فصل 3

Part Two

Default to Truth

Chapter Three

The Queen of Cuba

Let’s take a look at another Cuban spy story.

In the early 1990s, thousands of Cubans began to flee the regime of Fidel Castro. They cobbled together crude boats—made of inner tubes and metal drums and wooden doors and any number of other stray parts—and set out on a desperate voyage across the ninety miles of the Florida Straits to the United States. By one estimate, as many as 24,000 people died attempting the journey. It was a human-rights disaster. In response, a group of Cuban emigrés in Miami founded Hermanos al Rescate—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 radioing their coordinates to the Coast Guard. Hermanos al Rescate saved thousands of lives. They became heroes.

As time passed, the emigrés 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 24, 1996. That afternoon three Hermanos al Rescate planes took off for the Florida Straits. As they neared the Cuban coastline, two Cuban Air Force MiG fighter jets shot two of the planes out of the sky, killing all four people aboard.

The response to the attack was immediate. The United Nations Security Council passed a resolution denouncing the Cuban government. A grave President Clinton held a press conference. Ladies and gentlemen I have just been briefed by the National Security advisor on the shooting down on today in broad day light of two American civilian airplains by Cuban military aircraft. The Cuban emigré 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, cojones, we hit him.”

“We retired them, cojones.”

“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 death, you bastards.”

But in the midst of the controversy, the story suddenly shifted. A retired U.S. rear admiral named Eugene Carroll gave an interview to CNN. Carroll was an influential figure inside Washington. He had formerly served as the director of all U.S. armed forces in Europe, with 7,000 weapons at his disposal. Just before the Hermanos al Rescate shoot-down, Carroll said, he and a small group of military analysts had met with top Cuban officials.

CNN: Admiral, can you tell me what happened on your trip to Cuba, who you spoke with and what you were told?

Carroll: We were hosted by the Ministry of Defense. General Rosales 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 U.S. aircraft—not government aircraft, but private airplanes operating out of Miami. They asked us, “What would happen if we shot one of these down? We can, you know.” Carroll interpreted that question from his Cuban hosts as a thinly veiled warning. The interview continued: CNN: So when you returned, who did you relay this information to?

Carroll: 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—the DIA—is the third arm of the foreign intelligence triumvirate in the U.S. government, along with the CIA and the National Security Agency. If Carroll 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 DIA take those warnings to heart? Did they step in and stop Hermanos al Rescate from continuing their reckless forays into Cuban airspace? Obviously not.1 Carroll’s comments ricocheted around Washington, DC, policy circles. This was an embarrassing revelation. The Cuban shoot-down happened on February 24. Carroll’s warnings to the State Department and DIA were delivered on February 23. A prominent Washington insider met with U.S. officials the day before the crisis, explicitly warned them that the Cubans had lost patience with Hermanos al Rescate, and his warning was ignored. What began as a Cuban atrocity was now transformed into a story about American diplomatic incompetence.

By February 25th, When Carroll spoke with CNN, it’s clear 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 shoot-downs strike you as odd? There are an awful lot of coincidences here.

The Cubans plan a deliberate murderous attack on U.S. citizens flying in international airspace.

It just so happens that the day before the attack, a prominent military insider delivers a stern warning to U.S. officials about the possibility of exactly that action.

And, fortuitously, that warning 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 coincidences 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 Hermanos al Rescate—a pilot named Juan Pablo Roque. On the day before the attack, he had disappeared and resurfaced at Castro’s side in Havana. Clearly Roque told his bosses back home that Hermanos al Rescate had something planned for the 24th. That made it difficult for Brown to imagine that the date of the Carroll 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. Carroll’s words were right in front of them on the day the pilots took off from Miami.

So who arranged that meeting? Brown wondered. Who picked February 23? He did some digging, and the name he came up with startled him. It was a colleague of his at the DIA, a Cuban expert named Ana Belen Montes. Ana 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 Tenet, the director of the CIA. Her nickname inside the intelligence community was the “Queen of Cuba.” Weeks passed. 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 Montes’s stature. Finally Brown made up his mind, taking his suspicions to a DIA counterintelligence officer named Scott Carmichael.

