The principles behind bridging questions support a specific and clear outcome: getting a closed person to open up. Your prospects are enhanced if you:
Know what you’re after. Be clear about what you want to pursue and the nature of the problem. Have a focus and a destination in mind.
Avoid triggers. Don’t start with accusations or questions that prompt defensiveness. Go instead for conversation. You want to open a channel of communication. You’re in this for the long haul.
Don’t accuse, ask. Start with the person’s grievance and inquire about it. What’s wrong? What’s unfair? Then ask about rationale and motivations.
Affirm and validate. Walking someone across a bridge takes them farther than pushing them off a cliff. You want answers, background, and insight, so you want to encourage discussion. Guide and affirm. Offer rewards. Look for small ways to move across the bridge. The main thing is to get your subject talking. Be patient. This may take a while.
Get Them Talking
In this chapter, I introduce you to someone whose experience, insight, and work offer a travel guide to the toughest and most reluctant human terrain. He teaches how to question the most vexing characters. Though the examples he offers are extreme, the tactics are not. If you’ve ever tried to get answers from someone who won’t open up or who you think is harboring secrets or sitting on some bad stuff, you know how important these questions can be.
What motivates you?
What are you thinking?
Are you dangerous?
Barry Spodak is an expert in threat assessment. He has studied people who keep the darkest, most dangerous secrets. He knows how to talk to them and he has developed protocols for questioning them and building bridges so they will open up, even a little. He wants to get them to reveal their thoughts and intentions so he can determine whether they are on “a path to violence.” But what Barry has learned on the fringes can be applied to the mainstream. His tools can be put to work in everyday places.
Barry and I have known one another for years. His gentle demeanor belies his work on the dark side of humanity. Barry trains FBI and Secret Service agents and U.S. Marshals in questioning potential serial killers, terrorists, or would-be presidential assassins before they act. Sometimes he dresses up—beard, tattoos, earrings—to give his agent-students a living, breathing suspect so they can role-play the conversation. Barry can be a white supremacist, a Middle Eastern arms merchant, or a Christian or Muslim extremist. His disguises would make his favorite Hollywood makeup artist proud.
To Barry, everyone is a puzzle. Some people are just more complex, more mysterious, and more urgent to put together than others. He’s been drawn to them all his life, dramatically discovering this line of work when he was a young graduate student in Washington, D.C., in the late 1970s. His focus was on violent criminals who had been declared not guilty by reason of insanity. His studies involved fieldwork at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital—in its day, one of the premier psychiatric facilities in the country. To get locked up in a psych ward, someone had to be judged a danger to themselves or others. The challenge was how to determine if someone actually posed a threat. There was little research at the time, so psychologists and law enforcement alike struggled for a consistent approach to threat assessment.
Barry’s responsibilities at St Elizabeth’s included leading group therapy sessions. One day, a newcomer joined the group. He sat off to the side, watching, listening, but seldom participating. He seemed subdued, quiet, and innocuous enough. He had no previous history of mental illness. There was no outward indication that he posed a threat to anyone. Yet everyone knew the stark reality: He had tried to kill the president of the United States.
John Hinckley Jr. had pulled the trigger six times on his .22 caliber revolver outside the Washington Hilton Hotel on March 30, 1981, as President Ronald Reagan exited the building and made his way to the motorcade. The first bullet went into the head of White House Press Secretary James Brady. The second struck police officer Thomas Delahanty in the back of the neck. The third hit the window of a building across the street. Special Agent in Charge Jerry Parr pushed Reagan into the limousine as a fourth bullet hit Secret Service Agent Timothy McCarthy in the abdomen as he spread his body over Reagan. The fifth hit the side of the limousine. The sixth bullet ricocheted off the limousine and hit the president under his left arm and entered his body, lodging in his lung, one inch from his heart. The president nearly died as a result of a staph infection that followed.
Hinckley had been obsessed with the actress Jodie Foster. He had stalked her when she was at Yale. He thought killing the president would get her attention and impress her. A jury found Hinckley not guilty by reason of insanity. He was twenty-six years old when he joined Barry’s group therapy session for the first time.
In therapy, Hinckley said little. On occasion he would mention something about life inside the institution or about other patients or the staff. Barry recalled that Hinckley seemed scared of the other patients; he didn’t talk much to anyone in the early days. Barry tried to draw him out.
What was he thinking?
Could he be reached?
Off to the side, in one-on-one conversations, Hinckley offered a few words and opened up just a little. “He would talk to me after group therapy,” Barry recalled. “Hinckley thought we were about the same age so he didn’t feel threatened by me.” It’s not hard to see why. Barry is soft spoken, his voice gentle and mellifluous. He listens with his eyes. He used those attributes to slowly develop some rapport with the young man who nearly killed a president.
“I was able to sit with him outside the building and I got a little of his history and was able to better elicit his story of how he came to do what he did.” Barry won’t provide details out of respect for Hinckley’s privacy, but he learned that a deliberate, respectful process of asking and providing a sympathetic ear could prompt a would-be assassin to talk.
Solving Puzzles
Over the years, Barry built on his fascination with human puzzles. He developed protocols and practices for how to talk to and question potential assassins, terrorists, school shooters, and disgruntled employees. He became an expert in threat assessment. His approach is proactive and his purpose is clear: Talk to people before they act and elicit information to determine whether they are on a path to violence. He teaches what to ask, when to respond, and how to listen.
It’s worth pointing out that Barry’s methods do not involve the good-cop, bad-cop approach you see in the movies, where one interrogator intimidates and threatens while the other offers the sympathetic ear. He does not teach in-your-face screaming, where a questioner tries to frighten or intimidate someone into opening up. And he has nothing to do with “enhanced interrogation” of the sort Americans used in Afghanistan and Iraq, intended to crush the spirit and force the subject to talk.
Barry teaches “rights respecting” questioning, which most experts say is the most effective way to get a hostile person to open up. His objective is to lower a person’s defenses and move his or her brain out of red alert territory. His questions are framed to generate conversation, however halting, as a means of establishing trust and building a dynamic that will coax information from the most reticent personalities.