Broker, Trader, Lawyer, Spy - Eamon Javers [86]
Allan Pinkerton and Phil Houston, separated by more than a century, came to remarkably similar conclusions about the human condition.
Pinkerton said that his technique was based on judgment of human nature, and that is also true of the TBA technique. Pinkerton noted that detectives should use “sympathy,” which is what “elicitors” trained in TBA do as well. And Pinkerton talked about using “confidence,” just as the CIA’s elicitation method uses presumptive questions, in which the interrogator projects confidence that he already knows something crucial. Finally, Houston and Pinkerton agree on the most important point: the secret devours the criminal. Criminals all want to confess. The interrogator is just helping them along.
Pinkerton probably didn’t invent deception detection or elicitation, either. These may be among the things that smart, observant people invent for themselves. What’s remarkable, actually, is that every generation produces people who think that the best way to get information out of someone is to beat it out. In the face of so much evidence that deception detection and elicitation work, there are still interrogators who don’t want to be polite to a suspect. And usually, those are the interrogators who can’t get a confession.
IN THE SUMMER of 2005, BIA was on a roll. On July 14 Phil Houston and Patsy Boycan led a BIA team listening in on a Southwest Airlines earnings call with investors. Southwest was coming off a boffo quarter in which it beat Wall Street’s all-important expectations with an earnings spike of 42.9 percent over the same quarter the year before. BIA’s interest in Southwest was prompted by a client, Ziff Brothers Investments, a private equity fund controlled by the three billionaire sons of William Ziff, Jr., who built the Ziff-Davis publishing empire. Ziff Brothers wanted to know whether or not Southwest could continue its excellent run into the next quarter. Did Southwest’s executives believe their own rosy forecasts?
After a preamble, Southwest’s CEO, Gary Kelly, and its chief financial officer, Laura Wright, began to take questions from analysts. The back-and-forth was cordial and warm. Many of the analysts had been covering the company for years, and had spoken with the management dozens of times. Some analysts interspersed their questions with a few words of congratulations for the great quarterly results. But BIA’s spies on the call weren’t into schmoozing. They didn’t say a thing. They were in “L squared mode.”
BIA’s report on that call is not available, so it’s difficult to say exactly what conclusions the analysts reached. But a look at the transcript of the conversation of July 14 reveals several moments that may have stood out for the BIA team.9 First, J.P. Morgan’s Securities analyst Jamie Baker asked a question about potential fare increases—which could be deadly for a company like Southwest that makes its name as a discount airline.
“I know AMR [the company that owns American Airlines] put a $2 to $3 one-way increase into the majority of your markets yesterday, but would you characterize Southwest as still in the study period or have you definitively chosen not to match that?” Baker asked.
“Well, we haven’t changed our fares,” responded Kelly. “We want to be a leader, but we want to be the low fare leader.”
“Mmm hmm.”
“This is actually a perfect environment for us where all of our competitors are raising fares and it really helps us differentiate who we are,” continued Kelly.
On the basis of his noncommittal response, “Mmm hmm,” we can guess that Baker might have been skeptical about this point, too, but a trained TBA analyst might home in on specific phrases. Kelly responds to a direct question about raising fares in the present tense with information that’s not an answer at all: “Well, we haven’t changed our fares.” He doesn’t say what the company plans to do in the future, which is what Baker asked. BIA would call that a nonanswer.*