“He came over and we walked in the neighborhood for a while during lunch hour,” Carmichael remembers of his first meeting with Reg Brown. “And he hardly even got to Montes. I mean most of it was listening to him saying, ‘Oh God.’ He was wringing his hands, saying, ‘I don’t want to do the wrong thing.’” Slowly, Carmichael drew him out. Everyone who worked on Cuba remembered the bombshell dropped by Florentino Aspillaga. The Cubans were good. And Brown had evidence of his own. He’d written a report in the late 1980s detailing the involvement of senior Cuban officials in international drug smuggling. “He identified specific senior Cuban officers who were directly involved,” Carmichael said, “and then provided the specifics. I mean, flights, the dates, times, the places, who did what to whom, the whole enchilada.” Then a few days before Brown’s report was released, the Cubans rounded up everyone he’d mentioned in his investigation, executed a number of them, and issued a public denial. “And Reg went, ‘What the fuck?’ There was a leak.” It made Brown paranoid. In 1994, 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 Hermanos al Rescate crisis. Montes worked at the DIA’s office on Bolling Air Force Base, in the Anacostia section of Washington, DC. When the planes were shot down, she was called in to the Pentagon: if you were one of the government’s leading Cuba experts, you were needed at the scene. The shoot-down happened on a Saturday. The following evening Brown happened to telephone, asking for Montes.

“He said some woman answered the phone and told him that Ana had left,” Carmichael says. Earlier in the day, Montes had gotten a phone call—and afterward she’d been agitated. Then she’d told everyone in the situation room that she was tired, that there was nothing going on, that she was going home.

Reg was just absolutely incredulous. This was just so counter to our culture that he couldn’t even believe it. Everybody understands that when a crisis occurs, you’re called in because you have some expertise that can add to the decision-making processes. Here Carmichael starts thumping to make his point And at the Pentagon, you were available until you were dismissed. It’s just understood. If somebody at that level calls you in, because all of a sudden those North Koreans have launched a missile at San Francisco, you don’t just decide to leave when you get tired and hungry. Everybody understands that. And yet she did that. And Reg was just, “What the hell?” In Brown’s thinking, if she 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 Cuban specialist—just about the biggest crisis in a generation. And on top of that, she’s the one who had arranged the awfully convenient Admiral Carroll briefing?

Brown told Carmichael that the Cubans had wanted to shoot down one of the Hermanos al Rescate planes for years. But they hadn’t, because they knew what a provocation that would be. It might serve as the excuse the United 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.

And so he looked at that and went, “Holy shit, I’m looking at a Cuban counterintelligence influence operation to spin a story, and Ana is the one who led the effort to meet with Admiral Carroll. What the hell is that all about?” Months passed. Brown persisted. Finally, Carmichael pulled Montes’s file. She had passed her most recent polygraph with flying colors. She didn’t have a secret drinking problem, or unexplained sums in her bank account. She had no red flags. “After I had reviewed the security files and the personnel files on her, I thought, Reg is way off base here,” Carmichael said. “This woman is gonna be the next Director of Intelligence for DIA. She’s just fabulous.” 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 gonna be facing a shit storm.” Carmichael called Montes in. They met in a conference room at Bolling. She was attractive, intelligent, slender, with short hair and sharp, almost severe features. Carmichael thought to himself, This woman is impressive. “When she sat down, she was sitting almost next to me, about that far away”—he held his hands three feet apart—“same side of the table. She crossed her legs. I don’t think that she did it on purpose, I think she was just getting comfortable. I happen to be a leg man—she couldn’t have known that, but I like legs and I know that I glanced down.” 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 Carroll to Cuba, and she’d gotten a call afterward.

