10

E Is for Extract the Truth: Verbal Tells

My 10-year-old niece Christine said to me, “Auntie Lena! You are not going to believe this, but, um, I can hold my breath for five minutes!” I replied, “Really?” She giggled and said, “Well, almost! Come watch me and count!” Now, I know she can’t hold her breath for five minutes; if she could, she’d be in the Guinness Book of World Records. But if she had said, “Auntie Lena! You are not going to believe this, but, um, I got an A in math on my report card!” I still wouldn’t have believed her, for two reasons: first, she hedged her statement by indirectly telling me not to believe her; and second, she paused and used a filler word (“um”). Both of these clues together in one sentence tell me that whatever is coming out of her mouth next will pretty much be an embellishment at best, and a lie at worst. (Now, this clue about hedging is not an absolute; you have to baseline someone’s customary way of speaking, just as you have to baseline body language.)

In the Jodi Arias interrogation video I mentioned in Chapter 5, Jodi is left alone in the interrogation room, handcuffed behind her back and sitting in a chair with her head on the table. After a minute or so she decides to sit on the floor, bend over, and forcefully flip her head and hair back. A woman enters and asks her to sit in the chair. She sits back in the chair and puts her head back on the table. A detective enters to talk to her and reads her rights. At one point she asks the detective, “Um, this is a really trivial question, and it’s going to reveal how shallow I am, but before they book me, can I clean myself up a little bit?” You said it, Jodi, not us: You are indeed shallow for wanting to make yourself look good before they book you for brutally slaying your boyfriend. If we break apart this sentence, you will see three verbal “hot spots” or tells: first, she uses a filler word, which is essentially a spoken pause to give the mind time to think of what to say next; second, she uses the word “really,” which is sometimes used by people to emphasize their perceived truthfulness and reinforce their lie; and third, she uses the word “but,” which is commonly used to hedge a statement. She likely knows that asking this will make her look bad, so she uses “really” to minimize the trivial and shallow nature of the request (wanting to look good). When people use the word “but,” it is usually meant to minimize, soften, or weaken the value or significance of what is about to be said. Jodi is trying to weaken or minimize the full import of being concerned about cleaning herself up. She also does this by sounding demure and sincere, in hopes the detective will focus on that instead of the fact she is being booked for murdering her ex-boyfriend. I’ll talk more about hedging statements later on.

This chapter focuses on verbal (both spoken and written) deceptive tells. We are going to dissect sentences to see what the words really mean in context. Words are important! People choose to use specific words, both consciously and unconsciously, for a reason. We will conduct statement analysis, a term coined by Mark McClish, a retired deputy United States marshal with 26 years of federal law enforcement experience. He developed this method to determine whether a person is lying or telling the truth by analyzing the subject’s language.

I am also going to teach you four steps I follow to extract the truth from deceitful people. You will learn how to listen attentively and timeline events of a story so you can fill in the missing information (usually out of lying by omission). I will teach you 10 common verbal deceptive tells (deviations in verbal language). You will learn how to make people feel good about themselves by boosting their pride and ego. And you will learn how to use questioning techniques to extract the truth while maintaining rapport. This is the crux of this book, because not only do I want you to be able to get rid of deception from your life, but I want you to know the truth, too. Because you deserve it.

You may wonder why I call it truth extraction (which sounds a lot like tooth extraction). There is a reason. Do you remember the Milton Bradley game Operation, the one in which you had those metal tweezers to extract silly items from a male patient? If you weren’t careful extracting the butterfly from his stomach, or the funny bone from his elbow, your tweezers would hit the metal sides, and a loud buzzer would go off while his red nose lit up. When you are extracting the truth from someone, you have to be just as careful. You don’t want to alert the person to what you are trying to do. If you are interrogating or interviewing someone who is doing his best to resist your techniques and stick to a cover story, truth extraction becomes a skillful conversation in which you need to conceal your true intentions and objectives while getting him to confess to the truth. You can do this by carefully asking questions, using elicitation techniques, and controlling the conversation. It’s about making sure you don’t make his buzzer go off (tip him off) by making him uncomfortable, guilty, nervous, or worried about what he just told you or what you are asking. If you ask poor questions or the wrong questions, you will not get the information you want. Using bad questioning techniques will only frustrate the two of you. If you are both frustrated and emotional, you will most likely lose rapport with that person. And if you lose rapport, you may never get the truth. He may even shut down the conversation entirely. If this happens, my advice is get someone else to question him if you can. At that point, you have probably lost your credibility, so no matter how sincere and convincing you try to be to bring him back around, you probably won’t succeed.

As a former interrogator, I felt that questioning required more skill and tact than any other step in the interrogation process. Building rapport was easy, using our approach techniques was easy, but properly asking questions, fully exploiting topics, and controlling conversations, all while you are trying to maintain rapport and weave in various approaches, was tough. I am going to teach you questioning skills that will never fail you, if used properly.

Here are my four steps for extracting the truth:

1. Timeline events.

2. Listen for verbal hot spots.

3. Use “pride and ego up.”

4. Ask good questions.

Step 1: Timeline Events

A sure way to get detailed information, leaving no stone unturned, and no topic unexploited, is to use a technique I call timelining. Timelining is a super effective way to catch someone in a lie—so effective, in fact, that I used this technique in all my interrogations to gather the details of a story that my detainees wanted to tell, according to a time line. I italicize wanted because most detainees wanted to lie to me; they wanted to tell me a fabricated story—we called them “cover stories”—about why they were in Afghanistan; it was their safe story. They knew how to create a story with just enough details so it would appear to be truthful, but not so many that they couldn’t remember any of them. Their story contained small bits of truthful information that they were willing and ready to share, mixed in with their overall cover story. They had to be careful about how many details they made up, because the more they invented, the more they would have to remember, and remembering details that aren’t true is really difficult to do; in fact, most of the time it’s virtually impossible. Their stories were vague for that very reason. I like to say that details are the death of a lie, because if you fail to give any details, that is an indication that you are lying and don’t want to have to remember false details. Conversely, if you do give me details but they are lies, I’ll catch you tripping up on those fabricated details when I question you later. So either way, exposing and exploiting details will expose your lie.

Did you know that liars can’t remember a lie backward? Timelining detainees’ stories allowed me to see those stories in reverse, something they hadn’t foreseen or practiced for. So when I asked one to tell me again why he went to Afghanistan, this time I had him start from the time he arrived at GTMO, going back in time to the very first event that started his original story. Every single one of them who told me a cover story, a fabricated story (and that was most of them), would mess up the details of their story, leave out information, or add more facts. Nothing ever matched up with my notes from the original version. Remember that the next time someone tells you a story that seems off; ask her to tell you it again, but in reverse. If she can’t, the story probably wasn’t true to begin with. I say probably, because if you are like me and can’t remember dates and times (whether you are going forward or backward), you’ll never be able to do this, even if you are telling the truth! If you decide to use this technique, you’d better be a good listener, because if you can’t retain the details to question the person on later, you will have already failed.

As I listened and took notes my goal was to drill down and get every minute detail so I could find all the verbal hot spots. Timelining helped me collect every detail that I needed to break apart a cover story. As an interrogator you have a hundred things going on in your mind at once, from running approach techniques, building rapport, working with an interpreter, tag-teaming with individuals from law enforcement agencies, using specialized equipment, taking copious notes while listening attentively to every word uttered, and watching assiduously every gesture made. You are doing 10 things at once all the time, and it is exhausting. So in order for me to ensure I didn’t miss any details of a story, I timelined it so I could tear it apart at my own pace.

