HCCA: Genesis, Conception, and Development
Real-world needs drove the process
In the latest in the series of excerpts from my book, Holistic Contextual Credibility Assessment, here’s Chapter 4.
This chapter lays out the professional background that led to the development of HCCA.
If, as the earlier chapters show, body-based deception detection has failed: then what does work? The following three chapters detail the genesis, conception, development and the basics of a credibility assessment method that has passed the acid test of proven success. It was developed in the field, in espionage, intelligence, diplomatic, and commercial operations. This method, Holistic Contextual Credibility Assessment (HCCA), is a superior alternative to technological deception detection methods, including those that use measurements of body parts, movements, or functions. HCCA is applicable in any human domain, in any culture.[1]
I developed HCCA during my work in professions which required credibility assessment skills. These professional contexts and domains required knowledge and skills unique to each situation. The consequences of failure to accurately assess credibility or detect deception in each domain was great—life and death, or the potential for major financial losses.
In researching deception detection and credibility assessment, I’ve not yet found any practitioners, nor researchers, that lay out a systematic method like HCCA. There may be practitioners who recognize and use methods like HCCA.
Below is an overview of the skills required for each domain, the potential cost of failure, and obstacles faced by practitioners.
Human intelligence operator
Skills Required: Find and meet human candidates, assess their access, suitability, and motivations, develop relationships with, and recruit them as clandestine sources of foreign intelligence. Work done in the context of specific target cultures/languages—Middle East, Asia, Africa, Europe, etc.
Cost of Failure: Recruiting a source who is not who/what he claimed to be, or who lacked the access to information he claimed, could result, at worst, in multiple deaths (for one of many such examples, see the CIA debacle at Khost—7 CIA officers killed in a suicide bombing carried out by a fully recruited, vetted source), and at best in wasting massive amounts of human, technical, and monetary resources on a fake.
Systemic Hurdles: The source validation system is not viable. There is little to no incentive to identify bad assessments (failures to properly assess credibility) of sources. The system moves quickly and behind a façade of classification. The bureaucracy is incapable of self-correction. The dead at Khost included those directly responsible for assessment of the source’s credibility. The bureaucratic response was to hail them as heroes.
Consular Officer
Skills Required: Adjudicate foreign applicants for immigrant and non-immigrant visas, gather evidence, assess claims and applications, interview applicants, make decision on cases, in context of specific target cultures/languages. Follow a similar process for citizenship issues—applications to renew passports, determine citizenship, and others.
Cost of Failure: Bad actors given permission to enter the country under false pretenses, allowing them the chance to carry out illicit schemes, at best to enter and remain as illegal immigrants; at worst, to carry out terrorist attacks (the 9/11 attackers, all foreign non-immigrant visa holders were interviewed and approved by U.S. consular officers).
Systemic hurdles: While the system has a tracking function in place which reports on approved visa holders who are later identified as violators, such reporting is most likely delayed, sometimes by years. The violation report may never reach the consular official who made the decision, as that official may have already departed for another post.
Executive Recruiter
Skills Required: Search for, and find, candidates for highly specialized jobs, requiring specific knowledge, skills, and attitudes, vet and confirm candidates are ready, willing, and able to do the job, by interviewing and building relationship with candidates, as well as by doing background due diligence, in the context of specific target professions/skillsets.
Cost of Failure: For client—unsuitable hire causes disruption to business, incurring administrative costs, sowing discord in company, likely causing monetary and reputational losses to business. For recruiting agency—100% money-back guarantee that candidates would be suitable, and remain on the job for at least three months after hiring. If the candidate was not suitable, and/or left before three months, the guarantee required me to return the search fee paid by the client, ~30% of total annual compensation of hired candidate ($15,000 to $50,000).
Systemic reinforcement: The for-profit nature of executive recruiting has built-in monitoring and self-correcting mechanisms, unlike government operations which can fail with no consequences. A bad assessment that leads to a bad placement has an immediate and costly consequence. The recruiting firm not only loses the placement fee (potentially tens of thousands of dollars), but also suffers a blow to its reputation, potentially causing much greater monetary and opportunity losses.
In human intelligence operations (the goal of which is to spot, assess, develop, and recruit valid human sources of foreign intelligence), learning the foundational truth of a person is of utmost importance. The goal of assessing the person is to understand the truth of their identity, their motivations, their access, their suitability. This assessment requires gathering information/evidence about their thoughts, ideas, feelings, experiences, and background. A skilled human intelligence operator constantly assesses the subject and the evidence gathered. This assessment leads to a series of judgements about the subject. These judgements steer the decision to continue the development, or to stop.
As the operator is meeting the target, and gathering evidence, back in headquarters, there is a massive bureaucratic counterintelligence support mechanism backing up the field decisions and assessments of the subject. But this mechanism is, in effect, a paper tiger—requiring regular exercises of documenting assessments in an attempt to validate human sources, using technical and physiological deception detection tools, as well as operations officer assessments.
