Lying and Lie Detection: A CIA Insider's Guide

Clarity of Simple Lies

LIES ARE NOT ALWAYS STRAIGHTFORWARD. Unlike the blithe assurances of fact-checkers, there is more to the determination of lies than just a mere fact. While lies are significant in terms of their use, the more important concern is that they are part of a process of misleading people. An encyclopedia or the Internet can answer basic questions such as the year in which the Treaty of Westphalia was signed. That is a simple matter. What matters is not that you can detect a simple lie but can you see through a lie that has an important, strategic value.

What lacks clarity if is issues relating to values, impressions, or feelings are comprised. Looking at strategic psychological operations, one sees the role of deception. Every fact used in the PSYOP campaign may be true, but are those facts actually relevant? Investigating a murder case will require a detective to check on the alibi of a suspect or on a number of facts. However, evaluating an advertisement requires much more work. There was a time when advertisements for cigarettes depended on a presentation of charming and smart looking people smoking them. The advertisement presents a pleasant image but nothing more. The cigarette is associated with prosperous people having a good time. They might be standing in an open field with scenic views of mountains. The advertisement may be misleading but it does not contain lies.

An ad campaign may be deceptive, but to see the deception requires the analyst to consider values. No fact checker can do this for you. It involves a logical process that can be extremely complicated. We think about how to detect a lie but this does not always show the deceptive pattern. Nor does it reveal the intentions of the government that has undertaken a PSYOP campaign against you. As can be seen in evaluating the World War II’s Operation Mincemeat, the analyst needs to make a judgement about the adversary’s intentions. In 1943, the planners of Operation Mincemeat wanted to convince the Germans to take certain military actions, actions that were beneficial to the Allies.

The old television detective show Dragnet showed Joe Friday repeatedly making the statement to witnesses just the facts, ma’am. This request implies that facts tell the whole story when, in fact, the more important issue might be which facts are selected in telling the story. Each person will operate on the basis of perceptions and values that determine which facts are selected because they seem relevant to the question at hand. During the Cold War, many Westerners who were pro-Soviet visited Moscow. Their accounts of their visit would mention cheap rent, the low cost of the subway, and the apparent absence of inflation as things that impressed them. By contrast, anti-Soviet visitors noticed travel restrictions for Soviet citizens, the lack of a free press, and the restrictions on religious speech. For them, the relevant facts were those which underlined the oppressive features of the regime. All of their reports were factually accurate but it was the values of the tourists that determined what they saw as important features of the system.

The Need for Simple Lies

IN OUR EFFORT TO DISCERN THE truth behind lies, few things exceed the growing phenomenon of the fact checkers. These entities promise to protect us from the dreaded fake news that spreads disinformation. The fact checker promise is to expose the many untruths being peddled by politicians and others who expound on controversial public issues. In general terms, the fact checker concept is based on the assumption that lies will be simple matters of fact rather than complex issues requiring detailed, sophisticated research.

In 2016 Donald Trump said that 33% of would-be immigrant women heading north toward the US border had been subjected to sexual assault. He was pointing out the dangers of this journey. Fact checkers labeled his statement as false when a Doctors Without Borders report stated that 31% of the women had been assaulted. By itself, the 2% difference is minimal but it is more important to note that the Doctors Without Borders report was not the only data. It was convenient, so the fact checkers used it. There were, however, other agencies and entities, such as The New York Times, providing data that was even higher than 33%. Having different data providers is convenient but does not offer the certainty promised by fact checker advocates. People look to them for truth, but often they simply bring more confusion.

The work of fact checkers is ratified by the International Fact Checking Network (IFCN). IFCN is a worldwide forum for fact checkers and is hosted by a non-profit journalism school and research organization in Florida known as the Poynter Institute for Media Studies. Its work is based on a list compiled by the Southern Poverty Law Center that identified over 500 news sites deemed to be unreliable. This list became a controversial issue and eventually Poynter had to discard the list when critics charged that conservative outlets were routinely disparaged on it. Importantly, the Poynter Institute owns the Tampa Bay Times as well as the International Fact Checking Network.

