Educing Information: Interrogation - National Intelligence University

might require the source to offer information in return for a reliable agreement to
conceal the source’s identity or to provide certain things of value to that person
or his family. (Note that this kind of deal requires the United States to be able to
build a certain kind of credibility; namely, that the United States can be trusted
to honor the deal.)
Commitment Power
Commitment power is the power of persistence in negotiation. In an extreme
form, it means that the interrogator will never relent, in the hope that the source
will “give up,” cede control over his life, and then provide information (Abandon
hope, all ye who enter here.) Commitment power may sometimes be effective, or
appear effective, in getting people to say something, but it carries with it a possible
downside: taking away options from people may also incite rage, recalcitrance,
and a permanent rejection of more positive tactics that might later be used. (This
is one of the many reasons to consider negotiating over apparently small details,
such as where and how EI sessions will be conducted, in order to mitigate the
source’s pain of feeling that he has lost control over his life. It might motivate an
educer to “let up” sometimes in an interrogation, and just to listen.) Pragmatically
speaking, some uses of commitment power might also pose legal difficulties for
the United States.
Commitment power can of course also be used against the interests of the
United States. For example, a source may simply refuse to speak, or may provoke
someone to kill him. The source who uses commitment power against the educer
may at the least incite weariness, acute frustration, and rage.
There is a classic negotiations question about dealing with mistakes in
use of commitment power: how to help the other person, or oneself, give up a
commitment, or change one’s position, without losing face. This would appear to
be an essential element of EI — how to help the source give information and still
save face. It could also happen that the educing team fails badly in some tactic,
but the negotiation must continue. How might the United States proceed without
losing face
As noted above, one possible way for a source not to lose face is for him to be
able to convince his peers that he was in extreme fear. (It does not follow that he
need actually have been injured.) However, there is also a classic list of alternatives,
which includes discovery of “new facts,” a change in the “rules,” appeal to a
new “authority,” or the appointment of a new negotiator. These methods might
occasionally be useful if an educer needs to reposition the discussion — to use
“new facts hitherto unknown to the source,” or to declare that some aspect of EI
has changed “due to new orders,” or to send in a new interrogator (for apparently
extraneous reasons but actually to improve the “chemistry” between educer and
source).
Another classic method to help a source save face is simply to ignore a
previous commitment as if it had never existed. For example, the educer might
behave as though the source had never taken an oath that he would never talk; this
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