The Lie Detectors (27 page)

The findings heartened those who believed American soldiers could share the battlefield with nuclear weapons. True, the polygraph revealed that a majority had been fearful before the maneuver, though only half verbally acknowledged their fears (in language that shocked veterans of World War II). On the other hand, the troops exhibited less fear than a comparable group of paratroopers preparing for a drop, and thirty-eight out of forty-five said they’d be grateful for "atomic support" in any future combat. The tests suggested that the troops’ concerns could be assuaged, at least in this stage-managed "attack."

This same therapy was then extended to the nation. The most cheery of all postwar atomic propaganda was undoubtedly a CBS radio documentary, "The Sunny Side of the Atom." Over uplifting music, the narrator (Agnes Moorehead) described a nuclear tomorrow, with "men standing straight and tall and confident, facing, without fear, their future, urged forward by a new hope, by the infinite wonder and possibility of a new life." To make sure the message got across, CBS monitored a select group of listeners on polygraphs while they pressed red or green buttons to signal their conscious approval or disapproval. This sort of audience testing, pioneered by Marston, would soon become routine practice in mass media. And it confirmed the program’s success: apparently, as regards nuclear weapons, the broadcast assuaged the fears of 46 percent of the group, with only 3 percent becoming more fearful.

But every Eden has snakes who whisper of freedom. In 1953—just as Senator Joe McCarthy was threatening to use the lie detector whenever he encountered an obstacle to his search for the truth—the AEC pulled the plug on the polygraph. Though few employees at Oak Ridge had publicly vented their displeasure with the polygraph, several surveyed by Chatham had obliquely noted that "others" were hostile. One engineer admitted that more than half of the technical people felt very strongly that it was "lousy" to use the test to prosecute petty security violations, like leaving classified papers on a desk in a secure office. Some denied that the machine could read human intentions accurately; others thought that it violated the constitutional protection against coerced self-incrimination.

These scientists, moreover, were organized, and their skills gave them leverage. Shortly after Hiroshima, atomic scientists in Tennessee had formed the Association of Oak Ridge Scientists and Engineers, which joined the Federation of American Scientists to press for a more open discussion of science. While the association was grateful to President Truman for his assurance that atomic scientists would not be subject to political intimidation, it noted that several scientists had lost their security clearance for frivolous reasons, such as a chemist punished for "raising a fuss…over the Negro question." Partly as a result of hassles over security, the association said, 40 percent of senior physicists and chemists had quit Oak Ridge in 1947–1948. As for the lie detector, no sooner had Keeler begun his investigation than the association’s national publication noted that the instrument was scientifically discredited, had been rejected by the U.S. courts, and was chiefly used as "an instrument of third-degree intimidation."

Tellingly, after years of praising the technique, Carbide and Carbon Chemicals Corporation suddenly turned against the lie detector in the early 1950s, when the company assumed responsibility for recruiting scientists for the research lab at Oak Ridge. The lie test put them in "an unfavorable and sometimes embarrassing position with respect to the other contractors," all of whom were universities.

Privately, many administrators at the AEC were also worried. Many were New Deal liberals, concerned that "violent opposition" among scientists would cause the best scientists to quit government work. America’s strength lay in the open exchange of ideas. As one administrator put it, the AEC did not want to "get stuck in a Maginot line" with regard to nuclear knowledge. He feared the lie detector scared off the sort of "minds which will keep pushing back the frontiers of knowledge." One administrator described the agency’s aim as "assur[ing] that in this essentially secret and totalitarian work—and I use this word advisedly—[you]…should bring to bear as much of the traditional democratic process as you possibly can and still retain final authority where it belongs, in the agency itself."

In December 1951 the
New York Times
published the first report that the instrument was regularly used by the CIA, intermittently by the defense and state departments, and on a quasi-voluntary basis at Oak Ridge, and cited both its potential to reduce the backlog of security clearances and the repugnance it aroused in some circles. Within a month Senator Wayne Morse of Oregon, a political maverick and a former professor of constitutional law, took the Senate floor to denounce the machine as "un-American…, repugnant, foreign, and outrageous," citing a prominent civilian who had been denied a post at the Department of Defense on the basis of his supposed reaction to an innuendo-laced inquiry about his sexual preference.

Within weeks the AEC had secretly convened a panel of experienced polygraph operators to evaluate the program. Though all of them praised Chatham’s skill, they disparaged his mode of mass screening. Chatham, they complained, was using the machine mechanically! Fred Inbau, Keeler’s close colleague, would have none of this: "the examiner draws upon the sum total of his experience….Someone cannot sit down andmeasure [lying]." Moreover, gauging "dispositions" and intentions was particularly difficult, especially among subjects who were themselves experts. "When you get an expert," remarked another panelist, "he can never say yes or no, really, to anything, which is one of the measures of an expert." Early in 1953—just as the lie detector became Washington’s symbol of the new machinery of denunciation—the AEC terminated the "experiment" at Oak Ridge.

