Research and adapt: That’s the beginning of your planning and preparation.

Planning and preparation put in motion a process that concludes with you getting the outcome you want. Taking a shortcut approach, such as only reading eyes or relying solely on body language, is lame. It’s a shortcut to frustration and mistakes.

Planning and preparation mean securing background information on your source, knowing that person’s rituals, defining your role and his or hers, and making sure the costumes and scenery create the right effect. Interrogation is theater for one. If you want to see how effective interrogation techniques can really be in your life, keep that in mind as you plan and prepare.

In the interrogator’s world, planning and preparation constitute the major portion of the work. First, an interrogator creates a picture of the inside of a prisoner’s head by linking bits of information about him. In teaching young interrogators how to combine fragments of information to get a picture of someone, I used the pocket litter exercise. I would bring a uniformed soldier forward and have him dump the contents of his pocket on the table. The wallet alone would contain enough information to build a profile. You know a lot about a guy with a library card, condom, pilot’s license, blood donor card, and ATM statements. (Think about that the next time you put something away in your wallet.)

Second, the interrogator builds a plan of what she will do on contact. There is an old Army adage that goes, “Few plans survive first contact with the enemy.” It’s certainly true of interrogation, but I might also add that the enemy has less chance of surviving if you have a plan at first contact. That plan covers at least two essentials: what will likely motivate the prisoner to do what we want, and a questioning strategy.

An initial assessment of a source, whether that person is a prisoner or your boss, is going to be based on that person’s dominant role at the moment. You can influence that through good planning and preparation, but this is precisely where many people fail in their quest for a particular outcome. In my vernacular, they invite the wrong person to the dance. “Boss” is not a characterization that describes an entire person. “Boss” is one role of many that make up that person. Thorough planning and preparation let you view the other roles that create the person, in effect allowing you to decide whom you want to dance with. Given my choice, I want to dance with the role who’s no match for my skill set.

To illustrate how planning and preparation influence outcome, I’ll give you an overview of the phases of interrogation that receive a closer look in later chapters. Interrogators have the results of screening reports to help indicate who the source is; your “screening report” is the results of your research. Think of this tool as X-rays that help a surgeon pinpoint what she has to remove—in this case, information.

To make each point clear, I’ll continue the analogy of “interrogation as surgery”:

In military interrogations, there are three kinds of data requirements:

Know everything you possibly can about your target. If you plan to baseline and question a loved one, you already have a wealth of information. The challenge in that case becomes the fact that you have processed a great deal of data about the person through your own filters. You must adapt by remaining as objective as possible. If your target is a potential client or employee, you need to dig up anything you can about him before you walk into the room for the meeting. Then, in the course of the meeting, you use that knowledge to move that person or group toward the outcome you intend.

Most people don’t use the free resources that are readily accessible to find out about people around them, including their friends. They walk into presentations with prospective clients completely focused on themselves: What am I going to say? How can I impress him? That will get you nowhere compared to the person who has collected in-depth background.

By doing a search on someone prior to a meeting, you can find out facts about the individual’s personal life, as well as things about her business. It’s relatively easy and cheap to find out where someone lives, for example, which will tell you something about her level of affluence, preferences, and so on. If your target has a small ranch 30 miles outside of town, you can safely assume she likes the country, animals, and open spaces. When you conduct a Web search on her, you might also find references to the Rotary Club or some other service organization; that will clue you in about her sense of community. All of that is important baselining information. I’m not saying that you should find out where someone lives and start talking about her neighborhood in the first meeting—that’s potentially creepy. Find out what you can, make it clear that have you have good intelligence on the business, and then use the personal information you’ve collected to give you insights on the individual.

When I received an interrogation assignment in the Army, I read everything about that prisoner in the files. I examined everything that other soldiers had stripped off his body and put in a bag. Then, I walked out and watched the prisoner, maybe for 20 minutes, maybe for 10 hours, depending on who he was. I recorded everything he did—how he interacted with other people, what his mannerisms were, and so on—so that I would know later when he deviated from his normal pattern.

Let’s say the prisoner was a chemical weapons expert. Because that’s an area of strong interest, we would have had information on file about chemical weapons, even though we may have very few background facts on the prisoner himself. From that information, I could not only reinforce my ability to question him on his expertise, but also deduce certain things about him.

