The Queen of Cuba

00:00:15
Speaker 1: Pushkin. This episode contains explicit language. Revision's History listeners Malcolm glad we'll hear. I've written a new book called Talking to Strangers, and it's about the mistakes we make in our interactions with people we don't know. Talking to Strangers features con artists and sociopaths and spies. It talks about how drinking affects the way we make sense of others. I spend time with the psychologist who ran the CIA's interrogation program and the man who spotted Bernie Madoff before anyone else, and I try to get to the bottom of a heartbreaking encounter between a police officer and a civilian which resulted in the death of a young woman named Sandra Bland in Texas. I think it's a book that will prompt a lot of conversations and arguments, which, as you know from Rege History, is what I like to do. I'm very proud of it. And there's something else I'm proud of with Talking to Strangers. After making four seasons of Revisionist History, I've fallen in love with a kind of storytelling that can be done through a podcast, and I decided that I wanted to bring that same approach to the audiobook of Talking to Strangers. Normally, an audiobook is just the author or someone the author hires, reading into a microphone. I didn't want to do that. I wanted to make this audiobook of Talking to Strangers as compelling as an episode of revisionist history. So if you listen to the audiobook, you'll hear the voices of the people I interview, and if I'm describing some historical event, you'll hear archival tape for courtroom scenes. We have actors reimagining what happened. There's music, an extraordinary song by Jenelle money Scoring. We even have excerpts from other audiobooks and podcasts like The Fantastic Believed from NPR and Michigan Radio. I think the result is a completely different kind of audiobook experience, much more powerful, moving, engrossing. Anyway, rather than describe it, I thought I would give you a special preview. So here it is Chapter three of Talking to Strangers done the New way. Let's take a look at another Cuban spy story. In the early nineteen nineties, thousands of Cubans began to flee the regime of Fidel Castro. They cobbled together crewde boats made of inner tubes and metal drums and wooden doors, and any number of other stray parts. They set out on a desperate voyage across the ninety miles of the Florida Straits to the United States. By one estimate, as many as twenty four thousand people died attempting the journey. It was a human rights disaster. In response, a group of Cuban Emigreys in Miami founded Ermanos el Riscat Brothers to the Rescue. They put together a makeshift air force of single engine Cessna Skymasters and took to the skies over the Florida Straits, searching for refugees from the air and radioating their coordinates to the Coastguard. Ermanos el Riscate saved thousands of lives. They became heroes. As time passed, the Emigreys grew more ambitious. They began flying into Cuban airspace, dropping leaflets on Havana, urging the Cuban people to rise up against Castro's regime. The Cuban government, already embarrassed by the flight of refugees, was outraged. Tensions rose, coming to a head on February twenty fourth, nineteen ninety six. That afternoon, three Armanos al riscate planes took off for the Florida Straits. As they neared the Cuban coastline, two Cuban Air Force meg Fighter jets shot down two of the planes out of the sky, killing all four people aboard. The response to the attack was immediate. The United States Security Council passed a resolution denouncing the Cuban government a grave. President Clinton held a press conference.

00:04:35
Speaker 2: Ladies and gentlemen, I have just been briefed by the National Security Advisor on the shooting down today in broad daylight two American civilian airplanes by a Cuban military aircraft.

