Chapter 6
Analyzing the Answers
A questioner is an information collector. In the world of intelligence gathering, the complement to a collector is an analyst. That person looks at the information you’ve collected, dissects it, examines all the pieces and parts, and then links relevant content to other information about the subject. Unless you’re a spy reading this book just to find out if I know what I’m talking about, you don’t have a staff of intelligence analysts to figure out if the answers you’re getting make sense or have deeper relevance than you might think. You have to be your own analyst.
At the same time, you have to be your own body language expert to measure the truthfulness of what you’re hearing, to determine whether or not you’ve made someone uncomfortable, and to know when someone is holding back information.
Here’s another way of looking at analysis: When I am listening to the answers to my questions, the responses fall into one of two categories: sellin’ or tellin’. If a person is recounting fact and his response is mostly honest and captures a recollection, then he’s tellin’. If he is trying to convince me that the information he’s telling me is true, then he’s sellin’. It is a gut thing sometimes, an audible and visual observation at other times, and it can be a combination of both.
ANALYZING CONTENT
In his book Business Confidential, former senior CIA clandestine service officer Peter Earnest delves into the art, science, and necessity of information analysis. He begins by stating that analysis “is guided by key questions, such as “What portion of the information responds directly to the needs stated in the requirements?” “What can we verify as reliable?” and “Does the information reflect both logic and keen intuition?”1 So think of information analysis as another reason for discovery: It begins with questions just as information collection begins with questions.
Success in almost any profession comes from having what we in the interrogation business call “actionable intelligence”; that is, information that has relevance and practical value to the task at hand. Regardless of whether you are asking questions to find out if you want to date someone or to find out where a bomb is buried, you obviously benefit more from complete information. Making a decision or taking a next step based on partial information is potentially disastrous, as many of us who are divorced will agree. The first round of good questions can immediately yield actionable intelligence, but sometimes they aren’t enough; you need a round of follow-up questions targeting the gaps in information. Before exploring the nature of follow-up questions, however, let’s look at how to determine whether or not the information you have meets your needs.
Peter Earnest’s questions contain the three primary areas where you can begin to focus your analysis:
1. Requirements.
2. Reliability.
3. A combination of gut feeling and logic.
Requirements
Focusing on the four discovery areas—people, places, things, and events in time—will help you get a clean set of requirements, which are guided by your objective. For example, your objective is to get a $25,000 grant for your local museum from a corporate foundation. You meet someone who works for the foundation at a party, but you have heard that employees are very guarded about their giving program. You don’t want to ignore this rare social opportunity to interact and meet your requirements so you have the best shot at getting the grant. Put into questions, your main requirements are:
Where are their favorite places/types of places for giving grants?
What programs/types of programs do they think deserve their grants?
How do they like to be recognized for their contributions?
If you asked the questions outright, you would come across as rude, so you have to be creative in discovering the information. You also need to try to determine to what extent the person you’re talking with has the information to fulfill the requirements, so you might start out with, “I understand your executive director is an incredibly bright woman. How closely do you work with her?” Hearing that they work together on a daily basis, you proceed to lasso the facts you’re after. In the course of the conversation, ask yourself, What’s missing? To fulfill my requirements, what else do I need to know?
Questioning isn’t the only way you can fulfill your requirements, of course. Steering your conversation toward topics related to them can sometimes unearth the information you want. This is a technique that interrogators call elicitation, and it’s considered an advanced skill.
Students in elicitation classes I taught had various assignments to gather personal information from total strangers through nothing more than conversation, and absolutely no direct questions. One student was supposed to get a PIN number for a person’s bank card. He sat down next to a woman who had just arrived at a local bar to meet friends for happy hour. Talking in her direction, but not actually talking to her, he scratched his head and looked at his brand-new bank card and said, “I never know what to use as a PIN number so I can actually remember it.”
“I just use my birthday,” she said.
Her friends arrived and they all started talking. A little while later, he commented, “You remind me of my sister. I’ll bet you’re a Leo.”
“Man, you’re way off! I’m a Pisces.”
“Early April.”
“Nope. Ides of March.”
Having done his history homework as a kid—it was a day made famous by the assassination of Julius Caesar—my student now knew that her four-digit PIN was 0315.
Reliability
Reliability links to both the quality of the source and the quality of the information. Use of control, repeat, and persistent questions should help you determine a person’s relevant knowledge of a subject area, as well as allow you to check for inconsistencies.