The impression I create with the prisoner by knowing about chemical weapons gives me credibility with him as well as an ability to question sharply. If I begin the interrogation genuinely ignorant of his field, I might say, “Tell me something about chemical weapons,” and he could lead me down a path of irrelevant details and nonsense. He would know almost immediately that I had no clue about his expertise. If, however, I begin the interrogation the same way, but follow up with well-informed questions, he has no idea how much I know and I have the chance to lead him down a narrow path of fact after fact after fact.

In civilian life, this style of preparation has been invaluable to me. I walk into meetings with people I have never met and know the details of their business and maybe even their office operations—but they don’t know nearly as much about me. This one-up position might stem from really simple facts. The person comes from Kansas, has a teenaged boy who just learned to drive, and loves baseball. Knowledge is power. I know more than they do and that gives me an advantage in a negotiation, interview, or presentation.

Now is where the information in Section I starts to influence your ability to spot a liar. Everything you know about a source will impact how you approach him. Using what you know about Myers-Briggs, say you’ve determined that your source is a sensing-judging type (SJ), driven by input from the outside world, using methodical processes to make decisions. To establish rapport with him, you need to need to create an environment that is secure and fits his needs. Remember that his keywords are reliable, good, and respectable. You will need to decide early whether he is secure or insecure and whether you will attack his conformity to his own standards or bolster his self image. That is, you need to decide to go with the type, or against the type. The approach you then select is the lever you will use to create certain feelings to get the source to talk. In addition to his temperament category, you also want to ascertain learning style: Is he time-, event-, or sequence-driven? This will become important from the minute you open your mouth to engage your source in conversation. The learning modality—visual, auditory, or kinesthetic—will also give you insights on how to structure your questions either to suit his style of memory or to counter it to cause stress.

Combine this internal background information on your source with the externals, such as education, residence, and so on, and you can pinpoint sensitivities and characteristics of a person to an astonishing degree. You will know with a great level of certainty how useful pride, emotion, and other elements of approaches will be. These facts also figure prominently into the scheme of data that includes baselining the person’s body language and speech patterns. Taken together, they tell you what you need to know to build rapport and apply stress so you can drive toward your desired outcome.

The background information gives you an initial view of whom you want to invite to the dance. You refine that as you get to know your source. You know it will be easier to achieve your outcome in the meeting, for example, if you can draw out the relationship-oriented community servant than it will be if you draw out the cutthroat CEO.

A ritual can be an automatic response pattern or it could be something you do quite thoughtfully. In some cases, rituals are habits “forced” upon you because of your culture or religion, or perhaps even a health need. Working fact: You adapt your environment to you through rituals.

Humans are designed for rituals. We use them to relieve stress, lure a mate, connect us to God, and make us socially acceptable. Sometimes, even when we can’t quite identify a behavior pattern as a ritual, it often is. For example, I have a friend who grew up in the Roman Catholic tradition, which employs obvious and carefully structured rituals in worship. Whether it’s a sacrament, such as Baptism, or Mass, Catholics rely on an identical sequence of events and words; this gives a lot of people a strong sense of connection to each other and to the Church. When she went with her boyfriend to an Evangelical Free Church without a structured liturgy, she felt really uncomfortable with it. She said, “They have no ritual!” I said, “Yes, they do. It just looks different.” She insisted that wasn’t the case until we looked at the service closely. Every week, they sang at least five songs. Every week, they listened to a sermon or some other presentation containing a Bible-based message. Every week, they took up a collection. Every week, they had a designated time for socializing. There were also lots of physical elements of the service—where the musicians stood, where the pastor preached, and so on—that ritualized the experience. Without enough of those elements, people in the congregation would get “lost.” They wouldn’t feel connected to each other, to the pastor, to the point of the whole thing.

The rituals of primary interest to interrogators are those that relieve stress. Watch how animals use ritual for this purpose. Some cats crawl under the bed when a stranger enters the room, and some circle the new person and smell her shoes. A parrot might pluck his feathers. “Behaving like a caged animal” has real meaning if you watch a captive creature, no matter what the species. Most horses at the racetrack will develop one of these rituals, or “vices” as they are known in that world. The vices range from weaving a sort of dance back and forth, to wind-sucking, in which the horse grips something with his teeth and sucks air into his stomach. The vices release endorphins, so they become addictive behavior for the horse. Human stress rituals do the same thing. In response to the unknown or high level of anxiety, a person will automatically try to adjust to her environment. The interrogator’s job then is to note how the person behaves when under no stress and to get a clear indication when the rituals begin.