She said, “I know his dad, his dad called me, and he said, ‘Hey, if you want the latest scoop on Cuba, you should go see Admiral Carroll,’ and so I just called up Admiral Carroll and we looked at our schedules and decided the 23rd of February was the most convenient date that works for both of us, and that was it.” 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?

She said, “Well, yeah, I did leave.” Right away, she’s admitting to that. She’s not denying stuff, which might be a little suspicious. She said, “Yeah, I did leave early that day.” She says, “You know, it was on a Sunday, the cafeterias were closed. I’m a very picky eater, I have allergies, so I don’t eat stuff out of vending machines. I got there around six o’clock in the morning, it was about…eight o’clock at night. I’m starving to death, nothing was going on, they didn’t really need me, so I just decided I was going to get out of there. Go home and eat something.”2 That rang true to me. It did.

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 Carroll.

I learned that yeah, she does have allergies, she doesn’t eat out of vending machines, she’s very particular about what she eats. I thought, she’s there in the Pentagon on a Sunday. I’ve been there, the cafeteria’s not open. She went all day long without eating, she went home. I said, “Well, it kind of made sense.” What’d I have? I didn’t have anything. Oh well.

Carmichael told Reg Brown not to worry. He turned his attention to other matters. Ana Montes went back to her office. All was forgotten and forgiven until one day in 2001, 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’d joined the DIA, Montes had been a Cuban spy.

In the classic spy novel, the secret agent is slippery and devious. We’re hoodwinked by the brilliance of the enemy. That was the way many CIA insiders explained away Florentino Aspillaga’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 traitor 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.

Ana Montes was scarcely any better. Right before she was arrested, the DIA found the codes she used to send her dispatches to Havana…in her purse. And in her apartment, she had a shortwave radio in a shoebox in her closet.

Brian Latell, the CIA Cuba specialist who witnessed the Aspillaga disaster, knew Montes well.

“She used to sit across the table from me at meetings that I convened, when I was [National Intelligence Officer]”.

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, on—“What do you think Fidel’s motives are about this?”—she would fumble, in retrospect, the deer with the headlights in his eyes. She balked. Even physically she would show some kind of reaction that caused me to think, “Oh, she’s nervous because she’s just such a terrible analyst. She doesn’t know what to say.” One year, he says, Montes was accepted into the CIA’s Distinguished Analyst Program, a research sabbatical available to intelligence officers from across the government. Where did she ask to go? Cuba, of course.

“She went to Cuba funded by this program. Can you imagine?” Latell said. If you were a Cuban spy, trying to conceal your intentions, would you request a paid sabbatical in Havana? Latell was speaking almost twenty years after it had happened, but the brazenness of her behavior still astounded him.

She went to Cuba as a CIA distinguished intelligence analyst. 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 training while she was there. I suspect—I can’t prove it, but I’m pretty sure—she met with Fidel. Fidel loved to meet with his principal agents, to encourage them, to congratulate them, to revel in the success they were having together against the CIA.

When Montes came back to the Pentagon, she wrote a paper in which she didn’t even bother to hide her biases.

There should have been all kinds of red flags raised and guns 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 [the Cubans’] point of view.

But did anyone raise those red flags? Latell says he never once suspected she was a spy. “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 was convinced that she was a terrible analyst on Cuba. Well, she was. Because she wasn’t working for us. She was working for Fidel. But I never connected the dots.” Nor did anyone else. Montes had a younger brother named Tito, who was an FBI agent. He had no idea. Her 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 Montes 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 V 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 U.S. 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.

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 is 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 are given a partner. Someone they’ve never met before, who is, unknown to them, working for Levine. There’s 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. “It’s up to them whether they cheat or not. Then we interview them, asking, ‘Did you cheat?’” This is Team Levine. He says in about 30 percent of cases the research subject do cheat. Levine’s theories are layed out in his book, Dooped, truth default theory and the social science of lying an deception. If you wanna understand how deception works, there’s 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.3 And at the core of that theory are the insights he gained from that first trivia-quiz study.