Doing this also helped in building rapport. I never wanted to start off being accusatory, because the detainees never would have wanted to talk to me. So I would be super nice and respectful, and listen to their stories, even if it was one of the ridiculous cover stories du jour that circulated among the detainee population. One detainee would come up with the perfect cover story as to why he went to Afghanistan; he would then share that story with the other detainees, thinking they could all use it. We would have 50 detainees all telling us they went to Afghanistan to find a bride. How could they not see how absurd that was? I would say, “That’s lovely! Did you find one?” None of them ever said that they had, or answered, “No, but I found the Taliban!” I took the time to listen to their cover stories so I could build rapport with them and eventually get the real stories.

The importance of verb tense

When liars create a story that isn’t true, they are creating it in the present tense, because it never happened. Therefore, it is not recalled information. A verbal hot spot to look out for is abrupt changes in verb tense. Liars have a hard enough time remembering the details of a lie, so when they are in the act of spinning their story, they will often mix up verb tenses. They try to tell the lie in the past tense, as something that already happened, but because it never happened, you will often see the present tense popping up.

Viewing a story as a series of events in chronological order will allow you to see the gaps in the time line (that is, the gaps in the liar’s story). Once you identify chunks of missing time and information, you can then use effective questioning techniques to probe the subject for missing information. Once you have completely filled in the time line, you can fully exploit each event for details. This is where you will find the lies. After thoroughly questioning the subject about the entire time line, you can ask him to tell you the story in reverse, a proven technique to catch a liar. Why? Because liars can’t remember a lie backward. Why? Because they made the story up in the present tense, in chronological order, they never gave a thought to how the lie would have happened in reverse. They may remember certain key events, but they will be out of sequence; then they will forget details and get frustrated, flustered, and defensive. Once a liar starts to fall apart, you can start to chisel away at his will to resist telling the truth.

Let’s look at Larry King’s live interview with Patsy and John Ramsey in 2000 after their daughter, Jon-Benet, was found murdered in their home. I have transcribed the conversation, but I encourage you to Google the interview or watch it on YouTube so that you can see the body language and facial expressions, too.

(Larry King = LK, John Ramsey = JR, Patsy Ramsey = PR)

LK: “Let’s go back to that night. It’s December 26, the day after Christmas, right? That’s when this occurred.”

JR: “Uh huh.”

LK: “You’ve spent part of Christmas Day at your friend’s house. Give us a little history. You were in what business in Boulder?”

JR: “We were in the computer business, distribution business. We sold computer products to resellers who then sold them to users.”

LK: “Very successful, right?”

JR: “It was, uh, reasonably successful.”

LK: “So you have two children?”

JR: “Yeah.” [looks at Patsy]

PR: “Two children.”

LR: “You lost a daughter previously in a previous marriage, right?”

JR: “My oldest daughter, Beth, was killed in an automobile accident in Chicago in 1992.”

LK: “You lost two daughters.”

JR: “Two daughters. My oldest and my youngest.”

LK: “What happened that day?”

JR: “December…twenty…sixth?”

LK: “Sixth.”

JR: [sighs] “We were planning to leave for, uh, Charlevoix, which is…we have, uh, a summer cottage up there. Did have… uh…we were gonna rendezvous with our kids for uh, uh, first ever family Christmas, all together in Michigan. We were to leave early that morning, uh…um, fly to Michigan.”

[Author’ note: Notice all the filler words and the sigh, signs of stress and trying to think about what to say next.]

LK: “Morning after Christmas.”

JR: “Morning after.”

LK: “What happened that night? What’s the first thing you remember, Patsy?”

PR: “The first thing I remember is…waking up, getting dressed hurriedly, going downstairs, and, uh, putting a few things together to pack to take on the plane.”

LK: “This is about what time?”

PR: “It’s early morning, before daylight.”

LK: [to John Ramsey] “You’re up?”

JR and PR: [together] “Uh huh.”

LK: “Then what happened?”

PR: “Then I, I [stutters] go down the spiral staircase [making spiral motion with her hands] and…there on one of the rungs of the stair is a three-page ransom note.”

[Author’s note: The number three is, oddly, widely used by liars. In fact, it’s called the liar’s number. Perhaps it’s because people can more easily remember chunks of information in threes. Stuttering is also a sign of stress. But the most significant word in their statement so far is—can you guess? It’s the word “is.” Remember what I told you about liars creating a story, a lie, in present tense, and so they tell the story in present tense even though it supposedly happened in the past? Patsy should have said “was a three-page ransom note.” She switched from past tense to present tense at the most significant juncture in the story, the appearance of the ransom note. This is a verbal hot spot.)

LK: “And no one has entered the house, door isn’t open, you read the note…”

PR: “I don’t know that.” [Patsy is smiling.]

LK: “What did you do?”

PR: [still smiling] “Well. I hardly even read it, you know, and didn’t take long to understand [pause] what [pause] was happening, and I ran back up stairs and pushed open her bedroom door and she was gone.”

[Author’s note: Why is Patsy smiling? Duping delight, perhaps?]

Her story, which I believe is completely fabricated because of all the hot spots I pointed out, is told on a time line, but did you see how the timeline is not right? Patsy claims she went downstairs to pack a few things before she found the three page ransom note. Did she walk right by it the first time? Or did she put it on the rung of the stair the second time? I don’t know what their house looked like, but if there was more than one set of stairs, perhaps she went down a different staircase earlier. This is definitely a hot spot that the technique of timelining will help clarify. If I were Larry King I would have asked what time she did all of these things: got up in the morning, got dressed, went downstairs to pack a few things, found the three-page ransom note, opened the door to her daughter’s bedroom. Even if she gave times as an approximation, you would still have a rough time line. To show you how I use this technique in interrogations, I’ll create some answers for an imaginary timelining dialogue:

LS: “Patsy, what time did you get up the morning of December 26?”

PS: It’s early morning, before the sun is up.”

LS: “About what time did you get up?” [I ask her again because she didn’t answer my question.]

PS: “It’s about 5:00 a.m.”

LS: “What time did you get dressed?”

PS: “I immediately got dressed.”

LS: “What time did you get dressed?” [another repeat question]

PS: “Well, I washed up and got dressed by 5:15, I guess.”

LS: “What time did you go downstairs to pack a few things?”

PS: “At 5:15 I went downstairs to pack a few things.”

LS: “What time did you go down the spiral staircase and find the three-page ransom note?”

Now I don’t know what she would have said next; would she have tried to cover up the fact that she told us she went downstairs twice and didn’t see the ransom note the first time? Or would she claim that she went down a different staircase earlier, came back up, and then went down the spiral staircase? I don’t know. But can do you see how timelining can punch holes in a fabricated story? The other great thing about timelining a lie is the fact that you can use the times given to cross-reference and fact-check the story. If Patsy’s story is true, those times shouldn’t deviate much, if at all. If this story is a lie, she won’t remember the details of times, and she will mix them up and confuse the order of events. I encourage you to practice time-lining on people you think are being deceptive, whether it is your daughter claiming the cigarettes you found in her coat pocket weren’t hers, or your employee telling you he had no idea how that $200 in cash was stolen from the cash register.

