The pros can beat a lie-detector

Press, 27 December 1985, Page 6

The pros can beat a lie-detector

By

WILLIAM SAFIRE,

of “The New York Times” (through NZPA) Washington Two years ago, against the advice of his chief of staff, his legal counsel, and his Secretary of State, Ronald Reagan signed National Security Decision Directive 84, stripping over 100,000 Americans of their right to privacy by forcing them to undergo so-called lie-detector teste. His Secretary of State, Mr George Shultz, let it be known he would resign if he were no longer trusted; the Congress stepped in and said no; with an election coming up, the President rescinded the order that might have helped him

scare Government officials from leaking embarrassing information. Now there are no more re-election restraints.

A month ago a National Security Planning Group, chaired by the soon-to-de-part Robert McFarlane, and including the new chief of staff, Donald Regan, put the abomination into N.S.D.D. 196, recommending “that the U.S. Government adopt, in principle, the use of apenodic, non-life-style, counter-intelligence-type polygraph examinations ...” Mr Regan did not show the document to the White House Counsel, Fred Fielding, nor to the Treasury Secretary, Mr James Baker, who opposed the plan to plug leaks under cover of combating espionage.

He put it before the President, who signed his name under “I have decided this policy should be established.”

Mr Shultz then objected on principle in public; the President said, shucks, this doesn’t mean we would flutter bigshots, and his spokesman pushed the pretence that 196 only had to do with spying, not leaking.

When an Administration source told “The Washington Post" that the President said privately that he had not been fully briefed on the measure — that' it had been railroaded through unstaffed, without comment by counsel — a spokesman, Larry Speakes, affirmed that the President knew exactly what he had signed. I believe that.

Ronald Reagan is not putty in the hands of the Casey - Weinberger - Meese axis. He has his own dark side, and has long wanted to put the fear of the “liedetector” in anybody who talks about plans to overthrow Gadaffi.

Today, with spying in the news, he has his chance to crack down on internal dissent by using the concern about espionage.

The central fact is that the polygraph is the spy’s best friend.

The professional agent is trained to fool the machine.

When the C.LA.’s boss, William Casey, challenged James Baker to a polygraph test on a conflict of sworn testimony about Debategate, he was taking no chance —

the director takes a test every month, and each of his covert agents is schooled in faking fear to throw off interrogators.

Polygraphs are dangerous not only to the rights of individual Americans, who should not have to undergo mental torture to keep their jobs, but also to security bureaucracies, which routinely “clear” the real spies who know how to beat the machines.

If I were President, I would ask a few questions of the men who handed me that document that I wanted so badly to sign. First, I would want to know what happens when innocent people are made to look guilty. Specifically: has any highlevel official flunked a polygraph test during my Ad-

ministration? If so, was a test-flunker discovered by other means to be telling the truth, and was the polygraph result rejected? What happened to the polygraph operator who came to the wrong conclusion? Did any episode like this have any impact on the willingness of the National Security Planning Group to subject hundreds of thousands of reputations to possible polygraph error? Next, I would ask Messrs Casey and F.B.L’s the William Webster about the effectiveness of the “liedetector” on a real spy. Specifically, I would want to know if the Soviet defector, Vitaly Yurchenko, was regularly or “aperiodically” fluttered, and what his responses were to questions about an intention to defect.

Was the C.I.A. too eager to flutter Americans to bother to apply the test to a Russian spy? Further, I would ask if he had been polygraphed while assuring the C.I.A. that no “mole” existed in its high ranks, or while he was telling the F. 8.1. of the presence of a Soviet agent in the Congress. If he beat the machine about his own defection plans, did he beat the machine about his reassurances and accusations?

In other words, have the C.I.A. and F. 8.1. been suckered by an undue reliance on a device that terrifies the innocent and can be “turned” by the guilty? Because Mr Reagan is not asking these questions, both personal liberty and national security suffer.