Spy the Lie: Former CIA Officers Teach You How to Detect Deception
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At a glance
- Condition
- New
- Dimensions
- 5.5 x 0.68 x 8.5 in
- Weight
- 2.31 lb
- Publisher
- St. Martin's Griffin
- Publication date
- July 16, 2013
- Edition
- Reprint
- Language
- English
Description
THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER Three former CIA officers--among the world's foremost authorities on recognizing deceptive behavior--share their proven techniques for uncovering a lie Imagine how different your life would be if you could tell whether someone was lying or telling you the truth. Be it hiring a new employee, investing in a financial interest, speaking with your child about drugs, confronting your significant other about suspected infidelity, or even dating someone new, having the ability to unmask a lie can have far-reaching and even life-altering consequences. As former CIA officers, Philip Houston, Michael Floyd, and Susan Carnicero are among the world's best at recognizing deceptive behavior. Spy the Lie chronicles the captivating story of how they used a methodology Houston developed to detect deception in the counterterrorism and criminal investigation realms, and shows how these techniques can be applied in our daily lives. Through fascinating anecdotes from their intelligence careers, the authors teach readers how to recognize deceptive behaviors, both verbal and nonverbal, that we all tend to display when we respond to questions untruthfully. For the first time, they share with the general public their methodology and their secrets to the art of asking questions that elicit the truth. Spy the Lie is a game-changer. You may never read another book that has a more dramatic impact on your career, your relationships, or your future. Read more
Specs 9
| Publisher | St. Martin's Griffin |
|---|---|
| Publication date | July 16, 2013 |
| Edition | Reprint |
| Language | English |
| Print length | 272 pages |
| ISBN-10 | 1250029627 |
| ISBN-13 | 21 |
| Item Weight | 2.31 pounds |
| Dimensions | 5.5 x 0.68 x 8.5 inches |
No specs match.
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Top Amazon Reviews
"Don't Practice on Your Significant Other"
Format: Kindle
This book's authors have many years of experience interviewing CIA assets, CIA employees, and a variety of ordinary people in non-CIA settings. Their specialty is in determining when someone is lying. And they are good at it. This skill in detecting deception has done a lot of good, helping their clients make better decisions about hiring the right new employee, trusting the right baby sitter, and prosecuting the person who really "did it." Sometimes the skills bring pain, making clear that the waiting doctor's politeness covers bad news or that a spouse isn't really joking about "her boyfriend." Still, it's better to know, isn't it? Detecting deception isn't magic and it isn't infallible. But it is possible to become better at it than most of us are now. The book identifies several barriers to accurately detecting deception. We expect most people to tell the truth, we ask the wrong questions, and we look for the wrong "tells" in other people's behavior. And we try to watch everything they do instead of focusing on a small number of reliable indicators. Such reliable indicators of deception include certain kinds of verbal hesitations and evasions as well as specific body movements of which a deceiver is largely unaware. Readers learn to ask questions that require different mental processing from guilty versus innocent suspects. One technique is to ask questions a good guy will answer with an immediate--and perhaps angry--"No!" while the bad guy will need to give a longer, more carefully worded response. We watch for deception indicators that begin in the first five seconds after a question. And we look for clusters of indicators rather than for single actions. There is more to it, of course, but this is the core methodology the book presents. It's good stuff. And it's learnable. I attended a training session conducted by the authors' company (QVerity, in partnership with hemsleyfraser) this week. I had listened to roughly three-quarters of the audiobook during a long car ride the day before. Based on what I learned from the book I was able to do well in the video pre-test, successfully distinguishing a lying suspect from the four who told the truth. Almost everyone was also able to do this after two hours of training. So it seems to me that the book is nearly as valuable as being taught these skills by the authors themselves. It is a well-written, fascinating book on a very useful topic. I highly recommend it. A final comment. The book closes with a warning to use these skills only for good. And to not practice them on our significant others. Apparently catching your spouse in all of those little white lies can put unnecessary stress on the relationship. I may have made a variation of this error by giving my wife a copy of the book and inviting her along to the training. Not sure that was such a good idea. We'll see.
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Reviewed in the United States on July 20, 2012 by John M. Ford
Wow!
Format: Paperback
I do not understand how the authors got so much information so comprehensibly into such a short book. It's 272 pages but it felt so short because the information is jam-packed in there and presented so well. It's one thing to know your stuff, it's a whole other ballgame to present it so people (without the level of training the author's have) can dive deep and really understand what you're saying and these authors nailed it. Great book, so interesting and easy to read.