Quality of information can be undermined by both inadvertent omissions and a deliberate attempt to hide facts or deceive you. If you suspect inadvertent omissions, follow-up questioning, such as that discussed at the end of this chapter, will help you ferret out additional details. If you suspect a cover-up or deceit, you need more sophisticated techniques to be sure of that.
Deception takes different forms, so to help raise awareness of how it can surface, keep the acronym LIE in mind:
Lies, or blatantly false statements.
Inconsistencies.
Evasions.
Entire books, such as Gregory Hartley’s How to Spot a Liar, have been written about detecting all three kinds of deception, so my focus here is on how you alter your questioning based on what you believe is misleading or incomplete information. To that end, after looking at a few methods of analyzing content to determine deception, I’ve included a section on what kinds of follow-up questions you might ask a suspected liar.
A friend of mine, psychologist Dr. Jack Schafer, was my human intelligence collector (HUMINT) co-trainer and was also a behavior analyst for the FBI. He coined the phrase text bridges to describe features of a sentence in which a person jumps from one topic to another. They are a handy way of skipping over details, and may be used intentionally or unintentionally, so they don’t necessarily signal deception. Put your lie-detection antennae up, though, if they surface in the course of questioning your teenager about where he was until 2 a.m. or while interviewing someone for a job.
Jack’s three types of text bridges are:
1. Subordinating words.
2. Adverbial conjunctives.
3. Transition words.2
Subordinating words include after, although, as if, as long as, because, before, even though, if, in order, that, since, so, than, through, unless, until, when, where, wherever, and while. For example, “I didn’t know the client was upset even though her visit that afternoon was unexpected.”
Adverbial conjunctives link ideas in sequences that are essentially disconnected. Some of them are accordingly, however, besides, nevertheless, consequently, otherwise, again, indeed, also, moreover, finally, therefore, furthermore, then, and thus. They are a great tool for omitting salient facts. For example, during the 9-1-1 call that Anthony Mitchell and his mother made after the discovery of his girlfriend’s body, one of the dispatchers asked Anthony, “Where were you when she was walking on the trail?” He replied: “Me and her just walked up to McKnight Market to see if it was open, then she said she was going to stay at a friend’s house and she would call or text me when she got there.” The two of them “just” walked up to the market and, if this story should be taken literally, “then” the very next thing that happened was the girl’s announcement that she was going to stay at a friend’s house. Anthony Mitchell was later accused of murdering 16-year-old Anna Hurd on a trail in a Minneapolis, Minnesota park.
“Transitional words connect themes and ideas or establish relationships,” according to Jack, and they fall into the categories of time, contrast, result, and addition.
Time: after, afterward, before, during, earlier, eventually, finally, first, later, meanwhile, since, then, and until.
Contrast: however, in contrast, indeed, instead, nevertheless, on the contrary, on the other hand, and yet.
Result: because, consequently, as a result, on account of, so, then, therefore, and thus.
Addition: also, and, besides, for example, furthermore, in addition, moreover, and too.
A reckless driver is using a type of transition in telling a police officer: “Of course I saw the crosswalk. In addition, before I drove through it, I looked at the sidewalk to make sure no one was about to cross the street. Suddenly, this woman started banging on the hood of my car with her purse.” The cover-up is that the driver went through the crosswalk without coming to a complete stop first and didn’t see the woman approaching the crosswalk from the other side of the street.
In addition to learning about text bridges from Jack Schafer, I also had the benefit of learning lie-detection techniques from Avinoam Shapir, who had served with Mossad prior to his work with U.S. interrogation trainees and U.S. law enforcement. His technique is called SCAN (Scientific Content Analysis), but a more generic name is statement analysis. It’s marketed primarily as a science-based way for criminal investigators to determine whether or not a subject is telling the truth, hiding information, and involved in the crime. A key premise is that people who’ve committed a crime may make statements that are literally true about the circumstances related to it; they just give you the information in such a way that it doesn’t suggest their guilt. For example, “I saw the diamonds in the showcase, locked it, left the store, and armed the alarm” leaves out the fact that the person put the diamonds in his duffle bag before he locked the showcase and left the store. There are many more levels of sophistication in Avinoam’s approach, so I want to make it clear I’m only scratching the surface with this description.
