by John Verdon
“A reasonable guess,” said Gurney encouragingly. “Anyone have any other ideas?”
Half a dozen suggestions followed rapidly, mostly from the front of the room, mostly variations on the accurate-information theme.
“Any other ideas?” Gurney prodded.
“Goal is to get the bad guys off the street,” came a comment in a weary growl from the back row.
“Prevent crime,” said another.
“Get the truth, the whole truth, the facts, names, find out what’s going down, who’s doing what to who, what the plan is, who’s the man, who sits on top of the food chain, follow the money, shit like that. Basically, you want to know everything there is to be known—it’s that simple.” The dark, wiry man who rattled off this litany of goals with his arms folded across his chest was sitting directly in front of where Gurney was standing. His smirk announced that there was no more to be said on the subject. The name on the tent card nearest him on the long table read “Det. Falcone.”
“Any other ideas?” asked Gurney blandly, scanning the far corners of the room. The wiry man looked disgusted.
After a long pause, one of the three women attendees spoke up in a low but confident Hispanic-accented voice. “Establish and maintain trust.”
“What was that?” The question came from three different directions at once.
“Establish and maintain trust,” she repeated, a bit louder.
“Interesting,” said Gurney. “What makes that the most important goal?”
She gave a little shrug as though the answer were the most obvious thing on earth. “Because if you don’t have their trust, you have nothing.”
Gurney smiled. “ ‘If you don’t have their trust, you have nothing.’ Very good. Anybody disagree with that?”
Nobody did.
“Of course we want the truth,” said Gurney. “The whole truth, with all the incriminating details, just like Detective Falcone here said.”
The man eyed him coldly.
Gurney went on, “But as this other officer said—without trust what do you have? You have nothing. Maybe worse than nothing. So trust comes first—always. Put trust first, you’ve got a good chance of getting the truth. Put getting the truth first, you’ve got a good chance of getting a bullet in the back of the head.”
That got some nods, plus some increased attention.
“Which brings us to the second big question for today. How do you do it? How do you go about establishing the level of trust that will not only keep you alive but also make your undercover work pay off?” Gurney felt himself warming to the subject. As his energy level rose, he could see it starting to spread out into his audience.
“Remember, in this game you’re dealing with naturally suspicious people. Some of these guys are very impulsive. Not only might they shoot you on the spot, but they’d also be proud of it. They like looking bad. They like looking sharp, quick, decisive. How do you get guys like that to trust you? How do you survive long enough to make the operation worthwhile?”
This time the responses came quicker.
“By acting and behaving like they do.”
“By acting exactly like whoever you’re supposed to be.”
“Consistency. Stick to your cover identity, no matter what.”
“Believe the identity. Believe that you really are who you say you are.”
“Stay cool, always cool, no sweat. Show no fear.”
“Courage.”
“Brass balls.”
“Believe your own truth, baby. I am who I am. I am invincible. Untouchable. Do not fuck with me.”
“Yeah, make believe you’re Al Pacino,” said Falcone, looking for a laugh, not getting it, just creating a hiccup in the group momentum.
Gurney ignored him, glanced inquiringly at the Hispanic woman.
She hesitated. “You have to show them some passion.”
This triggered a few wiseass laughs around the room and a leering grin from Falcone.
“Grow up, assholes,” she said calmly. “What I mean is, you have to let them see something real in you. Something they can feel, that they know in their gut is true. It can’t all be bullshit.”
Gurney felt a pleasant rush of excitement—his reaction whenever he recognized a star student in one of his classes. It was an experience that reinforced his decision to participate as a guest lecturer in these seminars.
“ ‘It can’t all be bullshit,’ ” he repeated, in a voice loud enough for everyone to hear. “Absolutely true. Authentic emotion—credible passion—is essential to effective deception. Your undercover persona must be based on a real emotional piece of yourself. Otherwise it’s all posing, all imitation, all fake, all bullshit. And superficial bullshit rarely works. Superficial bullshit gets undercover people killed.”
