The Social Superpower: The Big Truth About Little Lies

By Kathleen Wyatt

"This might sound like a back-handed compliment, but it is not meant to be: I cannot think of a better, more elegant or more articulate guide to mistruth than Kathleen." – Sathnam Sanghera, author of Empireland: How Imperialism Has Shaped Modern Britain
***
"There are a few secrets," he tells me. "A few discoveries that I've never published. Some of the most powerful ones. I wouldn't betray them under torture."
In a time of deep fakes, alternative truths and leaked secrets, it would be easy to think that we are surrounded by lies. While most people are shaking their heads and muttering dark things about the new levels of deceit, former Times journalist Kathleen Wyatt is busy marvelling at how society manages it.
How do we do this extraordinary thing, often under the most ordinary of circumstances? When do we first do it, why do we do it and do we really tell more lies today? Wyatt goes deep into disinformation to find out – but given her own lies, can she even be trusted on this subject?
In this brilliant, wide-ranging study of lies and lying, Wyatt introduces us to a cast of professionals and professional liars – from scientists to investigators, from double agents to toddler specialists, from a fallen titan of industry to a Nobel Peace Prize-winning journalist. Together, they all help her prove a remarkable thesis: lies hold us together as much as they push us apart and they play a vital role in a healthy society.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Biteback Publishing
• Release date: Mar 24, 2022
• ISBN: 9781785907449

Kathleen Wyatt

Kathleen Wyatt grew up in England, Nigeria and Luxembourg, studied at Cambridge and Oxford, and splits her time between London and Hampshire. She loves words and puts them in speeches for others and books for herself. She worked at The Times for sixteen years, starting as a ‘workie’, graduating to the arts section, then news, then becoming travel editor. She has lived twice, speaks six languages and thinks there is always more than one way to see things. If she’s telling the truth, that is.

Book preview

This book is dedicated to my father, who combined supreme honesty with a supreme talent for imagining and reimagining.

We miss you and love you.

‘I can’t believe that!’ said Alice.

‘Can’t you?’ the Queen said in a pitying tone. ‘Try again: draw a long breath, and shut your eyes.’

Alice laughed. ‘There’s no use trying,’ she said: ‘one can’t believe impossible things.’

‘I daresay you haven’t had much practice,’ said the Queen. ‘When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.’

L

ewis

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arroll,

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hrough the

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CONTENTS

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

Chapter 1:The first lie | Amnesia

Chapter 2:Spies, lies and men | Foxtrot

Chapter 3:Deeper into the shadows | The double agent

Chapter 4:Spies, lies and women | Rose

Chapter 5:What is a lie? | Three parts

Chapter 6:Where does it all begin? | Toddlers

Chapter 7:Giving the game away | The face

Chapter 8:Going viral | That woman

Chapter 9:Digital warfare | Maria

Chapter 10:The lies we miss | Most of us

Chapter 11:Freedom | Lord Browne

Chapter 12:The second lie | Closet Case

Acknowledgements

Copyright

CHAPTER 1

THE FIRST LIE | AMNESIA

Iknow where it started, this fascination with lies. I know when: 9 January 1995. But if I know those two things, the events themselves are faint.

I was walking to a bus stop. I was well, happy, possibly care-free. Then suddenly, I collapsed.

A few decades later, I can guess at the long seconds, the confusion, the panic.

Why was I on the ground? What was happening? It made no sense.

My scarf. It was my scarf. I thought my scarf was strangling me.

I clutched at it. But the harder I fought, the tighter it got. I could not breathe.

My head, my body, my senses… they were all failing.

Why.

Was.

I…?

There was no…

Air.

The report said I kept fighting. But there was nothing I could do. There had been no warning and now my chest was shutting down. I was a healthy, fit twenty-year-old. No pre-existing medical condition. No clue. Just sudden and complete failure.

My heart had stopped.

But somehow, they restarted it.

‘Off-duty 999 hero saves girl.’ It was the front-page headline in the Cambridge Evening News. Below, it read: ‘An off-duty ambulanceman has been hailed a hero for saving the life of a student who was having a fit at the side of the road.’ The collapse happened so quickly that my first reaction was to rip at the tight piece of fabric around my neck. I remember none of this, but my family’s recollections and a black-and-white photocopy of the front page stand as a record.

The paramedic, Tony Collings, said: ‘I couldn’t leave her.’ My father was quoted too. ‘The debt we owe this man is beyond description.’ My father later kept in touch with Tony. I did not. And only now do I understand that I was afraid to see him. What had happened? Why did I collapse? Was it all my fault?

It was the end of the Christmas holidays after my first term at university. I was at my parents’ house, studying for exams. I planned to catch the bus into town to return some library books but then, it happened.

