Reading Lolita in Langley: The Unreliable Narrator as a Device to Evaluate Intelligence Credibility

Abstract

Current methods of ascertaining the reliability of human intelligence focus predominantly on evaluating the reliability of sources. More leverage might be achieved through considering the reliability of narratives constructed or furnished by those sources. Lessons can be drawn from literary theory which examines the creation and reading of unreliable and untrustworthy narratives. A narrative can be unreliable and/or untrustworthy, even when the informant appears to be cooperating in furnishing information, due to his often unconscious biases or limitations in understanding or retelling the tale.

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the US-UK Fulbright Commission for supporting my residence at the Institute of Advanced Study at Durham University in Winter 2013, during which this article was produced. I would also like to thank the members of the Durham University Seminar on ‘Narrating Time’ (especially Emma Miller and Simon James) for the insights and advice which they provided on the subjective of narrativity.

Notes

¹ Lindsay Moran, Blowing my Cover: My Life as a CIA Spy (New York: Putnam Adult 2005).

² Douglas Frantz and Catherine Collins, Fallout: The True Story of the CIA's Secret War on Nuclear Trafficking (New York: Free Press 2011).

³ Here I rely on Yuri Lotman's definition of a text, as explicated in Boguslaw Zylko, ‘Culture and Semiotics: Notes on Lotman's Conception of Culture’, New Literary History 32/4 (2011) p.395.

⁴ James Phelan, ‘Estranging Unreliability, Bonding Unreliability and the Ethics of Lolita’, Narrative 15/2 (2007) pp.222–38.

⁵ Lisa Genova, Still Alice (New York: Gallery Books 2009).

⁶ Lionel Shriver, We Need to Talk about Kevin (New York: Harper Perennial 2011).

⁷ M. C. Florea and E. Bosse, ‘Dempster-Shafer Theory: Combination of Information using Contextual Knowledge’, paper given at ‘Proceedings of 12th International Conference on Information Fusion’, Seattle, WA, 6–9 July 2009, pp.522–8.

⁸ See Richard Kerr et al., ‘Issues for the US Intelligence Community: Collection and Analysis on Iraq’, Studies in Intelligence 49/3 (2005), pp. 1–9.

⁹ See Joe Castleberry, ‘Polygraph: An Intelligence Tool’, Military Intelligence, July–September (2003) pp.53–5.

¹⁰ See, for example, Giulia Berlusconi, ‘Do all the Pieces Matter? Assessing Unreliability of Law Enforcement Data Sources in the Network Analysis of Wire Taps’, Global Crime 14/1 (2013) pp.61–81.

¹¹ US Army, ‘US Army Field Manual FM34-52’ (1992) < http://www.globalsecurity.org/intell/library/policy/army/fm/fm34-52/chapter3.htm> (accessed 20 February 2013) p.8.

¹² Bruce L. Pechan, The Collector's Role in Evaluation (Langley, VA: Central Intelligence Agency 1995) p.2.

¹³ Central Intelligence Agency, The Interrogation of Suspects under Arrest (Langley, VA: Central Intelligence Agency 1996) < http://archive.is/DNuWh> (accessed 19 February 2013).

¹⁴ George Noble, Jr, Diagnosing Distortion in Source Reporting: Lessons for HUMINT Reliability from other Fields, MA thesis (Mercyhurst College, Erie, PA 2009) < http://www.isn.ethz.ch/isn/Digital-Library/Publications/Detail/?id = 99245> (accessed 1 April 2013).

¹⁵ Christian A. Meissner et al., ‘Criminal versus HUMINT Interrogations: The Importance of Psychological Science to Improving Interrogative Practice’, Journal of Psychiatry and Law (2010) < http://works.bepress.com/christian_meissner/48> (accessed 27 February 2013).

¹⁶ Kerr et al., ‘Issues for the US’, p.3.

¹⁷ Noble, Diagnosing Distortion, p.44.

¹⁸ US Army, ‘US Army Field Manual’, p.6.

