August 9, 2016
Phil Houston is CEO of QVerity, a training and consulting company specializing in detecting deception by employing a model he developed while at the Central Intelligence Agency. He has conducted thousands of interviews and interrogations for the CIA and other federal agencies. His colleague Don Tennant contributed to this report.
As the debate rages over whether the payment of $400 million to Iran was a ransom to secure the release of four Americans being held prisoner by Iranian authorities, our analysis of the behavior exhibited by President Barack Obama in explaining the payment suggests that it was almost certainly a precondition for the prisoners’ release.
In an Aug. 4 press conference held at the Pentagon, President Obama made a concerted effort to disassociate the payment from the release of the prisoners. He argued that the payment, which had been announced in January, constituted an agreement to release Iranian assets that had been frozen by the U.S., following a legal review that concluded that not returning the assets could cost the U.S. billions of dollars in litigation fees. The timing of the payment, President Obama insisted, was simply a consequence of having diplomatic negotiations with Iran for the first time in several decades. “So the issue is not so much that it was a coincidence, as it is that we were able to have a direct discussion,” the President said. “John Kerry could meet with the Foreign Minister, which meant that our ability to clear accounts on a number of different issues at the same time, converged.”
What was never directly addressed was the key question as to whether the $400 million payment was a precondition for the release of the Americans. The high level of deceptive behaviors exhibited by President Obama during the press conference has left little doubt in our minds that it was.
First and foremost was the evasion behavior exhibited by the President, in the form of denial problems associated with the ransom question. We never heard the President explicitly state, “We did not pay ransom to secure the release of these four Americans.” Instead, the President relied on the non-specific denial, “We do not pay ransom for hostages.” At one point the President did say, “We do not pay ransom, we didn’t here, and we don’t, we won’t in the future.” But the denial issue here is its isolated delivery, buried in the long narrative of his argument. These denial problems are classic deceptive indicators.
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