Active CIA agents have been recruited by Wall Street firms to train their managers to detect lies using verbal and behavioral clues.
Business Intelligence Advisors (BIA), a Boston-based investment research firm with apparent links to the U.S. intelligence agency, employed workers with backgrounds in interrogation and interviewing to train hedge fund managers in a technique called “tactical behaviour assessment”.
According to a forthcoming book by US reporter Eamon Javers and confirmed by the CIA, veteran CIA workers helped hedge fund clients to make enormous investment decisions by assessing the veracity of a company’s financial presentation, for example. In one reported instance involving a company called UTStarcom, the BIA specialists correctly flagged problems with an answer by the company about its revenue recognition after finding in the response a “detour statement” intended to avoid commenting on the matter.
