“ Another key to the successful interrogation of the resisting source is the provision of an acceptable rationalization for yielding. As regression proceeds, almost all resisters feel the growing internal stress that results from wanting simultaneously to conceal and to divulge. To escape the mounting tension, the source may grasp at any face-saving reason for compliance - any explanation which will placate both his own conscience and the possible wrath of former superiors and associates if he is returned to Communist control. ”

“ Like other interrogation aides, a scheme of categories is useful only if recognized for what it is -- a set of labels that facilitate communication but are not the same as the persons thus labelled. If an interrogatee lies persistently, an interrogator may report and dismiss him as a "pathological liar." Yet such persons may possess counterintelligence (or other) information quite equal in value to that held by other sources, and the interrogator likeliest to get at it is the man who is not content with labelling but is as interested in why the subject lies as in what he lies about. ”

“ The person who avoids success has a conscience which forbids the pleasures of accomplishment and recognition. He frequently projects his guilt feelings and feels that all of his failures were someone else's fault. He may have a strong need to suffer and may seek danger or injury.
As interrogatees these people who "cannot stand prosperity" pose no special problem unless the interrogation impinges upon their feelings of guilt or the reasons for their past failures. Then subjective distortions, not facts, will result. The successful interrogator will isolate this area of unreliability. ”

“ The self-esteem of the interrogatee and of the interrogator becomes involved, and the interrogatee fights to keep his secrets from his opponent for subjective reasons, because he is grimly determined not to be the loser, the inferior. If on the other hand the interrogator establishes rapport, the subject may withhold because of other reasons, but his resistance often lacks the bitter, last-ditch intensity that results if the contest becomes personalized. ”

“ As an interrogatee the schizoid character is likely to lie readily to win approval. He will tell the interrogator what he thinks the interrogator wants to hear in order to win the award of seeing a smile on the interrogator's face. Because he is not always capable of distinguishing between fact and fantasy, he may be unaware of lying. The desire for approval provides the interrogator with a handle. ”

“ The success of good interrogators depends in large measure upon their use, conscious or not, of these principles and of processes and techniques deriving from them. Knowledge of subject matter and of the basic principles will not of itself create a successful interrogation, but it will make possible the avoidance of mistakes that are characteristic of poor interrogation. The purpose, then, is not to teach the reader how to be a good interrogator but rather to tell him what he must learn in order to become a good interrogator. ”

“ The interrogator who finds that he has become emotionally involved and is no longer capable of unimpaired objectivity should report the facts so that a substitution can be made. Despite all planning efforts to select an interrogator whose age, background, skills, personality, and experience make him the best choice for the job, it sometimes happens that both questioner and subject feel, when they first meet, an immediate attraction or antipathy which is so strong that a change of interrogators quickly becomes essential. ”

“ Drugs are no more the answer to the interrogator's prayer than the polygraph, hypnosis, or other aids. Studies and reports "dealing with the validity of material extracted from reluctant informants... indicate that there is no drug which can force every informant to report all the information he has. Not only may the inveterate criminal psychopath lie under the influence of drugs which have been tested, but the relatively normal and well-adjusted individual may also successfully disguise factual data." ”

“ Confession is a necessary prelude to the CI interrogation of a hitherto unresponsive or concealing source. And the use of coercive techniques will rarely or never confuse an interrogatee so completely that he does not know whether his own confession is true or false. He does not need full mastery of all his powers of resistance and discrimination to know whether he is a spy or not. Only subjects who have reached a point where they are under delusions are likely to make false confessions that they believe. Once a true confession is obtained, the classic cautions apply. ”

“ The interrogation of a resistant source who is a staff or agent member of an Orbit intelligence or security service or of a clandestine Communist organization is one of the most exacting of professional tasks. Usually the odds still favor the interrogator, but they are sharply cut by the training, experience, patience and toughness of the interrogatee. In such circumstances the interrogator needs all the help that he can get. And a principal source of aid today is scientific findings. ”

“ There is nothing mysterious about interrogation. It consists of no more than obtaining needed information through responses to questions. As is true of all craftsmen, some interrogators are more able than others; and some of their superiority may be innate. But sound interrogation nevertheless rests upon a knowledge of the subject matter and on certain broad principles, chiefly psychological, which are not hard to understand. ”