He did a quick survey of the thirty-nine faces and found he now had the positive attention of at least thirty-five. “So it’s all about trust. Credibility. The more your target believes in you, the more you’ll get out of him. And a big part of his belief in you depends on your ability to channel real emotion into your artificial role, to use a real piece of yourself to bring your cover personality to life—real anger, rage, greed, lust, disgust—whatever the moment calls for.”
He turned away from them, ostensibly to insert an old VHS videotape into a player beneath a large monitor set against the front wall and to check that everything was plugged in. When he turned back, however, his expression—in fact, the whole attitude of his body, the way he moved, the impression he gave of a man struggling to stifle a volcano of rage—sent a shock wave of tension through the classroom.
“You gonna get some crazy motherfucker to buy your act, you better find a sick place in you, then you talk to him from that place, you let that crazy motherfucker know that deep down inside you there’s an even crazier motherfucker who someday is gonna tear some motherfucker’s heart out, chew it up, and spit it in his fucking face. But for now, just for now, you’re keeping that rabid dog in your gut under control. Just barely under control.” He took a sudden step toward the first row and noted with satisfaction that everyone, including Falcone—especially Falcone—jerked back into a position of defensive readiness.
“Okay,” said Gurney with a reassuring smile, resuming his normal demeanor, “that’s just a quick example of the emotional side. Credible passion. Most of you had a gut-level reaction to that anger, that lunacy. Your first thought was that it was real, that this Gurney guy’s got a screw loose, right?”
There were some nods, a few nervous laughs, as the body language in the room relaxed about halfway.
“So what are you saying?” asked Falcone edgily. “That somewhere inside you there’s a fucking lunatic?”
“I’ll leave that question open for now.”
There were a few more laughs, friendlier.
“But the fact is, there’s more shit, nasty shit, inside each of us—all of us—than we realize. Don’t let it go to waste. Find it and use it. In the undercover life, the shit you normally don’t want to look at in yourself could be your biggest asset. The buried treasure that saves your life.”
There were personal examples he could have given them, situations in which he had taken a dark tile from the mosaic of his childhood and magnified it into a hellish mural that fooled some very perceptive antagonists. In fact, the single most compelling example of the process had occurred at the end of the Mellery case, less than a year earlier. But he wasn’t about to go into that now. It was attached to some unresolved issues in his life he didn’t feel like stirring up, not now, not for a seminar. Besides, it wasn’t necessary. He had the feeling his students were already with him. Their minds were more open. They’d stopped debating. They were thinking, wondering, receptive.
“Okay, like I said, that was the emotional part. Now I want to take you to the next level—the level where your brains and emotions come together and make you the best undercover operative you can be, not just a guy with a stupid hat and baggy pants falling of
f his ass trying to look like a crack addict.”
A few smiles, shrugs, maybe a defensive frown here and there.
“Now—I want you to ask yourselves a strange question. I want you to ask yourself why you believe the things you believe. Why do I believe anything?”
Before they had time to get lost in, or put off by, the abstract depths of this line of inquiry, he punched the “play” button on the videotape machine. As the first image appeared, he said, “While you’re watching the video clip, keep that question in the back of your mind: Why do I believe anything?”
Chapter 5
The eureka fallacy
It was a famous scene from a famous movie, but as Gurney scanned the faces in the room, he saw no sign that anyone recognized it. In the scene, an older man is interrogating a younger man.
The young man is eager to work for the Irgun, a radical organization fighting to establish a Jewish homeland in Palestine at the end of World War II. He presents himself boastfully as a demolitions expert, seasoned in combat, who acquired his expertise with dynamite by fighting the Nazis in the Warsaw Ghetto. He claims that after killing many Nazis he was captured and imprisoned in the Auschwitz concentration camp, where he was assigned to a routine cleaning job.
The older man wants to know more. He asks him several specific questions about his story, the camp, his duties.
