joined DA Montes had been a

(20:45):
Cuban spy. In the classic spy novel The Secret Agent
is Slippery and Devious were hoodwinked by the brilliance of
the enemy. That was the way many Cia insiders explained
the way Florentino Aspiaga's revelations. Castro is a genius, The
agents were brilliant actors. In truth, however, the most dangerous

(21:08):
spy are rarely diabolical. Aldrich aims maybe the most damaging
traitor 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. Anamantez
was scarcely any better. Right before she was arrested, the

(21:29):
DA found the codes she used to send her dispatches
to Havannah. Where did they find those codes? In her
purse and in her apartment? She had a short wave
radio in a shoe box in her closet. Brian Littell,
the CIA Cuba specialist who witnessed the Spiaga disaster new
Mont as well. He used to work as something called

(21:50):
a National Intelligence Officer NIO. She used to sit across
the table from me at meetings that I can beaned
when I was in IO. 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 can beaned, try
to tend her down on you know, what, what do

(22:11):
you think is Infradel? What do you think Fidel's motives
are about this? You know, she would fumble, you know,
she in a retrospect. In retrospect you know, the deer
with the headlights in his eyes. She blocked. You know,
she would even, you know, even physically, she would show
some you know, some kind of reactions that had caused
me to think, oh, she's nervous because she's just such

(22:31):
a terrible analyst. She doesn't know what to say. One
year later, Lttel says, Montees was accepted into the CIA's
Distinguished Analyst Program, a research sabbatical available to intelligence officers
from across the government. Where did she ask to go? Cuba?
Of course she went to Cuba funded by this program.

(22:54):
Can you imagine if you were a Cuban spy trying
to conceal your intentions, would you request a paid sabbatical
in Havana. Ltel was speaking almost twenty years after it happened,
but the brazenness of her behavior still astounded him. She
went to Cuba as a CIA distinguished Intelligence analysts. Of course,

(23:18):
they were delighted to have her, especially on our nickel.
And I'm sure that they gave her all kinds of
clandestine tradecraft training while she was there. I suspect camp proved,
but I'm pretty sure she met with Fidell. Fidel loved
to meet with this principal agency. Loved to meet with them,
to encourage them, to congratulate them, to revel in the

(23:39):
success that they were having together against the CIA. When
Montez came back to the Pentagon, she wrote a paper
in which she didn't even bother to hide her biases.
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

(23:59):
military that make absolutely no sense except from their point
of view. But did anyone raise those red flags? Hotel
says he never once suspected she was a spy. On
the contrary, they were CI officers at my rank or
close to my rank, who thought she was the best
Cuban analyst there was. I never trusted her, but for

(24:22):
the wrong reasons, and that's one of my great regrets.
I'm always believed I was convinced that she was a
terrible analyst on Cuba. Well she was, wasn't she objectively
because she wasn't working for us, she was working for
Fidel But I never connected the dots, nor did anyone else.

(24:45):
Annamantez had a younger brother named Tito, who was an
FBI agent. He had no idea. Monte'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, was Latin American intelligence.

(25:06):
His job was to go up against spies. Like his girlfriend,
he had no idea. When Montes was finally arrested, the
chief of her section called her co workers together and
told them the news. People started crying in disbelief. The
DA had psychologists lined up to provide on psych counseling services.

(25:27):
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 interception, which they dream not of. Or,

(25:52):
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 would spies? Is not that there is something brilliant
about them. It is that there is something wrong with us.
We'll be back after this. We're back with more from

(26:17):
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 students to his laboratory and gives them a trivia test.
What's the highest mountain in Asia? That kind of thing.

(26:38):
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
through the test, Rachel suddenly gets called away. She leaves
and goes upstairs. Then the carefully scripted performance begins. The

(27:05):
partner says, I don't know about you, but I could
do the money. I think the answers were left right there.
He points to an envelope lying in plain sight on
the desk, So it's up to them whether they cheat
or not. And then later we interviewed them, asking did
you get this is Tim Levine? He says, in about
thirty percent of cases, the research subjects do cheat. Levine's

(27:29):
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 study human deception is vast. There are more theories
about why we lie and how to detect those lies

(27:49):
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.
I watched videotape of a dozen or so post experiment