In my human intelligence career, I learned the value of my own assessments, as compared to the results of technical tools in the hands of deception detection specialists who traveled the world to assess subjects from all cultures and sub-cultures. I observed that it was bureaucratically safer to defer to technical tools and the specialists, because if you relied on your own judgement, and were wrong, then the blame for failure was placed on you. In such a bureaucracy, operators are rewarded for avoiding failure, and the default approach is to avoid risk. Thus, the major source of credibility assessment becomes the technical, physiological tools, that have the sheen of objectivity. This devalues the subjective assessment of the officer who is personally meeting the target.
Such a system is deeply flawed and fallible. First, because the system bestowed ultimate authority on physiologically-based deception detection tools (lie detectors), these tools are gate-keepers. Their decisions on deception could be challenged, but carried great weight. (An interesting note on the reliance on physiological tools: until the mid-1990s, American intelligence employed graphology, handwriting analysis, as an assessment tool, in conjunction with other physiological tools.) Yet, even when there are major failures, the bureaucracy is loath to adapt.
The acid test for my credibility assessment methodology was my business as an executive recruiter. Working on a contingency basis for venture-capital funded start-ups, I was paid only for successful placements. A successful placement required me to conduct a world-wide search, to identify candidates, to vet those candidates, and to validate that a given candidate was ready, willing, and able to do the target job. For each placement, I provided my corporate client with a 100% guarantee: the hired candidate would be suitable, and would remain in the job for at least 90 days, or I would return the placement fee (usually 25-33% of the candidate’s first year base salary, or $15,000 to $50,000).
Thus, my assessment of a candidate—experience, skills, background, education, work ethic, cultural fit, entire life story—was a high-stakes test of my credibility assessment methodology. Unlike assessments made in the government domain, there was a high cost for failure—both in dollars and in reputation.
Unlike law enforcement, or intelligence, or consular failures at credibility assessment, failure to correctly assess a candidate in executive recruiting would result in large monetary damages to my business. I applied my vetting and assessment techniques (using the at-the-time unnamed methodology that I later termed HCCA) on all potential candidates, and made the right judgement in all cases.
Genesis of HCCA
One intelligence training contract I worked involved designing and facilitating learning for a military junior ops officer training program. I took on the Deception Detection module, when the federal law enforcement agent who'd been running it retired. The curriculum was confused and useless. Other instructors were recommending and using Ekman's microexpressions. Although these instructors had their students complete the online training, there was never any discussion about using these purported deception detection skills. And, of course, no one ever did use them.
The students were going into war zones, where their ops would have life and death implications. I knew that there was no reliable physiologically-based system to detect deception. This drove me to design a deception detection module based on reality—the cluster of knowledge and skills that powered my own successes.
It is not possible to detect deception reliably, across subjects, across cultures. But it is possible to apply a methodology, based on logic, reason, deduction, gathering data, asking, listening, searching and confirming, to assess credibility.
The system begins with assessing the whole of a subject's personality, background, career, relationships, and life.
Introducing HCCA was further hampered by another failing in the US government’s received wisdom about human recruitment. Standard American doctrine for identifying human motivations is MICE—Money, Ideology, Coercion, Ego. My experience taught me this was nonsensical. If I had a dollar for every time I heard He's motivated by money, I'd be rich now. The truth is that no one is motivated by money.
Money is a medium of exchange--someone can use money to achieve his motivations, whatever they may be.
The best model I know of for identifying human motivations is Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. It begins with the most basic human needs: physiological—food, water, shelter—and continues to the highest, self-actualization, with all the other human needs in between. Belonging, recognition, achievement. Those are what actually motivate people. Money can be used as a medium of exchange to meet any need. But no one (besides Donald Duck’s Uncle Scrooge McDuck) is motivated by money.
My challenge was to overcome the combination of faulty, body-measurement-based attempts to detect deception, and MICE. So, those things combined drove my design of the credibility assessment module for this course. My course focused on case studies, real world examples of deception and its detection.
During my tenure on this course, while I was formulating and formalizing my methods for assessing motivations and assessing credibility, unfortunately, we were presented with a nearly perfect, tragic case study, of the horrible results of failures in humint operations. The bombing at Khost, which killed seven CIA employees was the tragic result of several failures: useless deception detection methods, flawed assessment of motivations (assessing this jihadi as motivated by money), combined with the real-world effects of the terrible criteria used to select counter-terrorism ops officers.
This, then, was the swirling, complicated multi-cultural, multi-skilled cauldron in which HCCA was formulated, stewed, and born.
[1] Law enforcement interrogations, and other situations in which a suspect/subject is detained, or in fear of detention, or already in prison, are different from non-custodial investigations. HCCA focuses on non-custodial situations, in which the subject is free to leave, and not held by force. That said, HCCA can be applicable to custodial situations.