Talking to Strangers - Malcolm Gladwell Page 0,109
from the documentary.
The U.S. government was aware of growing Cuban anger about the Hermanos al Rescate missions for some time before the shoot-down occurred and had alerted the organization, mainly by communicating directly with its leader, Jose Basulto. Through the summer and fall of 1995, the State Department and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) made public statements and cautioned the organization that no flight plan to Cuba was acceptable. At one point the FAA tried to revoke Basulto’s pilot license. Government warnings slowed in the fall of 1996, however, because officials felt that further alerts were “more likely to provoke Basulto than to quiet him down.” By this period, the Clinton administration and Hermanos al Rescate were at odds because of Clinton’s 1995 “wet feet, dry feet policy,” which forced Cuban rafters to repatriate.
The State Department knew about the shoot-down threat after meeting with Rear Admiral Eugene Carroll on the 23rd, but the government did not contact Hermanos al Rescate. Instead, the State Department warned the FAA the night before the attack that “it would not be unlikely that [Hermanos al Rescate would] attempt an unauthorized flight into Cuban airspace tomorrow.” In response, the FAA arranged for radar centers to pay special attention to flights over the Florida Straits. However, when radar monitors spotted the MiGs on the 24th, still no warning was issued to the pilots. Despite the fact that F-15 fighter jets were ready for action, the go-ahead to protect the planes never came. The U.S. government later blamed communication issues for its failure to protect the Hermanos al Rescate pilots. Basulto, who survived the incident, suggested the attack was the result of a conspiracy between Cuban leaders and the U.S. government. This account is taken from Marifeli Pérez-Stable, The United States and Cuba: Intimate Enemies (New York: Routledge, 2011), p. 52.
This was an embarrassing revelation: Scott Carmichael, True Believer: Inside the Investigation and Capture of Ana Montes, Cuba’s Master Spy (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2007), p. 5.
“CNN Interview with Admiral Eugene Carroll—U.S. Navy Rear Admiral (Ret.),” CNN, February 25, 1996, Transcript #47-22, hermanos/CNN%20Interview%20with%20Admiral%20Eugene%20Carroll.htm.
Montes’s nickname was the “Queen of Cuba”; DIA found codes in her purse and radio in her closet; and postmortem quote “Her handlers…work for Havana” are all from Jim Popkin, “‘Queen of Cuba’ Ana Montes did much harm as a spy. Chances are you haven’t heard of her,” Washington Post, April 8, 2013.
For a complete list of Tim Levine’s deception experiments, see “Deception and Deception Detection,” timothy-levine.squarespace/deception, accessed March 7, 2019.
For video of “Philip” and other interview subjects, see T. R. Levine, NSF funded cheating tape interviews (East Lansing, Mich.: Michigan State University, 2007–2011).
Levine had people watch twenty-two liars and twenty-two truth-tellers. The viewers correctly identified the liars 56 percent of the time. See Experiment 27 in Chapter 13 of Timothy R. Levine, Duped: Truth-Default Theory and the Social Science of Lying and Deception (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2019). The average for similar versions of the same experiment by other psychologists is 54 percent. C. F. Bond, Jr. and B. M. DePaulo, “Accuracy of deception judgments,” Review of Personality and Social Psychology 10 (2006): 214–34.
Tim Levine’s answer is called the “Truth-Default Theory”: Timothy Levine, “Truth-Default Theory (TDT): A Theory of Human Deception and Deception Detection,” Journal of Language and Social Psychology 33, no. 4 (2014): 378–92.
Stanley Milgram’s obedience experiment: Stanley Milgram, “Behavioral Study of Obedience,” Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 64, no. 4 (1963): 371–78.
The account of the second lesson from Milgram’s experiment was largely drawn from Gina Perry’s definitive Behind the Shock Machine: The Untold Story of the Notorious Milgram Psychology Experiments (New York: The New Press, 2013); “mild and submissive,” pp. 55–56; “…I might have killed that man in the chair,” p. 80; “‘Maybe it really was true,’” pp. 127–29.
the full statistics from the Milgram experiment: Stanley Milgram, Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1969), p. 172.
Chapter Four: The Holy Fool
The source of the following quotes is U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Office of Investigations, “Investigation of Failure of the SEC to Uncover Bernard Madoff’s Ponzi Scheme—Public Version,” August 31, 2009, sec.gov/news/studies/2009/oig-509.pdf: “told us in confidence” and “Throw in that his brother-in-law,” p. 146; “None of it seems to add up,” p. 149; “I came to the conclusion…any evidence we could find,” p. 153; “I never…truly fraudulent,” p. 158; “Sollazzo did not find…‘ridiculous,’” p. 211; “It would have been so easy…that was the case,” p. 427; “This is not rocket science…$10 billion of options,” p. 155.