Culture and Politics in the Cold War and Beyond

The Polygraph and the American Cold War

John Philipp Baesler

• Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781613765654
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia del mundo

A person strapped to a polygraph machine. Nervous eyes, sweaty brow, the needle trembling up and down. Few images are more evocative of Cold War paranoia.In this first comprehensive history of the polygraph as a tool and symbol of American Cold War policies, John Philipp Baesler tells the story of a technology with weak scientific credentials that was nevertheless celebrated as a device that could expose both internal and external enemies. Considered the go-to technology to test agents' and employees' loyalty, the polygraph's true power was to expose deep ideological and political fault lines. While advocates praised it as America's hard-nosed yet fair answer to communist brainwashing, critics claimed that its use undermined the very values of justice, equality, and the presumption of innocence for which the nation stood. Clearer Than Truth demonstrates that what began as quick-fix technology promising a precise test of honesty and allegiance eventually came to embody tensions in American Cold War culture between security and freedom, concerns that reach deep into the present day.

Chapter 1

How the Polygraph Does and Does Not Work

During a standard polygraph test, two soft rubber belts are strapped around a subject’s stomach and chest, measuring the subject’s breathing. Two wires are fastened on the ends of two of the subject’s fingers, measuring skin conductance of electricity. Then a blood pressure cuff is placed around the subject’s upper arm, measuring pulse and variations in blood pressure. In short, the polygraph determines a selection of responses from the autonomic nervous system. In the traditional, analog polygraph test, all measurements are hooked to a modestly sized box, which sits on a table between examiner and subject. During a typical exam, between nine and fifteen questions are asked in intervals of about fifteen seconds, with all physiological responses recorded on a continuous roll of paper. Digital technology has come to replace the box and the role of paper, so that, since the 1980s, most polygraph tests use computers to score the physiological responses. The test is usually repeated two or three times. It is preceded by a pretest interview, during which the examiner discusses the procedure and the questions with the subject. It concludes with a post-test interview, which offers the subject the chance to clear up any issues on their chart. It is therefore useful to distinguish between the polygraph test and the polygraph examination, a procedure that includes interviews before and after the test.1

Nonpractitioners, especially in academic psychology, have been mostly skeptical of the lie detector test’s validity—that is, its ability to measure what it claims to measure: a specific, universal, and reproducible physiological lie response that can be untangled from individual, evolutionary, and cultural context. According to communications scholar Mark Knapp, the ability to effectively deceive others is a valuable trade when seen from an evolutionary perspective. Since natural selection rewards successful lies, humans have learned to lie effectively. Further, there is no firm boundary between truthful and deceitful communication. Equivocation, irony, white lies, and other subtle forms of deceit map a wide range of verbal and nonverbal human interaction. These forms of deceit involve complex cognitive states, such as self-deception, that make a physiological demarcation between truth and falsehood difficult.2 Research in controlled laboratory situations suggests that some behavioral clues—such as higher vocal pitch, nervousness, or blinking—are correlated with deception; yet research subjects’ rate of success in detecting deceit is little better than a coin toss.3 Overall, humans have an ambiguous attitude toward deception. While societies value truthfulness and rely on trust in everyday social interactions, lying within limits has been found to be frequent. Rather than calculating costs and benefits of lying versus truthfulness, argues psychologist Dan Ariely, humans frequently engage in deception yet still want to view themselves as decent people. Fear of punishment or expectation of rewards, therefore, does not correspond with lower or higher likelihood of deception.4 As a result, the basic methodological assumption of the polygraph—namely, that lying requires extraordinary mental exertion—is questionable. This raises the issue of what exactly the lie detector examination does.

In the controlled setting of a lie detector examination, truthfulness can be framed as compliance with the interrogator’s questioning. By comparing responses to relevant and irrelevant questions and—more importantly—juxtaposing mental stress arising from intrusive control questions with anxiety that accompanies responses to the target questions (what the interrogator is really interested in), the lie detector examination attempts to isolate the deceptive consciousness from mere nervousness. This is why during the pretest interview, subjects are asked about any reasons why specific questions might cause them stress even when they answer truthfully. In the post-test interview, the subjects might be prompted to explain spikes in their curve in response to target questions; the lie detector test is then repeated.

The problem with this approach is that the subjects might not be aware of why they respond to certain questions more strongly than to others. For example, due to unresolved psychic conflicts, subjects might respond strongly to the question, “Have you ever stolen more than ten dollars?” because they have recently inherited a large sum of money of which they don’t consider themselves worthy. Further, while it is possible to concoct scenarios in a laboratory setting in which the truthfulness of statements can be precisely defined, the psychic stress that questions cause in a subject cannot be reproduced that easily. That is because the consequences of a “failed” polygraph exam are naturally much more severe in real life than in a scientific study. As a result, the responsiveness of subjects in laboratory tests may not resemble responsiveness in real-life situations. Similarly, disagreements between interrogator and subject about how to interpret a response often cannot be resolved by external verification of the facts at hand. In such situations, the interrogator must press for a confession, since the correctness of the chart interpretation might otherwise never be confirmed. This state of affairs results in a dearth of field studies that measure the so-called external validity of the polygraph exam.