The historical underpinning of some of our contemporary rituals is fascinating. For example, I found it curious that I could be easily identified as an American when I first had tours of duty abroad. Foreigners would watch me eat and know immediately where I’m from. Other cultures keep the knife and fork in hand throughout the meal. So why is it that most Americans pick up their knife with the right hand (even if they’re left-handed) and put it back down after cutting something? In the days of the American Revolution, the separatists and loyalists argued bitterly. These people were neighbors who shopped, worshipped, and ate together. So they developed a ritual that averted stabbings at the table and we follow it to this day: They put down the knife after they cut their meat.

Personal history also lies at the heart of many of our rituals as adults. If you were a thumb-sucking, hair-stroking, or foot-tapping kid, you may not be doing that specific action to calm yourself in a tense business meeting, but you’re probably doing a variation of it. The thumb-sucker might have a habit of bringing her thumb to her chin. The hair-stroker might put her hand on her neck. The foot-tapper might move his toes in his shoes.

Let’s say you’re a foot-tapper and I put you in the cloistered environment of an interrogation room—a place designed to ratchet up your stress level. Your comfort ritual will become a more dominant behavior than it usually is. In this artificially sterile environment, nothing is familiar to you at first except your weird little ritual. In a new business setting or on a first date, you’ll notice the same adjustment. You will also see it when, for example, a neat person has to experience some social or business event in a cluttered environment.

As you try to reorder your position in the alien environment, you will likely observe a whole spectrum of rituals that help the person adapt mentally. For example, if I’m interrogating the excessively neat person who has now been subjected to clutter, he may start out by foot-tapping, but that habit might join a party of rituals such as brushing his clothes, buttoning and re-buttoning his shirt cuffs, and moving his fingers across the table to remove dust. He would try to order what he could, to gain control over the structure of his environment as much as possible.

I have a cousin who used to bite himself when he was a kid. Any bit of stress and his teeth would clamp down on a nearby body part. He clearly had to train himself out of that to avoid ridicule; he developed a substitute. As an adult his version of the same habit was reflexively bringing his hand toward his mouth. Only someone who knew him as a child would ever connect the two gestures.

Food

Remember Pavlov’s experiment with the dogs? Ring a bell just before feeding time, and the dogs’ behavior becomes predictive of the meal. Dangle a treat in front of your own dog, and then take more than the usual time to give it to him. If you wait too long, the dog will salivate enough to drool. This is a simple example of a feeding ritual. We are not far removed from our canine friends in this sense. The mere thought of food can raise digestive enzymes in the stomach and increase salivation in humans. In filming a British TV special, our team of interrogators teased the volunteer prisoners by saying, “They are preparing your food. Can you smell it?” In fact, the volunteers were being fed standard Army rations, a high-energy, pre-cooked meal packaged in such thick plastic that the smell of food could not escape. That didn’t stop the prisoners from imagining it. The intent of the question was to raise expectations. A subsequent delay in the delivery of the food created a displaced expectation, which made them more vulnerable.

By most anyone’s standards, Army rations are disgusting, but, in the field, they represent health and home. In that way, even this kind of food is part of a stabilizing ritual. People who eat to excess tend to view food as the centerpiece of stabilizing ritual in their lives. Interrogators exploit the fact that people use food to stabilize and offer comfort items—tastier treats than the standard rations that everyone receives—as incentives for the prisoner to talk to us.

In some cases, you can similarly exploit a person’s ritualized link to food. Establish the routine of the source you are talking to. If the person has heavy food rituals, use that to enhance rapport or to exploit his telegraphed needs. You can create a great deal of discomfort for some people by working through lunch.

