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" Philip Houston is regarded to be one of America&amp;#039;s top lie-catchers. In his 25 years as a CIA operative, he interrogated or interviewed thousands of individuals, developing &amp;quot;detection of deception&amp;quot; techniques that are still in use today. On his retirement from the Agency, Houston earned a master&amp;#039;s degree in animal husbandry \u2295 and then co-founded QVerity, a consultancy that ferrets out fibbers in the corporate world \u2295. He is also co-author of Spy the Lie: Former CIA Officers Teach You How to Detect Deception (out this week in paperback). All of which raises a question: Just how good is this guy? To find out, I called him and started lying through my teeth. ESQUIRE.COM: So, I read the book \u2295 and found it very interesting. Clearly, you&amp;#039;re good at catching liars. Philip Houston: Yes. Most of my investigative work has involved the detection of deception. ESQ: I have to say, I&amp;#039;m sweating bullets right now \u2295. I think if you were here you&amp;#039;d suspect me of something. PH: Not necessarily. A lot of things could be causing you to sweat excessively. It could be hot in the room. Maybe it&amp;#039;s a condition you have. Who the heck knows? ESQ: I had a friend who was in the CIA \u2295, and he said that being able to spot when someone&amp;#039;s lying is a myth. What do you say to that? PH: Well, our firm coaches people on methodology, on ways to enhance information-collection capabilities. We look for certain behaviors in response to known stimuli. That can be an incredibly valuable tool. ESQ: My friend was borderline crazy anyway. I think the pressures of being in the CIA got to him \u2295. Did that happen to you? PH: I&amp;#039;ve not been accused of being crazy, but there are aspects of the job that are high pressure. You are placed in a situation to determine if someone&amp;#039;s telling the truth, and the stakes are high sometimes. You need to get it right. ESQ: Can you spot a lie over the phone? PH: Absolutely. Keeping in mind that no one&amp;#039;s a human lie detector. ESQ: So it&amp;#039;s a science, not an art. PH: Uh, it&amp;#039;s a bit of both. What we give you is a tool, a human GPS that helps guide you through a conversation or interaction. ESQ: I got horribly lost the other day using a GPS, for about seven hours \u2295. Does your human GPS ever go wrong? PH: I don&amp;#039;t like the word &amp;quot;wrong&amp;quot; for a simple reason: Deceptive behavior isn&amp;#039;t always caused by the face value of the question. If I say to you &amp;quot;Did you rob a bank?&amp;quot; and you exhibit deceptive behavior, it may not be because you robbed a bank, but because maybe you know who did. ESQ: One thing I do know is that my girlfriend&amp;#039;s been lying to me lately \u2295. Can you help me with that? PH: We don&amp;#039;t normally do that kind of work. We provide training, consultation, and analysis, screening. ESQ: You could help me screen my next girlfriend. I&amp;#039;m pretty well off \u2295. I&amp;#039;ll send you an email. PH: Okay.  ESQ: I&amp;#039;ve often thought I&amp;#039;d be a good interrogator \u2295. Any tips for how I&amp;#039;d get into it? PH: You&amp;#039;d have to get into a field where interrogation is a part of the job, whether that&amp;#039;s law enforcement or certain aspects of the military, things of that nature. ESQ: Then again,I don&amp;#039;t think I&amp;#039;m a good enough liar. That&amp;#039;s part of it, right? PH: Yes. The biggest deception involved is the requirement to manage your own emotions, to mask natural reactions. For instance, if someone tells you they just killed a person, you can&amp;#039;t look at them with disdain. It takes a lot of practice. ESQ: Also, I have this thing where I bob my head when I&amp;#039;m lying \u2295. Isn&amp;#039;t that a sign of deception? PH: If it&amp;#039;s inconsistent with what you&amp;#039;re saying. If you&amp;#039;re nodding &amp;quot;yes&amp;quot; when\u2026  ESQ: Not nodding: bobbing, like a pigeon \u2295. PH: Oh, yes. That might get in the way. ESQ: I also lick my lips excessively \u2295. PH: Humans do an awful lot of things that are a result of habit. We don&amp;#039;t want to be led astray because of habit. It&amp;#039;s just as rewarding for me to find that someone&amp;#039;s telling the truth as to determine they&amp;#039;re lying. The tagline for our company is: Truth Matters. But what is a truth? ESQ: What is a lie? PH: Right. If the truth really matters, then in order to find the truth you have to know what a lie looks like, what isn&amp;#039;t the truth. ESQ: One of the worst things I&amp;#039;ve ever done is to fabricate an annual English festival for a feature story in the US: The Running of the Squirrels \u2295. Though I&amp;#039;m not sure that counts as lying.  PH: It depends on your motive for doing it. ESQ: Money. PH: Ha. Well,I don&amp;#039;t want you to get into trouble. ESQ: I feel especially bad, because I won a major award for that piece \u2295. How might you have gone about catching me?  PH: You&amp;#039;re only as good as the questions you ask. If I say, &amp;quot;I shouldn&amp;#039;t be worried about this story, should I, Chris?&amp;quot; that begs for a &amp;quot;No.&amp;quot; It becomes harder for you to tell the truth each time you commit to the lie. Instead, I might have said, &amp;quot;This sounds very interesting. What can you send me to validate the existence of this festival?&amp;quot;  ESQ: And I&amp;#039;d have started bobbing my head. PH: \u2026  ESQ: My CIA friend, he used to say that it&amp;#039;s not the lie that&amp;#039;s important, it&amp;#039;s the truth behind the lie \u2295. What do you think that means? PH: It means truth matters. ESQ: He may have actually said, it&amp;#039;s not the truth that matters, it&amp;#039;s the lie behind the truth. It was one of those \u2295.  PH: Out of curiosity, where was your friend based? I might have known him. ESQ: Here in the U.K., in a village called, erm, Wexford. Actually, that&amp;#039;s in Ireland. So I guess he was based in Ireland \u2295. That sound right? PH: No. ESQ: Like I say, he was kind of nuts. PH: Mm. ESQ: Finally: If I had to pick the biggest liar in my family, it would be my mother \u2295. I used to study her face when she&amp;#039;d tell us that moldy bread was a delicacy \u2295. To this day, I can&amp;#039;t eat bread unless it&amp;#039;s got a bit of green on it \u2295. This shows how lies can insinuate themselves into who you are, doesn&amp;#039;t it?  PH: Absolutely, absolutely. Sometimes people go to their graves believing things that simply aren&amp;#039;t true \u2295. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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