We had only recently moved house, from one side of Cambridge to the other. The move put us within five minutes’ drive of the largest hospital in the area, Addenbrooke’s. Tony was driving home after his shift but made an unplanned detour to pick up a birthday card.

He was pulling into the shops when he saw me. I had collapsed metres from the bus stop. Just round the corner was a doctor’s surgery. Nearby, a payphone. As Tony told the newspaper, he realised I was ‘in difficulties’. He ran to my aid, got someone to fetch an airway from the surgery and someone else to use the payphone to alert the hospital. Few people had mobiles in those days, and payphones often did not work. This one did. Those casual facts and Tony’s quick action saved my life. ‘If anyone had luck on her side,’ he said, ‘she did.’ It was not a fit, as the reporter had written: it was a cardiac arrest.

Cambridge Evening News, 11 January 1995

Published with kind permission of Reach plc

The ambulance crew tried twice to restart my heart, but it was not until they tried the more powerful defibrillator in the hospital that it started beating again. Tony’s guess was that my heart had stopped for about ten minutes. I was in a coma for thirty-six hours, and when I came to, I had lost my memory.

I responded to my name and recognised friends and family, but if someone had asked me their names or why they were there, I would have been blank. In the subsequent months and without any sense of it, I started learning how to be ‘me’ again.

The first few weeks were uncertain. My brain had swelled and the specialists were unsure if there would be any long-term effects. The amnesia lingered. Doctors, nurses, loved ones came in and out of the different rooms I was in, but I could make no sense of it. Why was I there?

I stayed in hospital for six weeks until the medical team operated on me and fitted a heart device. It was an implantable cardioverter defibrillator and it would intervene if ever my heart went into another irregular rhythm. The main box with the battery sat just below my left rib cage, its wires passing through my veins and into my heart. It meant I no longer needed constant medical supervision. If my heart stopped again, I would have back-up power. Not long after Valentine’s Day, I left hospital with what felt like a new heart.

I have had three other heart devices since, as the technology improved and older models needed replacing. None of them has ever gone off – and I have never since had a problem with my heart. Despite numerous tests over many years, my case remains medically unexplained. In 2010, I had the last defibrillator removed. The surgeries had started to take a greater toll on my health than the benefits I got from this highly sophisticated back-up plan. I had been lucky, lucky beyond belief – but now my body was protesting.

What caused the cardiac arrest? The specialists could never find a clear explanation, but back then, the name they gave it was Sudden Death Syndrome. The adult version of cot death.

I returned to university and slowly resumed my studies – and my life. Five years later, I wrote a piece about it in The Times. I had just started at the newspaper, first doing work experience, then on the arts desk, and it was my first lead feature. It was a big moment. But although I told the story as carefully as I could, I left something out. Something significant. Fear lurked behind my tidy, journalistic words.

I lied then, as I had before. Guilt and shame silenced me. Because on New Year’s Eve 1994, ten days before my ‘sudden death’, I had taken class-A drugs at a party. Could that have been the cause? I did not write about it.

When I was rushed to hospital, my friends had a difficult choice to make. Should they tell my horrified parents about the drugs? Would that knowledge give my parents comfort, or hurt them even more? Tests revealed nothing in my blood and the only damage to my heart was likely to have been caused by the collapse. The medical team chalked it up as an unknown.

My friends had summoned their courage and told the doctors about the drugs but decided not to tell my parents. And because I was over eighteen, they could also ask the doctors not to tell them. The lie was brave and kind, and it was decided by a group of friends. When the doctors were asked to keep the truth quiet, it became an institutional lie. A silence that heals. Soon it would become my lie too.

As I woke, and began to recover, parts of my personality seemed to return. But it took time. Those close to me had to put up with the wearing routine of telling me what had happened, seeing some kind of understanding dawn over my face, only for me to then look puzzled and greet them again with unfeigned pleasure.

‘How lovely to see you!’

Silence in the room.

‘But… why are you here?’ And so it went on.

When I finally did stop looping the same goldfish bowl and started to remember, I was horrified to realise that I was the one who had caused them so much pain. It was me they were visiting, me who had sucked up so much of their love and resilience. It was devastating. A simple story, with a beginning, a middle and an end, was starting to make sense to me. But remembering what might have caused it was beyond my reach.

As for lies… they were too complex for me to grasp at that stage – too abstract. I could understand one version of a story only. But lies would come back to me. And it was just a few weeks later that I would feel their poisoned little teeth for the first time.

It was after the operation, when I was still recovering. A doctor came to see my parents and me, to talk us through possible explanations and what it meant for the future. I had a morphine drip, and was in a pleasant haze, loosely following what he was telling them.

What my parents really wanted to know was: what could have caused a cardiac arrest in such a healthy young woman? What was his medical opinion?

‘Well,’ he said. ‘There is, of course, the drugs incident to think about.’

‘What incident?’ they asked in unison.