I watched videotapes of a dozen or so of those post-experiment interviews with Levine in his office at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Here’s a typical one, featuring a slightly spaced-out young man. Let’s call him Philip.

Interviewer: All right, so…have you played Trivial Pursuit games…before?

Philip: Not very much, but I think I have.

Interviewer: In the current game did you find the questions difficult?

Philip: Yes, some were. I was like, “Well, what is that?”

Interviewer: If you would scale them one to ten, if one was easy and ten was difficult, where do you think you would put them?

Philip: I would put them [at] an eight.

Interviewer: An eight. Yeah, they’re pretty tricky.

Philip is then told that he and his partner did very well on the test. The interviewer asks him why.

Philip: Teamwork.

Interviewer: Teamwork?

Philip: Yeah.

Interviewer: OK, all right. Now, I called Rachel out of the room briefly. When she was gone, did you cheat?

Philip: I guess. No.

Philip slightly mumbles his answer. Then looks away.

Interviewer: Are you telling the truth?

Philip: Yes.

Interviewer: Okay. When I interview your partner and I ask her, what is she going to say?

At this point in the tape, there’s an uncomfortable silence, as if the student is trying to get his story straight. “He’s obviously thinking very hard,” Levine said.

Philip: No.

Interviewer: No?

Philip: Yeah.

Interviewer: OK, all right. Well, that’s all I need from you.

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. “He has no conviction. He couldn’t keep a straight face.”

Philip was easy. But the more tapes we looked at, the harder it got. Here is a second case. Let’s call him Lucas. He was handsome, articulate, confident.

Interviewer: I have to ask, when Rachel left the room, did any cheating occur?

Lucas: No.

Interviewer: No? You telling me the truth?

Lucas: Yes, I am.

Interviewer: When I interview your partner and I ask her the same question, what do you think she’s going to say?

Lucas: Same thing.

“Everybody believes him,” Levine said. I believed him. Lucas was lying.

Levine and I spent the better part of a 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 to answer one of the biggest puzzles in human psychology: why are we so bad at detecting lies? You’d think we’d be good at it. Logic says that it would be very useful for human beings to know when they are being deceived. Evolution, over many millions of years, should have favored people with the ability to pick up 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 he had watch all forty-four videos correctly identified the liars 56 percent of the time. Other psychologists have tried similar versions of the same experiment. The average for all of them? 54 percent. Just about everyone is terrible: police officers, judges, therapists—even CIA officers running big spy networks overseas. Everyone. Why?4 Tim Levine’s answer is called the “Truth-Default Theory,” or TDT.

Levine’s argument started with an insight that came from one of his graduate students, Hee Sun 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.

“Her big insight, the first one, was that the 54-percent deception-accuracy figure was averaging across truths and lies. You come to a very different understanding if you break out…how much people are right on truths, and how much people are right on lies.” What he meant was this. If I tell you that your accuracy rate on Levine’s videos is right around 50 percent, the natural assumption is to think that you are just randomly guessing—that you have no idea what you are doing. But Park’s observation was that that’s not true. We’re much better than chance at correctly identifying the students 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 we are 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 subjects should roll their eyes at this point. These are 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. But no!

“Sometimes, they catch that the instructor leaving the room might be a setup. The thing they almost never catch is that their partners are fake. Yeah. So they think that there might be hidden agendas. Yeah. They think it might be a setup because experiments are setups, right? But this nice person they are talking and chatting to? Oh no.” 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 can no longer explain them away.

This proposition sounds at first like the kind of hairsplitting that social scientists love to engage in. It is not. It’s 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 1961, Milgram recruited volunteers from New Haven to take part in what he said was a memory experiment. Each 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 Mr. Wallace. Mr. Wallace, they were told, was to be the “learner.” He would sit in an adjoining room, wired to a complicated apparatus capable of delivering electrical shocks up to 450 volts. (If you’re curious about what 450 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” wavered, 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, you must go on.”