Two important caveats: When you are timelining, be very careful not to sound as though you were interrogating the person with robotic questions, because he or she will get defensive and you will lose rapport. You need to maintain rapport with your subjects while questioning them so they want to stay in the conversation. You also don’t want to attack them or accuse them of wrongdoing. People confess to things when they feel comfortable doing so, when they have rapport with their questioner, when the questioner makes them feel like it’s okay or understandable that they did what they did. I’ll discuss this technique further in the third step, use pride and ego up. To the interrogators, investigators, and interviewers reading this book: If you don’t already do it, start timelining; it will save you time and frustration.

Step 2: Listen for Verbal Hot Spots

People use the words they do for a reason; thus, they are just as important as reading body language when it comes to detecting deception. Here are 11 verbal hot spots (including changing verb tense) that can indicate deception. I write “can” because you already know my rule of three: baseline, look for clusters of tells, and be aware of the context in which the information is being delivered.

1. Pronoun use

Liars tend to avoid using the words “I” and “my.” This helps to distance themselves from the lie. Most people are raised to be honest, and generally speaking, people don’t like to lie. When they do, they want to remove themselves from the dishonest act. It also allows liars to not have to definitive answer. When Congressman Anthony Weiner first spoke out regarding the photo on his Twitter account, he refused to say whether or not the picture was of him. All he kept saying was that his account had been hacked. When a reporter asked, “Can you tell me definitively, is that a photograph of you?” Weiner responded, “We are trying to find out the—where that photograph came from.” A few hot spots stand out here. First, he was asked a yes-or-no question that he would not answer with a yes or a no. Second, who is “we”? Why couldn’t he have just said, “I’m trying to find out where it came from”? Because he was lying and wanted to remove himself from the lie. He later went on to say, “I said, let’s try to figure out who, how, what this—how this prank went down, how we make sure it doesn’t happen again.” Again, why is he using the first person plural? His stuttering and hesitating was another hot spot. Of course we now know for a fact that he was lying. Later, when he finally came clean and apologized publicly, he was no longer removing or distancing himself. The “we” became “I”: “I have made terrible mistakes, I’ve hurt the people I care about the most, and I’m deeply sorry.” Pronoun usage can tell us a lot about whether someone is being deceptive.

Sometime you’ll hear pronoun usage switch. For example, back in November 2001, the Northern Alliance, under the control of General Dostum and aided by other countries, including the United States, captured members of the Taliban and al Qaeda, and held them at Qala-i-Jangi Fortress in Mazar-i-Sharif, Afghanistan, while trying to peacefully reason with the Taliban commander. Reason didn’t work, and what ensued was a three-day massacre. Out of hundreds of Taliban, al Qaeda, and foreign fighters, 86 survived, one of whom was John Walker Lindh, known as the American Taliban. When CNN interviewed him, he went from saying “we [the Taliban] were fighting for a cause,” to saying (about 10 minutes later) “it was one of them [the Taliban] who threw the grenade.” His shift from first personal plural, where he associated himself with the Taliban, to third person plural, where he distances himself from them, is a verbal hot spot or deviation. Just as with all other verbal tells, you have to listen carefully to pick up on these kinds of pronoun changes and shifts.

2. Verb tense changes

I’ve already illustrated how Patsy Ramsey mixed up her verb tenses in her timeline. Remember: When we tell a lie, we rehearse it in the present tense, so we forget to tell it in the past tense.

3. Non-contracted denials

People who “protest too loudly”—liars who are overly determined in their denial—often resort to formal language. Liars do not like to use contractions because they are trying to emphasize their lie making it appear believable by breaking apart contractions (remember that liars convince, while truthful people convey): “I did not do that,” “that is not true,” “we would not say that.” Both Bill Clinton and Anthony Weiner were famous for their non-contracted denials. Witness Clinton’s famous words: “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Ms. Lewinski. I never told anybody to lie, not a single time, never.” I’ll discuss this statement again later because there are actually two more verbal hot spots. And Anthony Weiner: “The answer is I did not send that [pause] tweet.” Be on the alert if you hear someone suddenly use non-contracted denials; he’s trying to emphasize what he is saying for some reason. It doesn’t always mean someone is being deceptive, of course; so as always, use my rule of three for greater certainty.

4. Can’t simply say yes or no

Anthony Weiner and Bill Clinton had this unfortunate problem, as well. The golden rule to follow is that if you are asking a yes-or-no question, you should get a yes or a no in response within three tries. If not, that person is hiding something. Sometimes you will get what I call substitute words. Substitute words for yes include absolutely, of course, definitely, and always. Notice that none of these words is actually yes. Substitute words for no include of course not, not ever, certainly not, and never (which I’ll talk about next by itself), none of which is a substitute for no. As an interrogator I considered yes-or-no questions bad questions because they don’t elicit a narrative response, and hence are unlikely to yield new information. However, if they are used properly, and inserted to test for truthfulness, they can be very useful indeed. Asking a yes-or-no question is like asking someone what’s the fifth word in the “Star Spangled Banner” is: It’s a quick and easy baseline.

Although the word “never” is a negative word, it is not a replacement for no. It is easier for someone to be evasively dishonest by using the word never than it is to directly tell a lie by saying no. Answering with never can sometimes fool the interviewer. That said, this doesn’t automatically mean a person is being deceptive. There are perfectly correct and legitimate ways to use the word. For example, if I said, “I have never been skydiving,” it would be a truthful statement. However, using never as a substitute for no can be an indication of deception when it’s being used to avoid giving a direct “no.” Remember to baseline. I use the word “never” all the time; I even use it to mean no when I’m being truthful.

Let’s look at Lance Armstrong again when he appeared on Sports News Television in 2005, denying, under oath, his use of steroids to win the Tour de France. Here is part of the transcribed dialogue from Armstrong’s sworn deposition. (You can also view the entire thing on YouTube: www.youtube.com/watch?v=klz86uQMrVg.)

Interviewer: “Just want to make sure: it’s not that you don’t remember that the Indiana hospital room incident occurred; it, it affirmatively did not take place.”

LA: “I know it did not. How could it have taken place when I’ve never taken performance-enhancing drugs? Look, how could that have happened?”

Interviewer: “That was my point. You’re not, it’s not just simply that you don’t recall—”

LA: “How many times do I have to say it?”

Interviewer: “I’m just trying to make sure your testimony is clear.”

LA: “Well, if it can’t be any clearer than I’ve never taken drugs, then incidents like that could never have happened.”

Interviewer: “Okay.”

LA: “How clear is that?”

Interviewer: “Okay, I think it’s clear.”

If you watch this video you will also see Lance use the “knife hand” gesture, as though he were chopping the air with the side of his hand, to make a point. You can hear him getting defensive and belligerent. Lance was what we call a severe convincer; he would get aggressive, accusatory, and confrontational when anyone dared question him about his use of performance-enhancing drugs.

5. Answering a question with a question

If you ask someone, “Where were you last night?” and she responds with another question, such as, “Why do you want to know where I was last night?” this is almost always an indicator of deception. If she has nothing to hide, she would have just answered your question. People with nothing to hide, don’t hide! It’s not a question of her not hearing your question, since she asked one in response. This is simply a stalling technique to buy time to think of what to say. The only other reason to answer a question with a question would be if the person being asked felt that the person asking didn’t trust them, and that meant more to them than answering the question. So if you ask your significant other a pointed question, and he replies with a question, he could simply be upset that you doubted him enough to even ask, and wants to find out why before he answers. Most often, though, it’s used as a stalling technique.

