Foreword

As long as I have worked with Maryann Karinch, her overriding interest has been to understand how people communicate and how to tell when they’re telling the truth and when they’re lying. In pursuit of her driving interest, she has interviewed a wide range of professionals who engage with people for a variety of purposes: law enforcement officials, journalists, intelligence officers, medical doctors, academics, and numerous others.

From her many interviews and extensive research, she has identified some key factors and guidelines you can apply in sharpening your own capabilities for judging the veracity of what others are telling you. She has published several books on in this field, though I consider the present the most comprehensive distillation of her observations and thinking.

Most of my career in the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)’s Clandestine Service as a case officer was devoted to recruiting and running clandestine sources or agents. Developing close relationships with foreigners, let alone assessing them as potential clandestine sources, is a challenging and often drawn-out process in itself.

The recruitment process is usually overlooked or given short shrift in films and popular thrillers on espionage. In these portrayals, individuals are simply “recruited”: no details on how or for what reason are given. The book’s sections on rapport building and motivators are particularly applicable for this developmental side of operations.

In fact, recruitment and the secure management of clandestine sources is the essence of most clandestine operations in the HUMINT (human intelligence) field. Creating and sustaining relationships with potential sources, those with access to the intelligence, usually takes time and requires the case officer to simultaneously assess the individual’s access to intelligence and his personality; that is, would he consider becoming a clandestine source, and if so, why? What would motivate him?

People’s motivations for working secretly with the CIA are varied, as are their personal and professional lives, their sense of secrecy, their personalities, and their ways of expressing themselves. Some report their information only in hushed spoken exchanges; others speak from hastily scribbled notes; others deliver immaculately prepared typed reports; and others pass along copies of highly classified (stolen) documents.

Besides trying to understand agents’ reporting (often delivered in a safe house or in a car in the dark of night), the case officer must also continuously assess his own agent: how did he acquire his information, and is he reporting as accurately as possible? These are daunting tasks performed within the framework of the case officer’s need to keep the agent motivated and on target. The author’s thoughts on “managing the exchange” are right on the mark.

You can understand that many of the factors the author raises and discusses in her book—from rapport building and motivating to questioning and managing the exchange—apply directly to my work with clandestine sources. Indeed, it’s hard to find a chapter in her book that doesn’t apply in some way to the work of recruiting and managing sources.

While my CIA work was in the arcane field of clandestine operations, anyone who deals regularly with people in the course of his or her working life—and that includes most of us—will find some terrific insights and tips in Maryann’s book for use in the day-to-day business of judging whether other folks are leveling with you—or not.

—E. Peter Earnest
Former Senior CIA National Clandestine Service Officer
Executive Director of the International Spy Museum