The one thing that the article doesn’t mention is homosexuality or other proclivities. That doesn’t seem to be a concern in the 21st Century, but I wonder whether it was in 1965 when my father, who had shipped his family gear off to central Asia was told, “Sorry, G, you didn’t pass the test. Best of luck to you.”
I had just been born, family crap was on the boat (that’s the way things were shipped back in the last century, by boat, or ship…). Pop was SOL. He looked around and got a job with the Peace Corps. Eventually the family crap caught up with the family in deepest Asia.
Family lore says that Dad told the truth when it came time for his lie detector and telling the truth got him run from the Company. The question, as it’s been told was, “Do you think Communism is wrong?”
To which my dad replied, “Not in all circumstances.”
Wrong answer.
What I want to know is was that question, “Do you believe Communism is wrong?” a part of the CIA lie-detector test in the mid 1960s?
There are other questions that my father probably had to answer that were more pertinent to his character that I don’t know the answer to:
“Did you ever cheat on an exam in college?”
“Have you ever used illegal drugs?”
“Have you ever hit your wife or girlfriend?”
I think that the CIA has gotten the message from the Obama Administration that sexual orientation is not something that should be probed.
But I know that wasn’t the situation in 1965. And although my father was married for 25+ years until my mother died, and had a long-time female lover after, I don’t know that he didn’t give the wrong answer to the question, “Have you ever had a homosexual encounter?” which I’m certain was asked.
In 1965 if my father had answered “Yes,” telling the truth would have been the wrong answer.
Dad was in interesting places throughout his life. He was in Kabul Summer '79 before the Soviets invaded at Christmastime. He spent New Years 1990 in Baghdad. He spent a couple months learning Turkish in the mid 90s when the government was fighting a Kurdish insurrection; winter was spent on a cruise to Indonesia the year East Timor gained independence. The late 90s was spent in Tashkent, Yerevan, Almaty writing a book on oriental carpets. Great cover.
I think he may have been with the Company his whole life. When he was dying of lymphoma he said to me one day, “If there’s anything you want to know, ask me.”
I nodded my head, “OK.” What a dolt.
There are two places the FOIA doesn’t allow one to delve into: Intelligence matters and personnel records.
So I hope someone can help me with this question: What does the CIA ask on its lie-detector test? and How has it changed over the years?
I don’t know what the CIA actually asked, but I’ll just chime in here to point out that they don’t have lie-detector tests, because there’s no such thing as a lie detector. What they do have is polygraphs, which measure things like body temperature and perspiration rates. Those things can indicate nervousness, and nervousness can be caused by lying, but the correlation is so weak that you might as well just flip a coin to tell if someone is lying.
I’ve been polygraphed plenty. Firstly, there are various formats - there’s the criminal one (for individuals accused of crimes and willing to take the test), there’s a law enforcement one, counter-intelligence, and lifestyle. The latter is the most “invasive.”
Not all of the questions are pertinent. For example, “Is your name GiantRat?” That’s only for establishing a baseline, because they know who you are. I’ve thrown “Significant Responses” a few times, largely a side effect of a guilty conscience (they really don’t care about that piece of rock candy I stole when I was 6). Also worth noting in response to the OP, your fathers purported response to the question about Communism would probably just piss the polygrapher off - they want “yes” or “no.” Conversational responses come up in the post-poly interview (immediately after the “wired” portion).
It may well be that your father concocted the story to conceal that he was actually a Company man. Or he just had a clever imagination or enjoyed self-delusion (which is more common than most people think… or maybe I’m fooling myself).
An amusing anecdote: The agency I was working for polygraphed an applicant, who acknowledged having had sex with his dog as a teenager (that will, by the way, disqualify you). The polygrapher’s supervisor sent her a memo based on the test results asking the gender of the dog because “we don’t want to hire any perverts.” That guy’s memos were always hilarious… although his bosses thought otherwise.
A naive statement, and one that shows how revealing “proper” American values (and political progressivism and approval) defeats its own purpose if someone (like you, here) thinks that applying it is helpful to “passing along that message” rather than undermining the credibility of the political supporter.
And I sincerely hope your statement is not true across the board.
A provably or near provably homosexual undercover intelligence agent in, I don’t know, almost every country in the world, would be vulnerable, if "exposed, or in threat of being exposed, to incredible social, if not criminal, danger.