00:04:50
Speaker 1: The Cuban emigrat population in Miami was furious. The two planes had been shot down in international airspace, making the incident tantamount to an act of war. The radio chatter among the Cuban pilots was released to the press. We hit him, Cohonis, we hit him. We retired them, Cohonis, we hit them fuckers. Mark the place where we retired them. This one won't fuck with us anymore. And then after one of the MiGs zeroed in on the second Cessna Homeland or Deathew Bastards, But in the midst of the controversy, the story suddenly shifted. A retired US rear admiral named Eugene Carroll gave an interview to CNN. Carol was an influential figure inside Washington. He had formerly served as director of all US Armed Forces in Europe, with seven thousand weapons at his disposal. Just before the Armanos El Roscotte shootdown, Carol said he and a small group of military analysts had met with top Cuban officials. CNN's Katherine Callaway interviewed Carrol to try and make sense of it all. Admiral, can you tell me what happened on your trip to Cuba, who you spoke with, and what you were told? Then, Carol says, we were hosted by the Ministry Defense General Rossalis del Toro. We traveled around, inspected Cuban bases, Cuban schools, their partially completed nuclear power plant, and so on. In long discussions with General Rosales del Toro and his staff, the question came up about these overflights from US aircraft, not government aircraft, but private airplanes operating out of Miami. They asked US what would happen if we shot one of those down? We can you know? Carol says he interpreted that question from his Cuban hosts as a thinly veiled warning. Then Callaway asks, so, when you returned, who did you relay this information to? Carol replies, as soon as we could make appointments, we discussed the situation with members of the State Department and members of the Defense Intelligence Agency. The Defense Intelligence Agency THEA is the third arm of the foreign intelligence triumvirate in the US government, along with the CIA and the National Security Agency. If Carol had met with the State Department and the DIA, he had delivered the Cuban warning about as high up in the American government as you could go. And did the State Department and the DiiA take those warnings to heart? Did they step in and stop Armanos el Rascote from continuing their reckless forays into Cuban airspace? Obviously not, Carrol's comments ricochet around Washington d C. Policy circles. This was an embarrassing revelation. The Cuban shootdown happened on February twenty fourth. Carol's warnings to the State Department and DIA were delivered on February twenty third. A prominent Washington insider met with the US officials the day before the crisis explicitly warned them that the Cubans had lost patients with Armanos el Riscote, and his warning was ignored. What began as a Cuban atrocity was now transformed into a story about American diplomatic incompetence. By February twenty fifth, when Carol spoke with CNN, it's clear that this perception had already sunk in. Fidel Castro wasn't being invited onto CNN to defend himself, but he didn't need to be. He had a rear admiral making his case. Does anything about Admiral Carroll and the Cuban shootdowns strike you as odd? There are an awful lot of coincidences here. First, the Cubans plan a deliberate, murderous attack on US citizens flying in international airspace. Second, it just so happens that the day before the attack, a prominent military insider delivers a stern warning to US officials about the possibility of exacs that action. And third, that warning frituitously puts that same official the day after the attack, in a position to make the Cuban case on one of the world's most respected news networks. The timing of those three events is a little too perfect, isn't it. If you were a public relations firm trying to mute the fallout from a very controversial action, that's exactly how you'd script it. Have a seemingly neutral expert available right away to say I warned them. This is what a military counterintelligence analyst named Reg Brown thought in the days after the incident. Brown worked on the Latin American desk of the Defense Intelligence Agency. His job was to understand the ways in which the Cuban intelligence services were trying to influence American military operations. His business, in other words, was to be alert to the kinds of nuances, subtleties, and unexplained co incidences that the rest of US ignore. And Brown couldn't shake the feeling that somehow the Cubans had orchestrated the whole crisis. It turned out, for example, that the Cubans had a source inside Armanos el Roscote, a pilot named Juan Pablo RoCE. On the day before the attack, Roque had disappeared and resurfaced at Castro's side in Havana. Clearly, Roque told his bosses back home that Armanos al Riscote had something planned for the twenty fourth. That made it very difficult for Brown to imagine that the date of the Carol briefing had been chosen by chance for maximum public relations impact. The Cubans would want their warning delivered the day before, wouldn't they That way, the State Department and the DIA couldn't wiggle out of the problem by saying that the warning was vague or long ago. Carol's words were right in front of them on the day the pilots took off from Miami. So who ragned that meeting? Brown wondered who picked February twenty third. He did some digging, and the name he came up with startled him. It was a colleague of his DIA, a Cuba expert named Anna Balen Montes. Anna Montes was a star. She had been selected repeatedly for promotions and special career opportunities, showered with accolades and bonuses. Her reviews were glowing. She had come to the DIA from the Department of Justice, and in his recommendation One of her former supervisors described her as the best employee he had ever had. She once got a medal from George Tennant, the director of the CIA. Her nickname inside the intelligence community was the Queen of Cuba. Weeks past, Brown agonized to accuse a colleague of treachery on the basis of such semi paranoid speculation. Was an awfully big step, especially when the colleague was someone of Monte's stature. Finally, Brown made up his mind, taking his suspicions to a DIA counterintelligence officer named Scott Carmichael.

00:12:19
Speaker 3: He came over and we walked in the neighborhoods around there for a while during lunch hour.

00:12:24
Speaker 1: This is Carmichael talking about his first meeting with Reg Brown.

00:12:27
Speaker 3: And I think it was during that lunch hour. He hardly even got to tamatas. I mean, most of it was listening to him saying, oh God, he's bringing his hands, saying I don't want to do the wrong thing. Yea, yeah, yeah.

00:12:38
Speaker 1: Slowly Carmichael drew him out. Brown had more evidence. He had written a report in the late nineteen eighties detailing the involvement of senior Cuban officials and international drug smuggling.

00:12:50
Speaker 3: He identified specific Cuban senior Cuban officers, including I think a general office and some lesser officers who were dirking involved, and then provided the specifics I mean whites, the dates, the time, to places who did walked home a whole enchilada.

00:13:09
Speaker 1: In a few days before Brown's report was released, the Cubans rounded up everyone had mentioned in his investigation, executed a number of them, and issued a public denial.

00:13:19
Speaker 3: I wrote one for the fuck there was a league.

00:13:24
Speaker 1: It made REDG. Brown paranoid. In nineteen ninety four, two Cuban intelligence officers had defected and told a similar story. The Cubans had someone high inside American intelligence. So what was he to think? Brown said to Carmichael, didn't he have reason to be suspicious? Then he told Carmichael the other thing that had happened During the Ermanos al Riscote crisis. Montees worked at the DIA's office on Bowling Air Force Base in the Anacostia section of Washington, d C. When the planes were shot down, she was called into the Pentagon. If you were one of the government's leading Cuba experts, you were needed at the scene. The shootdown happened on a Saturday. The following evening, Brown happened to telephone asking for Montes. He sent some woman answered the phone and told him that Anna had left. Carmichael says, earlier in the day, Montes had gotten a phone call and afterwards she'd been agitated. Then she told everyone in the situation room that she was tired, that there was nothing going on, that she was going home, and Reg.

00:14:34
Speaker 3: Was just absolutely incredulous. This is just so counter to our culture that he couldn't even leave it. Everybody understands that when a crisis occurs, you're called in because you have some expertise you can add add to the decision making processes.

00:14:51
Speaker 1: Here, Scott Carmichael starts thumping to make his point, Pentagon, you.

00:14:57
Speaker 3: Were available until you were dismissed. That's it's just understood. You know, at somebody at that level calls you in because all of a sudden, with North Koreans and launce A Michelan San Francisco, you don't just decide to leave when you get tired and armored. Everybody understands, and yet she did that and was just.