¹⁹ This is the approach detailed in US Army, ‘Field Manual 2-22.3 Human Intelligence Collector Operations’ (2006) < http://www.cfr.org/intelligence/human-intelligence-collector-operations-us-army-field-manual-intelligence-interrogations/p11394>. In my analysis of contemporary intelligence collection information gathering techniques I have relied extensively on this Field Manual, along with the Counterinsurgency Field Manual. These are the most recent and most extensive publically available resources dealing with the question of intelligence collection and thus are the ones which academic students of intelligence are most likely to have read. Throughout this piece, I assume that they are representative of writing within the intelligence community on issues of reliability in intelligence collection – though it may be that there are more sophisticated discussions o this issue which are classified and thus not publically available. If that is the case, then current intelligence practitioners may have a rejoinder to this work.

²⁰ Pechan, The Collector's Role.

²¹ Noble, Diagnosing Distortion, p.48.

²² Ibid., p.18.

²³ Cate Watson, ‘Unreliable Narrators? “Inconsistency” (and some Inconstancy) in Interviews’, Qualitative Research 6/3 (2006) pp.367–84.

²⁴ Ibid., p.371.

²⁵ Noble, Diagnosing Distortion, p.28.

²⁶ Meissner et al., ‘Criminal versus HUMINT’, p.8.

²⁷ Pechan, The Collector's Role, p.2.

²⁸ James Phelan and Mary Patricia Martin, ‘The Lessons of “Weymouth”: Homodiegesis, Unreliability, Ethics, and The Remains of the Day’, in David Herman (ed.) Narratologies: New Perspectives on Narrative Analysis (Columbus: Ohio State University Press 1999) pp.88–109. Quoted in Ansgar F. Nunning, ‘Reconceptualizing Unreliable Narration: Synthesizing Cognitive and Rhetorical Approaches’, in James Phelan and Peter J. Rabinowitz (eds.) A Companion to Narrative Theory. Retrieved from Blackwell Reference Online (accessed 3 February 2013).

²⁹ Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, ‘Ambiguity and Narrative Levels: Christine Brooke-Rose's Thru’, Poetics 3/1 (1982) p.100.

³⁰ Wayne Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction, 2nd ed. (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press 1983) p.340.

³¹ Ibid., p.159.

³² Phelan, ‘Estranging Unreliability’, pp.222–38.

³³ Greta Olson, ‘Reconsidering Unreliability: Fallible and Untrustworthy Narrators’, Narrative 11/1 (2003) p.93.

³⁴ Booth, quoted in James Phelan, ‘Estranging Unreliability, Bonding Unreliability and the Ethics of Lolita’, Narrative 15/2 (2007) p.223. See also Watson, who makes much the same argument about the real-life interview. In her work, she suggests that the informant is always somehow performing for the interviewer; it is an artificial situation. Watson, ‘Unreliable Narrators?’, p.371.

³⁵ One should note here that these analysts do not guide the reader to finding the ‘truth’ of the situation – since many analysts would argue that there is no authentic truth at the bottom of these narratives, or indeed, any narrative. They might suggest that the writer himself has a somewhat ambiguous stance towards the story he is telling. Thus, most analysts agree that the writer's aim in writing such a narrative is not merely to either teach the reader something or to tell him a story. Instead, they suggest that the writer's aim is to force the reader to work at understanding a situation and, in this way, to facilitate his growth as a reader. Thus, in giving advice on understanding these narratives, analysts usually suggest ways in which the reader could most effectively do the work of reading the narrative in such a way as to understand which parts of the narrative have been either embellished or under-narrated. The reader's aim is thus to be able to point out where the narrative diverges from what we might expect – rather than to point out which parts of the story are wrong and which are correct.

³⁶ See Olson, ‘Reconsidering Unreliability’, pp.95–7. Also John S. O'Connor, ‘Seeking Truth in Fiction: Teaching Unreliable Narrators’, The English Journal 83/2 (1994) pp.48–50.

³⁷ The typology is discussed in Interdisciplinary Center for Narratology, ‘Unreliability’, The Living Handbook of Narratology < http://www.lhn.uni-hamburg.de/> (accessed 15 January 2013). See also Bruno Zerweck, ‘Historicizing Unreliable Narration: Unreliability and Cultural Discourse in Narrative Fiction’, Style 35/1(2001) p.153.