The discussion came to a screeching halt. I snapped out of my haze as the horror hit me that the doctor was about to tell them something deeply unpleasant. Something my friends had tried to tell me about for weeks, without it ever sinking in. Something about New Year’s Eve.

The gentle tone of the discussion was gone. Everything came into focus. I remembered the party, the recreational drugs, the smiles. My wide-eyed parents took turns looking at the medic, then back at me. The shame was acute. My poor, courageous, exhausted parents. This talented doctor had unwittingly broken the doctor’s oath – the promise of confidentiality.

But something else was happening. Something confusing and unsettling. My brain was still healing, but I was having to wrestle with two versions of ‘the truth’. In one version, I was responsible for everything that had happened. In another, I was in a mysterious cocoon, the injured party being looked after by others. How could there be two versions? What did it mean? Who was I? Perhaps it was all a mistake?

The lie bit me hard – the memory of drugs I had taken covertly, mischievously, a frivolous choice I had made. Was it my own actions that had unstitched so many things? The lie was a snake, returned to me, but it came from my friends’ kind intentions.

The facts are that there were no residual drugs in my system, they could find no link to unexplained substances and I was fit and well for eight days after the party. The alternative facts are that I took something unknown and illegal, and my healthy heart stopped soon afterwards. Those two versions of the truth comfort and torment me still, because there is no way to know.

Later, years later, I asked my mother what she remembered about the moment the doctor said the words ‘drugs incident’. How did she feel when he said it?

‘I was relieved.’ I did not expect such a brief, clear-cut answer. And did she talk about it with my father?

‘Of course! We both felt exactly the same way. We thought… at least there is a reason. Now, we know.’

‘And… have you ever blamed my friends for hiding the truth?’

‘Not at all.’ She spoke without hesitation. ‘We totally understood that. Your friends were brilliant. They were so supportive. We never, ever thought they should have told us.’ She paused. ‘It was just so nice to have them around.’

I felt a strange combination of relief and panic mounting as we spoke. It was a tough subject. I braced myself and asked my next question.

‘And do you still think that drugs were the reason for my collapse?’

‘Now, I don’t think so. There were no traces of anything in your body. And we have heard of similar situations with young people. We just think that there was… a coincidence.’ Another pause. ‘Maybe helped a little bit by the drugs?’

I remember her voice fading off. When was the last time we sat down and talked about any of this? She continued, a little shaken.

‘But when I saw you that first day in intensive care, the nurse kept saying: Our hope is she’s healthy. I just could not take it in. She was saying they hoped you would survive.’

I could see that she was imagining herself in that ward again. We quickly changed the subject. I would never learn the true cause of what happened by poking around in painful memories, but over time, I have learnt something astonishing. Grave, life-stopping moments demand lies as much as they do truths. They are when stories meet. And if my friends and the doctors had kept something from my parents, I later found out that my parents had kept something from me.

I knew that they had not told my grandmother about my cardiac arrest. What I did not know was that she had had a heart attack that same month. My father’s daughter and mother were in different cardiac wards, in different hospitals, and neither knew about the other. My family kept the doubled pain for themselves.

And it is with all of those lies together that I start this book.

Lies. Why is that word so difficult? Why is it hard to tell my story without remembering them? What is it about mistruths that leave such a stamp on what happens to us and what we do?

Growing up, every source of information told me that lies were bad. I should always, always avoid them. At home, at school, at play. Don’t fib. Don’t cheat. Don’t make things up. But the lies that surrounded my collapse were of a different order altogether. And they were vital to all of us at that time. They were neither harmful nor destructive. They may have come from fear, they may have caused pain, but they were kind, they were careful and they were proof of love.

I wonder now if our lies bound us together in a way that would never have happened if we had just stayed silent. Back then, we needed our lies as much as we needed our truths. Could it be that what we choose to tell each other is what counts? The details of the cardiac arrest are on that black-and-white photocopy, but what lives on is the story we tell.

I am now more than twice the age I would have been, if it were not for Tony Collings. I think differently about a lot of things (like wrinkles and hangovers and pop music). I think differently about my life and how to live it. But now, I realise that I think differently about lies too.

Especially today, with fake news, alternative truths and leaked secrets making constant headlines. We are telling stories about ourselves all the time and we are telling them in so many different ways. From vlogs and blogs to tweets and posts, from photos to gifs and live streams. From instant updates that disappear, to rash words that last for ever and data trails that chart every step we take. Even if I had wanted to, I could not stop thinking about lies, misleading, pretence, fibs and fabulation.

And while all the saner people around me shake their heads and mutter bad things about the new levels of day-to-day deceit, I am busy marvelling at how society manages it. How do we do this extraordinary thing – often under the most ordinary of circumstances? How do we convince each other to suspend disbelief? How old are we when we start lying? And why do we do it?

Could it be that lies hold us together as much as they push us apart? Are they vital in a healthy society?