These and other methodological issues of polygraph exams were thoroughly assessed in a nineteen-month investigation for the National Research Council (NRC) by a group of researchers under Stephen Fienberg, a professor of statistics at Carnegie Mellon University. The study was commissioned by the U.S. Department of Energy and released in 2002, yet it highlighted issues that critics of the polygraph had raised long before.5 On a basic level, the NRC study found that polygraph research was of low quality: fewer than one in three polygraph studies fulfilled minimal scientific standards. Most studies concerned themselves with application of existing procedures rather than underlying theory or even improved technique. Accordingly, there was “inertia among practitioners about using familiar equipment and techniques that rely on 1920-era science.”6 After analysis of acceptable research, the study concluded nevertheless that in specific event investigations, when relevant factual details are known and the significance of questions can be better assessed, lie detector tests performed “at rates well above chance, though well below perfection.” However, the scientists also warned that “polygraph accuracy may be degraded by countermeasures” and judged that “its accuracy in distinguishing actual or potential security violators from innocent test takers is insufficient to justify reliance on its use in employee security screening in federal agencies.”7

As for “construct validity,” defined as a convincing theory as to why the test measures what it claims to measure, the NRC found that polygraph research offers as potential answers fear, arousal, or excitement, the conflict between two incompatible reactions, a conditioned response to lying, or the anticipation of punishment in case of being found out. In other words, there were many theories about the polygraph test’s construct validity. All theories leave open possibilities for error, since, for example, fear of punishment might be present even in truthful examinees, who might anticipate the repercussions of a wrong call. Due to these problems, David Lykken developed an alternative approach based on the “orientating theory” of lie detection. Lykken stated that hearing a question with stress-triggering information is enough to cause a physiological response because it focuses the subject’s attention. For example, a burglar who used a red Toyota as a getaway car would respond more strongly to any question involving a “red car” than questions that do not contain the trigger information. On the basis of this theory, Lykken developed the concealed knowledge test, a line of questioning that compares responses to a variety of questions with or without information relevant to the investigation at hand.8 But the assumption underlying Lykken’s orienting theory runs counter to the common practices used by most polygraph practitioners, such as the practice of discussing the questions before the test in order to avoid startling the subject. Consequently, after decades of practice there was no agreed-upon theory of what the polygraph test legitimately measured.

Further, the NRC study insisted that physiological data recorded by the polygraph are not universal and can vary among individuals:

The physiological responses measured by the polygraph do not all reflect a single underlying process such as arousal. Similarly, arousing stimuli do not produce consistent responses across these physiological indicators [blood pressure, skin conductivity, heart rate] or across individuals. This knowledge implies that there is considerable lack of correspondence between the physiological data the polygraph provides and the underlying constructs that polygraph examiners believe them to measure.9

As a result, the questions chosen by the examiner can influence the test results, as can the responses from different examinees to the same questions as well as a number of other variables that polygraph research has failed to calculate. Therefore, “the basic science relevant to the polygraph suggests that it can at best be an imperfect instrument, but it leaves unclear the degree of imperfection.”10

Another crucial issue the NRC study examined was polygraph use for security screening purposes—that is, the use of lie detector tests to identify the suitability of applicants or employees for work in federal security agencies. The study identified two major problems. First, U.S. security agencies did not agree on what findings they considered severe enough to warrant denial of employment for applicants or termination of employment for employees. As a result, the predictive value of the test remained unclear. While federal statistics on the utility of the polygraph often counted the detection of small infractions of security protocol or lies about insignificant matters as true positives (that is, the correct identification of a deceptive statement), the purported goal of the screenings was to identify serious threats to U.S. national security. As the NRC researchers put it, “Assessing the polygraph’s accuracy for screening cannot be done without agreement on the criterion—what it is supposed to be accurate about. The committee has seen no indication of a clear and stable agreement on what the criterion is, either in general or within any particular organization that uses polygraph screening.”11 Homosexuality is a good example of this problem. For the longest time—indeed, until the 1990s—the Central Intelligence Agency considered homosexuality as a disqualifier for employment for reasons relating to both morale within the agency and the perceived susceptibility of a homosexual to blackmail. Yet as cultural acceptance of homosexuality increased, this criterion lost its value, and the CIA eventually adjusted its policy. What other criteria that intelligence agencies have been using to define suitability for employment might be subject to change in the future?