Sex

I just compared us to dogs, so I’ll move on to another species in talking about the rituals of sex: birds. Bird rituals commonly involve a demonstration ritual, followed by acknowledgment, and then a mirroring ritual. In humans, these dances become more polished with age, but the basics are there early in life. Two of the more noticeable rituals are proximity and mirroring. Americans reserve space of less than 18 inches for intimate contact. This varies culturally. If someone moves in past this space he or she had better be invited or it is a seen as a sign of hostility. Even in culture where casual contact is closer, the rituals of sex are demonstrative. Americans traveling abroad are often taken aback by intimate contact in the streets and see it as a sexual ritual. The truth is that the elements of American sexual ritual don’t involve intimate contact and this is obvious to the trained eye. Simply holding hands does not indicate intimacy. Mirroring involves making the body move as the other person’s, and in its subtle form, it subconsciously puts the other person at ease. On the other hand, the seduction dance involves overt mirroring done at a slow pace. Watch sexually attracted adults still in the stage of courtship and notice the exaggerated movements that seem almost lethargic. If you increase the speed, you would find the dance bizarre. Voices lower, hands curl to make each person appear less threatening, heads tilt, eyes are open. As a result of hormones pumping, blood flows to mucosa and the systems needed for reproduction—eyes dilate to take in the picture better, lips fill, faces flush, and everything seems softer. As this progresses the mating couple begins to match cadence and the ritual is complete.

When I was stationed at Ft. Bragg, some of my fellow interrogators and I frequented a large country bar. Most nights, one of our group would walk back toward the rest of us and start mirroring the behavior of one of the others after his unsuccessful attempt to begin the “love dance.” All of a sudden, the obvious rituals of mating take on a comic or disconcerting meaning. Out of context, they appear contrived, or even robotic.

If you are in an intimate relationship, there are rituals you conduct on a regular basis that lead to lowering defenses and opening up to your mate. This baseline is well established. If these rituals feel wooden and something is out of sequence, it is cause for concern. This does not indicate infidelity, but it does indicate a change in the way the other person’s mind is engaged. Stress impacts sexuality in tremendous ways.

Sleep

Anyone who has suffered from insomnia realizes the power of ritual in putting the mind at rest and the body to sleep. How your pillow is angled, the temperature of the room, which side you sleep on—all of these factors can influence your ability to sleep.

The routine you conduct before you go to sleep can indicate whether or not you’re at ease. Interrogators and guards keep their eyes and ears on all prisoners in the cage to learn about their state of mind as they try to sleep. (By the way, this is the kind of help guards in Abu Ghraib were supposed to provide to interrogators: simple observation, not acts of wanton cruelty.)

Companies and other organizations that establish patterns for conducting meetings attempt to embed a ritual into the participants that not only connects them with each other, but makes it easier for the boss, manager, or supervisor to manipulate them. It sounds sinister—and it could be—but the point is to try to accomplish the corporate mission as efficiently as possible.

Bring people from different companies together for a trade association or coalition meeting and you’re likely to see “ritual wars.” To some extent, they will drag their corporate rituals with them into the new arena; before they know what happened, the rituals clash and cause disruptions. Robert’s Rules of Order can be useful in establishing a kind of neutral set of behaviors in that setting, but they only go so far. If the guy from Company A keeps his laptop open and wirelessly alive because that’s how people do it at his corporate meetings, but the guy from Company B has been trained to avoid that at all costs, the meeting has an undercurrent of tension. The simple solution is to create a new ritual specifically for that group: “Today, we’ll going to go through presentations for an hour at a time. No laptops. After that, we’ll take 10-minute breaks to check e-mail.”

The 202nd MI Battalion stationed in Augusta, Georgia, is considered a “strategic asset” for collecting intelligence, and it’s at the complete disposal of the theater commander. For a while, their motto was “Semper Gumbi” (“ever flexible,” but don’t call it classical Latin). This describes a basic requirement for an interrogator and surfaces most obviously in how he adopts different roles.

What will you project to the person you want a straight answer from? How do you want to be perceived? Are you playing mother? Tyrant? Seducer? Analyst? What is the other person’s role? Act as a predator, move as a predator, and you will be perceived as a predator. Act as a rescuer, and your source will respond to you as someone who can take him away from the predator.

Well, at least that’s how it is in an ideal situation. The more thorough you are with all aspects of planning and preparation, the more likely you are to adopt the role and approach that match the personality and background of your source.