6. Repeating the question

This is a subset of the previous hot spot. Unless you’re talking to someone who doesn’t speak your language and is trying to make sure he understands the question, he is stalling and buying himself some time to answer. It doesn’t necessarily mean he’s about to lie, but it does mean he felt he needed that extra second to think of how to respond. I actually know people who do this all the time as their baseline; my father is one of them. Whether he truly cannot hear me (his hearing is not as sharp as it once was) or he just isn’t paying attention (because he’s more interested in his British comedy TV shows), whenever I ask him a question, he often repeats it back to me. So be sure to baseline.

7. Filler words

Words such as um, uh, and ah are filler words or stall words used to give the mind time to think of what to say next. I also like to call them pet words, because when people are nervous they tend to use their favorite filler words over and over again, especially when they are speaking in public. They use these words as pacifiers, but just as pacifying body gestures do, they only make them look nervous, unsure, and deceptive. If you know or have been told you use filler words when you speak, break the habit now. Start practicing your speeches in the car, in the shower, wherever you can be alone, and start consciously avoiding them. Only practice will make you more confident; soon you won’t be using them. Let’s look once again at this transcribed dialogue between the Ramsey’s and Larry King to see stalling techniques in action and hear how unsure of themselves it makes people sound:

LK: “Okay, police are there, friends come over. What happened to Burke? Does he stay asleep? Or do you wake him up and send it? What happens to Burke?

JR: “Burke, uh, was in bed, uh… [pause/stutter] We, uh, got him up, uh, don’t remember what time, but we [pause] had him go to a friend’s house. Uh, I told him his sister was missing, uh…”

LK: “Told him the truth.”

JR: “Told him the truth. We didn’t [pauses, then shakes head no as he shrugs his shoulders] try to make it [pause] as easy on him as we could, but he cried immediately, so he knew something seriously was wrong, uh, and he went to a friend’s house.”

The total conversation time is 43 seconds. John Ramsey uses “uh” seven times in 43 seconds, and he stutters or pauses at length four times. Why is he concentrating so hard on what to say? In my opinion, it seems as though he were trying to remember a fabricated lie of what he and his wife were saying happened that day, while perhaps seeing in his mind what really happened. But this is only my opinion. Certainly, neither one has been convicted of any crime, and even suspects are considered innocent until proven guilty.

8. Hedging statements

Hedging a statement—prefacing a statement with another statement in order to be deceptive—is not used to show caution, but rather to intentionally create vagueness that obscures the facts in and details of another statement. It softens what’s about to come next. Such statements come across as polite and modest, so the listener’s guard is down, along with his or her awareness. Such statements can be used as smokescreens that hide or take the focus off what comes after, which is usually the important piece of information, and usually where the deception is embedded. Liars love to hedge their statements because it allows them to avoid responsibility and evade the truth. It’s similar to the way an illusionist gets the audience to focus on one thing so they can’t see the means or method of the illusion. Liars desperately want you to focus on the hedged statement, so when you hear one, it should be a signal to pay close attention to what comes after it.

I want to talk briefly about the experience of being smokescreened. In the interrogation world we call it “being taken down the rabbit hole.” When my detainees wanted to take me down the rabbit hole—that is, take my focus off pertinent topics and on to a non-pertinent one—they would be very nice and cooperative and would want to talk up a storm, but only about what they wanted to talk about. They thought by being cooperative and friendly, they would be able to hide the fact they were talking about nothing of importance, nothing that had any intelligence value. They would tell me elaborate stories that, in the words of Shakespeare, were “much ado about nothing.” Some junior interrogators would let the detainees ramble on and on for hours, for fear of losing rapport and having him shut down if they stopped the smokescreen story. I would take the interrogator out and give him a pep talk to get back in the booth and put a stop to the nonsense. The detainee was doing nothing but wasting the interrogator’s time until he was allowed to go back to his cell. We didn’t have the luxury of time, especially when we needed to get information to the soldiers on the battlefield and the people at the agencies. Don’t let yourself be taken down the rabbit hole. People will try desperately to bring you there if they are trying to hide information.

Have you ever tried to confront your significant other about why he came home so late, only to have him go off on a story/tangent that had nothing do with why he came home late or where he had been? Or worse, have him turn the conversation back around on you by saying how hurt he was that you didn’t trust him? Have you ever confronted your child about the bad progress report she received, only to hear her complain about how the teacher has a vendetta against her and how mean he is to her? If so, you’ve been smokescreened. People will create a smokescreen, just like the giant puff of smoke that appears to hide what the magician is really doing, to steer you away from the subject they want to avoid. Who wants to say, “Darling, I got this gorgeous new winter coat. It was way too much money—$1,000—but I had to have it!” None of us, right? So we may say instead, “Darling, I finally found a winter coat—you know how I have been looking for one for ages? I’ll be able to wear it to your company’s Christmas party now! I didn’t have a nice one I could wear when I have to dress up, and I want to look good for you. It was even on sale!” That’s a lot of extraneous information, just to tell your husband that you bought a new coat. That extra fluff about the Christmas party and looking good for him, means you are trying to smokescreen him by making him feel good and happy for you, and prevent him from coming back and asking, “How much was the coat?” thus forcing you to admit that you dropped a significant amount of cash on it. I’m pretty sure I’ve done this, but with shoes.

I am going to use another transcription from the Jodi Arias interview, so you can see her smokescreen while she tells the story about how Travis was murdered, a story that later proved to be a lie. The video is just full of juicy deceptive tells! Jodi is in the midst of telling the story (read: lie) about what happened the day her ex-boyfriend Travis Alexander was brutally murdered:

JA: “We woke up around one, um, I’d say, o’clock in the afternoon. When we woke up we had sex twice, once in his bed and once in his office downstairs.”

[Commentary: “And then, just like old times, they pulled out the camera.”]

JA: “We decided to do another photo shoot, um, where we were going to just get him in the shower, but these were waist up shots—you know, tasteful shots.”

Interviewer: “He was in the shower?”

JA: “He was in the shower. Hm, the shower was on, it looked really cool because the way the water was frozen in the image.”

[Author’s note: In this last statement her rate of speech quickens. She is smokescreening the interviewer by focusing on how cool the water looked, frozen in time, in her photography. She is taking the focus off the fact that Travis was found shot and stabbed 27 times, and on to the shower water looking “cool” in her picture. She is painting a picture of an image that she wants the interviewer to have of them being romantic, flirty, happy, and artistic, rather than her stabbing and shooting Travis in a crazy jealous rage and leaving his dead body slumped in the shower. A smokescreen tells us, “Don’t focus on that, focus on this.”]

The but syndrome hedge

I’ve already talked about how Jodi Arias used the word but when she said, “Um, this is a really trivial question, and it’s going to reveal how shallow I am, but…” to downplay the significance of being concerned about freshening up before she was booked for murder. Have you ever heard someone start telling you story by saying, “I know this sounds crazy, but…” or “You’re not going to believe this, but…”? I am sure you have. Did the story seem crazy and unbelievable? It probably was. This person could have been telling you, subconsciously, that the story truly was crazy and you shouldn’t believe it! Ask yourself why someone would need to tell you that you are not going to believe what they are about to say. Remember that most people don’t like to lie, so perhaps this was a way for this person to tell you that he was going to lie to you, or at least be dishonest in some way. In other words, it was a circuitous, noncommittal way of being—honest! Some people use these two particular hedges all the time when they go to tell a story so it may be their normal behavior, but if their stories are always embellished then it’s probably a deceptive tell. However, remember you must baseline people first before you can say this is a deceptive tell.