00:15:19
Speaker 1: In Reg Brown's thinking, if Montez really worked for the Cubans, they would have been desperate to hear from her. They would want to know what was happening in the situation room. Did she have a meeting that night with her handler. It was all a bit far fetched, which is why Brown was so conflicted. But there were Cuban spies. He knew that. And here was this woman taking a personal phone call and heading out the door in the middle of what was, for a Cuba specialist, just about the biggest crisis in a generation. And on top of that, she's the one who wo had arrange the awfully convenient Admiral Carrol briefing. Brown told Carmichael that the Cubans had wanted to shoot down one of the Harmanos el Riscotte planes for years, but they hadn't because they knew what a provocation that would be. It might serve as the excuse, you know, States needed to depose Fidel Castro or launch an invasion. To the Cubans, it wasn't worth it unless, that is, they could figure out some way to turn public opinion in their favor.

00:16:21
Speaker 3: And so he looked at that one. Holy shit, I'm looking at a kitting color and Dollan's influence operation to spin a story, and I asked the one who led the effort to me with the adil, Carol, what the hell is that all about?

00:16:37
Speaker 1: Months past? Brown persisted. Finally, Scott Carmichael pulled Montez file. She had passed her most recent polograph with flying colors. She didn't have a secret drinking problem or unexplained sums in her bank account. She had no red flags.

00:16:55
Speaker 3: After I had reviewed the security file of a personnel file on her, I thought, reg Way off here, this woman is like, she's going to be the next director of Intelligence from DN. He's just fabulous.

00:17:10
Speaker 1: He knew that in order to justify an investigation on the basis of speculation, he had to be meticulous. Reg Brown, he said, was coming apart. He had to satisfy Brown's suspicions one way or another, as he put it, to document the living shit out of everything. Because if word got out that Montes was under suspicion, I knew I was going to be facing a shit storm. Carmichael called monta is in. They met in a conference room at Bowling Air Force Base. She was attractive, intelligent, slender, with short hair and sharp, almost severe features. Carmichael thought to himself, this woman is impressive.

00:17:52
Speaker 3: She sat down. She was sitting like almost texting to me about that for away.

00:17:55
Speaker 1: Here Carmichael holds his hands three feet apart.

00:17:59
Speaker 3: Same side of the table, kind of thing, and she crossed her legs. I don't think that she did it on purpose. I don't think she didn't think she was just getting comfortable. Happen to be lame man. She couldn't know that. I mean, I like it. I know that I glanced down.

00:18:18
Speaker 1: He asked her about the Admiral Carroll meeting. She had an answer. It wasn't her idea at all. The son of someone she knew at DIA had accompanied Carol to Cuba, and she'd gotten a call afterward.

00:18:29
Speaker 3: I know his dad. His dad called me and he said, hey, you know, if you want the latest scoop on, you should go see the Admiral Carroll. And so I just called up Admiral Carroll and we looked at our schedules and decided twenty third of February. It was the most convenient date that works for both of us, and that was it.

00:18:43
Speaker 1: As it turned out, Carmichael knew the DIA employee she was talking about He told her that he was going to call him up and corroborate her story, and she said, please do So what happened with the phone call in the situation room, he asked her. She said she didn't remember getting a phone call, and to Carmichael, it seemed as though she was being honest. It had been a crazy, hectic day nine months before. What about leaving early?

00:19:10
Speaker 3: She said, well, yeah, I did leave. Okay, So right away she's admitting to that, and she's not denying stuff which might be a little suspicious. She said, yeah, I did leave early today that day, and she says, you know, it was on a Sunday. The cafeterias were closed. I'm a very picky eater. I have analogies, so I don't eat stuff out of any machines. I got there around six o'clock in the morning, about again, case black at night, I'm starving to death. Nothing was going on. They didn't really need me, so I just decaided I was just gonna get out of there, go home and eat something. And that rang true to me. I did.

00:19:43
Speaker 1: After the interview, Carmichael set out to double check her answers. The date of the briefing really did seem like a coincidence. Her friend's son had gone to Cuba with Carol.

00:19:54
Speaker 3: And I learned that, Yeah, she does a aalogy. She's very particular about what she eats. I thought, she's there in the Pentagon on Sunday. I've been there. The cafterias aren't open. She went all day long without eating. She went home. I said, well, it kind of makes sense.

00:20:09
Speaker 1: So Carmichael went back to reg Brown and told him not to worry. He turned his attention to other matters. Anna Montes went back to her office. All was forgotten and forgiven until one day in two thousand and one, five years later, when it was discovered that every night Montes had gone home typed up from memory all of the facts and insights she had learned that day at work and sent it to her handlers in Havana. From the day she joined the Dia, Montes had been a Cuban spy. In the classic spy novel The Secret Agent is Slippery and Devious were hoodwinked by the brilliance of the enemy. That was the way many Cia insiders explained the way Florentino as Piaga's revelations. Castro is a genius. The agents were brilliant actors in truth, however, the most dangerous spies are rarely diabolical. Aldrich Ames, maybe the most damaging trader in American history, had mediocre performance reviews, a drinking problem, and didn't even try to hide all the money he was getting from the Soviet Union for his spying. Anna Montes was scarcely any better. Right before she was arrested, the DIA found the codes she used to send her dispatches to Havana. Where did they find those codes? In her purse and in her apartment? She had a short wave radio in a shoe box in her closet. Brian Mattel, the CIA Cuba specialist who witnessed the Espiaga disaster, knew mont as well. He used to work as something called a National Intelligence Officer NIO.

