There are three kinds of people against whom the foregoing tricks do not always work: sociopaths, veterans of torture, and professional intelligence officers. Here are some tips.
Sociopaths
The category of sociopaths includes pathological liars and habitual criminals. They may be quite bright and quite well informed, but they are ruled by a need to dominate their im- mediate surroundings from moment to moment in disregard of the consequences of their behavior. Their weakness is that when they lose control of the person-to-person situation, they will go to great lengths (even telling the truth) to get back their feel- ing of control. What often upsets them and starts them on the road to cooperating is for the interrogator to shrug his or her shoulders, say that the prisoner is too trivial to waste time on, and pretend to end the interrogation. Sociopaths suffer when they are dismissed with bored contempt. They then seek to
enlist their interrogator in some kind of conspiracy that they can dominate. Playing their game with them from this point on is tricky, but necessary.
Veterans of Torture
A survivor of prolonged brutal interrogation at the hands, say, of the Gestapo in France, the Japanese in Malaya, or the KGB in the Lubianka has probably survived because he learned a trick of self-hypnosis, an ability to go limp, to turn off the mind. Whatever you call it (“voluntary autism”?), it stops an inter- rogation dead.
When are you likely to encounter such veterans of torture? More often than you might think. Examples: (1) a Central American peasant who has been brutalized by a police inter- rogation that provided him with a motive to join a commu- nist guerilla group, from which he was recruited and trained as a General Directorate of Intelligence (Cuban Intelligence Service) agent to work in, say, Puerto Rico; (2) a Slovak Jew- ish survivor of Auschwitz recruited by the Czech Intelligence Service to serve as an agent in Israel.
With such prisoners, however, you have the advantage of
not being in the torture business; and, with patience, the con-
trast between your interrogation and the old brutal ones can be brought home to the prisoner. Here is the point at which you should abandon threats altogether. If you can’t get cooperation using friendship, realism, and analysis, give up. But if you work at it properly, you will probably find that you don’t have to give up. Genuine humane sympathy for someone who has been tortured is easy to feel and easy to convey, and it makes for a powerful bond between interrogator and prisoner.
Professional Intelligence Officers
No subject is more difficult or more fun to interrogate than a pro from a hostile service. He knows your tricks, he knows the When the Tricks Don’t Work
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43material, he knows what he can throw away and what he must protect, and he has so much information that he can easily deflect you from the more important to the trivial, or from the generally true to the specifically false. Assume from the begin- ning that a pro may bend but will never break (see “The Breaking Point” below.) Even the true defector will have some secrets that for private reasons—shame, loyalty to old comrades, plans for his own use of the information—he will never give you, and sometimes those secrets are important ones. Even Schmidt, whose story is told above, kept some secrets that we learned only much later, including the important one that Müller had a war- time connection with Soviet intelligence through the Schulze- Boysen group in Berlin. (Oberleutnant Harro Schulze-Boysen was a Soviet penetration of the headquarters of German Air Force Intelligence until his detection and execution in 1942).
“Legal” intelligence officers—those with diplomatic immu- nity—have “legends” (cover stories) built into their “cover,” like second secretary, cultural officer, and the like. And they will often have a “throwaway” legend by which they admit to being less important spies than they really are.
“Illegals,” on the other hand, usually depend on being incon- spicuous to avoid detection and have trouble supporting their cover once caught. With some good detective work and analysis, their documents can usually be shown to be false, and their osten- sible means of earning a living can be exposed as improbable.
Kolon Molodiy, a KGB illegal who worked in London as “Gordon Arnold Lonsdale,” the proprietor of a business that sold pinball machines, was documented with the identity of a dead Canadian. When the birth records were checked in Canada, it was found that the real Gordon Lansdale had been circumcised, whereas London’s “Gordon Lonsdale” had his foreskin intact. This bit of detective work by the Mounties was welcomed by Molodiy’s interrogators in London. But Molodiy clammed up and the interrogators got little information from him to expand their case against his illegal rezidentura.
Interrogation of professional intelligence officers like Molodiy is tough, but in one respect the job is easy, because early rapport with a pro is almost automatic. An oil geologist from Texas talks the same basic language as a rival from Iran. They may be at swords’ points, but they understand each other. So it is with pros in the spy business. After the first few minutes, interrogating a pro is a combination of chess and judo. Good luck.