I thought of my own daily, social mini-fibs. The white lies I tell my young nieces about the world they are discovering. Information management at work. Family secrets. The lie I told (or tried to tell) my father about the doctor’s assessment of his condition, in a cancer ward, when my father knew it was bad. I was adjusting the truth every day. I still do.

I have told two big lies that have frightened, shamed and changed me. But is it possible that they have been good for me too? One is about the drugs. The other is about identity. And if lies were less tricky, I would also write about that one now, but I am not ready. Not just yet. What on earth makes lies so powerful? I had to find out.

But why would a reader take my word for anything? To see if lies should be celebrated or shut down, I set out to find those who could tell me more. From scientists to investigators, from professors to practitioners, from toddler specialists to a fallen titan of industry.

But to begin to understand lies better, I had to start at the extreme.

I had to find a group of unfindable people. Professional liars. Spies.

CHAPTER 2

SPIES, LIES AND MEN | FOXTROT

There were three of them. A shadow triumvirate, all deeply different, all flitting in and out of sight. One I would meet in person, one I would speak to on a bad telephone line and one would ultimately evade me.

I braced myself as I entered the shadows. I knew the lies I had experienced in my life were trifles compared with what I would find in here. But it was no use being safe and warm at home if I really wanted to understand what it takes to live a life of lies.

The spy I met in person took so much finding that the search itself was a lesson in subterfuge. The deeper I went into the shadows, the more I had to promise to keep identities and connections secret and the more I dreaded who or what it was I would eventually track down. And just like the best kept secrets or most effective lies, the meeting, when it did happen, seemed entirely unremarkable from the outside. I remember trying tensely to look relaxed as I approached the agreed rendezvous.

He rises to greet me and smiles disarmingly. He is not what I expected. There is a bustle of people around us. In the rituals of coming and going, arriving and leaving, I sense that no one notices us. It is daytime, in an ordinary place, but we are inside the shadows.

We chat a little. There is a polite preamble while I order the coffee that I will forget to drink. Then, he suddenly blurts something out that proves incredibly alarming.

‘I’m a terrible liar!’

In a flash, I forget all the cloaks and all the daggers. Have I been set up with a civil servant? I wonder if our interview is going to work at all. But just as suddenly, his smile disappears, he starts rattling off his stories and I know that I am talking to the right person.

Here is someone who has lived a secret life, in darkness, obscured, but always watching. I’ll call him a friend, or F, Foxtrot in the NATO phonetic alphabet. Foxtrot is patient, deeply calm and talks at length about his life of extreme measures.

Foxtrot has worked at the very top of intelligence operations and analysis, both at home and abroad: he is a highly trained agent specialised in fighting terrorism and the narcotics trade, ‘containing belligerent activity’ and working in post-conflict scenarios. Foxtrot also tells awful fibs in his daily life, likes extreme sports and has been caught in the shower singing Blondie songs loudly – and badly.

If I said he had spent time in America (Virginia) and in Britain (Gloucestershire and London, north and south of the river) it would be true, even if it were not the whole story. Foxtrot has military decorations and decades of experience yet he wears his service lightly. The interviews are conducted in English and I meet him several times face to face. Where, I cannot say. I find answers but not hard facts as I look deep into a life defined by truth and lies.

None of Foxtrot’s answers are black and white. About his career, he says: ‘My role is to ensure that information is as truthful as it can be.’

He seems candid under the veil of anonymity. Too candid for me to write many of the sensitive details discussed, but he gives enough material for me to describe a twilight world – and one that shows me how much I assume about my own day-to-day interactions. I begin to see that there is a set of tacit rules that mean I expect most people I encounter to be honest most of the time. And it is not just me. Society’s default is to assume that someone is who they say they are and this unspoken social contract is what allows a person like Foxtrot to hide in the open. I scribble a quick note in the margin of my pad that this might also be why people get away with telling fibs. We expect truth.

For Foxtrot, though, it is not about being honest; it is about presenting the truth of a situation as events are unfolding. The gist of my discussions with him is the deceits that are justified in the pursuit of this kind of truth.

So how does someone take the first step on a path like his, one that leads deep into obscurity, illusion and danger? He smiles at my question as he thinks back.

‘I was very fresh-faced.’ He says that it was a few years before he felt ready for his first challenge, which was to be what he calls ‘a runner’.

‘I’d meet people, pick up things, move things around. All within the community.’

The community being the intelligence community. During that time, he was ‘talent-spotted’ and given a sleeper role.

‘It was great. I was paid to take a year out and have a good time with other young people. Enjoy yourselves, they said, but if you hear anything, you know what to do.’

Foxtrot says that in that time, his only lie was his name, because everyone had an alias. He was a ‘clean skin’, he had nothing else to pretend about.

He was partnered with a woman, whose real name he would