00:21:54
Speaker 4: She used to sit across the table from me at meetings that I convened when I was INIO. You know, I would try to engage her and she would always give me these strange reactions when I would try to pin her down at some of these meetings that I convened, try to pen her down on you know, what do you think is infidel what do you think Fidell's motives are about this? You know she would fumble, you know, she in a retrospect and retrospect, you know, the deer with the headlights in his eyes, she she blocked. You know, she would even you know, even physically, she would show some you know, some kind of reactions that that caused me to think, Oh, she is nervous because she's just such a terrible analyst. She doesn't know what to say.

00:22:34
Speaker 1: One year later, Lttel says, Montez was accepted into the CIA's Distinguished Analyst Program, a research sabbatical available to intelligence officers from across the government. Where'd she ask to go? Cuba?

00:22:48
Speaker 4: Of course she went to Cuba funded by this program. Can you imagine.

00:22:58
Speaker 1: If you were a Cuban spy trying to conceal your intentions, would you request a paid sabbatical in Havana. ATel was speaking almost twenty years after it happened, but the brazenness of her behavior still astounded him.

00:23:13
Speaker 4: She went to Cuba as a CIA distinguished intelligence and analysts. Of course, they were delighted to have her, especially on our nickel, and I'm sure that they gave her all kinds of clandestine tradecraft.

00:23:25
Speaker 3: Training while she was there.

00:23:27
Speaker 4: I suspect camp rude, but I'm pretty sure she met with Fidel. Fidell loved to meet with his principal agents. He loved to meet with them, to encourage them, to congratulate them, to revel in the success that they were having together against against the CIA.

00:23:43
Speaker 1: When Montes came back to the Pentagon, she wrote a paper in which she didn't even bother to hide her biases.

00:23:49
Speaker 4: There should have been all kinds of red flags raised and gongs that went off when her paper was read by her supervisors, because she said things about the Cuban military that make absolutely no sense except from their point of view.

00:24:04
Speaker 1: But did anyone raise those red flags? Hotel says he never once suspected she was a spy.

00:24:10
Speaker 4: On the contrary, there were CIA officers of my rank or close to my rank who thought she was the best Cuban analyst there was. I never trusted her, but for the wrong reasons, and that's one of my great regrets. I'm always believed I was convinced that she was a terrible analyst on Cuba. Well she was, wasn't she objectively? Because she wasn't working for us she was working for. But I never connected the dots.

00:24:43
Speaker 1: Nor did anyone else. Anna Montez had a younger brother named Tito, who was an FBI agent. He had no idea. Montez's sister was also an FBI agent, who in fact, played a key role in exposing a ring of Cuban spies in Miami. She had no idea. Montes's boyfriend worked for the Pentagon as well. His specialty, believe it or not, was Latin American intelligence. His job was to go up against spies like his girlfriend. He had no idea. When Mantes was finally arrested, the chief of her section called her coworkers together and told them the news. People started crying in disbelief. The DIA had psychologists lined up to provide on site counseling services. Her supervisor was devastated. None of them had any idea. In her cubicle, she had a quotation from Shakespeare's Henry the Fifth taped to her wall at eye level for all the world to see. The king hath note of all that they intend by interception which they dream not of. Or, to put it a bit more plainly, the Queen of Cuba takes note of all that the US intends by means that all around her do not dream of The issue with spies is not that there is something brilliant about them. It is that there is something wrong with us us. We'll be back after this. We're back with more from this excerpt of my new book, Talking to Strangers. Over the course of his career, the psychologist Tim Levine has conducted hundreds of versions of the same simple experiment. He invites students to his laboratory and gives them a trivia test. What's the highest mountain in Asia? That kind of thing. If they answer the questions correctly, they win a cash prize. To help them out. They're given a partner, someone they've never met before, who is unknown to them, working for Levine. There's also an instructor in the room named Rachel. Midway through the test, Rachel suddenly gets called away. She leaves and goes upstairs. Then the carefully scripted performance begins. The partner says, I don't know about you, but I could use the money. I think the answers were left right there. He points to an envelope lying in plain sight on the desk, so it talk.

00:27:16
Speaker 5: To them whether they cheat or not, and then later we interview them, asking Digiti.

00:27:21
Speaker 1: This is Tim Levine. He says, in about thirty percent of cases, the research subjects do cheat. Levine's theories are laid out in his book duped Truth, Default Theory and the Social Science of Lying in Deception. If you want to understand how deception works, there is no better place to start. The number of scholars around the world who study human deception is vast. There are more theories about why we lie and how to detect those lies than there are about the Kennedy assassination. In that crowded field, Levine stands out. He has carefully constructed a unified theory about deception, and at the core of that theory are the insights he gained from that first trivia quiz study. I watched videotape of a dozen or so post experiment interviews with Levine in his office the University of Alabama in Birmingham. Because of privacy regulations, we can't play them for you here, but we're going to re enact them. Here's the first. The interviewer and the subject, a slightly spaced out young man. Let's call him Philip.

00:28:29
Speaker 6: All right, So have you played trivial pursuit games before, not very much, but I think I have. Okay, So in the current game, did you find the questions difficult?

00:28:39
Speaker 3: Yes? Some were?

00:28:42
Speaker 6: Yes, yes, some were.

00:28:44
Speaker 3: I was like, whoa, what is that?

00:28:47
Speaker 6: If you would scale them on one to ten? If one was easy and ten was difficult, where do you think you would put them?

00:28:53
Speaker 4: I would put them an eight and an eight.

00:28:55
Speaker 6: Yeah, they're pretty tricky.