³⁸ For more on this subject, see David L. Perry, ‘“Repugnant Philosophy”: Ethics, Espionage, and Covert Action’, Journal of Conflict Studies (1995) < http://www.scu.edu/ethics/publications/submitted/Perry/repugnant.html> (accessed 12 January 2013).

³⁹ Nunning, ‘Reconceptualizing Unreliable Narration’.

⁴⁰ Edgar Allan Poe, The Best of Poe: The Tell-tale Heart, the Raven, the Cask of Amontillado and Thirty others (London: Prestwick House 2006).

⁴¹ Zerweck, ‘Historicizing Unreliable Narration’, pp.156–7.

⁴² Peter Rabinowitz, ‘Truth in Fiction: A Reexamination of Audiences’, Critical Inquiry 491 (1977) pp.121–41.

⁴³ Quoted in Zerweck, ‘Historicizing Unreliable Narration’.

⁴⁴ Olson, ‘Reconsidering Unreliability’, p.95. See also Meissner et al., ‘Criminal versus HUMINT’, 2010. Again, Meissner and his colleagues seem to regard information as binary – it can be either wholly true or wholly false. They suggest that the best way to determine if information is true is thus to compare the informant's rendering of a situation, looking for elements of internal consistency. An informant who contradicts himself somewhere in the middle of the story is thus said to be lying.

⁴⁵ Nunning, ‘Reconceptualizing Unreliable Narration’.

⁴⁶ Olson, ‘Reconsidering Unreliability’, p.104.

⁴⁷ See, for example, David G. Muller, Jr., ‘Intelligence Analysis in Red and Blue’, International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence 21/1 (2007) pp.1–12. In this article, he describes the ways in which someone who is a Republican and Realist may carry certain assumptions about how the world works into his analysis unconsciously. His assumption that the world is Hobbesian, and characterized by conflict rather than cooperation, for example, might cause him to overemphasize some parts of the information he is given while overlooking other information which does not fit into that worldview. (A Democrat who is a liberal internationalist would do the same.)

⁴⁸ Interagency OPSEC Support Staff Section 2, ‘Intelligence Collection Activities and Disciplines’ 1996 < http://www.fas.org/irp/nsa/ioss/threat96/part02.htm> (accessed 12 January 2013).

⁴⁹ I first became interested in this topic while listening to a colleague talk about the unreliable narrator in the literature of trauma. A common device in narratives about rape and incest is the insertion by the author of a sense of time being unreal. Particularly as a survivor of rape or violent trauma recounts events, there may be a sense of time as unreasonably long. Alternately, events might be compressed and there might be a mingling of real and unreal events. As my colleague explains it, there are some events which are so beyond our everyday experiences that we simply have no words to describe them or the vocabulary which exists in our society to explain these events may simply be inadequate. (For example, when a woman tells a story of being raped, our own sexualized culture may cause us to see it as being a story about sex rather than one about violence.)

Here again, culture matters. In a culture with a tradition of honor killing or an understanding that men own women, such narratives will be framed very differently. Thus, it is important to ask how such understandings might shape narratives provided, for example, about wartime atrocities. In such a situation, it is possible that a woman might describe the violation of her bodily integrity while a man might see the events as a violation of his family's honor. Again, it is incorrect to say that one narrative is necessarily truer than the other, or more reliable or more trustworthy. They are simply different.

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Mary Manjikian

Mary Manjikian is Associate Dean at the Robertson School of Government at Regent University in Virginia Beach, VA. She received her BA from Wellesley College, an MPhil from Oxford University and an MA and PhD from the University of Michigan. She is the author of Apocalypse and Post-Politics: The Romance of the End (Lexington 2012); Threat Talk: Comparative Politics of Internet Addiction (Ashgate 2012); and The Securitization of Property Squatting in Western Europe (Routledge 2013). Her work has also appeared in International Studies Quarterly, Alternatives, Millennium, International Feminist Journal of Politics and International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence. In 2012, she was a Fulbright Scholar at the Institute of Advanced Study at Durham University in the UK. A former US foreign service officer with service in the Netherlands, Russia and Bulgaria, she teaches intelligence, terrorism and research methods in the MA and MPA program at Regent University.