A big part of interrogation is not just adopting a role that benefits you, but overcoming the role held by the prisoner. What if, as a young kid, I had been sent in to interrogate a general from a foreign army? The process would depend on my moving into a role of authority and undermining his ability to maintain his role as a general. I talked to a guy who interrogated Saddam Hussein. Imagine the role coaching, never mind the other aspects of planning and preparation that went into that confrontation.

In rehearsal, even before the costumes and scenery show up, an actor preparing for a role might anchor key traits of the character in his head through a piece of clothing, speaking, or ritual he designs for the character. The villain twirls his moustache when he yells at the ingénue, who bites her lower lip in fear. Before a job interview, you prepare for the role of public relations executive by putting on a suit, straightening your posture, and smiling.

You have certain scripted roles in your daily life. You’re a little different with the various people you know: mother, best friend, employees, lover, kids, and so forth. Does that mean you have multiple personalities? No, because all of the roles are facets of your own personality. Within those roles, you’re consistent. A sudden inconsistency that signals a role change would cause ripples in your world. Nevertheless, you sometimes have a reason to adopt a different role or expand on the one you have. You were in the rear cubicle yesterday and a manager today. Last year, you had the role of a partner in your law firm, this year you own a deli and entertain people while you make sandwiches.

Certain roles you adopt stay with you for life. I was a career soldier and I’ll always be a soldier. People who see me in a corporate setting see that regardless of what my title is on the organizational chart. Your roles could be similarly colored by something in your background or a fact of your life (you were a body builder, you’re a mom, you’re gay).

Changing roles to suit your circumstances doesn’t make you a fake; it doesn’t imply lying. Adjusting your demeanor can be simply part of putting yourself in charge. Adopting the right role gives you a way of controlling events and the flow of conversation, and of driving toward the outcome you want. Your role affects perceptions of what you know, what you can do, and even who you know.

The role you choose can affect your very survival, or your survival in a job, too. If your boss suddenly yells at you, he brings out the victim in you, unless you have the capacity to bring to the fore another part of you. It takes practice because stress hormones will take you down an emotional path unless you have practiced remaining in cognitive thought under stress.

If I haven’t trained a part of me to handle a traumatic situation, if I can’t play the role of someone in control under stress, then I’m just a victim. Other roles, such as Greg the Businessman, Greg the Medieval Fighter, and Greg the Horse Lover, are still in my repertoire, but they aren’t any good to me. If I can call on Greg the Hostage Survivor, however, then he can come to the fore saying, “This is what I do well.”

When Oprah Winfrey appears in public, she brings the mogul, the abused child, the activist, the person who has both been overweight and overcome obesity, the African-American, the glamorous woman, the philanthropist, and many more roles. She makes cognitive choices about which ones she projects and when, based on circumstances, as well as the needs and interests of the people she’s talking with. She doesn’t allow her guests, for example, to draw forth the roles she doesn’t deem appropriate for the occasion. She does have a keen ability to do that to other people, however (although, I’ll add, I’ve never seen her do it disrespectfully).

Even within the same role, you can have dramatic variations through changes in speech and body. It’s logical that you make the changes depending on the circumstances. A cop in the doughnut shop doesn’t sound the same as a cop busting a thief. Volume, cadence, and other elements of speech convey relaxation, commands, anger, stress, and so on. The non-language aspects of vocal expression, especially tone of voice, have a critical role in conveying meaning and cementing your role in the mind of whoever hears you. Moms and dog trainers probably know this better than anyone. Mom can say sweetly, “Please go outside and play,” and you know she just wants you to have some fun. Or, she can make the same sentence sound as though it’s a tenpenny nail stabbing your thumb. They’re the same words, but it really means, “Get out of my hair!” The rate of speech can carry a great deal of meaning, too. Excellent teachers and motivational speakers do this to drive home a point. Their speech is energetic and fast-paced until it comes time to deliver the Important Fact. They slow down so...you...get...every...word.

In presenting yourself as an authority figure to your sales team, you might wear a suit, but the motivational speaker who climbed Everest might command far more attention from the same people by wearing hiking pants. Your costume has to match your role to have maximum effect.