00:28:57
Speaker 1: Philip is then told that he and his partner did very well in the test. The interviewer asked him why.

00:29:04
Speaker 6: Teamwork, teamwork? Yeah, okay, all right, So now I called Rachel out of the room briefly. When she was gone, did you cheat?

00:29:14
Speaker 4: I guess no.

00:29:17
Speaker 1: Philip looks away.

00:29:18
Speaker 6: Are you telling the truth?

00:29:20
Speaker 3: Yes?

00:29:21
Speaker 6: Okay. So when I interview your partner and I ask Kurt, what is she going to say?

00:29:25
Speaker 1: At this point, there's an uncomfortable silence, as if the student is trying to get his story straight, He's obviously thinking very hard. Levine said no.

00:29:36
Speaker 6: No, yeah, okay, all right, Well that's all I need from you.

00:29:42
Speaker 1: Is Philip telling the truth. Levine has shown the Philip videotape to hundreds of people, and nearly every viewer correctly pegs Philip as a cheater. As the partner confirmed to Levine, Philip looked inside the answer filled envelope the minute Rachel left the room. In his exit interview, he lied. And it's obvious.

00:30:04
Speaker 3: That's so like.

00:30:04
Speaker 7: Everybody gets a sky right, Yeah, a cheater. He is no conviction, right. She can't even keep a straight face, right.

00:30:18
Speaker 1: Philip was easy, But the more tapes we looked at, the harder it got. Here's the second case. Let's call him Lucas. He was handsome, articulate, confident. Here he is talking to the interviewer.

00:30:32
Speaker 6: So I have to ask, when Rachel left the room, did I he cheating a card?

00:30:35
Speaker 4: No?

00:30:36
Speaker 6: Are you telling me the truth?

00:30:38
Speaker 3: Yes?

00:30:38
Speaker 4: I am.

00:30:39
Speaker 6: When I interview your partner and I ask her the same question, what do you think she's gonna say?

00:30:43
Speaker 3: Same thing? Yeah?

00:30:46
Speaker 1: Yeah, he is good. It's everybody believes him, Levine said. I believed him. Lucas was lying. Levine and I spent the better part of the morning watching his trivia quiz videotapes. By the end, I was ready to throw up my hands. I had no idea what to make of anyone. The point of Levine's research was to try and answer one of the biggest puzzles in human psychology, Why are we so bad at detecting lies? You'd think would be good at it. Logic says, it would be very useful for human beings to know when they're being deceived. Evolution over many millions of years should have favored people with the ability to pick up on the subtle signs of deception, but it hasn't. In one iteration of his experiment, Levine divided his tapes in half, twenty two liars and twenty two truth tellers. On average, the people watching the videos correctly identified the liars fifty six percent of the time. Other psychologists have tried similar versions of the same experiment, The average for all of them fifty four percent. Just About everyone is terrible, police officers, judges, therapists, even CIA officers running big spy networks. Every one why Tim Levine's answer is called truth default theory.

00:32:07
Speaker 3: Or t d T.

00:32:09
Speaker 1: Levine's theory started with an insight that came from one of his graduate students. He's soon park. It was right at the beginning of Levine's research, when he was as baffled as the rest of his profession about why we are all so bad at something that, by rights, we should be good at.

00:32:24
Speaker 5: Her big insight, Well, first one was in the fifty four percent deception accuracy thing that's averaging across trust and lies, and you come to a very different understanding if you break out truth how much people are right on truth and how much people are right on lies.

00:32:48
Speaker 1: What he means is this, If I tell you that your accuracy rate on Levine's videos is right around fifty percent, the natural assumption is to think that you are just randomly guessing, that you have no idea what you're doing. But Park's observation was that's not true. We're much better than chance at correctly identifying the student who are telling the truth, but we're much worse than chance at correctly identifying the students who are lying. We go through all those videos and we guess true true, true, which means we get most of the truthful interviews right and most of the liars wrong. We have a default to truth. Our operating assumption is that the people that we're dealing with are honest. Levine says his own experiment is an almost perfect illustration of this phenomenon. He invites people to play a trivia game for money. Suddenly the instructor is called out of the room and she just happens to leave the answers to the test in plain view on her desk. Levine says that logically the subject should roll their eyes at this point. They're college students, they're not stupid. They've signed up for a psychological experiment. They're given a partner whom they've never met, who is egging them on to cheat. You would think that they might be even a little suspicious that things are not as they seem.

00:34:08
Speaker 5: But no, so they catch that they leaving the room might be a set up. I think they almost never catch as that their partners.

00:34:18
Speaker 7: A suite I see, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:34:23
Speaker 3: So it's weird. It's interesting what they suspect. So they think that there might be hidden gaps.

00:34:29
Speaker 5: Yeah right, they think it might be a set up, because insurements are set.