The reason the 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 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 Williams said during the experiment had been memorized from a script written by Milgram himself.

“Mr. Wallace” was in fact a man named Jim McDonough. He worked for the railroad. Milgram 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 Milgram experiment was not produced for a Broadway stage. Mr. Wallace, by Milgram’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 loudspeaker 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, why on earth did Williams 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 person 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.

“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,” one subject wrote to Milgram in a follow-up questionnaire. Another wrote, “Believe me, when no response came from Mr. Wallace with the stronger voltage I really believed the man was probably dead.” These are adults—not callow undergraduates—who were apparently convinced that a prestigious institution of higher learning would run a possibly lethal torture operation 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 the obedience experiments, Behind the Shock Machine, Gina Perry interviews a retired toolmaker named Joe Dimow, who was one of Milgram’s original subjects. “I thought, ‘This is bizarre,’” Dimow told Perry. Dimow became convinced that Wallace was faking it.

But then Mr. Wallace came out of the locked room at the end of the experiment and put on a little act. He looked, Dimow 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.’” Dimow 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 Dimow folded his cards.

Just look at the full statistics from the Milgram experiment:

56.1 percentI: fully believed the learner was getting painful shocks.

24 percent: Although I had some doubts, I believed the learner was probably getting the shocks.

6.1 percent: I just wasn’t sure whether the learner was getting the shocks or not.

11.4 percent: Although I had some doubts, I thought the learner was probably not getting the shocks.

2.4 percent: I was certain the learner was not getting the shocks.

Over 40 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 is 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.

I’m going to come back to the distinction between some doubts and enough doubts, because I think it’s crucial. 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 the problem. 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.

Ana Belen 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 U.S. government was then working to overthrow, and her activism attracted the attention of a recruiter for Cuban intelligence. In 1985 she made a secret visit to Havana. “ Her new compatriots encouraged her to apply for work in the U.S. intelligence community. That same year, she joined the DIA—and from there her ascent 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 coworkers to describe her. It is an impressive list: shy, quiet, aloof, cool, independent, self-reliant, standoffish, intelligent, serious, dedicated, focused, hardworking, sharp, quick, manipulative, venomous, unsociable, ambitious, charming, confident, businesslike, no-nonsense, assertive, deliberate, calm, mature, unflappable, capable, and competent.

Ana 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 brusque.

“When she first came in she tried to blow me off by telling me—and it was true—she had just been named as the Acting Division Chief. She had a ton of responsibilities, meetings and things to do, and she just didn’t have a lot of time.” 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. “I dealt with it the way you normally do,” he remembers: The first time you just acknowledge it. You say, “Oh, I understand. Yeah, I heard that, congratulations, great. I understand you’ve got a limited 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 them go. But then she hit me with it again.…She really made a point of it. I hadn’t even settled in yet and she said, “Oh, but seriously, I’ve gotta leave by two,” or something like that, “because I’ve got all these things to do.” I’m like, “What the fuck?” That’s what I’m thinking.…I didn’t lose my temper, but I lost my patience. “Look, Ana. I have reason to suspect that you might be involved in a counterintelligence influence operation. We need to sit down and talk about this.”

Montes had been, by that point, a Cuban spy for nearly her entire government career. She had met with her handlers at least 300 times, handing over so many secrets that she ranks as one of the most damaging spies in U.S. 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.

“She was just looking at me like a deer looking at the headlights, waiting for me to say another word, just waiting.” When Carmichael looked back on that meeting years later, he realized that was the first clue he had missed: her reaction made no sense.

I just didn’t pick up on the fact that she never said, “What are you talking about?” Nothing like that. She didn’t say a freaking word. She just sat there and was listening. If I’d been astute, I’d have picked up on that. No denial, no confusion, no anger. Anybody who has been told they’re suspected of murder or something.…If they’re completely innocent it’s like, “Wait a minute, you just accused me of some…I want to know what the fuck this is all about.” Eventually, they’ll get in your face, they’ll really get in your face. Ana didn’t do a freaking thing except sit there.