(28:10):
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 reenact them. Here's
the first. The interviewer and the subject, a slightly spaced
out young man, let's call him Philip. All right, So

(28:30):
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? Yes, some were yes, yes, somewhere.
I was like, well, what is that? If you would
scale them on one to ten, if one was easy
and ten was difficult, where do you think you would

(28:51):
put them? I would put them in eight an eight. Yeah,
they're pretty tricky. Philip is then told that he and
his partner did very well in the test. The interviewer
asked him why, teamwork, teamwork? Yeah, okay, all right, So
now I called Rachel out of the room briefly. When

(29:12):
she was gone, did you cheat? I guess no? Philip
looks away. Are you telling the truth? Yes? Okay. So
when I interview your partner and I asked her, what
is she going to say? 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, no, yeah, okay,

(29:39):
all right, Well that's all I need from you. 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

(29:59):
left the room. In his exit interview, he lied and
it's obvious. So like everybody, Yeah, he is no conviction
right version. He can't even keep a straight face, right,
Philip was easy. But the more tapes we looked at,

(30:22):
the harder it. God, here's a second case. Let's call
him Lucas. He was handsome, articulate, confident. Here he is
talking to the interviewer, say, have to ask when Rachel
left the room today't cheating a car? No? Are you
telling me the truth? Yes, I am. I want to
interview your partner and ask her the same question. What
do you think she's going to say? Same thing? Yeah, yeah,

(30:46):
he's good. Everybody believes him, Levin said. I believed him.
Lucas was lying. Levin and I spent the better part
of a morning watching his Chivia 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 of the

(31:06):
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, but it hasn't.

(31:29):
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, the average for
all of them fifty four percent. Just About everyone is terrible,

(31:54):
police officers, judges, therapists, even CIA officers running big spy networks.
Every one why Tim Levine's answer is called truth default theory,
or ted T. Levine's theory started with an insight that
came from one of his graduate students. He soon park

(32:15):
it was right at the beginning of Levine's research, when
he was as baffuled as the rest of his profession
about why we are all so bad at something that,
by rights we should be good at. Her big insight,
the first one was in the fifty four percent deception
accuracy thing that's averaging across trus and wise and you

(32:37):
come to a very different understanding if you break out truth,
how much people are right on truth and how much
people are right on lies. 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

(33:00):
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 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

(33:20):
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 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,

(33:43):
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 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 ever met,
who is egging them on to cheat. You would think

(34:03):
that they might be even a little suspicious that things
are not as they seem. But no, so they catch
that the leaving the room might be a set up.
The thing they almost never catch is that their partners
a suite. Oh let's see, yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,

(34:24):
So it's weird, it's interesting what they suspect. So they
think that there might be hidden gamuts. Yeah right, They
think it might be a set up, because insurements are
set 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

(34:45):
trigger is not the same as a suspicion or the
first sliver of doubt. We fall out of truth default
mode only 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

(35:09):
start by believing, and we stop believing only when our
doubts and misgivings rise to the point where we could
no longer explain them away. This proposition sounds at first
like the kind of hair splitting that social scientists love
to engage in. It is not. It is a profound
point that explains a lot of otherwise puzzling behavior. Consider,

(35:33):
for example, 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,

(35:54):
who explained 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.

(36:17):
If you're 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

(36:40):
perform memory tasks. As the shocks escalated, Wallace would cry
out in pain, and ultimately he started hammering on the walls.
But if the teacher wavered, the imposing instructor would urge
them on, please continue. The experiment requires that you continue.

(37:04):
It is absolutely essential that you continue. You have no
other choice. Must go on. The reason the Milgram 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 Ti 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. Milgram 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 Milgram experiment
was not produced for a Broadway stage. Mister Wallace, by
Milgram'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 loudspeaker 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 was

(38:56):
to measure learning, why on earth 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 observed the 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 Mulgram 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
in the death of the so called learner. I was

(39:43):
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
institution of higher learning could run a possibly lethal torture

(40:05):
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.
They had doubts, lots of doubts. In her fascinating history

(40:28):
of Milgram's obedience experiments Behind the Shock Machine, Gina Parry
interviews a retired two maker named Joe Dimo, who was
one of Milgram's original subjects. I thought this is bizarre,
Dimo told Parry. Dimo became convinced that Wallace was faking it.
But then mister Wallace came out of the locked room