00:34:32
Speaker 1: Ups, right, But this nice person they're talking and chatting to, they never question it. To snap out of truth default mode requires what Levine calls a trigger. A trigger is not the same as a suspicion or the first sliver of doubt. We fall out of truth default mode only when the case against our initial assumption becomes definitive. We do not behave. In other words, like sober minded scientists slowly gathering evidence of the truth or falsity of something before reaching a conclusion, we do the opposite. We start by believing, and we stop believing only when our doubts and misgivings rise to the point where we could no longer explain them away. This proposition sounds at first that the kind of hair splitting that social scientists loved to engage in. It is not. It is a profound point that explains a lot of otherwise puzzling behavior. Consider, for example, one of the most famous findings in all of psychology, Stanley Milgram's Obedience Experiment. In nineteen sixty one, Milgram recruited volunteers from New Haven to take part in what he said was a memory experiment. Each volunteer was met by a somber, imposing young man named John Williams, who explained that they were going to play the role of teacher in the experiment. Williams introduced them to another volunteer, a pleasant, middle aged man named mister Wallace. Mister Wallace, they were told, was to be the learner. He was in an adjoining room wired to a complicated apparatus capable of delivering electrical shocks up to four hundred and fifty volts. If you're curious about what four hundred and fifty volts feels like, it's just shy of the amount of electrical shock that leaves tissue damage. The teacher volunteer was instructed to give the learner a series of memory tasks, and each time the learner failed, the volunteer was to punish him with an ever greater electrical shock in order to see whether the threat of punishment affected someone's ability to perform memory tasks. As the shocks escalated, Wallace would cry out in pain, and ultimately he started hammering on the walls. But if the teacher waivered, the imposing instructor would urge them on, please continue. The experiment requires that you continue. It is absolutely essential that you continue. You have no other choice. It must go on. The reason the Milgrim experiment is so famous is that virtually all of the volunteers complied. Sixty five percent ended up administering the maximum dose to the hapless learner. In the wake of the Second World War and the revelations about what German guards had been ordered to do in the Nazi concentration camps. Milgram's findings caused a sensation, But to Levine, there's a second lesson to the experiment. The volunteer shows up and meets the imposing young John Williams. He was actually a local high school biology teacher, chosen, in Milgram's words, because he was technical, looking and dry, the type you would later see on television in connection with the Space Program. Everything william said during the experiment had been memorized from a script written by Milgram himself. Mister Wallace was in fact a man named Jim McDonough. He worked for the railroad. Molgram liked him for the part of victim because he was mild and submissive. His cries of agony were taped and played over a loudspeaker. The experiment was a little amateur theatrical production, and the word amateur here is crucial. The Milgrim experiment was not produced for a Broadway stage. Mister Wallace, by Mogram's own description, was a terrible actor, and everything about the experiment was, to put it mildly, more than a little far fetched. The electric shock machine didn't actually give shocks. More than one participant saw the loud speaker in the corner and wondered why Wallace's cries were coming from there, not from behind the door to the room where Wallace was strapped in, and if the purpose of the experiment was to measure learning wyner, did William spend the entire time with the teacher and not behind the door with the learner. Didn't that make it obvious that what he really wanted to do was observe the pre inflicting the pain, not the person receiving the pain. As hoaxes go, the Milgram experiment was pretty transparent, and just as with Levine's trivia test, people fell for it. They defaulted to truth. As one subject wrote to Mogram in a follow up questionnaire, I actually checked the death notices in the New Haven Register for at least two weeks after the experiment to see if I had been involved and a contributing factor in the death of the so called learner. I was very relieved that his name did not appear another road. Believe me, when no response came from mister Wallace with the stronger voltage, I really believe the man was probably dead. These are adults who were apparently convinced that a prestigious institution of higher learning could run a possibly lethal torture experiment in one of its basements. The experiment left such an effect on me. Another wrote that I spent the night in a cold sweat and nightmares because of the fear that I might have killed that man in the chair. But here's the crucial detail. Milgram's subjects weren't hopelessly gullible. They had doubts, lots of doubts. In her fascinating history of Milgram's obedience experiments, Behind the Shock Machine, Geina Perry interviews a retired too maker named Joe Demo, who was one of Milgram's original subjects. I thought this is bizarre, Demo told Perry. Demo became convinced that Wallace was faking it. But then mister Wallace came out of the locked room at the end of the experiment and put on a little act. He looked, Demo remembers, haggard and emotional. He came in with a handkerchief in his hand, wiping his face. He came up to me and he offered his hand to shake hands with me, and he said I want to thank you for stopping it. When he came in, I thought, Wow, maybe it really was true. Demo was pretty sure that he was being lied to. But all it took was for one of the liars to extend the pretense a little longer, look a little upset, and mop his brow with a handkerchief, and Demo folded his cards. Here are the full statistics from the Milgrim experiment. Fifty six point one percent I fully believed the learner was getting painful shocks. Twenty four percent, although I had some doubts, I believe the learner was probably getting the shocks six point one percent. I just wasn't sure whether the learner was getting the shocks or not. Eleven point four percent. Although I had some doubts, I thought the learner was probably not getting the shocks. Two point four percent. I was certain the learner was not getting the shocks. Over forty percent of the volunteers picked up on something odd, something that suggested the experiment was not what it seemed, But those doubts just weren't enough to trigger them out of truth. Default. That's Levine's point. You believe someone not because you have no doubts about them. Belief is not the absence of doubt. You believe someone because you don't have enough doubts about them. Just think about how many times you have criticized someone else in hindsight for their failure to spot a liar. You should have known there were all kinds of red flags you had doubts. Levine would say, that's the wrong way to think about what happened. The right question is were there enough red flags to push you over the threshold of belief. If there weren't, then by defaulting to truth, you were only being human more After this, we're back with chapter three of Talking to Strangers. Anna Berlin Montes grew up in the affluent suburbs of Baltimore. Her father was a psychiatrist. She attended the University of Virginia, then received a master's degree in foreign affairs from Johns Hopkins University. She was a passionate supporter of the Marxist Sandinista government in Nicaragua, which the US government was then working to overthrow, and her activism attracted the attention of a recruiter for Cuban intelligence. In nineteen eighty five, she made a secret visit to Havana. Her new compatriots encouraged her to apply for work in the US intelligence community. That same year, she joined the DIA, and from there her assent was swift. Montes arrived at her office first thing in the morning, ate lunch at her desk, and kept to herself. She lived alone in a two bedroom condo in the Cleveland Park neighborhood of Washington. She never married. In the course of his investigation, Scott Carmichael, the DIA counterintelligence officer, collected every adjective used by Montes's co workers to describe her. It is an impressive list, shy, quiet, aloof cool, independent, self reliant, standoffish, intelligent, serious, dedicated, focused, hard working, sharp, quick, manipulative, venomous, unsociable, ambitious, charming, confident, businesslike, no nonsense, assertive, deliberate, calm, mature, unflappable, capable, and competent. Anna Montes assumed that the reason for her meeting with Carmichael was that he was performing a routine security check. All intelligence officers are periodically vetted so that they can continue to hold a security clearance. She was presque because.

