The Lying Game:
National Security and the Test for Espionage and Sabotage
By George W. Maschke <maschke@antipolygraph.org>
17 December 1999
(revised 25 December 1999)
(links updated, 18 November 2006)

IF I WERE TO DIRECT YOU to answer a question falsely, would your false answer be a lie? As absurd as such an exercise may seem, it is a game which the United States government plays with thousands of Americans to determine whether they are worthy of being trusted with America's most sensitive secrets. The Department of Defense (DoD) began playing this game with its employees in the mid-90s,¹ and in 1999, the Department of Energy (DOE) decided to follow suit.²

The game is the "Test for Espionage and Sabotage" (TES), a variety of what is known in the polygraph trade as a "directed-lie control test" (DLCT).³ Before our government plays this high-stakes game with you, you would do well to know the unspoken rules. Your polygraph examiner will under no circumstances give you an honest explanation of the game he is playing with you. In the following paragraphs, I will provide details about this polygraph screening format that the United States government does not want you to know, along with references for further reading.

An Important Preliminary Note

First and foremost, you must understand that your polygraph "test" is actually an interrogation. Your mild-mannered polygrapher is a trained interrogator, and his main objective is to extract damaging admissions from you. FBI Special Agent David Vessel begins a recent article on interrogation with the observation that "[o]btaining information that an individual does not want to provide constitutes the sole purpose of an interrogation."⁴

As with criminal interrogations, anything you say during a polygraph screening interrogation can and will be used against you. But unlike criminal interrogations, our government denies you the right to have legal counsel present at a polygraph screening interrogation. David Thoreson Lykken notes in his seminal work on polygraphy, A Tremor in the Blood: Uses and Abuses of the Lie Detector (Plenum Trade, 1998):

Many polygraphers [use] the polygraph as an interrogation tool, asking subjects to explain why certain questions on the screening test might have disturbed them enough to cause a response. In this stressful context, many people will make damaging admissions hoping that, after their conscience has been purged, the polygraph will pronounce them truthful. These admissions, rather than the polygraph results per se, [are] often used as the basis for an adverse recommendation.... (p. 225)

In 1983, the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment reported:

It appears that NSA (and possibly CIA) use the polygraph not to determine deception or truthfulness per se, but as a technique of interrogation to encourage admissions. NSA has stated that the agency "does not use the 'truth v. deceptive' concept of polygraph examinations commonly used in criminal cases. Rather, the polygraph examination results that are most important to NSA security adjudicators are the data provided by the individual during the pretest or posttest phase of the examination"....⁵

On 4 May 1993, the National Security Agency (NSA) wrote to the White House, "over 95% of the information the NSA develops on individuals who do not meet federal security guidelines is derived via [voluntary admissions from] the polygraph process."⁶

Keep in mind that any admissions you make during your polygraph interrogation may be blown out of all proportion by your polygrapher. Former FBI Special Agent Mark Mallah testified at the Department of Energy's public hearing on polygraph policy at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory on 14 September 1999:

And also be aware that to a polygraph examiner/interrogator, a confession is like a trophy. So the slightest sliver of anything -- anything that can be construed or misconstrued as damaging -- that examiner has a strong incentive to say, "I got an admission; this person was deceptive; here's the proof."⁷

Mr. Mallah knows what he's talking about. He worked for nearly six years in counterintelligence and himself became the subject of a two-year espionage investigation based on a false-positive polygraph screening "test."⁸ Although Mr. Mallah was finally absolved, his career in the FBI became untenable because of the suspicion and innuendo brought about as a result of the false positive result.

Jack Luger, in an earthy book on interrogation writes:

Polygraph operators usually follow up the test with a post-test interrogation. In theory, this is to point out areas of strong responses on the charts, and to offer the subject an opportunity to explain them. In reality, this is another way of badgering the subject into a damaging admission. Some polygraph operators routinely bluff every subject this way, whether or not the charts indicate deception at all.⁹

As we have seen, it is in your interest to make no admissions. Any lapses to which you admit may be blown out of all proportion and could have seriously adverse career consequences for you. Just ask Wen Ho Lee.