The oath hedge

“I swear to God I am telling you the truth,” “As God is my witness,” “I swear on my mother’s/father’s grave.” These are all oaths people use when they want to be taken seriously. Both truthful and deceptive people use them, so be sure to baseline. Deceptive individuals will try to give interviewers as little useful information as possible, while doing their best to convince interviewers that what little they say is true. They will often use mild oaths to try to make their statements sound more convincing. Deceptive people are more likely than truthful people to sprinkle their statements with expressions such as “I swear,” “on my honor,” and “cross my heart.” This verbal hot spot falls under the “convince, not convey” category. Remember: Liars want to convince us of the lie, whereas truthful people convey their true story. They do need feel the need to convince anyone of anything by backing their statements with empty oaths, because they are more confident that the facts will prove the veracity of their statements.

“Actually”

I love this word, because just as a shoulder shrug means uncertainty 100 percent of the time, this word means there is another thought 100 percent of the time. If you said to me, “Actually, I’m a financial advisor,” my first instinct is to wonder, What else are you? If you truly were a financial advisor, you would have just said so: “I’m a financial advisor,” but the fact that you felt the need to hedge the statement with actually tells one of several things: either you just became one and were something else; you want to become one but aren’t yet (maybe you are still in school); you were one but now have moved on to something else; or you are something else and decided to just tell me you are a financial advisor. Even though the word “actually” always means there is another thought or idea or fact, it does not always mean it is deception.

9. Distancing language

For this, let’s look at Clinton’s famous words: “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Ms. Lewinski. I never told anybody to lie, not a single time, never.” This statement is littered with verbal deception, but I bet he thought he was making himself look pretty confident and poised at the time. You can see his use of a non-contracted denial (“did not”), his use of the word “never” to reinforce his lie, and his clever use of distancing language to remove himself from the action. Why is Monica Lewinsky, the woman he clearly knew, suddenly “that woman,” a stranger? Because Bill wanted us to think that she was a stranger to him, and so he couldn’t have had an affair with her. But Bill did a poor job of that. People will distance themselves from persons, places, and things by not using names, titles, or designations. People will distance themselves from events or actions by using vague terminology. In my world as an Intelligence professional, I often couldn’t say what I was doing, so I would call it “work” or “training.”

10. Softening language

People will soften the harshness or reality of the truth through the use of noncommittal or softening language. Here are some examples of softening language, with my comments after each:

Q: “Where were you when she was murdered?”

A: “I was at home when she passed.”

Passed is a softer way of saying died, which is in turn much softer than murdered. It also removes any possibility of any blame since there was no murder.

Q: “Did you abort her unborn child?”

A: “Her pregnancy was terminated because of a miscarriage.”

Again, abort is a pretty harsh word with really ugly images; terminated is a much softer, more clinical statement. Also note the use of the passive voice, another way to create distance between the actor and the action.

Q: “How many times did you stab your ex-boyfriend?”

A: “I hit him three times before I could get away.”

Hitting is not stabbing, plain and simple. The interrogator here would have to try to get this individual to admit to stabbing by forcing her to use that word. Sometimes it’s just a matter of getting the person to admit it to him- or herself. People may admit to a crime in a nominal sense, but they may not have consciously taken responsibility for the severity of it yet, so they still talk about it using softening language.

During Chris Cuomo’s CNN interview with Amanda Knox (watch it on YouTube: www.youtube.com/watch?v=J_NQKBZBsyo), Amanda Knox continued to defend herself against accusations that she murdered Meredith Kercher:

AK: “I—[pause]—I did not kill my friend. I did not wield a knife.”

The word “wield” is a great example of softening language. Wielding sounds a lot less harsh than “grasp,” “grab,” “clutch,” “clench,” or even “hold.” What do you picture when you imagine someone wielding a knife versus clenching or grabbing one? I bet there is a difference, and I bet you see someone clenching as more apt to use a knife in a murder. Later in the interview she stated:

AK: “If I were there, I would have traces of Meredith’s—[pause]—broken body on me.”

Amanda again uses softening language by referring to Meredith’s body as “broken.” This is odd verbiage to use about her friend’s body that had actually been brutally stabbed and cut open.

11. Text bridges

Picture the Golden Gate Bridge in your mind. Now think of a statement such as “I went to the movies” on the Marin County side, and the statement “I came home” on the San Francisco side. Then picture the words “and then” on the bridge. So the entire statement put together would read “I went to the movies and then I came home.” The phrase “and then” is a text bridge; it is tying bits of information together while glossing over what else might have happened in between those two events. It implies a linear, exhaustive chronological narrative when it is anything but. I’ve already stated that lying by omission is the preferred way that most of us lie, because we don’t have to actually tell a lie; we just have to keep it quiet. Liars will often tell the truth right up to the point where they want to conceal information; then, they skip over the withheld information and tell the truth again. When you hear a text bridge, you should ask yourself what else is on the bridge that is not being mentioned. What does the “and then” cover up? Mark McClish, the creator of statement analysis, states that “a text bridge is a word or phrase that allows a person to transition from one thought to another” (source: www.all-about-body-language.com/mark-mcclish.html) while leaving out a thought. Other text bridges include the following words and phrases: after, afterward, later on, at that point, following, finally, next, and the next thing. You will often hear people say “and the next thing I knew…,” which just tells you there is a gap in the information. It doesn’t necessarily mean that they are being deceptive and are aware of the information they are purposely skipping over. It may be that they truly don’t know what happened during that time. For example, I almost drowned when I was about 12 years old. I was in the rough ocean waters on Misquamicut Beach, Rhode Island. I was pretty small when I was a pre-teen, much smaller than everyone else in my age group at that time. I grew up in the ocean, and my dad made sure all of us kids knew how to swim early on. One day I took off for the beach, along with my cousins who were visiting from Connecticut. I was by myself in the ocean, having fun in the big waves, until this one monster wave came and changed me forever. It was so huge that I couldn’t ride over it, so I tried to turn around and run out but the surf was so strong, and I was so small, it just sucked me back in. I didn’t know how to dive under the wave to escape it. I’ll never forget looking up at this wall of water and seeing it crashing down right on top of me. I was pummeled into the ocean floor and tossed around in the surf for what seemed like an eternity. I told myself, Relax and let it wash you to shore. I struck out with my arms and legs to see if I could reach the floor or air. Nothing. I opened my eyes to see if I could see where the light was coming from and which way was up. Still nothing. I couldn’t hold my breath any longer. Finally I told myself. You are going to take a breath under water and drown. I took a deep intake of breath and the next thing I remember was waking up face down in the sand with a crowd of people around me. See? I used a text bridge, but to this day I don’t know what happened in that period of time between when I took the breath and when I woke up coughing on the shore. To this day I hyperventilate a little bit when I’m in the ocean, but I won’t let it keep me out of it!