00:45:10
Speaker 3: When she first came in, she started blowing off, you know, by telling me and it was true. She had just been named as an acting division chief. She had a ton of responsibilities and meetings and things to do, and she just didn't have a lot of time.

00:45:22
Speaker 1: Carmichael is a disarmingly boyish man with fair hair and a substantial stomach. He looks, by his own estimation, like the late comedian and actor Chris Farley. She must have thought she could bully him.

00:45:35
Speaker 3: And so I just dealt with the way you normally do. The first time, you just kind of ignore it, just acknowledge it. I mean, the first thing you use, you acknowledge, say, oh I understand, yeah, I heard that. That congratulation's great, I understand. You got a living in amount of time. And then you just kind of ignore it, because if it takes you twelve days, it takes twelve days. You don't let him go. But then she hit me with it again, and she really me appointed it. I mean, I hadn't settled in yet, and she said, oh, but seriously, I got to leap by two or something like that because I got all these things to do, and I'm like, what the fuck? You know? I asked what I'm thinking? And so when she did that, I lost I lose my temper, but I lost my patience. That's why I hit her. Be twenty eyes look on, I have reasons to suspect that you might be involved in the car and velo and simple as operational. We need to sit down and talk about this.

00:46:20
Speaker 1: Montes had been by that point a Cuban spy for nearly her entire government career. She had met with her handlers at least three hundred times, handing over so many secrets that she ranks as one of the most damaging spies in US history. She had secretly visited Cuba on several occasions. After her arrest, it was discovered that Fidel Castro had personally given her a medal. Through all of that, there hadn't been even a whiff of suspicion. And suddenly, at the start of what she thought was a routine background check, a funny looking Chris Farley character was pointing the finger at her. She sat there in shock.

00:47:02
Speaker 3: She would just looking at me like I'm sure, looking at the headlines, waiting for say, another word, just waiting.

00:47:12
Speaker 1: When Carmichael looked back on that meeting years later, he realized that was the first clue he had missed her reaction made no sense.

00:47:20
Speaker 3: I just didn't pick up on She never said, what are you talking about? Nothing like that. She didn't see a freaking word. She just sat down and listening. And you know, if i'd been a stute, I picked up on that. No denial, no confusion, no anger. Anybody who's told the suspective of murder or something the completely and it's like, wait a minute, you just accused me of so I don't want to know what the fuck this is all about. And eventually they'll get in your face, you know, they'll really get in your face. I didn't do a freaking thing and stept sit there.

00:48:03
Speaker 1: Like Carmichael had doubts right from the beginning, But doubts triggered disbelief only when you can't explain them away, and he could easily explain them away. She was the Queen of Cuba, for goodness sake. How could the Queen of Cuba be a spy? Sure, Carmichael told her, I have reason to suspect that you might be involved in a counterintelligence influence operation, but he later admitted he said that only because he wanted her to take the meeting seriously.

00:48:34
Speaker 3: I was anxious to get into it and get to the next step. And like I said, I just panted myself in the back and I worked. I'd shut her up, not to hear anymore of that crap anymore. Now, let's get do this, get this done. That's why I missed.

00:48:52
Speaker 1: They talked about the Admiral Carroll briefing. She had a good answer. They talked about why she abruptly left the Pentagon that day. She had an answer. She was being flirty, a little playful. He began to relax. He looked down at her legs again, and.

00:49:09
Speaker 3: She's bouncing her toe like that. I don't know if it was conscious, but what I do know is that catches your eye. And we got more comfortable with one another, and she became just a little bit more flirty.

00:49:25
Speaker 1: They talked about the phone call the day the plane was shot down. She said she never got a phone call, or at least she didn't remember getting one. It should have been another red flag. The people who were with her that day in the situation room distinctly remembered her getting a phone call. But then again, it had been a long and stressful day. They'd all been in the middle of an international crisis. Maybe they just confused her with someone else. There was one other thing, another moment when Carmichael saw something in her reaction that made him wonder. Near the end of the interview, he asked Montez a series of questions about what happened after she left the Pentagon that day. It was a standard investigative procedure. He just wanted as complete a picture as possible of her movements that evening. He asked her what she did after work. She said she drove home. He asked her where she parked. She said, in the lot across the street. He asked her if she saw anyone else as she was parking. Did she say hello to anyone? She said no.