The first fact checking operation to enjoy success was Snopes. com, which was founded in 1993 by the husband and wife team of David and Barbara Mikkelson. It was intended to be an urban folklore website focused on urban legends. It expanded to cover more topics and relied on user discussions to determine the truth or falsity of stories. When Barbara stopped writing for the site and their work load increased, they hired people who had been submitting to the site’s message board. Snopes came to enjoy widespread acceptance and, at one point, there was an effort to transform it into a television program. The site counts at least seven million visits each month. Because of its commercial success, ownership of the site became a legal controversy that has yet to be fully resolved. In 2019, Snopes expanded by purchasing another website known as OnTheIssues.org that serves as a vehicle for informing voters about various policy issues.

Over the past decade, fact checking has become a worldwide phenomenon, and it is especially relevant in Europe and Latin America. On 2 April 2017, the first International Fact Checking holiday was celebrated. This was an international effort to develop skills for identification of fake news and the protection of people from the effects of misinformation. Organizers for the event solicited fact checking resource materials from media outlets and encouraged the posting of articles on the importance of fact checking. The targets of these events were students, as well as the general public.

In spite of a growing international presence, the United States remains the world leader in its dependence on fact checking sites. Unfortunately, the proliferation of fact checking services has undermined their value because of the disparity of results. It is likely that this disparity is an understandable consequence of the complexity of issues and the difficulty of reducing answers to simple facts.

This difficulty was highlighted by the legal battle between Snopes and the satirical online publication The Babylon Bee. In 2018, an article joking that CNN used an industrial sized washing machine to spin the news appeared in The Babylon Bee. Snopes, in a fact check report, claimed that the obviously satirical article was false, a claim that prompted Facebook to threaten to de-platform the Bee. This embarrassing incident highlighted the shortcomings of the fact checking concept and led to apologies from both Snopes and Facebook.

In an effort to improve the methodological legitimacy of fact checking sites, computer specialists have worked on an algorithm for the identification of fake news. The algorithm is based on the appearance of certain words and symbols as well as of common word patterns. This approach is consistent with the efforts of graduate schools to improve the image of political science as a science in the fashion of disciplines like biology and physics. Because fact checking often suffers from negative popular perceptions, its proponents want to refute accusations that these sites are biased. In a 2016 Rasmussen survey, only 29% of the respondents indicated they trusted the process, while 62% did not. Defenders of the process complain that phony fact checking sites have been created, largely by Russia and Turkey, as part of a misinformation campaign against fact checkers.

Many of the issues faced by fact checking operations are obvious. Everyone makes mistakes, and working on such a diverse range of topics makes that inevitable when facing the true or false dichotomy. If new information comes in, a rating may change from false to mixture or even true. The decisions are being made by reporters forced to evaluate issues about which they have no special expertise. In the end, they make pseudoscientific judgments on topics that relate to values and concepts, rather than to questions of specific fact.

The greatest utility of the fact checker may be in the area of non-controversial editorial matters. The fact checker staff of a magazine was responsible for determining the correct spellings of names, the verification of facts, such as dates of birth, and other matters that were important to publications. Fact checking opinions is not only much more difficult than checking specific facts, it is in many ways impossible.

In the search for truth, it is reckless to rely upon a fact checking organization when you can never be sure about the qualifications of the checkers. Nor can you be certain if those people have a particular political bias. It is one of those times when you are required to do your own research rather than outsource it to an unknown entity.

The widespread use of the term deception tells us that simple lies are a luxury too often not available in the marketplace of dishonesty. The head of East Germany’s foreign intelligence service, Markus Wolf, wrote about his work in a book entitled The Art of Deception. In one example, he presents a clear picture of the necessary lack of clarity in his efforts to undermine Western intelligence services. Wolf describes a real life situation in which there are two Soviet defectors telling contradictory stories about Soviet involvement with Lee Harvey Oswald. The challenge for the security service is to weigh an abundance of often confusing information in order to decide which defector is truthful.

Liars in History

THERE IS ALWAYS SPECULATION ABOUT WHO are the most notorious liars in history. Such speculation has an important value in what it teaches us about the impact of lies as well as how to detect lies. Of course, if you are in the dentist’s waiting room, you will often find popular magazines offering articles with titillating titles about America’s most famous liars. These tend to be celebrities who have lied about their date of birth or who they may be dating. These lies are about trivial matters, unlike those that have to be unraveled by detectives or intelligence officers. Criminal, military, and economic disasters have been made possible because a person or a government has advanced lies about serious topics. The lies of an adolescent entertainer are of little consequence beyond offering a distraction for the fearful person waiting to see his