Let’s see how Jodi Arias used text bridges in another statement from her interview:

JA: “I heard, um, a really loud, um, pop, and the next thing I remember I was lying next to the bathtub, and Travis was, um, was screaming.”

In addition to all those filler words, she cleverly uses a text bridge to tell the reporter, “I don’t know what happened in that chunk of time between when I heard a pop and when I came to, finding Travis badly wounded and seeing two intruders in the bathroom.” She implies that she was hit in the head, but never comes right out and says that.

So there are the 11 verbal hot spots that can indicate deception, whether you are listening to someone tell a story or you are reading a confession. Here is a series of questions and answers that illustrate clusters of verbal hot spots. Each response contains more than one verbal hot spot, which I will explain and then show you how to deal with them and extract the truth.

Question: “Did you sell drugs to teenagers?” (This is a yes-or-no question that demands a yes or a no in response.)

Response #1: “I would never do that!”

Remember: Never is not a substitute for no. A good response question would be, “You say you would (conditional future tense) never do that, but have you (past tense) sold drugs to teenagers?” Ask the question again, because the subject did not answer it the first time. Again, look for a yes or a no. The fact that the subject is saying he “would never” in the future does not tell me that he didn’t in the past. A narrative response in the past tense would be something like “I didn’t sell drugs to teenagers” or “I have never sold drugs to teenagers.” You are probably thinking, Wait, he said never, and that’s a verbal hot spot! Yes, it is, so you will have to baseline to find out whether this person uses the word never when he is being truthful. You’ll also have to look for clusters of tells. If he answered saying “I have never” he could be trying to convince, right? So I would ask the question one more time, to see whether I could get a definitive yes or no to indicate truthfulness. Keep asking the same question until you get the answer you need. Don’t give up! Too many people give up right before they prove the deceptive tell or prove truthfulness.

Response #2: “I have tried my best to teach teenagers that drugs are bad.”

The immediate question that comes to my mind is, And what? Failed? When people say, “I tried my best,” that should tell you that they failed at what they tried to do. In this case, I don’t care if the subject tried his best; I want to know if he sold drugs to teenagers. Ask the question again, because the subject did not answer the question. Again, we’re looking for a yes or a no.

Response #3: “All I can say is I never sold drugs to teenagers.”

When people use the qualifier “all I can say,” they are basically telling you “I can’t tell you everything,” plain and simple. Why can’t they tell you? Probably because it will incriminate them or someone they know. Ask the question again, because the subject did not answer it this time, either.

Response #4: “I never really talk to teenagers.”

First, I don’t care; second, you didn’t answer the question; and third, there’s that word “never” again. You already know that the word “really” is often used by liars to reinforce their lies to make them appear more truthful. It can also indicate that there is something else on the subject’s mind. In this instance the subject might be saying that he never talks to teenagers, but he sells drugs to them.

Response #5: “I don’t recall selling drugs to teenagers.”

When Bill Clinton said, “That is not my relocation. My recollection is that I did not have sexual relations with Miss Lewinsky,” there were several things going on. First, there was his failure to answer yes or no; second, he didn’t use contractions; and third, he used the phrase “that is not my recollection” as a substitute for no. “I don’t recall” may sound like a fancy way of saying no, but it isn’t a no. It is a deflection technique. You also have to take the context of the statement into consideration. If someone asked me whether in 2000 I taught a Sgt. Moorhead, I might respond with something like, “I don’t recall or remember if I taught a student by the name of Sgt. Moorhead.” It’s very unlikely that I’d remember a student’s name from 14 years ago; I can’t even remember my brothers’ birthdays! But it seems hard to believe that Bill Clinton couldn’t remember whether he had ever touched Monica Lewinsky’s breasts in the Oval Office! Likewise, the subject in our Q&A would have remembered selling drugs to teenagers, so he still didn’t answer the question. Your responsibility is to ask it again and try rephrasing it like this: “Yes or no: Did you sell drugs to teenagers?” Now there is no way this guy can get out of giving you a definitive answer; if he still refuses and spins another narrative answer, he is almost certainly being deceptive. (For an important caveat regarding the use of yes-or-no questions, please see my personal story at the end of this section, about when I was subpoenaed as a prosecution witness and forced to testify against a detainee.)

Response #6: “You know I couldn’t sell to teenagers.”

The use of “you know” always makes me laugh. No, I don’t know: I don’t know anything about you or what you did, which is why I was asking you in the first place! I would repeat the question again: “Yes or no: Did you see drugs to teenagers?”

Response #7: “Obviously I would not sell drugs to them.”

The word “obviously” is similar to “you know.” In this case I would ask, “Why would it be obvious that you wouldn’t sell drugs? It isn’t obvious to me.” Then I would follow up with the question again: “Yes or no: Did you sell drugs to teenagers?” In this statement you can see that the subject also uses a non-contracted denial.

Let me share what happened to me when I was on the stand being cross-examined by the defense attorney during the military tribunal I was involved in at GTMO a few years ago. I can’t share all the details of the questions asked or the information I provided, but I can share this: I was asked a yes-or-no question by the defense that I refused to answer on the stand. I answered in the narrative because it was a leading question. If I had answered yes, it would have falsely incriminated me; and if I had answered no, it would have falsely incriminated me for something else. I’m an expert in questioning techniques, so I wasn’t about to be trapped with his leading question. My refusal to answer with a yes or a no infuriated the defense lawyer as well as the judge, who slammed down his gavel and demanded to know why I wouldn’t answer the question properly. I told him that the question was a leading question, and I wasn’t going to be trapped into a false admission. He ordered that the question be struck from the record and told the lawyer to rephrase it. He was pissed, but I stood my ground. In fact, a writer for one newspaper wrote that I “stood my ground” as I “sparred with the defense attorney.” That’s right, I thought. Don’t mess with an interrogator! I am sharing this with you because these kinds of questions can trap people into a false confession. So be sure to properly phrase your yes-or-no questions in such a way as to eliminate any vagueness. If people feel that answering a yes-or-no question could falsely incriminate them, they simply won’t answer.

Here’s another mock Q&A to illustrate some verbal hot spots:

Question: “Did you answer my questions truthfully?

Response #1: “I believe so.”

How about a yes or no? The word “believe” is a terribly noncommittal word. Other noncommittal words are think, guess, suppose, figure, and assume. Ask the question again.

Response #2: “I swear to God I am telling you the truth.”

Again, where’s the yes or no answer? You already know that deceptive subjects often use mild oaths to try to make their statements sound more convincing. Deceptive people are more likely than truthful people to sprinkle their statements with expressions such as “I swear,” “on my honor,” “as God is my witness,” and “cross my heart.” Truthful witnesses are more confident that the facts will prove the veracity of their statements, and thus feel less of a need to back their statements with oaths. Remember to baseline, though, because some people use this phrase all the time.

•••••

Now that you have a good handle on a variety of verbal deceptive tells, it’s time to start getting to the truth. Before we jump into our questioning techniques, however (some of which you’ve already seen in the previous examples), you’ll want to prep the person you think is lying to you, to make him feel good and thus want to tell you the truth. The way you do this is by inflating his pride and ego, just a bit. We want to make him feel good to create rapport. This brings us to step three, use “pride and ego up,” or what Janine Driver calls “assigning positive traits.”

