FOREWORD
FROM THE DESK OF JAMES J. NEWBERRY
Senior Special Agent, ATF (Retired)
Major, U.S. Army Reserve—Military Intelligence (Retired)
President and Co-Founder of the Institute of Analytic
Interviewing, Inc.
Certified “Truth Wizard”
She has done it again. Janine Driver’s new book is powerful.
The techniques and tricks within her easy, step-by-step plan have the potential to strengthen your already strong, innate ability to spot liars—which Janine calls your “BS Barometer”—to create trustworthy relationships in all aspects of your personal and professional lives. And not surprisingly, when your world is filled with people who are honest and trustworthy, other trustworthy and honest people will feel compelled to connect with you, too—to make a purchase, to visit your blog, to pick you up at the airport (on time), and to treat your children and aging parents like family, protecting them as if they were their own. These true friends will be the ones who leap into action immediately and reach out a helping hand when you are drowning in stress, anxiety, and sorrow. Janine’s unique book, You Can’t Lie to Me, also inspires us to take action fast—which is exactly what we both did when I first met Janine nearly ten years ago.
In late 2003, early 2004, Janine tracked me down after spending more than ten years learning kinesics and analytic interviewing techniques from the manuals I’d helped put together as a senior special agent in the ATF (Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives). She’d seen my name in the manuals—my former students had collected anecdotes and secret tips I shared in class and edited them into the student guides, calling them out as “J.J. Newberry Moments.” After reading these little teaching nuggets for more than a decade, Janine decided she wanted to meet me. True to Janine form, once she made that decision, she instantly dug in and did her research. After she heard a tape of a radio interview that I’d done, she was determined to accomplish her goal: to track me down.
The phone rang in my remote cabin one afternoon in late December 2003. The answering machine picked up. “Hi, Mr. Newberry! I’m Janine Driver. I’m an industry operations investigator and a training program manager in ATF headquarters and I’m running the interviewing program up here. I’ve been seeing these J.J. Newberry Moments of yours in my textbooks for over a decade, and I want to meet the source. I want to talk to you about what I need to do to become the next J.J. Newberry. I’d like you to be my mentor.”
I spent the next two weeks investigating and calling random people I still had contact with at ATF. Who is Janine Driver? What’s her legacy at ATF? Who was this obviously passionate investigator who’d sought me out specifically? I called her current bosses’ bosses, her former bosses’ bosses. I heard tales of her key work as a public information officer at New York City’s World Trade Center and her powerful contributions on the award-winning explosives team out in Hartford, Connecticut, where she helped uncover explosives companies that were illegally manufacturing contraband M80s and illegally importing highly volatile explosives. I learned how Janine and an ATF special agent out of Boston conducted a complicated firearms investigation that resulted in the seizure of hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of illegally imported semiautomatic weapons.
At every turn, I heard things like “a natural” and “can quickly read people accurately” about her detecting deception abilities. I was glad I’d done my homework—Janine Driver was sounding like the real deal.
Two weeks after Janine’s surprising message, I was headed to Washington, D.C., to train U.S. Customs officers in analytic interviewing and detecting deception. U.S. Customs officers enforce the laws of the United States of America for every person or object that enters or leaves the States. Their interviews can result in the prevention of undocumented immigrants or other people from entering the country unlawfully and may result in the detection and confiscation of contraband guns, drugs, and fraudulent documents. Since Janine worked in ATF’s bureau headquarters in D.C. and my background research on her left me intrigued, I called her. “Janine, this is J.J. I’m coming to D.C. in two days to train U.S. Customs officers with Dr. Mark Frank. I’d like you to come meet us for breakfast.”
At 7 A.M. sharp, she bounced in smiling, armed with a million questions, and stayed with me for the day. During that exclusive six-hour training session, I watched Janine quickly absorb all the information eagerly and ask brilliant questions. She even learned a dangerously simple deception detection technique that day that she reveals here within the book—but we can’t tell you which one it is because it’s the number one most effective technique used by Customs to spot someone who 100 percent has something to hide. (We wouldn’t want to give that away, would we? Just know it’s in here!)
Best of all, Janine made me laugh. A lot.
I told her I would be her mentor and that she’d be my final protégée. But I had one rule: “Janine, if I mentor you, then you have to guarantee to mentor others.”
That day was the beginning of a beautiful friendship. I started out as Janine Driver’s mentor, but, after watching her in action, I soon realized I had become the student. Janine has the remarkable ability to read people’s body language and detect deception. Although Janine is not listed as one of the “Truth Wizards” (Dr. Maureen O’Sullivan, who tested the wizards, passed away from cancer before she could ever test her), she is, in my opinion, highly skilled enough to be one. Janine also has two other critically important abilities:
- She can take any complex, hard-to-understand material and make it fascinating and educational; and
- She’s a total riot.
In our deadly serious world, you often don’t see that combination.
While many of the students I’ve trained remain exclusively in the law enforcement world, Janine is one of the few who has successfully decoded and packaged the information for readers like you. Janine has carefully crafted these techniques without giving away any top-secret governmental techniques, adapting them for personal and business settings, so you can save your own life and the lives of people you love.
Out of all the top-secret security clearance people I’ve trained and mentored, Janine’s the playful one—she takes heavy techniques and the way that they must be used, and she injects them with humor. She coined the term “the belly button rule” (a.k.a. “navel intelligence”), brought awareness of “naughty bits” to the corporate world, and now introduces the “BS Barometer”—all fun, creative, easy-to-understand terms for complex, serious concepts. This playfulness allows her methods and tools to seamlessly cross over into the business world and into the dating, marriage, and keeping-our-children-safe worlds, too.
These days, when I read Janine’s two books and watch her instruct others, I am in awe. Janine’s ability to read people is surpassed only by her ability to transfer her knowledge and ability to others. I was thrilled to see how well she’d translated that in her first book, You Say More Than You Think. And now, with You Can’t Lie to Me, I am blown away. I feel like I am the student reading manuals with little “Lyin’ Tamer” gems throughout it.
Janine has learned my stuff and she’s made it her own, adding continually along the way. And I know that she expects you to do the same. So whatever you do, learn from the Janine Driver way—and then make it the Kyle way or the Kevin way or the Karen way. Do it your way.
Janine and I have each other’s backs, and we appreciate the security that loyalty and friendship provide for us. We want that same thing for you: if your ultimate goal is to find someone to trust, someone who cares about you—you’re in luck. You’re about to uncover your own hidden potential to read others accurately. To find out how to develop your own abilities to spot trustworthy friends and allies, look no further than this book.
You’ll learn to surround yourself with people who have your back—and who inspire you to be a better version of yourself. Keep your eyes open, and it will happen sooner than you think.
Now go work out and strengthen that killer BS Barometer of yours!
Oh, and have fun!