The young man’s version of events begins to fall apart when the interrogator reveals that there was no dynamite available in the Warsaw Ghetto. As his heroic narrative crumbles, he’s forced to admit that he learned what he knows about dynamite from his real job in the camp, which was blasting holes in the ground big enough to hold the thousands of bodies of his fellow prisoners, being killed each day in the gas chambers. Beyond that, the older man makes him admit, even more degradingly, that his other job was picking the gold fillings out of the mouths of the corpses. And finally, collapsing in tears of rage and shame, the young man admits that his captors repeatedly raped him.
The raw truth is exposed—along with his desperation to redeem himself. The scene concludes with his induction into the Irgun.
Gurney switched off the tape player.
“So,” he said, turning to the thirty-nine faces, “what was that all about?”
“Every interview should be that simple,” said Falcone dismissively.
“And that fast,” someone chimed in from the back row.
Gurney nodded. “Things in movies always seem simpler and faster than real life. But something happens in that scene that’s very interesting. When you remember it a week or a month from now, what aspect do you think will stick with you?”
“The kid getting raped,” said a broad-shouldered guy next to Falcone.
Murmurs of agreement spread around the room, encouraging other people to speak up.
“His breakdown in the interrogation.”
“Yeah, the whole macho thing evaporating.”
“It’s funny,” said the only black woman. “He starts out by telling lies about himself to get what he wants, but he ends up getting it—getting into the Irgun—by finally telling the truth. By the way, what the hell is the Irgun?”
That got the biggest laugh of the day.
“Okay,” said Gurney. “Let’s stop there and take a closer look. The naïve young guy wants to get into the organization. He tells a lot of lies to make himself look good. The smart old guy sees through it, calls him on his bullshit, drags the truth out of him. And it just so happens that the awfulness of the truth makes the kid an ideal psychological candidate for the fanatical Irgun. So they let him join. Is that a fair summary of what we just saw?”
There were various nods and grunts of agreement, some more cautious than others.
“Anyone think that’s not what we saw?”
Gurney’s Hispanic star looked troubled, which made him grin, which seemed to give her the nudge she needed. “I’m not saying that’s not what I saw. It’s a movie, I know, and in the movie what you said is probably true. But if that was real—you know, a real interview video—it might not be true.”
“The fuck is that supposed to mean?” someone whispered, not quite softly enough.
“I’ll tell you what the fuck it’s supposed to mean,” she said, sparking to the challenge. “It means there’s no proof at all that the old guy actually got to the truth. So the young guy breaks down and cries and says he got fucked in the ass, excuse my language. ‘Boo-hoo, boo-hoo, I’m no big hero after all, just a pathetic little pussycat that gave the Nazis blow jobs.’ So how do we know that story isn’t just more bullshit? Maybe the pussycat is smarter than he looks.”
Christ, thought Gurney, she did it again. He decided to step into the speculative silence that followed her impressive exposition. “Which brings us to the question we started with,” he said. “Why do we believe what we believe? As this perceptive officer here just pointed out, the interrogator in that scene may not have gotten to the truth at all. The question is, what made him think that he did?”
This new twist produced a number of reactions.
“Sometimes your gut tells you what’s what, you know?”
“Maybe the breakdown the kid had looked legit to him. Maybe you had to be there, catch the attitude.”
“Real world, the interrogator would know more stuff than he’s putting on the table. Could be the kid’s confession squares with some of that stuff, confirms it.”
Other officers offered variations on these themes. Others said nothing but listened intently to every word. A few, like Falcone, looked as if the question was making their heads hurt.
When the flow of replies seemed to be stopping, Gurney stepped in with another question. “Do you think a tough-minded interrogator could be misled once in a while by his own wishful thinking?”
A few nods, a few affirmative grunts, a few expressions of pained indecision or maybe plain indigestion.
A guy at the far end of the second row, with a fire-hydrant neck emerging from a black T-shirt, along with densely tattooed Popeye forearms, a shaved head, and tiny eyes—eyes that looked like they were being forced shut by the muscles in his cheeks—raised his hand. The fingers were curled almost into a fist. The voice was slow, deliberate, thoughtful. “You asking, do we sometimes believe what we want to believe?”