In his brilliant tract of 1956,
The Torment of Secrecy,
the social scientist Edward Shils offered a searing portrait of McCarthyism as a crisis in the American equilibrium between public scrutiny and private autonomy. Public scrutiny kept the governing elite honest, while privacy protected the autonomous conscience at the foundation of democratic decision making. Shils saw the scientific community as a model for this sort of polity; a community dedicated to finding consensus, yet committed to autonomy of thought. America’s democratic balance had been upended by McCarthyism, a movement which had redirected populist mistrust of political and financial conspirators against (among others) those atom-age longhairs who hoarded the secret knowledge that simultaneously underpinned the nation’s safety. These experts also threatened the authority of the old-style governing elite. That was why McCarthy’s obsession with secrecy fed on a surfeit of publicity: congressional exposés, impatience with the Fifth Amendment, and loyalty oaths.

A loyalty oath does not guarantee loyalty any more than a lie detector guarantees truth. What traitor would hesitate to swear an oath? Rather, an oath is both speech and act, a public avowal and an invitation to legal jeopardy—and for that reason, it has been shunned as a threat to the autonomy of conscience since the Elizabethan age. The oath publicly affirms society’s mastery over private conscience, and binds the oath-taker to the body politic, as the pledge would have it: "[O]ne nation indivisible" (with the phrase "under God" added in 1954 at the height of anticommunist sentiment). To oblige a person to take a lie detector test served much the same purpose: affirming the subordination of the inward self to the public’s demand for conformity. "In many respects," one security officer noted, "a sworn statement has the same psychological effect as a lie detector test." Like an oath, the lie detector functioned as an intensifier: heightening the subject’s self-consciousness in hopes of prompting disclosure, putting the legal person at risk of further prosecution if he or she misspoke, and placing the souls of believers in mortal danger. Just as an oath disrobed the believer before God—while the secular authorities watched—so the lie detector, for those who believed in science, disrobed the subject before science, while the operator watched. In that sense, the Bible and the lie detector serve the same role in the court: as placebos, which work to the extent the subject believes they work; that is to say, as psychological "intensifiers," which raise the stakes of each utterance, the one by reference to the all-seeing eye of God, the other to the all-seeing eye of Science.

Such a hypothetical Mind Resonating Organ, by adjusting itself to the

Fields emitted by other minds, could perform what is popularly known as "reading emotions," or even "reading minds," which is actually something even more subtle. It is but an easy step from that to imagining a similar organ which could actually force an adjustment on another mind.

—ISAAC ASIMOV,
SECOND FOUNDATION,
1953

THE WATCHWORD OF THE EARLY COLD WAR WAS VIGILANCE.
The great fear in those grim years, among both conservative nativists and liberal internationalists, was that America would be lulled into complacency. The cold war was a battle of wills. This was a manly form of combat. The will to wait—containment. The will to take a stand—dominos. The will to absorb a blow and strike back—deterrence. And above all, the will to keep secrets while uprooting conspiracies—J. Edgar Hoover. It was an age anxious about the discrepancy between surface and depth and the demands of self-mastery. There were so many ways the nation’s self-control might be sapped, not just by covert enemies but also by unacknowledged personal and sexual weaknesses. No wonder America fretted about its subconscious. This was a golden age of pop psychology. The social critic Dwight McDonald dubbed it the "lie-detector era."

Nearly 400 years had passed since Queen Elizabeth I had declared that her majesty did not "make windows in men’s souls," even though the sectarian conflicts of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation were pushing the sovereign powers of Europe to assert their mastery over inward belief—extending the definition of sin from deed to desire, and redesigning confession to elicit a new sort of conscience. So too, under the strain of their twentieth-century conflict with Nazism and communism, Americans began to monitor their fellow citizens for signs of secret deviance. In such a battle, how to distinguish friend from foe? The enemy might come disguised as a foreign ally, as a golden exemplar of American success, or even—who knew?—as one’s own unacknowledged self. Here the lie detector came into its own: a psychological strip search for America. At stake were such mundane matters as domestic political advantage and control over the direction of U.S. foreign policy. One unanticipated consequence was to transform personal identity—including sexual identity—into a new kind of political claim.

Running parallel to the atomic arms race of the cold war was a psychiatric "minds race." If the lie detector was a mirror in which America faced its own fears, then when cold warriors looked in the mirror, they saw Soviet mind control. At the CIA, where each employee was required to take a polygraph test, the agency suspected the enemy of developing techniques of scientific interrogation that bore an uncanny resemblance to those America was developing: the lie detector, sodium amytal, LSD, hypnosis, electroshock treatments, lobotomies.