In addition, since applicants who flunked polygraph tests due to failure to disclose minor infractions were denied employment, it was also impossible to compare their job performance and loyalty with those who passed the test. This lack of comparison data goes a long way toward explaining the continued controversies over not just the validity, but also the utility of the polygraph test. There is simply no consensus as to how reliable a predictor of future loyalty a failed polygraph test is. “Perhaps most critical,” emphasized the NRC analysts,

it is necessary to make inferences about future behavior on the basis of polygraph evidence of past behavior, such as illegal drug use, to future behavior of a different kind, such as revealing classified information. We have not found either any explicit statement of a plausible theory of this sort in the polygraph literature or any appropriate evidence of construct validity.12

Worse still, the NRC found a second, even more critical shortcoming of polygraph tests as a means of screening applicants or employees in federal security agencies. In order to correctly identify spies who attempt to infiltrate an intelligence agency, the test has to result in accusations of spying against many innocent people. This is because polygraph examiners, in order to calibrate the test to be sufficiently sensitive to identify deceptive individuals in large pools of people, have to make the test sufficiently unspecific. This lack of specificity will result in many false positives (individuals who show signs of anxiety for reasons unrelated to lying but are nevertheless identified as deceptive). The study gave the following example of the tradeoff between sensitivity and specificity of the test in employment screening. If we assume ten spies in a population of ten thousand applicants for a job, and the test is set sensitive enough to identify eight of the ten spies, it will result in 1,598 wrongly accused applicants.13 Yet federal examiners did not have a clear understanding of this fact, namely that there were different appropriate measures of accuracy—the “decision threshold”—for different purposes.14 Instead, it appeared that examiners often relied on informal criteria to judge a person as either nervous or deceptive. This finding offers a mathematical explanation for the accusations hurled against lie detector tests in screening procedures. It further justifies the claim of many polygraph practitioners that the quality of the test ultimately depends on the experience of the examiner.

Many polygraph examiners maintain that they are interrogators who use the machine as a tool of the trade. They argue that a successful polygraph examination is an art more than a science and that the test will lead, ideally, to a confession. Especially in specific interrogations, examiners insist, an unexplained “deception indicated” can be given with a strong sense of confidence, while during screenings the polygraph test often leads to admissions of crimes or other lapses of ethics that otherwise would have remained unnoticed. The amount of credence polygraph examiners give to the scientific value of the test varies, but they usually agree that the validity of the test depends on the quality of the examiner. CIA polygraph examiner John Sullivan’s attitude may serve as a typical defense of the polygraph that does not rely on science. Sullivan admits to the scientific limitations of the polygraph but argues that “in the real world, there is no better screening device than a polygraph instrument in the hands of a good examiner—‘good examiner’ being the operative word.”15 Similarly, former Army Intelligence polygraph examiner Gordon Barland argues that phrasing precise control questions is crucial. He maintains that experienced examiners do not judge responses in screenings the way they would in specific investigations. Rather, they will incorporate other indicators such as behavior into their judgment and will retest the subject, with differently worded questions if necessary, resulting in a lower amount of false positives in real life than studies show. Barland also insists that the deterrent effect of the test should not be underestimated.16

There is evidence that experienced examiners can conduct effective polygraph interrogations and that the prospect of a polygraph exam has deterred potential or actual spies from entering national security agencies. On the other hand, the appeal of the polygraph comes to a large degree from its family resemblance with science and its aura of objective, precise technology. Early developers and practitioners of the polygraph test counted on this aura, and most polygraph examiners still employ it today. It is a result of these various perceptions of the polygraph exam—part science, part art—that its role and effectiveness in U.S. security policies remains so controversial. Another consequence of this state of affairs is that the polygraph exam is often experienced by subjects as an expression of overbearing, powerful authority, while polygraph examiners consider themselves marginal, misunderstood, and unjustly under attack. These varying perspectives on the polygraph present another reason to consider the lie detector a fascinating lens through which to study U.S. national security policies.

I use the terms “lie detector” and “polygraph” interchangeably, unless a passage is meant to emphasize the significance of one term or the other in a specific context. In general, the most meaningful difference between the two designations is that the term “lie detector” was coined by popular culture (apparently it was first employed in 1909 in the novel The Yellow Circle by Charles Walk)17 and thus emphasizes the role reputation has played in the rise of the technology. “Lie detector” also tends to emphasize the instrument itself rather than the skills of an examiner using it. The term encourages a tendency to endow the instrument with agency of its own. “Polygraph,” on the other hand, was the name chosen by the man who patented the technology, Leonarde Keeler. Among the other names Keeler considered were “Emotograph”...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. How the Polygraph Does and Does Not Work
• Chapter 2. Truth to Remake Society
• Chapter 3. World War II, National Security, and the Search for Loyal Citizens
• Chapter 4. The Polygraph and the Specter of Totalitarianism Within
• Chapter 5. Truth and National Security in the American Cold War
• Chapter 6. Immeasurable Security: The Polygraph and the CIA
• Chapter 7. The Polygraph and the Problems of Deterrence
• Chapter 8. Congress, the Right to Privacy, and the Retrenchment of the Polygraph
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Index