It’s hard enough walking around as a spy in the closet.
What is the threat of being a gay spy, in older times? That someone will blackmail you, “we know you’re gay. Help us, or we’ll tell your bosses, and you’ll be fired in disgrace.” If your boss doesn’t care, there’s no threat.
Being a homosexual in a lot of countries is a risk, but no more risk than being a CIA spy is. One can assume that said agent is no more will to broadcast being gay in said countries than he is in advertising that he is engaged in espionage. Just because he’s gay doesn’t mean he’s out cruising the hottest Tehran gay clubs when he should be planting bugs in government offices.
I also need to point out that the Polygraph is a giant scam. Operators expect you either to confess to all sort of misdeeds or they will have decided you’re guilty (either in advance or due to cold reading, the best operators are expert cold readers) and will point to any spike or blip and say “The Lie Detector says you lied here.” Then you confess.
Guilt, lying and nervousness all “detect” about the same.
It’s a black mark on our “Intelligence” Services that they continue to use this bullshit.
I second this. Ive taken one as part of a law enforcement test and they know which questions they can get a little more meat from and will constantly repeat it saying that your being deceitful in an effort to get u to ‘think hard’ about why that would be the case.
On a side note I got asked a question where I could feel myself jump and cringe and I immediately started to get flush in the face, my heart was racing and she said I passed it no problem even after I mentioned how fast my heart was racing.
The policy to deny, or presume denials of, security clearances to homosexuals on the basis of their sexual orientation was eliminated 21 years ago this month.
Well, that’s a shame, because it simply creates more hoops for reasons to be found or defended for specific jobs.
For example, a “no pale white freckled redheads need apply” is appropriate for an undercover agent in a Congo warlord camp. I’m guessing.
ETA: we’re talking about two different things. Security clearances and information gleaned from polygraph other sources available as information to the employer, the CIA.
Everything goes into the file. Hell, they might one day need a chicken fucker, and will regret missing the opportunity.
Dude, you don’t know what you’re talking about. Being gay is pretty much a non-issue in the intelligence world. Your insinuation that the Government trumps up reasons to not hire homosexual intelligence officers is at odds with there being well-known LBGT EEO and outreach efforts in such agencies.
I can’t even tell what you’re talking about, let alone what you’re trying to say. **Ravenman **has already provided us the straightest and dopest straight dopeness on that point and there’s really nothing more to add.
Leo Bloom, I take from your comments that you think that intelligence organizations in the U.S. don’t want gay people as spies or perhaps at all. Why do you believe that?
You say that being gay in a hostile foreign country might be very dangerous, but, as Just Asking Questions noted, the real risk is being a spy in a hostile foreign country. A trained spy probably has a better chance of keeping his gayness concealed if he or she needs to than a regular person.
You also made a gross comment likening a gay person to a “chicken fucker.” The irony is that you’ve ignored the very real benefits of having diversity in your intelligence officers. Since even gay people have to earn a living, countries that oppress gay people likely have in their governments gay people with (1) experience working hard to keep personal things from their employer, and (2) a lot less loyalty to their government than the average straight employee might have. I’m no intelligence officer, but I have to assume these are great sources for U.S. intelligence to cultivate. You could try cultivating them by exploiting homophobia in the foreign country and threatening to out them to their officials. This would seem to me to create a source that is hostile, fearful, and perhaps more dangerous if he’s cornered. This same mindset probably manifested itself in the U.S. intelligence agencies through policies to actively exclude gay people for a long time. I’ll bet these policies were counterproductive. It would have led to closeted gays serving in the U.S. intelligence services who were probably less loyal to the U.S. government and easier for foreign agents to turn.
The alternative is to fully and willingly accept gay intelligence officers into our intelligence agencies. If the CIA asks a candidate about his personal relationships and he freely admits to gay lovers, the CIA knows he is honest and open so not subject to blackmail on the basis of being gay. If the CIA willingly accepts him anyway, the new agent knows he is safe and he has no reason to hide part of his personal life. He is likely much more loyal to a CIA that accepts him and keeps him safe. Freely accepting gay people into both our society and our intelligence agencies strengthens both.