In the context of professional questioning, SCAN is mostly applicable if you’re in some aspect of law enforcement. If you were to talk to a particular victim of a crime as well as the accused, you might actually be able to calculate the time and focus of information prior to, during, and after the crime/incident. You could then compare statements and thereby see what the perpetrator emphasizes or minimizes based on actual word count. The victim will spend less time talking about the time and events leading up to and after the crime and expand on the incident so much that the time and word count are again comparable.
Zeroing in on a person’s natural sorting style can also help you detect deception. Some people have a tendency to be time-oriented, whereas others focus on sequence of occurrences, or events. A time-based person has a greater awareness of when he does things, how long it takes to do something, and so on, than do the other two types. The person who thinks in terms of sequence will answer a question like, “What did you this morning?” with a string of actions that probably begins with, “I got up.” Ask the same question of an event person, and you’ll get highlights such as “I attended a staff meeting, and I had a great conversation with my new client.”
If a person has a distinct sorting style, it would raise suspicions if he deviates from his pattern. For example, Jack leaves home at 7:30 every day and gets to his office between 8:45 and 9:00, depending on weather and traffic. He always allows 15 minutes extra to get to an appointment, so he generally arrives early and waits for the meeting to begin. If you ask him what he did that day, he’d start off by giving you the time he did it: “I got up at 6...” One day, Jack comes home at 8 p.m. and his wife asks, “Where have you been? You said you were leaving the office at 5:30 today!”
“After I left the office, I realized I forgot the power cord for my notebook, so I went back upstairs. Then I ran into the project team for the Smith account and they said they were having trouble making the numbers work, so I went into the conference room to help. I’m really sorry, dear. I should have called.”
If Jack’s wife knows anything about sorting styles and text bridges, she will whip out some interrogatives and ask questions such as, “How long were you with the project team?”
Logic and Gut Feeling
René Descartes, the French philosopher famous for saying “I think therefore I am,” also said, “We have now indicated the two operations of our understanding, intuition and deduction, on which alone we have said we must rely in the acquisition of knowledge.” When it comes to analysis, therefore, you need both. Some people might assert that they just don’t have any intuition, but I would disagree. It’s not that we all don’t have it; it’s that we often ignore it.
In psychological terms, intuition refers to the ability to acquire knowledge without the use of reason or without drawing a conclusion based on evidence. Unless you’re a human behavior and/or body language expert, you use intuition regularly to decide whether or not you can trust the stranger next to you in a store, for example. You just know it.
When it comes to information analysis, “using your head” means both evaluating what you’ve been told based on the pieces fitting together in a logical way, and deciding, once you’ve connected them, if they feel as though they belong together.
Bobby was an inveterate liar, but Nicole didn’t know that for months. They got engaged quickly, met with a real estate agent to discuss a home loan that leveraged his military benefits, and moved clothes and a dog into her apartment. Normally, he was a talker—full of details about his academic and social life at The Citadel, his adventures in the Marine Corps, and his enjoyment of high-adrenaline sports. But whenever Nicole asked about work, he’d say, “We test things for the government, mostly the military. We test everything from pencils to parachutes.”
She felt he was hiding something, but she was madly in love and brushed her concerns aside. Reasoning her way toward a good excuse for his vagueness about his work, she concluded he didn’t like it very much. She figured that he talked about skiing, skydiving, and riding his motorcycle because these things were just more interesting to him.
Two months into their intense relationship, Bobby said he had to go on an extended field trip to Nevada. His team would be testing some equipment related to nuclear waste containment, and he really wouldn’t have the ability to communicate much.
“What kind of equipment?” she asked.
“The focus in really on the mechanical stuff at this facility,” he responded. And then he described the facility in great detail. He talked about the challenges associated with nuclear waste containment. He never answered the question.
“Yeah, but what kind of equipment are you testing,” she asked again. He went into even greater detail about the location, the weather in the area, and everything except what equipment his team would be testing.
Nearly a month later, he came back home. He was sore and tired and he seemed a bit distant. It was the sense of distance that woke up her intuition.
She noticed that muscle pain, fatigue, and headaches seemed to plague him. Nicole gave in to both logic and intuition and started asking questions. Why was he so sick? What had they been testing in Nevada?
As he was drifting off to sleep, he muttered something about malaria. “Malaria? I didn’t know that malaria was something people got in Nevada,” she said sharply.
“I was in Kenya.”
After that, she questioned him until she got the truth. Much of what he had told her about himself in the past few months was true—the parts with the abundant detail—but much of what he had told her was a cover-up—the parts with the sketchy descriptions. Bobby was working for a U.S. intelligence agency and was not at liberty to disclose what he did. During his absence, he had also come to the conclusion that their relationship was moving too fast.