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Reviewed in the United States on April 2, 2026 by DiBeth
Very informative and eye opening
"There is no such thing as a human lie detector" (p. 14). Three ex-CIA agents, the authors!, who are now working privately spill the beans on the system they apply to detect lies. This method, L-Square Mode System, focus on observing what 'the suspect' says, does and reacts, and by learning to make the right kind of questions to spot deceiving behaviour. It all comes down to body language, congruency in speech and behaviour within the subject's own idiosyncrasy. It also come down to being aware of our self-defeating beliefs and limitations to spot a lie: the belief that people will not lie to us, the reliance on behavioural myths, the complexity of communication, our own biases, the 'global' influence, and how smart we think we are.The system relies on getting clusters of deceiving information, not just individual clues. However, one of the most surprising statements is that if we can identify the first deceiving behaviour (verbal or non-verbal) in the first 5 seconds (seconds!) we can reasonable conclude that that behaviour is directly linked with the stimulus. (p. 31). Of course, the higher the number of deceiving behaviours exhibited by a person, the most likelihood of deception. One of the most important things to keep in mind when applying the L-square System is that its virtue relies on its simplicity, that deceiving clues do not always equal deceit or a lie, that the system is not infallible, that the more we practise it the better we get at it, and part of the success depends on obtaining information in a non-confrontational non-judgemental way. The authors have successfully applied this system for years, and once we go through the book and see some of their examples (especially the long transcript and examination in appendix 2), you will notice that you can, too, start spotting deceiving behaviour. The book has a glossary with a short explanations of all the specialised terms the authors use throughout this work. I always appreciate the effort when electronic books have the index properly hyperlinked, which is the case here. The main downside of the book is that is not particularly didactic if you want a step by step sort of book. Some of the things that prevent the book from being more user- friendly are: > Some of the summaries, oddly enough, are placed in the middle of a page, interrupting the narration and some of them not directly related. Why not placing them at the end of the chapter they relate to? > The amount of information and types of questions they offer can be complicated because their names and because involve different and dynamic approaches that vary depending on how the subject of interest reacts. However, there is not a cheat-sheet scheme or figure to help readers navigate the system easily. > There is no section with exercises for us to practise, with hidden solutions at the end of the book. That would have been so handy especially because the book is about spotting lies. > Some of the statements about body language are familiar to me, but it would have been really useful having some figures or photos with some of those mentioned in the book shown, but there is none. Overall this a fascinating book that it is usable for daily queries about your family, friends and co-workers, not just to learn how intelligence and law enforcement institutions operate. However, not as practical as I was hopping for.
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Reviewed in the United States on May 30, 2018 by M. T. D. C. M.
A must have for, among others, clinical physicians and -especially- mental health experts
Format: Paperback
Very good book. The authors state in a clear and unambiguous way several "tips" that may help us detect deceptive behaviors. They repeat the points, making them easier to "stick". What's interesting is how simple they appear in their application; we are not talking about mathematical topology...The glossary completes admirably the book. Would I read it again? Definitively (a quality "seal" for me). As a physician (psychiatrist) I would definitively suggest it to all physicians that perform clinical work, but, above all, to psychiatrists...
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Reviewed in the United States on May 19, 2026 by Antonios Paraschakis
A must have
Format: Paperback
really good
Reviewed in the United States on September 12, 2026 by Dorit
Deception Detection Primer
This book is well written and is perfect for the newbie like me to grasp the concepts: easy to follow, logically structured, points explained well and with examples, points tied together so you understand how they fit. A few reviewers think the points in the book are obvious. Many of them are, but I think the easy-to-follow writing makes the points seem even more obvious. Superficially, and taken separately, many of these ideas do seem obvious. The hard part is coming to an accurate conclusion about deception. One reason is because many deception indicators can be false positives. For example, a commonly-believed indicator of deception is crossing your arms. How do you tell if a specific instance of this behavior is a deception indicator or not? The book gives a framework for when deception indicators are, at that moment, an indicator of deception. Another reason is that verbal indicators of deception can be missed or misunderstood. The book goes into excellent detail about how to recognize verbal indicators and to tell when a verbal indicator is, in fact, likely to be deception. One of the better parts of the book, in my opinion, discussed the initial interrogation of OJ Simpson before his murder trial. They run through the questions that the detectives asked and explained how and why these questions did not work in eliciting possible deception. They then ran through the questions they would ask, following the model in the book, and explained how these questions would have been more effective. The book stresses the limits of these ideas. You will not read this book and become a human lie detector. Being really good at spotting the lies AND directing an interview to extract those lies takes, I'm sure, lots of practice. However, you CAN gain insights and be better at deception detection just from reading this book. For example, when you watch a suspect interviewed on a news show like Dateline NBC, you'll spot the verbal cues that indicate possible deception, and you'll never watch these shows in quite the same way. Prior to reading this book, I read "I Know You Are Lying" by McClish. Both books cover a lot of the same material, but from slightly different perspectives. I highly recommend both books if you're interested in this topic. I recommend reading "Spy the Lie" first, as it seems to give a more complete framework for implementing these ideas, then read the McClish book for additional insights.
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Reviewed in the United States on April 16, 2013 by Tom
So So
Format: Kindle
It was an interesting read, with real life examples. However, I was hoping for a little more. Good advice about interviewing included when to pursue details of an admission vs. inviting additional or deeper admissions/information first; and recognizing and setting aside our own biases when presented with convincing statements, like "I love my child. I could never hurt him!" I was happily surprised by the direct, but non-blaming approach recommended by the authors in an effort to reach the ultimate goal of getting (more) information. All in all, I would recommend this book for someone who is interested in a light read with good information. Just don't expect any real neat tricks or sure-fire way to detect lies.
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Reviewed in the United States on September 6, 2012 by Kathy S
My honest review of the book . Spy The Lie
Format: Paperback
Spy the Lie" by Philip Houston is a practical and fascinating guide that teaches you how to spot deception using the same proven techniques developed by the CIA. Instead of looking for unreliable body language "clues," it focuses on identifying specific verbal and non-verbal behaviors that people show when they are feeling the stress of a lie. It’s written in very clear, everyday language with plenty of real-world examples, making it a great tool for anyone who wants to communicate more effectively and know who they can really trust.
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Reviewed in the United States on February 4, 2026 by Bernice Tett