“ It usually happens that the source has a relatively large body of information that has little or no intelligence value and only a small collection of nuggets. He will naturally tend to talk about what he knows best. The interrogator should not show quick impatience, but neither should he allow the results to get out of focus. The determinant remains what we need, not what the interrogatee can most readily provide.
At the same time it is necessary to make every effort to keep the subject from learning through the interrogation process precisely where our informational gaps lie. ”

“ In fact, it is likely to be a failure, and the interrogator should not be dissuaded from the effort to establish rapport by an inward conviction that no man in his right mind would incriminate himself by providing the kind of information that is sought. The history of interrogation is full of confessions and other self-incriminations that were in essence the result of a substitution of the interrogation world for the world outside. In other words, as the sights and sounds of an outside world fade away, its significance for the interrogatee tends to do likewise. ”

“ Skilled interrogators, for example, listen closely to voices and learn a great deal from them. An interrogation is not merely a verbal performance; it is a vocal performance, and the voice projects tension, fear, a dislike of certain topics, and other useful pieces of information. It is also helpful to watch the subject's mouth, which is as a rule much more revealing than his eyes. ”

“ Playing upon his vanity, especially by praising his courage, will usually be a successful tactic if employed skillfully. Anxious, self-centered interrogatees who are withholding significant facts, such as contact with a hostile service, are likelier to divulge if made to feel that the truth will not be used to harm them and if the interrogator also stresses the callousness and stupidity of the adversary in sending so valiant a person upon so ill-prepared a mission. There is little to be gained and much to be lost by exposing the nonrelevant lies of this kind of source. ”

“ There is some evidence that graphology is a useful aid in the early detection of cancer and of certain mental illnesses. If the interrogator or his unit decides to have a source's handwriting analyzed, the samples should be submitted to Headquarters as soon as possible, because the analysis is more useful in the preliminary assessment of the source than in the later interrogation. Graphology does have the advantage of being one of the very few techniques not requiring the assistance or even the awareness of the interrogatee. ”

“ The effectiveness of a threat depends not only on what sort of person the interrogatee is and whether he believes that his questioner can and will carry the threat out but also on the interrogator's reasons for threatening. If the interrogator threatens because he is angry, the subject frequently senses the fear of failure underlying the anger and is strengthened in his own resolve to resist. ”

“ As an adult he may have learned to cloak his resistance and become passive-aggressive, but his determination to get his own way is unaltered. He has merely learned how to proceed indirectly if necessary. The profound fear and hatred of authority, persisting since childhood, is often well-concealed in adulthood, For example, such a person may confess easily and quickly under interrogation, even to acts that he did not commit, in order to throw the interrogator off the trail of a significant discovery (or, more rarely, because of feelings of guilt) . ”

“ In other words, Orne is probably right in holding that most recalcitrant subjects will continue effective resistance as long as the frame of reference is undisturbed. But once the subject is tricked into believing that he is talking to friend rather than foe, or that divulging the truth is the best way to serve his own purposes, his resistance will be replaced by cooperation. The value of hypnotic trance is not that it permits the interrogator to impose his will but rather that it can be used to convince the interrogatee that there is no valid reason not to be forthcoming. ”

“ Any interrogatee has his ups and downs, times when he is tired or half-ill, times when his personal problems have left his nerves frayed. The peculiar intimacy of the interrogation situation and the very fact that the interrogator has deliberately fostered rapport will often lead the subject to talk about his doubts, fears, and other personal reactions. ”

“ In other words, a psychologically immature source, or one who has been regressed, could adopt an implication or suggestion that he has been drugged, hypnotized, or otherwise rendered incapable of resistance, even if he recognizes at some level that the suggestion is untrue, because of his strong desire to escape the stress of the situation by capitulating. These techniques provide the source with the rationalization that he needs. ”

“ It should be equally clear that if the person does not feel guilt he is not in his own mind guilty and will not confess to an act which others may regard as evil or wrong and he, in fact, considers correct. Confession in such a case can come only with duress even where all other conditions previously mentioned may prevail." The accused, finally, is pushed far enough along the path toward confession that it is easier for him to keep going than to turn back. ”