Now, you have a gay agent who can loyally serve anywhere in the world. This gay agent may be better able to cultivate gay foreign sources in oppressive regimes by demonstrating to those gay sources that there are countries, like the U.S., where gay people are respected, appreciated, and able to live fulfilling professional lives in the manner they wish. You could ask those gay foreign sources to be allies in the fight to marginalize repressive regimes and to strengthen supportive ones like the U.S. Now the foreign sources fear their own government and see the U.S. as a potential protector. Do you think these sources might be better than one motivated solely by fear? I suspect U.S. intelligence agencies know this is the case. It turns out, you may want a lot of loyal “chicken fuckers” on your intelligence team.
What we don’t need in our intelligence services are a lot of people who don’t like and discriminate against people who are different, whether those people are gay or just hockey fans. That creates disloyalty. I think intelligence agencies probably work very hard not to sow disloyalty.
I wondered if someone would say this. Read the thread. It is an allusion to a post. Not my own. A horrible, horrible, horrible, offensive post. I, for one, do not plan to bring it up, or mine, in ATMB. Feel free to report it, or me.
No reason ahead of time to judge chicken fuckers and homosexuals and Hasidim and raving anti-Semites as not being useful and productive members of the CIA if tasked correctly.
I don’t know if “gaydar” is a thing, or an urban legend, or (more likely) like many other personality traits, depends on the individual. it can’t hurt to possibly add that to your asset’s repertoire, as long as we’re not saying that a spy is hired to troll foreign countries, any more than a straight female would be hired for the purpose of seduction. Another benefit would be that if the other side is under the mistaken assumption that person can be blackmailed when they can’t, it becomes an opportunity to create a credible double agent.
The CIA or any other such group obviously wants to eliminate people who can be blackmailed, tempted with ideology, sex, or with cash - or has a character flaw like alcoholism or impulse control that might also make them vulnerable to loose lips. So presumably their questions look for those character flaws and vulnerabilities. However, it is possible that they also have a bee in their bonnet about the “perceived” ideal agent and want to eliminate anyone who does not meet their standards - and possibly a willful blindness over some flaws because they don’t think of them as flaws (“nothin’ wrong with a hard-drinkin’ man!”.
Thank you for the compliment. I don’t know how to report people and I have no plan to report you but I will say that your “chicken fucker” comment alludes to no posts in this thread and that it seemed clear to me from context that you were comparing gay people to chicken fuckers. You seem to have broadened the comparisons in this post. If you thought someone else’s chicken fucker comment was so offensive, perhaps you could have avoided repeating it.
But back to the OP, I have limited professional experience with lie detector tests. A polygraph really just measures your response to certain metabolic indicators. Generally, there are three or four (respiration, heart rate, and galvanic skin response – a test of how much you are sweating, and in some newer ones, voice pitch.
During my lie detector work, I learned that the standard protocol is to actually interview a person at least twice. The first time, you ask a series of yes/no questions based on your general knowledge of the person (perhaps from earlier interviews, investigation, and your suspicions in the case) before the person is hooked up to lie detector. Then, you use those answers to ask for clarifying information if necessary and to refine your questions to clear yes/no answers. Only once you and the interview subject both have a clear set of mutually-known yes/no questions can you hook the subject up to the lie detector (polygraph).
The reasons for the pre-interview are three-fold at least. First, the person can’t be surprised by the questions on the examination or the stress of the surprise question can trigger the same reflexes that would indicate a person is lying. If I ask you out of the blue, “When did you stop beating your cat?” just the implication is likely to cause your heart rate to go up, your skin to sweat and your respiration to increase. All that would register on the polygraph that your answer is a lie, regardless of how scrupulously honest you were. If you are surprised by the questions, the results of the polygraph are completely meaningless, even more meaningless than they probably are under the best of circumstances.
Second, yes/no questions are really the only questions a polygraph is equipped to judge. Basically, the polygraph measures your metabolic responses to the questions while you are answering them. If you have a low response to the question while answering, you are presumed to be telling the truth. If you have a high reading while answering the question, you are presumed to be lying. If you have long rambling answers to a question, you might have low metabolic responses at some points and high responses at others. The metabolic responses might lag behind the untruthful parts of your answers. They might also lag by different amounts. Maybe heart rate jumps up first, breathing second, and galvanic skin response last. The result might be that it’s impossible to map the metabolic responses to the portion of the answer that was a lie. You wouldn’t know what parts of the answer were true and what parts were lies. With yes/no questions, you can ask the question, the person answers quickly and either has a metabolic response (lie) or doesn’t (truth). You pause, allow the person’s metabolic rates to go back down to the baseline, then you ask the next question. You have to pre-interview the person so they know that you will ask only yes/no questions and so you get only yes/no answers.