Carmichael had doubts, right from the beginning. But doubts trigger 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? He had said that line to her—“I have reason to suspect that you might be involved in a counterintelligence influence operation”—only because he wanted her to take the meeting seriously. “I was anxious to get into it and get to the next step. Like I said, I’m just patting myself on the back: ‘That worked, that shut her up. I’m not going to hear any more of that crap anymore. Now, let’s get to this, get this done.’ That’s why I missed it.” 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.

She’s got her legs crossed and 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.…We got more comfortable with one another, and she became just a little bit more flirty.

They talked about the phone call. 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 had all been in the middle of an international crisis. Maybe they had 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 Montes 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.

I said, “OK, well, so what’d you do? You parked your car and you walked across the street”—and while I’m doing this is when the change of demeanor occurred. Keep in mind, I’d been talking to her for almost two hours and by that time, Ana and I were almost like buddies, not that close, but we have a great rapport going. She’s actually joking about stuff and making funny remarks every once in a while about stuff—it’s that casual and that warm, if you will.

Then all of a sudden, this huge change came over her. You could see it, one minute she’s just almost flirting and stuff, having a good time.…All of a sudden she changed. It’s like a little kid who has been caught with his hand in the cookie jar, and he’s got it behind his back, and Mom says, “What do you have?” She was looking at me and denying, but…with that look like, “What do you know?” 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 them the following morning at a prearranged 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.

She was scared to fucking death. She thought I knew it and I didn’t. I had no idea, I didn’t know what I had. I knew I had something, I knew there was something. After the interview, I would look back on it…and what did I do? I did the same thing every human being does.…I rationalized it away.

I thought, Well, maybe she’s been seeing a married guy…and she didn’t want to tell me. Or maybe she’s a lesbian or something and she was hooking up with a girlfriend that she doesn’t want us to know [about], and she’s worried about that. I started thinking about all these other possibilities and I sort of accepted it, just enough so that I wouldn’t keep going crazy. I accepted it.

Ana 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 Ana Montes was telling the truth, and—almost without realizing it—worked 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, 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 inconsistencies you spot in his story, you explain away. But three months later you happen to notice an unusual hotel charge on his credit-card bill, and the combination of that and the weeks of unexplained absences and mysterious phone calls pushes you over the top. That’s how lies are detected.

This is the explanation for the first of the puzzles, 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.

I said, “Reg, I realize what it looks like to you, I understand your reasoning that you think that this is a deliberate influence operation. Looks like it. But if it was, I can’t point a finger [to] it to say she was part of a deliberate effort. It just doesn’t make any sense.…At the end of the day, I just had to close out the case.”

Four years after Scott Carmichael’s interview with Ana Montes, one of his colleagues at the DIA met an analyst for the National Security Agency at an interagency meeting. The NSA is the third arm of the U.S. intelligence network, along with the CIA and the DIA. They are the code-breakers, 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 analyst decided 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 Guantánamo Bay in the two-week time frame from July 4 to July 18, 1996.

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. The FBI had been working on a spy case potentially involving a DIA employee for two and a half years, and they hadn’t told him? 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 Guantánamo 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 wish to interview at the base.

“Okay, so two messages,” Carmichael said.

He guessed that the earliest anyone traveling to Guantánamo 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 Guantánamo Bay made between April 1 and July 18, 1996. He told his coworker, “Gator” Johnson, to run the same search simultaneously. Two heads would be better than one.

They began searching to safe system. I’m going through them real quickly, just to see if any [name] pops out at me, and that’s when I’m pretty sure it was the twentieth one hit me. It was Ana B. Montes. The game was fucking over, and I mean it was over in a heartbeat.…I was really stunned—speechless stunned. I could have fallen out of my chair. I literally backed up—I was on wheels—I was literally distancing myself from this bad news.…

I said, “Oh shit.”