Step 3: Use “Pride and Ego Up”

This is a technique I used as an interrogator and still use in my everyday life to make people feel good about themselves. Sometimes I’m sincere and I truly value what a person has done; and sometimes I use it to get something I want: cooperation, a positive attitude, information, or a favor. That makes me sound like an awful person, right? I don’t use it to get my friends or family to do things for me! I use it to get out of speeding tickets; I use it to appease the type-A personalities at work to keep a harmonious work environment; and I use it to inspire my friends and colleagues to take chances and start their own businesses or write their own books. These things aren’t bad or malicious. Well, maybe trying to get out of a speeding ticket is a bit selfish, but it’s certainly not malicious. I use pride and ego up to “prime” individuals to tell me the truth. For example, if you tell a suspect that you know she is honest, has integrity, makes the right choices, cares for others, is looked up to by others and respected for doing the right thing, and so on, before going in to extract the truth, she will be more likely to tell you the truth than not. Studies show that people who take a polygraph or appear in court and “swear to tell the whole truth, nothing but the truth,” tell the truth because they have been primed to—by a machine and an oath. You can ask a subject up-front, with sincerity, “Will you tell me the truth in response to what I’m about to ask you?” If she consents, she may feel that she has locked herself in to telling the truth, according to some moral code. Or you can simply state, “I want you to be truthful when I ask you these questions.”

Here’s how I used pride and ego up with my detainees. I would tell them, “I know you believe in your cause and I respect you for that,” or “I heard that your dedication and honesty is unmatched by others you trained with,” or “I know you do the right thing to protect yourself and your family, even if I don’t think it’s the right thing.” As I said these things, I could see their pride and ego inflating right before my eyes: They would sit up straighter, roll their shoulders back, lift their chin. In short, they would began to look and feel more confident. But what it did best was that it made them feel as though they had to prove to me how dedicated, honest, and good they were—even though that meant they had to tell me incriminating information that could get them locked up for life. At the end of my interrogations I would thank them for being so honest with me, and tell them how good they should feel, knowing they had integrity. I got a lot of information using this technique. The amazing thing is that even after they “broke” and told me the truth, they would still walk out of the interrogation looking and feeling proud. Trust me, this technique works! Every human being wants to feel proud of who they are, no matter what they have done. So before you fire off your sharpened questioning techniques, use pride and ego up first.

Step 4: Ask Good Questions

Do you think you ask good questions? Think hard about your answer, then ask yourself this again after you read what I’m about to teach you regarding the art of questioning, which is my forté. In this final step to getting to the truth, I will give you eight types of questions to use.

1. Ask a narrative question to get a narrative response.

If you are looking for narrative-type information, you must ask a narrative question. A narrative question begins with one of the six interrogatives: who, what, where, when, why, or how. Avoid asking vague narrative questions. If you want specific details, you’ll need ask specific questions. For example, if you want to know what, exactly, your witness saw at the scene of the fire, you wouldn’t ask, “What did you see?” Yes, it’s a narrative question, but it’s too vague. Your subject may respond with something like, “I saw people standing around.” That tells you nothing. So in order to not waste anyone’s time in getting to the pertinent information, make your narrative question more specific: “At 6:40 p.m., when you said you arrived at the scene of the fire, how many people did you see?” If you wanted find out whether he spoke to anyone who was standing around the fire, you wouldn’t ask him that point blank, because it would create a space for him to be evasive. Instead, assume he spoke to others and simply ask, “What did the others say to you?” If he didn’t speak to anyone, he can just say so. You’ve saved time by not having to ask two questions; you only had to ask one and you received the answer to both. Anyone who conducts interviews or interrogations as a normal part of their job knows that there is never enough time, and the few seconds saved by having to ask one question versus two can be crucial. So let’s say you want to find out whether someone has children. Instead of asking, “Do you have children?” just assume he does and ask, “How many children do you have?” Again, if he doesn’t have any, he will say so.

2. Ask yes-or-no questions, cautiously.

I’ve already given you many examples of these questions and how they can be used. Use them for a singular purpose: to test for truthfulness. Do not use them as a crutch or make the mistake of asking them repeatedly; this is a bad questioning technique, because if you don’t ask narrative questions, you won’t get information. When asking yes-or-no questions, you should try to get a yes or no response within three tries. If you don’t, you will know that the subject is avoiding the question and likely hiding something.

3. Ask “Really?”

I love this one-word question and I used it frequently as an interrogator, but it does require that you have some patience. It’s effective because most people are uncomfortable with silence in a conversation, so they will feel more inclined to break the silence and keep talking. Asking “Really?” encourages your subject to provide more information without your even having to ask. How cool is that? Especially when rapport and emotions are hanging in a delicate balance, you don’t want to hammer someone with questions if they are still deciding whether they like or trust you enough to divulge their information. If silence makes you uncomfortable, this is when you will need patience. You can’t be the one to break the silence! You asked your question, now wait for the response. If you don’t, you just devalued your own question, and it will look as though you are waffling. Waiting for a response sends the message that you are in control, even if you wait in silence for three or more minutes, waiting for the subject to elaborate. This is a great technique to use if you suspect someone is lying. It also gives the subject an opportunity to amend or add to his or her statement without having to backpedal or lose too much face: “Well, maybe it didn’t happen just like that” or “Now that I think about it, this is what happened.”

4. Ask “How did that make you feel?”

I’ve mentioned that liars don’t think about the feelings they should have when they lie. If you ask someone how something made him feel, he won’t be able to conjure up sincere feelings for something he hasn’t done, seen, experienced, or felt. At this point you’ll probably hear some stuttering and stalling techniques. It is very difficult for liars to feel fake emotions, so when they do come up with an answer, they won’t be very convincing. For example, let’s say your son Sam comes home from school with bruises on his arms; he’s depressed and completely withdrawn. You ask him what the problem is and finally drag it out of him that another kid at school, Patrick, is bullying him. You, your son, Patrick, and Patrick’s mother all meet up in the principal’s office. Patrick has repeatedly told his mother that he wasn’t the one who hit Sam. He claims it was another student, Tommy. At this point it’s his word against Sam’s because there are no witnesses. So the mediator in this scenario, likely the principal, should ask Patrick, “How did it make you feel when Tommy bullied Sam and hit him?” If Patrick says, “I don’t know,” you’ve got him, but you still need to expose the truth. If Patrick hesitates and squirms around, obviously trying to think of how he should have felt, you’ve got him again, but you still have to expose the truth. If Patrick says, “It made me feel bad,” the principle needs to come back and ask, “Really?” And dive deeper: “Why did it make you feel bad, Patrick?” or “Why didn’t you stop Tommy?” Let Patrick incriminate himself before you accuse him, because Patrick’s mother will shut you down in a heartbeat if you accuse her son of bullying. Keep asking non-accusatory, narrative questions until you break Patrick’s will to resist telling the truth.

