Today, I want to tell you the hard lesson I learned during an undercover mission a few years ago.
This story reveals something most people misunderstand about crises: they don't test how smart you are. They test your structure.
What happened that night was a predictable human response to high pressure. In this case, fear.
It was a high-risk meeting, late evening. We were a team of several operators, located in an isolated place, and surrounded by people no one would describe as "safe".
With us, a subject-matter expert who was essential to the meeting. He was not a HUMINT professional, but he had a specific expertise we needed. Sharp man, articulate, confident. Nothing about him suggested vulnerability.
He was intensively briefed and prepared for that meeting (to be held exclusively in English or French).
Our "guests" arrived late, just after the end of Ramadan. The meeting started, we were all seated in a room arranged in a U-shape, a few meters from each other.
I was the only woman in the room. In hypervigilance mode, observing.
When something happened...
The expert turned toward me and his eyes were... different.
It's hard to describe: I just saw in his eyes he was not in his normal state. He leaned in and started whispering to me mechanically... in HEBREW!
Not quietly enough and not safely, and clearly without realizing what he was doing. We were undercover. In that room, that language was not neutral... at all.
By chance, they didn't hear him. The expert was freezing from the inside, but he couldn't stop talking and looking at me with his dissociated gaze. He was petrified.
I had to contain him, quickly. I stood up as if for a banal reason, crossed the room, and signaled our security guy. Within seconds, I created a pretext and we extracted him from the room.
We prepared for many emergency scenarios the weeks before. But this... No plan had covered it! We didn't have a scenario that had anticipated "expert reverts to native language under stress, blowing up the cover of the whole team".
But the danger was real and immediate, for all of us.
We handled the crisis, finished the meeting.
The first thing I did when they left: I jumped into the pool, to let my body go of the pressure accumulated. I will not forget this very early swim!
What happened that night was a predictable response of the human system under pressure. When it crosses a certain threshold, the system changes its operating logic to survival.
The nervous system searches for what is immediately stable and familiar, that does not require interpretation. It seeks safety!
Language is one of the strongest anchors: it carries identity, memory, and belonging. It feels safe. So in this specific case, and under extreme stress, our expert reverting to native language was a reflex. From the outside, I can tell you it looked like "regression".
But it was just his system simplifying itself to survive.