Ever wonder what your employees say about you when you’re not around? Or if you could handle a full-on military-style interrogation? If you said yes to either question, Greg Hartley’s your man.
Meet the kinder, gentler interrogator, who’s set to become the first ex-Army interrogator to spin his mind-bending, truth-wresting abilities into a general management consultancy. He also moonlights as a Guantanamo-style cellmaster: People pay him and the affiliated “Team Delta” as much as $1,400 for the “detainee” experience—complete with orange jumpsuits, blindfolds and screaming guards. “[W]hen I was lying naked, shaved, shackled in a ball on the floor, alone with a hood over my head, listening to white noise with a cold fan at my back, I realized just how superficial the term ‘informed consent’ can be,” one evidently satisfied customer wrote in a testimonial posted at TeamDelta.com.
Hartley, who has already worked for multiple Fortune 500 companies, employs battle-tested techniques for extracting information from terrorists, spies and enemy prisoners—and sets them to use on sneaky clients, unmotivated subordinates and even cheating spouses in a system he calls “Mind at War.” He has no staffers yet, just himself, but he hopes to turn some early success into a multimillion-dollar consulting, workshop and conference business.
If this Arabic-speaking, former special-forces op and Desert Storm vet is to make it in the cutthroat world of management consulting, it’s the tough-guy stuff that will set him apart. His idea rides largely on the new aura the military has gained since 9/11 (though he’s at pains to call Abu Ghraib “a mess” and “out of control”), the country’s fear of terrorists and its fascination with the Jack-Bauer types who slay them.
As it happens, Hartley hasn’t taken part in post-9/11 interrogations in any active way—he hasn’t handled an Arabic-speaking detainee since the Gulf War—but he consults for people in the government who do, and lists a string of military honors, including the Knowlton Award for excellence in Army intelligence, among his credentials. He has worked as an instructor in the Army’s Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape school, which teaches military guys how to avoid capture and what to do if it happens. He also claims impressive-sounding, but probably unverifiable successes building multinational intelligence and interrogation programs in the mid- and late-1990s.
The premise of the business: Garden-variety managers and employees can benefit from “Extreme Interpersonal Skills,” Hartley’s proprietary method for interrogation. Already he has a growing client list, book deals, several dozen media gigs and a stream of people who pay $1,400 to spend a weekend being treated like Abu Musab al Zarqawi.
A few months ago, Hartley’s somewhat slapdash book, How to Spot a Liar: Why People Don’t Tell the Truth . . . and How You Can Catch Them, from New Jersey-based Career Press, the little-known publishers of 151 Quick Ideas to Inspire Your Staff and 6 Habits of Highly Effective Bosses, came across my desk. It contained, among others, such timeless gems as “You can use words to go deep into someone’s soul, to create a psychic pain it’s impossible to defend against”; “If all you want is a confession, all you need are barbaric tools”, and “We prey on the weakest link.” If Chuck Norris worked for McKinsey & Company, he might sound something like this.
And the hits kept coming: “You aren’t behind bars in an orange jumpsuit. You eat good food, not stale rations. You walk about freely and bathe daily. But you’re in a kind of captivity. You wake up and wonder why you’ll get yelled at today. You look out the window and dream of running away—from school, from home, from your job.” Is that really a consultant talking? Or is it Fight Club’s Tyler Durden?
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I invited the Atlanta-based Hartley to my northeast Washington offices to talk interrogation, thinking I would meet some Torquemada of the cubicle. He squeezed me in last week around lectures for clients in the government (“law enforcement” intelligence types; he couldn’t say much more than that). He showed up in jeans, a long-sleeve black T-shirt and a salesman-ish demeanor. Trim and just over six feet, he’s not some hulking muscle guy.
He starts running down his philosophy, a something-for-everyone pastiche of red-meat Army talk, management-consultant empower-speak and Myers-Briggs psychobabble, all sweetened with a healthy dose of Dr. Phil self-empowering happy-talk.
The big idea, put simply, is to “baseline” your target, so that you know roughly his or her normal demeanor, and then can begin to detect outliers and aberrations that suggest discomfort, stress and possibly deception.
It’s not about slamming walls and slicing fingers, Hartley tells me, but careful observation of human behavior, and tweaking the environment and conversation to achieve a given outcome. “You don’t win by screaming and yelling,” Hartley says. “I can be a harsh bastard, but only so the nice guy can do the job. People nowadays associate Army interrogation with the abuses at Abu Ghraib, but the question is, ‘How do I get from my head into yours?’…I have to see myself through your eyes.” He then likens himself to Jane Goodall among the chimps—only he’s a chimp too, he stresses.
It’s a lot like acting. Hartley has a little acting experience, as it happens, mostly in community theatres. He hasn’t done it in about five years, though, since he accidentally split a guy’s scalp open during a sword scene in a “MacBeth” production in Georgia.
What works? The most telling indicators are the eyes. According to Hartley, when the eyes move down and to the left, this “means calculation,” whereas down and right “means emotion.” Hartley’s methods, designed to “polish all this to a razor’s edge,” also include pointers on body language, physiology and voice.
So how does it all apply in the office? Essentially, Hartley wants you and your boss to be “brokers of stress.” That’s what interrogators are, Hartley says; they modulate their quarry’s stress levels to detect abnormalities. That’s not to say that they yell and scream, and certainly not that intimidating people at work is useful—quite the opposite. Instead, they use subtle cues—posture, hand gestures, even the arrangement of items on the desk—to establish a baseline. Then they begin asking questions.
So where’s the nasty stuff? Sure, sometimes the questioning borders on “Vee Heif Vays of Makink You Talk.” Hartley recounts helping a firm decide on a North American sales manager as an outside consultant who’d been brought in to help evaluate their suitability. As Hartley tells it, he cut immediately to the existential questions. “Who are you?” he asked. “What kind of person are you?” and followed the conversation where it led. It didn’t matter where the conversation went; only the candidates’ response and logic mattered. It disarmed them with the unexpected. “I’m loyal,” one responded. Really? Then why are you jumping ship from your current position? The stress ratchets.
The idea, then, is to ask questions and to observe—which in reality isn’t so different from other consultancies, minus the military veneer and torture getaway-weekends.
Brendan Conway is an editorial writer at The Washington Times and associate editor of Doublethink (www.affdoublethink.com).