(40:49):
at the end of the experiment and put on a
little act. He looked, Dimo 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,
I thought, wow, maybe it really was true. Demo was

(41:14):
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.
Here are the full statistics from the Milgrim experiment. Fifty
six point one percent I fully believe the learner was

(41:36):
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
was getting the shocks or not. Eleven point four percent.
Although I had some doubts, I thought the learner was

(41:59):
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,
something that suggested the experiment was not what it seemed,
But those doubts just weren't enough to trigger them out

(42:20):
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
times you have criticized someone else in hindsight for their

(42:40):
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,
then by defaulting to truth, you were only being human more.

(43:05):
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 the University of Virginia,
then received a master's degree in foreign affairs from Johns

(43:29):
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 nineteen eighty five, she
made a secret visit to Havana. Her new compatriots encouraged

(43:52):
her to apply for work in the US intelligence community.
That same year she joined the da 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 a two bedroom
condo in the Cleveland Park neighborhood of Washington. She never married.

(44:14):
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,
aloof cool, independent, self reliant, standoffish, intelligent, serious, dedicated, focused,

(44:36):
hard working, sharp, quick, manipulative, venomous, unsociable, ambitious, charming, confident, businesslike,
no nonsense, assertive, deliberate, calm, mature, unflappable, capable, and competent.
Anamantes assumed that the reason for her meeting with Carmichael

(44:58):
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 brusque because when
she first came in, she tried to blow me off,
you know, by telling me and it was true. She
had just been named as an acting division chief. She
had a tone of responsibilities and meetings and things to do,

(45:20):
and she just didn't have a lot of time. 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, and so I just don't like
the way you normally do. The first time, you just
kind of ignored it, just acknowledge it. I'm the first
thing you used to acknowledge, saying, oh, I understand, Yeah,

(45:42):
I heard that. That. Congratulations, great, I understanding. Got a
living amount of time. And then you just kind of
ignore it because if it takes to twelve days, it
takes twelve days. You don't let him go. But then
she hit me with it again, and she really made
appointed it. I mean I hadn't even settled in yet,
and she said, oh but seriously, I got a lead
by two or something like that, because I got all
these things to do, and I'm like, what the fuck

(46:05):
you know? I mean, that's 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 yards. Look on, I have a reason to
suspect you might be involved in the carr And development.
Simful of operational. We need to sit out and talk
about this. Montez had been by that point a Cuban
spy for nearly her entire government career. She had met

(46:27):
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 Castro had personally given her a medal. Through
all of that, there hadn't been even a whiff of suspicion,

(46:51):
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.
She would just look at emulate sued for headlines, waiting
to say another word, just waiting. When Carmichael looked back

(47:13):
on that meeting years later, he realized that was the
first clue he had missed. Her reaction made no sense.
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. I was listening,
and you know, if i'd been astute. I picked up

(47:38):
on that. No denial, no confusion, no anger. Anybody who's
who's told the suspect of them murder or something, they're
completely in and it's like, wait a minute, you just
accused me of so I don't 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

(48:01):
do a freaking things. Sit there, 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,

(48:21):
Carmichael told her, I have reason to suspect that you
might be involved in a counterintelligence influence operation, but he
later admitted he said that only because he wanted her
to take the meeting seriously. I was anxious to get
into it and get the next step. And like I said,
I'll just patted myself in the bag and I worked.

(48:43):
I shut her up, like they hear anymore that crap anymore.
Let's get through this, get this done. That's why I missed.
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,

(49:03):
a little playful. He began to relax. He looked down
at her legs again, and she bounce, bouncing her toe that.
I don't know if it was conscious or 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. They talked about the phone call

(49:26):
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 had all been in the middle of an international crisis.

(49:47):
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 just wanted as complete

(50:10):
a picture as possible of her movements that evening. He
asked her what she did after work. She said she
drove home. He asked her where she parked. She said
in the lot across the street. He asked her if
she saw anyone else as she was parking. Did she
say hello to anyone? She said no. I said, okay,

(50:30):
boll so what'd you do? You can parked the car
and you walked across the street. And while I'm doing this,
one changed the command. Steven Mine. I've been talking to
for almost two hours, and by that time, Arna and
I were almost like buddies. Okay, not that close, but
we have a great rapport going. She's actually joking about stuff.