“ There are a number of non-coercive techniques for inducing regression, All depend upon the interrogator's control of the environment and, as always, a proper matching of method to source. Some interrogatees can be repressed by persistent manipulation of time, by retarding and advancing clocks and serving meals at odd times -- ten minutes or ten hours after the last food was given. Day and night are jumbled. Interrogation sessions are similarly unpatterned the subject may be brought back for more questioning just a few minutes after being dismissed for the night. ”

“ The task of screening is made easier by the fact that the screener is interested in the subject, not in the information which he may possess. Most people -- even many provocation agents who have been trained to recite a legend -- will speak with some freedom about childhood events and familial relationships. And even the provocateur who substitutes a fictitious person for his real father will disclose some of his feelings about his father in the course of detailing his story about the imaginary substitute. ”

“ Some people cannot bring themselves to provide information that puts them in an unfavorable light until, through a lengthy prefatory rationalization, they feel that they have set the stage that the interrogator will now understand why they acted as they did. ”

“ When the individual is told to stand at attention for long periods, an intervening factor is introduced. The immediate source of pain is not the interrogator but the victim himself. The motivational strength of the individual is likely to exhaust itself in this internal encounter.... As long as the subject remains standing, he is attributing to his captor the power to do something worse to him, but there is actually no showdown of the ability of the interrogator to do so. ”

“ Whenever a person is talking about a subject of consequence to himself, he goes through a process of advance self-monitoring, performed at lightning speed. This self-monitoring is more intense if the person is talking to a stranger and especially intense if he is answering the stranger's questions. Its purpose is to keep from the questioner any guilty information or information that would be damaging to the speaker's self-esteem. ”

“ It is of basic importance that the interrogator not using an interpreter be adept in the language selected for use. If he is not, if slips of grammar or a strong accent mar his speech, the resistant source will usually feel fortified. Almost all people have been conditioned to relate verbal skill to intelligence, education, social status, etc. Errors or mispronunciations also permit the interrogatee to misunderstand or feign misunderstanding and thus gain time. He may also resort to polysyllabic obfuscations upon realizing the limitations of the interrogator's vocabulary. ”

“ The principal reason is that the ultimate threat is likely to induce sheer hopelessness if the interrogatee does not believe that it is a trick; he feels that he is as likely to be condemned after compliance as before. The threat of death is also ineffective when used against hard-headed types who realize that silencing them forever would defeat the interrogator's purpose. If the threat is recognized as a bluff, it will not only fail but also pave the way to failure for later coercive ruses used by the interrogator. ”

“ Another effect frequently produced by non-coercive (as well as coercive) methods is the evocation within the interrogatee of feelings of guilt. Most persons have areas of guilt in their emotional topographies, and an interrogator can often chart these areas just by noting refusals to follow certain lines of questioning. Whether the sense of guilt has real or imaginary causes does not affect the result of intensification of guilt feelings. Making a person feel more and more guilty normally increases both his anxiety and his urge to cooperate as a means of escape. ”

“ His real purpose is to test the sincerity (reliability, honor, etc.) of the source. The interrogator then asks a few questions to which he knows the answers. If the subject lies, he is informed firmly and dispassionately that he has lied. By skilled manipulation of the known, the questioner can convince a naive subject that all his secrets are out and that further resistance would be not only pointless but dangerous. If this technique does not work very quickly, it must be dropped before the interrogatee learns the true limits of the questioner's knowledge. ”

“ An environment still more subject to control, such as water-tank or iron lung, is even more effective. An early effect of such an environment is anxiety. How soon it appears and how strong it is depends upon the psychological characteristics of the individual. The interrogator can benefit from the subject's anxiety. As the interrogator becomes linked in the subject's mind with the reward of lessened anxiety, human contact, and meaningful activity, and thus with providing relief for growing discomfort, the questioner assumes a benevolent role. ”

“ It has been plausibly suggested that, whereas pain inflicted on a person from outside himself may actually focus or intensify his will to resist, his resistance is likelier to be sapped by pain which he seems to inflict upon himself. ”