The Defensive Informant
Occasionally one encounters an informant who is irrevocably committed to a defensive posture, for whom “No comment” is the primary defense, and calculated evasion is the fallback position. Try to diagnose this problem very early in the interview and to reassess your goals for the interview in light of this situation. You should concentrate on gaining information about specific questions that this informant is able to answer but that are probably not answerable by any other source. Since so much of your energies will have to go into the cracking of the informant’s defenses, you should concentrate them on very specific objectives. Once these are in mind, you should begin to probe for them right away.