Caveat Emptor

Speaking at DOE's public hearing on polygraph policy at Sandia National Laboratories on 16 September 1999, David M. Renzelman, chief of DOE's polygraph program, explained:

An unauthorized disclosure of classified information is probably the most prevalent in people who are in the business that we're in. And it's earned a nickname called "pillow talk." There are a lot of people who have access to classified information who come home and may talk to a significant other, friend, relative or just a neighbor, and in general conversation mention something to that person who does not have a need to know, access to or a clearance for. That would be an unauthorized disclosure of classified information.

My boss and General Habiger have mandated that we are interested in only disclosure of classified information to foreign intelligence services. We are not concerned with pillow talk. Pillow talk, to me, and the powers to be, are really two things: A, not terribly intelligent; and B, a security infraction of some sort. And that's the Laboratory's responsibility. We're here only to verify that you're working for our government and not another government at the same time.¹⁰

You may believe that at your own risk. Pages 6-7 of DOE's supplementary material to its new polygraph regulation states:

A counterintelligence-scope polygraph examination both serves as a means to deter unauthorized disclosures of classified information and provides a means for early detection of disclosures to enable DOE to take steps promptly to mitigate harm to the national security.¹¹

You have been warned.

The Test for Espionage and Sabotage

Your polygrapher/interrogator will start by giving you a brief explanation of how the polygraph instrumentation works. He will explain that it records blood pressure, heart rate, respiration, and skin conductance, which is a function of perspiration. Then he will hook you up to the machine to give you a demonstration of how it all works. He will do this by administering what in the Department of Defense Polygraph Institute's (DoDPI's) parlance is called an "acquaintance" test (ACQT), but which is also widely known in the polygraph industry as a "stimulation" or "stim" test. As DoDPI explains in A Comparison of Psychophysiological Detection of Deception Accuracy Rates Obtained Using the Counterintelligence Scope Polygraph and the Test for Espionage and Sabotage Question Formats, its most detailed published report on the Test for Espionage and Sabotage:

The acquaintance test (ACQT) is a standard known solution numbers test...The examinee is told that the purpose of the ACQT is to: (a) demonstrate the examination process to the examinee, (b) allow the examinee to become accustomed to the components and procedures, (c) allow the examiner an opportunity to adjust the instrument, and (d) allow the examiner to make sure the examinee is physiologically capable of responding when lying. (p. 83 of Polygraph reprint)

The explanation provided to the examinee is an outright lie. The purpose of the acquaintance test is to dupe you into believing that the polygraph is highly accurate and to make you fear detection if you are deceptive. Lykken describes a common version of a "stim" test in A Tremor in the Blood at p. 100:

...The subject is asked to pick a number, say, from 1 to 7. That number is then written large on a piece of paper and hung on the wall where both the subject and examiner can see it. As in the card test, the subject is told to reply ... "No" to each question of the form, "Did you choose number X?" The subject is also told that the purpose of this procedure is to calibrate the polygraph, "so that I can determine what your polygraph responses look like when you are lying and when you are telling the truth." The ability of the procedure to inspire confidence in the subject depends on this latter statement, which, of course, is untrue and misleading. Selecting the number, revealing the choice to the examiner, seeing it prominently displayed when the question is asked, all this makes the chosen digit significant to the subject and leads him to react more strongly to that one than to the others. None of this has anything to do with lie detection and it is simply deceptive to suggest that the subject is showing a pattern of reaction that the examiner now knows to be the way he responds when he is lying....

Thinking he has duped you into believing he can see your soul, your polygrapher/interrogator proceeds with the polygraph interrogation. As noted earlier, the Test for Espionage and Sabotage (TES) is a form of what is known in the trade as a directed-lie control test (DLCT).