5. Ask follow-up questions to fully exploit information.

Listen carefully and analyze every word people say when answering your questions. Follow up on all topics they tell you to extract all of the details. Remember this saying: Exploit all verbs and define all nouns. If I tell you I am going the movies tonight, you have to fully exploit “going” and define “movies” and “tonight.” How am I going? By car, by foot, by train? How long will it take me to get there? Who am I going with? When am I going? Why am I going? What movie am I going to see? Where are the movies located? Ask “What else?” “What other?” “Who else?” “Where else?” “When else?” and “How else?” to exploit the information you have and get all of the details. For example, let’s say you ask me, “Who are you going with?” and I reply, “Alissa.” Am I only going with Alissa? Maybe I’m going with someone else. To find out you must ask a follow-up question: “Who else are you going with?” Keep going until you hear me say, “I’m not going with anyone else.” Now you have fully exploited who I’m going with. Truthful people may just come right out and say, “I’m going with Alissa, Diane, and Kristy.” But deceptive people will make you work for the entire answer, just as my detainees did. We have two ears and one mouth, so it makes sense that we should listen twice as much as we speak. In the interrogation world, we listen intently more than we speak because we are listening to the details, and listening for verbal deceptive tells, so we can ask follow-up questions.

6. Ask the same question twice.

This is a simple questioning technique that is commonly used to check for truthfulness and accuracy of information provided. Let’s say you ask your subject, “When did you first notice the gun was missing,” and your subject answers, “When I checked the safe this morning.” Let 10 or 15 minutes go by and ask the same exact question again to see if your suspect responds with the same answer. If he answers, “When I checked the safe last night,” you know you have a discrepancy that you need to exploit. Use the timeline method and your questioning techniques to fully exploit the discrepancy. Your suspect may have legitimately made a mistake and explain it was for certain this morning; or he may have lied and forgot the details of his lie. Don’t be accusatory; use the techniques in this book before you lose rapport and shut him down.

7. Ask a control question.

Control questions are a bit more complicated than repeat questions, but they are a great tool to check for truthfulness and accuracy. I’ll use the same example from the previous page. After your suspect tells you, “When I checked the safe this morning,” instead of asking the same question again to see if he gives the same answer, change up the information a bit when you rephrase the question. So instead, maybe ask, “The first time you noticed the gun missing was when you checked the safe last night, right?” This is a yes-or-no question, but if the suspect is being truthful, he should pick up on the fact you changed his answer and correct you. If he fails to spot the inconsistency, does that mean he was lying? Or was he just not paying attention to what you asked? You’ll have to find out.

8. Ask non-pertinent questions.

You might be wondering why you would ever need to get irrelevant information. Isn’t the whole purpose of this book to teach you how to extract truthful pertinent information? Yes, but the other purpose, which I mentioned way back in the Introduction, is how to extract information while maintaining rapport. This technique is how you do just that. When you start to see the body language shift in your subject, especially if she is closing off to you physically, you need to bring her back to a more relaxed frame of mind by letting up on the stress and tension. A way to do this is by asking a non-pertinent question. Ask her about topics that make her feel comfortable. Even if you are on the brink of getting a confession, you won’t get it if your subject shuts down. Trust me, as I’m speaking from experience. Take the time to relax your subject so she can regain her composure. Confessions come when people are relaxed and feeling trusting. You may want to ask her about her family, her favorite sport or hobby, or what she likes to watch on TV or listen to on the radio. Get her comfortable and talking again. After she is feeling more relaxed you can go back to your pertinent questions, but do so delicately. A conversation often brings about an ebb and flow of emotions, so you will have to go with the flow.

You now have eight really solid questioning techniques to catch lies. Now you need to know the three types of questions to avoid because they will only frustrate you and the person you are questioning, and hinder you from obtaining detailed, specific information.

Questions to Always Avoid Asking

Don’t ask leading questions.

Leading questions are questions that are phrased in a way to get the answer you want, not necessarily the true answer. Lawyers use this technique all the time because it works. When I was on the stand during the military tribunal, the defense lawyer asked me a leading question: “Isn’t it true that in my client’s culture, the perception of females is different than an American’s perception?” I said yes, and as soon as that word came out of my mouth, I wanted to suck it back in. He got me. He led me into saying yes so that it would appear to the courtroom that I knew I made my detainee uncomfortable, which was not the case. The lawyer did a little happy dance and said, “No further questions, Your Honor.” I was so angry at myself, which is probably why I sparred with him the next time he asked me a leading question, and every time after that! Getting the information you think you want to hear is not necessarily truthful information. If you are not a lawyer, don’t use leading questions. If you are ever on the stand, don’t fall victim to them. Refuse to answer yes or no and state why: it’s a leading question, and the lawyer is leading you to what she wants to hear. (Sorry, lawyers—your secret’s out!)

Don’t ask compound questions.

Ask one question at a time, always! If you ask two questions at once, you will miss important information. Deceptive people love to be asked compound questions, because if someone doesn’t want to give up information, this is the perfect way to avoid answering. For example, let’s say you asked your employee, “Sheryl, why is the drawer coming up $100 short? Did anyone else work the register today?” If Sheryl took that $100 from the drawer, she is going to answer only one of those questions with the hope that you forget to come back and ask the other one again. Save yourself the trouble and never, ever ask a compound question; it’s the perfect way for someone to get away with a lie. It also will make you look bad as an interviewer, interrogator, or questioner. You don’t want to allow the suspect to control the interview. Refer back to the transcript of Larry King’s interview with the Ramseys: he asks several compound questions and gets the answer to one.

Don’t ask vague questions.

I’ve already covered this, so I am going to leave you with a saying: “If you ask a vague question, you will get a vague answer.”

Ajmal (named changed for security reasons), a Pakistani detainee with whom I had built great rapport and who actually invited me to Pakistan to meet his family one day, had information on the location of a secret underground Taliban training camp in Afghanistan. He didn’t want to tell me who was in charge of the camp. He went into details about where it was located and even identified its location on maps that I brought in. He told me that he would tell me anything I wanted to know except who was in charge. Oh, a challenge! I agreed and told him I appreciated all the information he was giving me, so I could live without knowing this one thing, while I grinned to myself, thinking, You’ll tell me by the time I’m done and you won’t even realize it when you do. Ajmal loved to smoke cigarettes, so I offered him a cigarette break in every interrogation session, which he appreciated. My interpreter and I would step out of the interrogation booth to take a break since I hated the smoke. My plan was to trick to Ajmal into telling me who ran the camp solely by skillfully controlling the conversation and inserting the right question at the right time. It was a simple plan, but it wasn’t easy. Ajmal had to be relaxed enough in order to let his guard down and forget he didn’t want to tell me that piece of information. That meant I had to downplay the importance of it by not talking about it, and, if it came up, by not showing facial expressions leaked happiness, contempt, or surprise. I briefed my interpreter about my plan to trick Ajmal into telling me who ran the camp. He agreed and was eager to play along. Ajmal finished the cigarette, and we went back inside and continued the interrogation. After three hours of dancing around the subject and getting Ajmal laughing and completely relaxed, I inserted a control question. I simply said, “When Abdullah ran the camp, how many fighters could he train at one time?” Ajmal replied, “Abdullah didn’t run the camp; Abdul Rahman did, but anywhere from 50 to 200 fighters would be there.” Then there was silence. All three of us looked at each other; my interpreter and I had a grin on our faces (we couldn’t help it—our plan had worked after all this time!), while Ajmal looked puzzled. He suddenly grabbed his mouth in shock as his eyes flew open. He realized that he had been caught. I told him that I didn’t want to trick him but that I really needed that one piece of information. Knowing when to insert the perfectly phrased question is the key to successful truth extraction. I was able to extract that name without Ajmal’s buzzer going off. It took me three hours to do it, and I was mentally exhausted at the end, but it was worth every minute.

Congratulations! You have just completed my five-step program to detecting deception and getting to the truth. Now get out there and use it!