(50:51):
We're 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 mean,
one minute, she's just almost flirting stuff. We were having
a good time by that wall. All of it. It's
like a little cute handle. The cookie Jarneys had his

(51:15):
back and monsays, what you have? She was looking at
me like and denying, but looking at me with that
looked like, what do you know? After her arrest, investigators
discovered what had really happened that night. The Cubans had
an arrangement with her. If she ever spotted one of

(51:36):
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 sight. That night, when she got home from
the Pentagon, she saw one of her old handlers standing
by her apartment building. So when Carmichael asked her pointedly,

(51:58):
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, and she
was scared fucking that And she thought I knew it
and I didn't. I mean, I had no idea, I
didn't know why I had. I knew I had something.
I knew there was something, And long after the interview,

(52:20):
I looked back in that and what did I do?
I did the same thing every other human du But
I rationalized it away. I thought, well, maybe she was
maybe she's been seeing a merry guy, and she hooked
up at her marriage and she didn't want to tell me.
Or maybe maybe she's a lesbian or something, and she
was hooking up with a girlfriend. She doesn't want us

(52:40):
to know. She's worried about that. I started thinking about
all these other possibilities, and I accepted just enough so
that I wouldn't keep going crazy. Accept Anna Montez wasn't
a master spy. She didn't need to be. In a
world where our lie detector is set to the off position,

(53:02):
a spy is always going to have an easy time
of it. And was Scott Carmichael somehow negligent? Not at all.
He did what truth default theory would predict any of
us would do. He operated from the assumption that Anamantez
was telling the truth, and, almost without realizing it, work

(53:22):
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 Tim Levine argues,
is that lie detection does not cannot work the way

(53:43):
we expect it to work in the movies. The brilliant
detective confronts the subject and catches him right then and
there in a lie. But in real life, accumulating the
amount of evidence necessary to overwhelm our doubts takes time.
You ask your husband if he is having an affair,
and he says no, and you believe him. Your default

(54:05):
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've happened to notice an unusual
hotel charge on his credit card bill, and the combination
of that and weeks of unexplained absences and mysterious phone
calls pushes you over the top. That's how lies are detected.

(54:28):
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 the rest
of us human equipped with the same set of biases
to truth as everyone else. Carmichael went back to REDG.

(54:53):
Brown and tried to explain so reg it 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 looks like it. Whatever was, I can't point
to finger it out to say she was part of deliberative.

(55:13):
Just shut in the end, he says, he just had
to close out the case. Four years after Scott Carmichael's
interview with Anna Montez, 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

(55:35):
US intelligence network, along with the CIA and the DA.
They are the codebreakers, and the analysts 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

(55:55):
shortwave radio, and the NSA had managed to decode a
few snippets. They had given the list of tibbits to
the FBI two and a half years before, but had
heard nothing back. Out of frustration, the NSA analyst acided
to share a few details with her DIA counterpart. The
Cubans had a highly placed spy in Washington whom they

(56:17):
called Agent S. She said Agent S had an interest
in something called a safe system, and Agent S had
apparently visited the American base at Guantanamo Bay in the
two week time frame from July fourth to July eighteenth,
nineteen ninety six. The man from the DIA was alarmed.

(56:42):
Safe was the name of the DIA's internal computer messaging
archive that strongly suggested that agents was at the DA,
or at least closely affiliated with the DIA. He came
back and told his supervisors. They told Carmichael he was angry.
So well, twenty a half years, how many DA employees

(57:03):
are going on there? You've never opened up? You've never
told me. They opened up a freaking case. Id im
boy old mother Parker's. 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

(57:23):
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 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

(57:46):
their clearances was April, so he had his search parameters,
travel authority and security clearance 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

(58:09):
than one. They began searching to the safe system, so
I thought, I'm gonna go through this real quick and
just need something jumped on it. And that's when I
hit That's when I'm pretty sure it was the twenty
one hit me and it was Hanna be Montess and
the game was fucking over. I mean it was over
in a heart, and I was really stunned, speechless, stunned,

(58:33):
and I could have fallen out of my chair, and
I literally backed up, you know, I was on wheels.
I was literally distancing myself from this bad news. Carmichael said,
Oh shit,