A source reported on a foreign weapons program for years. Then someone asked him what his job was.
Kent Clizbe served as a staff CIA case officer in the 1990s and as a contractor after 9/11. He is the author of Holistic Contextual Credibility Assessment and Willing Accomplices. As a new officer at headquarters, Kent reviewed that source’s file and wrote a list of plain questions for the officer sent to test him. The first one was, what is your job? The source said he was a quality control engineer in a moped factory. Asked why he never told his case officer, he said, “She never asked.”
Credibility in place of lie detection
Kent told me the agency leaned on deception detection, which measures the eyes, the breathing and the blood pressure. He says it does not work. By his account, East German and Cuban sources passed those tests, and every one of them was a double agent.
So Kent assesses credibility. His words: “I’m not going to be able to tell if he’s telling a lie, but I’m going to be able to tell: is he credible?” He calls the method holistic contextual credibility assessment (HCCA). It depends on contextual competence, which means real knowledge of the other person’s country, language, profession and subculture.
I asked Kent whether I would have caught Wayne Simmons, the Fox News “CIA expert” who went to federal prison in 2016. He said no. When I told him I had been to many of the countries on his list, he said, “Are you competent? Having passed through there doesn’t make you competent.”
Context is orientation
Boyd put cultural traditions and previous experience inside orientation, and orientation sits at the center of the OODA loop. Orientation shapes what you observe and how you act. When I said that to Kent, he answered, “I think previous experience, that’s what context is.”
Before you hire the candidate, fund the founder or book the guest, ask Kent’s question about yourself first. Are you competent in that person’s world?
Who fooled you because you didn’t know their world?
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Written by Ponch Rivera with AI assistance in production. The full conversation is in the player below.