The CIA’s covert Bluebird and Artichoke programs of the early 1950s used intensive polygraph exams as a "cover" to initiate more coercive interrogation techniques with suspected enemy agents. Initially justified as a way to help CIA operatives defend themselves, these programs quickly expanded to include offensive methods. Polygraphers were to double as hypnotists and monitor the effects of LSD and other drugs on the truthfulness of subjects. Under the guise of these programs the CIA reached beyond the lie detector to create a highly classified arsenal of new but related techniques to bring acute psychological pressure on subjects, including such methods as sensory deprivation, self-inflicted pain, and sleep deprivation. Designed to break the personality of the subject, rendering him dependent and compliant, these forms of psychological torture constituted a crucial component of the CIA’s interrogation tool kit during the cold war, and have been quickly adapted to the current "war on terror."

At the same time, Americans were given chilling accounts of how advances in psychological science let communist regimes extract dramatic public confessions from their prisoners and former opponents. Popular books like
Brainwashing
—written by the journalist and covert CIA operator who invented the term—described how communist psychologists had advanced from studies of Pavlov’s salivating dogs to new techniques of hypnotic mind control. In reality, neither the Soviet Union nor Nazi Germany before it saw any need for the lie detector—as the CIA secretly acknowledged. Totalitarian governments brook no impediment to their control over the bodies of their subjects, not even the minimal restraint that justice appear fair and machinelike. Thus it was not until the U.S. occupation that the German military tentatively adopted the lie detector. Similarly, the Russians never used the lie detector until the Soviet Union fell. The only place the lie detector turned up in Soviet Russia was in spy movies when steely KGB agents outwitted the American device.

Ironically, in both the Soviet Union and the United States during the 1950s, psychologists favored behaviorist explanations of human action that gave little or no scope to an autonomous will. As one British author pointed out, the American lie detector elicited confessions much as the Soviet Union converted people to its cause, or as religions did: by commanding loyalty through control of emotional responses. Of course, a common psychological theory need not produce equivalent outcomes. Psychiatric hospitals in the Soviet Union were horror houses where dissidents were regularly detained and tortured until they confessed. Nothing quite like that existed in the United States, though the CIA would soon be covertly exporting its methods of psychological torture to Vietnam and Latin American regimes. The parallel was there. Civil libertarians like Stewart and Joseph Alsop warned that the lie detector test would erode psychological privacy to the point where "we begin palely to imitate the system we fear."

In that sense, the history of the lie detector during the cold war shows how closely its fate was bound to a conflict within American society over the balance of civil liberties and national security. The lie detector is a kind of hypocritical homage that democracy pays to justice: a public facade of machinelike fairness, which partially constrains the unequal treatment within. This, as George Orwell noted, is the minimal constraint that public ideals impose on justice in liberal democracies, as compared with totalitarian regimes: "An illusion can become a half-truth, a mask can alter the expression of a face…. In England such concepts as justice, liberty andobjective truth are still believed in. They may be illusions, but they are very powerful illusions. The belief in them influences conduct, national life is different because of them."

Americans were so uncertain about their ability to distinguish foreign friend from foe that they even began to distrust their own interpreters. In 1950, in the midst of the Korean War, the army decided to bring in Keeler’s former partner, George Haney, to test its translators for communist sympathies. The presumption here, as with Keeler’s German POWs, was that the lie detector, because it read underlying physiological reactions which transcended the subtleties of language, would enable Americans to assess otherwise indecipherable foreigners. Not that anyone had tested the ability of a white American man to pull this off. After evaluating the honesty of twenty-five translators—using, of course, a Korean translator to pose questions and interpret answers—Haney recommended that several be discharged. He also recommended that a team of fifty polygraph experts "sort" through the massive influx of enemy prisoners, following the model of Keeler’s operation with German POWs. (The polygraph would be also used periodically in Vietnam.)

By 1953 the army was polygraphing its own members on a regular basis—something it had done only in criminal cases during World War II. It began with personnel at nuclear facilities, then expanded to those in intelligence work and certain administrative jobs. After Senator Morse’s outcry, the Department of Defense agreed to ban the device, only to backtrack and reinstate it. Soon the department was buying the Stoelting Company’s Deceptographs in bulk. This expansion meant big business. Every employee at the army post exchange in Washington was tested, in order to stop pilfering. Every sailor on the
U.S.S. Pritchett
was tested, to learn who had damaged onboard machinery. By the late 1950s the army was using the lie detector in the way Keeler had pioneered at Chicago’s banks, to ensure honesty and loyalty in a hierarchical organization.