Nicole didn’t have any formal training in questioning or lie detection. But she did sense that the discrepancy between how he seemed to enjoy describing parts of his life in great detail and how he talked about his work was a sign of lying. She also believed that the distance she felt between them was not a result of his illness.
Incongruity in narrative style is a red flag no matter what the topic. Someone who relishes going on and on about various subjects, and then clams up with others, is someone you can suspect of withholding pertinent facts. In a personal situation, the spouse who provides great detail about meetings at work and the horrendous drive home in the rain, but leaves out details about the “social hour” that occurred before the drive home might be hiding something. Give in to both your logic and intuition when something like this occurs. When you ask in a straightforward manner, “What happened at the social hour?” and the answer is uninformative, maybe you want to start a round of timeline questioning and highlight “who.”
ANALYZING MANNER OF EXPRESSION
Questioning does not stand alone as a way of getting information and determining whether or not it’s truthful. Body language and vocal cues need to be counted in the mix of indicators about whether or not you are building rapport, getting complete information, and getting truthful information. Information collection is not only a matter of what people say, but also how they say it and what they are doing when they say it.
You are looking for deviations from the person’s pattern, and not a specific syllable like “um” or a specific movement like wandering eyes. Some people insert “um” nearly as much as they do regular words when they are trying to answer a question. You are listening and looking for vocal and physical expressions that are different from those the person generally uses.
Vocal Cues
Vocal elements are how the content is delivered. A famous example of vocal cues suggesting there is more to the story than the words would suggest is President Bill Clinton’s denial of an intimate relationship with Monica Lewinsky. The words were separate and deliberate, and he seemed to be beating listeners with his tone of voice—all vocal features that were uncharacteristic of an affable man who was well-regarded for his ability to give a speech and make the experience feel personal. When he said, “I did not have sexual relations with that woman,” his words of denial were spaced far apart, and millions of people who are not schooled in interrogation wondered, “What’s up with this?”
Here’s an example of good questioning. I called customer service for an online retailer and complained that I’d never gotten a $30 item I had ordered. The representative did a good job with interrogatives, starting with, “Who are you?” “What is your order number?” and “When did you place the order?” I answered all the questions—not once, but at least three times—and the representative kindly informed me that the shipment must have been lost in transit so he would replace it at no charge. In addition, the company would do an overnight shipment as a precaution against losing the package in transit again. I found out the next day that the first package had actually arrived but it had been put somewhere I never would have looked for it. I called the company back and explained what happened and we sorted it out.
Customer service people such as the one I dealt with are accustomed to people trying to get something for nothing. They do persistent questioning and repeat questioning as a matter of policy. They also record the calls “for quality assurance purposes,” which no doubt includes a record in case there is a suspicion of fraud. Anyone listening to my call would have heard someone who was truthful and merely interested in rectifying a situation. In contrast, a person who had received the item and was calling to get a duplicate for free would most likely have evinced vocal cues of deception. They could have included one or all of the following:
Enunciation of key words may change the third time the person is providing the information, as if the lie is getting too hard to repeat.
Pace of speech might change, either getting quicker (“I’ve gone through this before; let’s just wrap it up”) or slower (“What is the point of going over this again?”).
Stridency, or tightness, in the voice because stress is present.
Insertion of filler words like “well” or “uh,” as a subliminal way of avoiding the repetition of a lie, or maybe because the person just forgot what he said the first time.
Shift in tone of voice, perhaps to a more agitated state.
Keep in mind that any of these changes could occur even if the person is telling the truth. Some people strongly dislike filing a complaint, so the vocal cues are no more than a sign of stress. But the presence of stress is often a sign of lying, so no one could blame a customer service representative for questioning the truthfulness of a caller if he hears these indicators.
Body Language Cues
Drawing from work done by the man who wrote the Foreword for this book, Gregory Hartley, I will give you an abbreviated view of body language cues that indicate stress—a key indicator that a person might be trying to deceive you or withhold information. I’ll use the same categories of movement that Greg and Maryann have used in their last seven books, including How to Spot a Liar. They list four major types—illustrators, regulators, barriers, and adaptors—and define them briefly as follows:
1. Illustrators are movements that punctuate a statement.
2. Barriers separate one person from another.
3. Adaptors are nervous gestures that help someone try to calm down.
4. Regulators are used to control someone else’s speech.
Deviation from what’s customary for a person in each type is a body language cue that the person is under stress.
