It’s a short video: A man in a suit steps out of a
flower shop with a bouquet in his hand and gets
into a car. “We were watching the video and
everyone was saying, ‘Well there’s not much to
see there,’” is the way Joe Navarro recalls an
espionage case he investigated for the FBI.
Another country had warned the agency about a
man they thought was posing as a U.S. citizen
but working for a foreign intelligence service.
“They told us he’d somehow entered the United
States and was working as a mole.” Suddenly
Navarro called out: “Stop the film right there!”
The body language expert noticed that as the
man left the shop, he turned the bouquet so the
flowers were pointing down with the stems up.“That’s how they carry flowers in Eastern Europe,”
he told his team members. “Americans hold them
the other way around.”
Navarro was certain, but rather than openly
accuse the man during interrogation, he simply
asked him: “‘Would you like to know how we
know?’ When I told him it was the flowers, he
confessed.” Such a detail might have eluded the
average investigator, but Navarro is anything but
average. For many years his job was to catch
spies, and he learned a lot from it. In the case of
the flower bouquet, a seemingly small error had
brought the spy’s carefully constructed house of
cards crashing down. It took Navarro only a few
seconds to demolish it.HOW TO CA
IS THE PERSON
WELL-GROOMED?PAY CLOSE AT TENTION
May 2020 54 ideasanddiscoveries.com