The paranoia of this era took in more than foreign friends and one’s own comrades; Americans even began to doubt whether they could trust themselves. America’s anxieties about its own wobbly will were intensified by the brainwashing scandal of the Korean War—the inspiration for
The Manchurian Candidate.
After the cease-fire of 1953 many Americans were shocked to learn that one-third of the 4,000 American POWs in communist hands had apparently collaborated with the enemy. Conservatives claimed that this capitulation was unprecedented, and they saw it as evidence that tolerant democratic brains lacked the mental toughness to resist totalitarian mind control. In fact, follow-up studies found that the collaboration rate had been much exaggerated. Many GIs had just been "playing it cool," feigning compliance to outwit their captors. At the time, however, Americans were given reasons to doubt that they could trust their own minds.

By chance, the American prisoner who became most celebrated for resisting indoctrination was Major General William F. Dean, the highest-ranking officer captured in Korea, a winner of the Medal of Honor, and a former college cop in Berkeley who had been the best man at John Larson’s wedding. Dean had been the first fellow officer Larson had trained in the art of lie detection, yet even he had signed an ambiguous statement asking his own side to confine its attacks to military targets. On his return from Korea, he publicly supported Larson’s efforts to end abuse of the technique. By then, however, politicians had discovered the instrument’s value.

Richard Nixon deserves credit for first discovering the potential of the lie detector as a prop of political theater. The instrument made its debut—with Keeler waiting in the wings—during the high drama of the cold war known as the Alger Hiss affair. The controversy began in 1948, when Whittaker Chambers, an unsavory editor at
Time
magazine who was a repentant former communist, accused Hiss, a former golden boy of the State Department, of being a member of the Communist Party. Hiss angrily denied the charge, and President Truman bluntly dismissed it as a "red herring."

Ordinarily, Chambers—a rumpled, overweight ex-communist (and rumored homosexual)—could not have matched the credibility of Hiss, a dapper diplomat who had been Roosevelt’s aide at Yalta and currently served as president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Yet after listening to both men testify, one member of the House Un-American Activities Committee concluded that "whichever one of you is lying is the greatest actor that America has ever produced." This was to underestimate a first-term congressman from California. Richard Nixon had found a tool to unmask those traitors who seemed to have reputation and demeanor on their side. To probe beneath the surface of establishment respectability took courage—and a flair for populist politics. This was a job for the great equalizer: the lie detector.

Nixon set his trap carefully. In later years he would claim that he had been on the verge of dropping the investigation when the journalist Bert Andrews privately suggested challenging both witnesses to a lie-detector test. On August 7, as Chambers’s closed-door testimony was ending, Nixon dramatically asked him if he would be willing to repeat his accusations on a polygraph.

Only then did Nixon place a call to Leonarde Keeler in Chicago. He queried him about the polygraph and Keeler agreed to "fly out and assist the committee" if that became necessary.

A week later, when the committee brought in Hiss, Nixon asked him the same question. Hiss temporized, lawyerlike, demanding to know in advance who the examiner would be. This may have been good lawyering, but it was bad political theater. Nixon responded that Leonarde Keeler, "the outstanding man in the country," had agreed to fly to Washington, D.C., to conduct the tests. Hiss agreed to get back to the committee with a reply.

The next morning Nixon’s challenge, which had been leaked, was reported on the front pages. The day after that, Hiss affirmed his refusal to take the test, explaining that whatever else the machine was, it was "
not,
however, a ‘lie detector’"; that it had not been scientifically validated; that no federal court had accepted it; and that the FBI doubted its validity.

In the next weeks, elite liberal opinion rallied behind Hiss and waxed indignant against trial by polygraph. An editorial in the
New York Times
dismissed Keeler’s polygraph as little more than a gauge of human emotions and cited his nemesis: "In the opinion of Dr. John A. Larson, the lie detector is not to be trusted." The
Washington Post
likened it to a medieval trial by ordeal, noting that even Keeler considered his own machine only "82 percent accurate."

Feelings in the conservative camp ran just as high. In later years Nixon recalled that Hiss’s evasiveness had swung him against the accused. Certainly this evasiveness helped dramatize the conflict in populist terms, pitting unrehearsed frankness against elitist shilly-shallying. Decades later Nixon could be heard on the White House tapes urging his subordinates to use the lie detector to flush out leakers: "I don’t know anything about polygraphs, and I don’t know how accurate they are, but I know they’ll scare the hell out of people." As for Chambers, he was so eager to be vindicated that he arranged to be interviewed on television while hooked up to a polygraph. Only with difficulty did the FBI and his lawyers dissuade him.

Nixon’s strategy launched the political career of the lie detector. Nixon had discovered that no one actually had to take the test for it to generate a headline. The box worked even when no one was hooked up to it. By the time Hiss was convicted of perjury in January 1950, Nixon’s innovation had been adopted by Senator Joseph McCarthy.