Third, the pre-interview allows the interrogator to ask free-form follow-up questions that may provide new and useful information in ways that could not be evaluated by the lie detector. This is really the meat of the interrogation but it can’t be conducted during the polygraph exam for the reasons discussed above.
So, in the first round, the interrogator doesn’t ask a person’s name. He asks “Are you Joe Schmoe?” If the answer is yes, they move on to the next yes/no question. If the answer is no, or must be qualified, the interrogator asks follow-up questions with the goal of getting all the qualifications into a yes/format. For example the person might answer, “no, my name is Joe Blow,” or he might say, “I’m called Joe Schmoe now, but I was born Joel Schmovsky.” A good interrogator will then follow up and ask, “have you ever been known by any other names?” The subject might answer some other names. Eventually, he will run out of alternative names. In that case, the interrogator will modify his question for the polygraph examination. If the name is Joe Blow, he’ll ask that as a yes no question. If the person had a list of names, the interrogator might ask something like, “Do you currently use the name Joe Schmoe?” [Answer: Yes] Have you also used the names Joel Shmovsky, and [complete list of names]?" [Answer: Yes] Have you ever used any other names? [Answer: No, because the earlier interrogation should have listed all the earlier names.]
The pre-interview asks a mix of irrelevant questions that everyone in the room knows the answer to and that presumably no one would lie on. If this is an investigation into an assault for example, irrelevant questions they don’t expect you to lie about might include, “Do you have a driver’s license?,” “Is your home address [blank]?,” “Do you drive a blue car?,” or “Have you ever left the state?” They also ask a series of irrelevant questions that they expect everyone to lie on. For example, “have you ever taken anything that didn’t belong to you?,” “Have you ever cheated on a homework assignment?,” “During your marriage, have you ever been more attracted to another woman?,” “Have you ever lied to your teacher?”
Then, when they ask these questions during the polygraph interview, they compare your metabolic responses on the easy questions to your metabolic responses on the more accusatory but irrelevant questions. If you have low metabolic responses on the probative questions that resemble yours from the “no one would lie” questions, they presume you are telling the truth. If you have high responses to the probative questions like on the “everyone lies about these” questions, they presume you are lying in your answers to the probative questions.
So, to turn this discussion back to the OP, if your father had unacceptable answers to would-be polygraph questions and he always told the truth about them to the CIA, the CIA would likely have disqualified him from consideration before he ever got to take the polygraph exam. The only way that the polygraph itself would have disqualified him is if they believe that the polygraph caught your father in a lie they didn’t expect and where they didn’t know the real truth.
Also, if they asked him about whether he cheated on a college exam, that might merely have been a control question designed to elicit a white lie. The answer they recorded and his response would have been largely irrelevant to their interrogation and would tell you little or nothing about your father’s character. The entire test is based on the truth that we all lie sometimes but we don’t like to admit it. The test simply doesn’t work if we all tell the complete truth all the time. (It also doesn’t work for lots of other reasons).
All this and there are only two critical lines " the results of the polygraph are completely meaningless, " and “It also doesn’t work for lots of other reasons”. Yes, your post is well thought out and worded and discusses the theoretical use of th ePolygraph. But the reality is far different.
The Operator rarely tries to examine the little squiggles, they are, as you said “completely meaningless”. He either wants to get you to confess based upon your fear of the “Lie Detector” (which is a misnomer) , or has decided you are guilty and will use any squiggle to show “The Lie Detector says you lied here”.
The results of the polygraph* are *completely meaningless, what is crucial is the interview. A experienced operator can get lots of confessions. Even to crimes the person didnt commit.
That’s a possibility but Leo Bloom needs to make better allusions if he wants to make his point. The commenter with the dog story seemed to be telling an interesting aside. Leo Bloom seems to be directly comparing gay people with chicken fuckers. It was hard for me to pick up the parallels.
I agree and I will concede that polygraphs are completely useless at detecting the truth or falsity of anything said in an interview. As you note, their real utility is extracting statements when people believe the lie detector will unveil the truth.
I’m okay with “lie detector” as a term because that’s its job and people are familiar with the term. It’s more important to me for people to realize that lie detectors don’t work. Thanks for contributing to that effort.