Adolf Hitler often used an illustrator that Greg labels “batoning,” which describes the hammering movement the dictator made to drive home a point. That was a customary illustrator for Hitler. In contrast, when a man (or woman) known for more conciliatory or gentle gestures suddenly uses batoning to punctuate denial of an affair, for example, that means it’s time to whip out the inter-rogatives and quiz him. Batoning in this instance is an example of what Greg calls a deviation from baseline; that is, how a person typically speaks or acts in a relatively low-stress situation.
Another way to determine deviation is by the intensity of the movement. A person might use illustrators quite a bit, with arms moving all around while telling story, but maybe those arms tend to move in the mid-section of the body. Suddenly, in the midst of answering a question about why she changed jobs, the arms come to a rest at the side of her body. Or she may start flailing above her shoulders. Either variation suggests that stress is present; the question wasn’t an easy one to answer and it caused some anxiety.
People create barriers with their bodies as well as objects. After asking a question that the other person perceives as difficult—for whatever reason—he may turn to the side, take a step back, or maybe put his glass of wine between the two of you. Any movement like this suggests a need for more personal space and for separation from you. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, by the way. If you’re flirting with someone who does this, it may just mean that she feels nervous at the come-on. If you are in a meeting or job interview, however, it could mean that the question provoked defensiveness. Probe further. Observe any other deviations, and listen for them as well.
Adaptors are those little nervous things we do to soothe ourselves. Some people shake their feet; others rub their fingers together. Some people have really annoying adaptors like clicking ball point pens or tapping their fingers on a tabletop. When you have asked a question and you see an adaptor surface that had not been there before, remember your question and realize that it caused stress.
Regulators reflect a desire to control the conversation. Moms tend to be very good at them, with movements that dictate “Zip the lips!” or “C’mon—tell me what you want faster because something’s burning in the oven!” When someone starts posing a question that may not be comfortable for the other person, she may purse her lips, as if to suggest, “Stop talking—now.” It’s a sign of stress, but unlike the other categories of movement, this is probably more an indication of a question the person doesn’t want to answer than it is a sign that anything she’s said is suspect.
FOLLOW-UP QUESTIONS
When students return from deployments and we cross paths again, I always ask them, “What did we teach you that made a difference?” One student replied recently, “My source [a common reference for an enemy combatant or detainee] had a cover story with many layers, and since you always told us to continue with the follow-up of the question that gets an answer one time, my consistent ‘what else?’ led to the admission he was a well-placed leader in the regional network of insurgents.” The source later stated that because my student kept asking for more, he thought he must have known more. He said, “I had no choice but to finally tell you the truth.”
In interrogation school, we teach a complete block of instruction called approaches, which are techniques to engender cooperation and thus collect information from a more cooperative source. There’s an old saying: “You can lead a horse to water, but you cannot make him drink.” In terms of approaches, it’s always been my endeavor as a former salesperson in intelligence collection to make that statement read, “You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink—but if you make him thirsty, he’ll drink on his own!”
One of the many approaches is “we know all,” in which the interrogator conducts himself and the interrogation in such a manner that everything discussed is known information and he is simply quizzing the source to determine his or her level of cooperation. It’s a game that parents play too, when mom shakes a finger at Johnnie and says, “I watched you at the playground, so don’t make up any stories!”
My student’s persistent questioning evoked the same result, but with a direct question. In Mission: Black List #1 about the pursuit of Saddam Hussein, Eric Maddox talks about direct and persistent questioning as a valuable tool, whereas some teammates’ attempts to follow up and shake up a source with “we know all” backfired and destroyed rapport with a key source. Basically, unless you have confidence and sufficient supporting information in advance of a “we know all” approach, it can quickly go from “we know all” to “we don’t know s#@*!”
In short, don’t play games in your follow-up questioning. Be linear; refer to your timeline and focus on gaps of information. Go back to your requirements and determine what you don’t have yet. Do you need to ask who, what, when, where, how, or why questions—or all of them—or maybe just have a conversation and insert “Really?” or “Huh?” Perhaps, if you’re feeling skilled, you can pin down the details through elicitation techniques that help to “box” the information you need through conversation.
However you approach the follow-up, use active listening and, when appropriate, note-taking to connect with your source and organize what you hear into the four areas of discovery.