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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.”
6.
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”
5
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.
What [the computer system] did back in those days, it would set up a hit file. It would
electronically stack up all your messages and tell you, “You’ve got X number of hits.” I can
hear Gator over there…I can hear him tapping away and I knew he hadn’t even finished his
query yet and I already had my hit file to go through, so I thought, 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 literally backed up all the way to the end of my cubicle and Gator is still going
dink-pink-tink-tink.
I said, “Oh shit.”
1
The State Department had informed Hermanos al Rescate, through official channels, that any flight plan with Cuba as a
destination was unacceptable. But clearly those warnings weren’t working.
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