“That’s pretty much what I’m asking,” said Gurney. “What do you think?”
The squinty eyes opened a little. “I think that’s … right. That’s human nature.” He cleared his throat. “I’ll speak for myself. I’ve made mistakes because of that … factor. Not because I so much want to believe good things about people. I’ve been on the job awhile, don’t have a lot of illusions about people’s motives, what they’re willing to do.” He bared his teeth in apparent revulsion at some passing image. “I’ve seen my share of hideous shit. Lot of people in this room have seen the same shit. What I’m saying, though, is that sometimes I get an idea about the way something is, and I may not even know how much I want that idea to be right. Like, I know what went down, or I know exactly how some scumbag thinks. I know why he did what he did. Except sometimes—not often, but definitely sometimes—I don’t know shit, I just think I do. In fact, I’m positive I do. It’s like an occupational hazard.” He fell silent, gave the impression that he was considering the bleak implications of what he’d said.
Once again, for perhaps the thousandth time in his life, Gurney was reminded that his first impressions were not especially reliable.
“Thank you, Detective Beltzer,” he said to the big man, glancing at his ID tag. “That was very good.” He scanned the faces along the rows of tables and saw no signs of disagreement. Even Falcone seemed subdued.
Gurney took a minute to extract a mint from a little tin box and pop it into his mouth. Mostly he was stalling to let Beltzer’s comments resonate before going on.
“In the scene we watched,” said Gurney with new animation, “that interrogator might want to believe in the validity of the young man’s br
eakdown for a number of reasons. Name one.” He pointed randomly at an officer who hadn’t yet spoken.
The man blinked, looked embarrassed. Gurney waited.
“I guess … I guess he might like the idea that he broke the kid’s story … you know, that he succeeded in the interrogation.”
“Absolutely,” said Gurney. He caught the eye of another previously silent attendee. “Name one more.”
The very Irish face beneath a carroty crew cut grinned. “Thought he’d win a few points, maybe. Must report to somebody. Enjoy walking into the boss’s office. ‘Look at what I did.’ Get some props. Maybe a boost for a promotion.”
“Sure, I can see that,” said Gurney. “Can anyone name another reason he might want to believe the kid’s story?”
“Power,” said the young Hispanic woman disdainfully.
“How so?”
“He’d like the idea that he forced the truth out of the subject, forced him to admit painful things, forced him to give up what he was trying to hide, forced him to expose his shame, made him crawl, even made him cry.” She looked like she was smelling garbage. “He’d get a rush out of it, feel like Superman, the all-powerful genius detective. Like God.”
“Big emotional benefit,” said Gurney. “Could warp a man’s vision.”
“Oh, yeah,” she agreed. “Big time.”
Gurney saw a hand go up in the back of the room, a brown-faced man with short, wavy hair who hadn’t yet spoken. “Excuse me, sir, I’m confused. There’s an interrogation-techniques seminar here in this building and an undercover seminar. Two separate seminars, right? I signed up for undercover. Am I in the right place? This, what I’m hearing, it’s all about interrogation.”
“You’re in the right place,” said Gurney. “We’re here to talk about undercover, but there’s a link between the two activities. If you understand how an interrogator can fool himself because of what he wants to believe, you can use the same principle to get the target of your undercover operation to believe in you. It’s all about maneuvering the target into ‘discovering’ the facts about you that you want him to believe. It’s about giving him a powerful motive to swallow your bullshit. It’s about making him want to believe you—just like the guy in the movie wants to believe the confession. There’s tremendous believability to facts a person thinks he’s discovered. When your target believes that he knows things about you that you didn’t want him to know, those things will seem doubly true to him. When he thinks he’s penetrated below your surface layer, what he uncovers in that deeper layer he’ll see as the real truth. That’s what I call the eureka fallacy. It’s that peculiar trick of the mind that gives total credibility to what you think you’ve discovered on your own.”