Get the Truth: Former CIA Officers Teach You How to Persuade Anyone to Tell All Read Online Free Page A

prayer break was a typical element of his interviews. With instinctive reverence, given his Catholic upbringing, Phil found himself lowering his head slightly, but with his eyes squarely on Omar. He expected to see Omar bowing his head in prayer. Instead, he saw Omar rise from his chair and walk into the bathroom.
    A moment later, Omar emerged with a towel, and walked toward the window in the sitting area. If he didn’t know better, Phil would have thought his colleagues from the local operation were pranking him. He was struggling to make some sense of Omar’s actions, but to no avail.
    What is this guy doing? Phil’s mind was racing. Is he going to try to signal somebody with the towel? How bad is this going to get?
    As Omar unfolded the towel and gazed out the window, Phil suddenly remembered. Omar, a Muslim, was getting his bearings so he could face Mecca as he prayed. He spread the towel on the floor and prostrated himself on it. After about ten minutes of silent prayer, Omar arose, returned to his seat, and thanked Phil for accommodating his request.
    “Of course,” Phil said. He asked Omar if he was ready to resume. Omar nodded.
    “Okay,” Phil said. “Omar, have you ever worked for any other intelligence service?” Phil’s voice was just as relaxed as it had been earlier, perhaps just a bit quieter.
    Omar looked at Phil. Again, he appeared to be conducting a mental search. Shifting his feet uneasily and dabbing the perspiration from his brow, he responded.
    “Sir, why are you asking me this? Is there a concern?”
    * * *
    If ever there was a loaded word in the English language, it’s interrogation . It’s a word that stirs emotions and creates uneasiness. And for good reason. In the contexts that we most commonly hear and read it, the word evokes images of intense verbal abuse, even physical violence. It’s understood as being harsh, intimidating, often threatening. Consequently, we’ve found that in our discussion of the topic, we need to precede the word with a modifier to identify the form of interrogation to which we subscribe, the one that is most likely to result in a successful outcome: noncoercive . We should point out, moreover, that we use the word elicitation interchangeably with interrogation . All of this begs an obvious question: Regardless of what you call it, what is it?
    The idea is pretty simple: Think of it as a process that’s designed to influence or persuade an individual to reveal information that he has reason to want to conceal. So what’s the difference between that and interviewing? Interviewing is a means of collecting from a person information that he has no reason to want to withhold. There’s another distinction that may not be as readily comprehensible: An interview is a dialogue. An interrogation, counterintuitive as it may seem, is a monologue.
    As distinct as the two processes are, shifting from interview mode to interrogation mode needs to be accomplished seamlessly, imperceptibly. No doubt, Omar never recognized the switch.
    Up until the point just after Omar paused to pray, when Phil repeated the question about whether Omar had ever worked for another intelligence service, Phil was squarely in interview mode. He had no reason up to that point to believe there was anything Omar felt compelled to conceal. That changed the moment Phil heard Omar’s response:
    “Sir, why are you asking me this? Is there a concern?”
    That behavior told Phil that Omar had a problem with the question—that there was something on his mind that he didn’t want to disclose. Phil’s task was to find out what that something was. Time to retrieve the best-case/worst-case continuum.
    The best-case scenario, as Phil saw it, was that the question caused something relatively innocuous to pop into Omar’s mind. Perhaps he had been approached by someone he suspected of working for a foreign intelligence service, but failed to report it. Perhaps he had a friend or a relative with connections