Again, I’ll begin with the value of Semper Gumbi. You may be a guy who projects precision with your clothes, taste with your Rolex, and neatness with your clean car. But what if wrinkled trousers distract you from a conversation, wearing a $20 sports watch causes hives, and you feel desperate for a car wash after riding through mud?

As an interrogator, I learned to destroy people who must have that level of predictability in their lives—people who rigidly maintain control over their environment. The less flexible you are about externals, the easier you are to move off center and, ultimately, to break. And if clothes, cars, and other elements of costumes and scenery define you, you’re locked into a narrow role, so you fail as an interrogator as well. In the movie Something Wild (Orion, 1986), Jeff Daniels plays a stiff banker who meets an outrageous Melanie Griffith. Scene after scene provide vivid examples of how difficult it is for a rigid person to adapt to new situations.

That kind of person is an interrogator’s dream target for two reasons: Any deviation from his routine that he initiates will show up right away, and any deviation I force upon him—such as spilling coffee on his pants—will drive him nuts. That kind of person could also be his own saboteur in trying to apply interrogation techniques for two reasons: He may have a tough time matching his role to the source, and anyone who is aware of his obsessions has a certain power over him.

I’m not telling you to change who you are. I just want to point out that you may have limits that will make it difficult for you to either fully use or fully resist the techniques I describe.

In choosing your costumes and scenery as part of your preparation and planning, you first need to be aware of preconceived notions of certain images. For example, if you walk into a cold room where a bright, white light stabs the darkness and see nothing but a small table and one straight-backed chair, you think “interrogation room.” That’s because you’ve seen it on television hundreds of times. If I know something about you, whether it’s cultural or personal, that tells me how to make the environment more intimidating, then I should change the scenery accordingly. The idea is to make the prisoner feel vulnerable. When I worked at SERE, one of my colleagues often adopted the role of a cruel guard, a dark creature obsessed with cigarettes and coffee. He would pour his coffee on the floor, and then he put his cigarettes out in it. He made prisoners sit in that foul puddle while he questioned them.

Planning and preparation include every aspect of the stage you are preparing for your audience of one. If you plan to come across as the mild, non-threatening type, your environment must support this; if you portray the savage, that role also needs support from the stage and props. When Team Delta filmed The History Channel special We Can Make You Talk, one of the volunteers was a bright young man who lectured at London University. On our interrogation staff, we had a world-class questioner who was a retired U.S. Army interrogator with SERE with combat experience in Panama. We also had a younger interrogator named Marshall Perry, who shaves his head and has multiple piercings in his face and ears. To illicit fear from the young volunteer, Marshall washed beer around his mouth, punched the wall to bloody his knuckles, and visited the young man in his interrogation room. Marshall used his size and all the props at hand to portray a loose cannon. The retired interrogator, Dora Vazquez-Hellner, moved in and won a confession by coming to the volunteer prisoner’s rescue and gaining his trust and confidence. He later told us he thought she was the only intelligent person in the group and he feared we would really injure him, despite the fact that this was a simulation. Interrogators in daily operations have to improvise because they are often not in the most suitable environment for their purposes. When you go into a prospect’s office, you face a similar challenge. You are not likely to have the capability to modify his environment—or can you? Is it possible to remove him from the safe zone of his office, thereby creating a feeling of discomfort that you then resolve by offering services to make his life easier? In the interrogation world the only limit is the mind. We use change of scenery to create the illusion that we are not the bad guys. We walk the prisoner to somewhere he has never seen. We tell him we would get in trouble if our superior caught us, so walk quietly. We lead him between the two sets of barbed wire of the cage so that he feels that we are on his side. So how do you change the scenery in a strange office? Use your imagination!

Scenery can have either a calming and welcoming effect, or it can have an inhibiting effect, which is what all barriers do. Barriers remove your ability to read body language, but you can also use them to help make yourself unreadable. When you’re stressed, the toe tapping, finger rubbing, and foot twitching that always occurred during a math test will show up once again. Putting a table between you and another person can hide stress reactions—precisely what you don’t want if you’re the one trying to baseline. The ideal configuration is one that hides your stress and reveals the other person’s. Most offices are unintentionally arranged this way. The occupant sits behind a massive desk and the visitor gets a lone chair. If it’s your office, take advantage of the set-up. If it’s the other person’s, find a way to bring the person out from behind the barrier.