00:50:29
Speaker 3: I said, okay, well, so what'd you do? You can park the car and you walked across the street while I'm doing this is when changed the demeanor keeven in mine. I'd been talking to her for almost two hours, and by that time, Anna and I were almost like buddies. Okay, not that close, but where we have a great rapport going. She's actually joking about stuff or making funny remarks every once in a while about stuff. It's that casual, and then all of a sudden it's huge. Change came over and you could see it, and one minute she's just almost flirting stuff. We were having a good time at that. Oh, all of a sudden, it's like at was handing the cookie jar and his back and monsters you have. She was looking at me like and denying, but looking at me with that looked like, what do you know?

00:51:26
Speaker 1: After her arrest, investigators discovered what had really happened that night. The Cubans had an arrangement with her. If she ever spotted one of her old handlers on the street, it meant that her spymasters urgently needed to talk to her in person. She should keep walking and meet the following morning at a pre arranged site. That night, when she got home from the Pentagon, she saw one of her old handlers standing by her apartment building. So when Carmichael asked her pointedly, who did you see? Did you see anyone as you came home, she must have thought that he knew about the arrangement, that he was on to her.

00:52:07
Speaker 3: She's scared the fucking dam and she thought I knew it and I didn't. I mean, I had no idea, I didn't know what I had. I knew I had something. I knew there was something, And long after the interview, I looked back at that, and what did I do? I did the same thing every other human, I mean does, But I rationalized it away. I thought, well, maybe she was maybe she's been seeing a married guy and she hooked up with her merriat and she didn't want to tell me. Or maybe she's a lesbian or something and she was hooking up with a girlfriend she doesn't want us to know. She's worried about that. I started thinking about all these other possibilities, and I accepted just enough so that I wouldn't keep going crazy. Accepted it.

00:52:53
Speaker 1: Anna Montes wasn't a master spy. She didn't need to be. In a world where our lie detector is set to the off position, a spy is always going to have an easy time of it. And was Scott Carmichael somehow negligent? Not at all? He did what truth default theory would predict any of us would do. He operated from the assumption that Anna Montes was telling the truth, and, almost without realizing it, work to square everything she said with that assumption. We need a trigger to snap out of the default to truth. But the threshold for triggers is high. Carmichael was nowhere near that point. The simple truth, as Tim Levine argues, is that lie detection does not cannot work the way we expect it to work. In the movies, the brilliant detective confronts the subject and catches him right then and there in a lie. But in real life, accumulating the amount of evidence necessary to overwhelm our doubts takes time. You ask your husband if he is having an affair, and he says no, and you believe him. Your default is that he is telling the truth, and whatever little inconsistency as you spot in his story, you explained away. But three months later you happen to notice an unusual hotel charge on his credit card bill, and the combination of that and weeks of unexplained absences and mysterious phone calls pushes you over the top. That's how lies are detected. This is why the Cubans were able to pull the wool over the CIA's eyes for so long. That story is not an indictment of the agency's competence. It just reflects the fact that CIA officers are like the rest of us human equipped with the same set of biases to truth as everyone else. Carmichael went back to Reg Brown and tried to explain it.

00:54:56
Speaker 3: Just you know, I realized what it looks like to you. I understand your reasoning that you think that this is a deliberate influence operation. Look see what if it was. I can't a finger at on to say she was part of delivery efforts.

00:55:13
Speaker 1: In the end, he says he just had to close out the case. Four years after Scott Carmichael's interview with Anna Montes, one of his colleagues the DA met an analyst for the National Security Agency at an interagency meeting. The NSA is the third arm of the US intelligence network, along with the CIA and the DA. They are the codebreakers, and the analyst said that her agency had had some success with the codes that the Cubans were using to communicate with their agents. The codes were long rows of numbers broadcast at regular intervals over shortwave radio, and the NSA had managed to decode a few snippets. They had given the list of tidbits to the FBI two and a half years before, but had heard nothing back. Out of frustration, the NSA analysts to share a few details with her DIA counterpart, the Cubans had a highly placed spy in Washington whom they called Agent S. She said Agent S had an interest in something called a safe system, and Agent S had apparently visited the American base at Guantanamo Bay in the two week time frame from July fourth to July eighteenth, nineteen ninety six. The man from the DIA was alarmed. Safe was the name of the DIA's internal computer messaging archive that strongly suggested that Agent S was at the DIA, or at least closely affiliated with the DIA. He came back and told his supervisors. They told Carmichael. He was angry.

00:57:00
Speaker 3: He said, two and a half years, how many DIA employees have gone on there. You've never opened up. They've never told me they open a freaking case on DII in boy Old Mother Farmers.

00:57:11
Speaker 1: He was the DIA's counterintelligence investigator. He knew exactly what he had to do, a search of the DIA computer system. Any Department of Defense employee who travels to Guantanamo Bay needs to get approval. They need to send two messages through the Pentagon system, asking first for permission to travel and then for permission to talk to whomever they wished to interview at the base. Okay, so two messages. Carmichael said. He guessed that the earliest anyone traveling to Guantanamo Bay in July would apply for their clearances was April, so he had his search parameters travel authority and security clearance requests from DIA employees regarding Guantanamo Bay made between April first and July eighteenth, nineteen ninety six. He told his co worker Gator Johnson to run the same search simultaneously. Two heads will be better than one. They began searching to the safe system.

00:58:14
Speaker 3: I thought, I'm gonna go through this real quick and just see something jumps on it. And that's when I hit That's when I'm pretty sure it was the twenty four hit me and it was Hannabi Montes and the game was fucking over. And I mean it was over in a heart, and I was really stunned, speechless, stunned. I could have fallen out of my chair, and I literally backed up, you know, I was on wheels. I was literally distancing myself from this bad news.

00:58:47
Speaker 1: Carmichael said, Oh shit,