The relevant questions in the TES relate to espionage and sabotage, as the name of the test suggests. However, a second class of questions not related to these matters is also asked for comparison purposes. These are the "directed-lie" control questions, though it must be borne in mind that these questions do not constitute any sort of "control" in the scientific sense of the word.

Your polygrapher/interrogator will compare your physiological responses as measured by the polygraph machine while answering the relevant questions to those measured while answering the "control" questions. If the latter are deemed stronger, you pass. But if your physiological responses while answering the relevant questions are stronger, you will be deemed deceptive. If your physiological responses to relevant and control questions are about the same, the result will be deemed inconclusive.

Speaking at the Department of Energy's public hearing on polygraph policy at Sandia National Laboratories on 16 September 1999, David Renzelman, who worked at DoDPI around the time the TES was developed, described these directed lie control questions:

And then we have diagnostic questions we would like to ask you, whereon you can display that you have the capability of providing physiological responses if you would lie. And that's called a directed lie.

And we're going to ask you something very simple, like, most people drive an automobile. We would perhaps ask you, Do you drive a car? And if the person responds Yes, I drive a car, most people I know, at one time or other in their life, have violated the traffic law. Could I then presume that you have? And most people would say, Yes.

And I would ask if they could recall an instance where they had violated a traffic law. And if they can[,] simply to acknowledge it and not tell me anything about it. If they could, I would then ask them, During the polygraph test, I would like to ask you that question as a diagnostic question during that test. But I don't want you to tell me anything about it. I want you to see it. I want you to visualize it. And then I want you to lie to me and tell me you did not do that.¹²

But, contrary to Mr. Renzelman's assertion, the purpose of the directed-lie questions is not to determine whether you can "display that you have the capability of providing physiological responses if you would lie." To begin with, the "directed-lie" is not a "lie" at all, in the commonly understood sense of the word. Webster's 9th New Collegiate Dictionary defines a lie first as "an assertion of something known or believed by the speaker to be untrue with intent to deceive" (emphasis added).

This intent to deceive is utterly missing with the "directed-lie" questions, because both you and your polygrapher/interrogator will know that your answers are untrue. You answer falsely, as directed, but you are not lying. Whatever physiological responses the polygraph may record while you answer these "directed-lie" questions, they do not "display that you have the capability of providing physiological responses if you would lie."

David M. Renzelman

Mr. Renzelman lied when he stated, "...[W]e have diagnostic questions we would like to ask you, whereon you can display that you have the capability of providing physiological responses if you would lie." He repeated this lie the next day at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where he stated, "So, we have diagnostic questions, that are designed to elicit your capability of responding physiologically should you intentionally tell a lie."¹³

While researching this article, I e-mailed Mr. Renzelman confronting him with his less than candid representations and asked if he would care to withdraw or modify them. He declined to do so, but forwarded my e-mail to his boss, DOE counterintelligence chief Edward Curran, for comment. Mr. Curran did not reply to the inquiry forwarded him by Mr. Renzelman, nor did he reply to a follow-up e-mail inquiry.

Subsequent to my inquiries, DOE repeated in writing the lie told by Mr. Renzelman at page 27 of its supplementary material to its new polygraph regulation: "Control questions are a standard part of a counterintelligence-scope polygraph examination and are designed to determine an individual's ability to respond during a polygraph examination."¹¹

Why did the director of DOE's polygraph program lie to some of America's foremost scientists and engineers about the rationale behind these "directed-lie" questions? Why did DOE repeat the lie in a public document? They lied because the "directed-lie" TES, like "probable-lie" polygraph "tests,"¹⁴ depends upon the polygrapher/interrogator's deceiving the examinee about the nature of the control questions.

The rationale behind the "directed-lie" questions is that you will feel anxiety about whether you are providing appropriate physiological responses while answering these "control" questions. It is assumed that if you are innocent of espionage and sabotage, your anxiety while answering the "directed-lie" control questions will result in stronger physiological responses than when you answer the relevant questions.

Charles R. Honts, a professor of psychology formerly employed by DoDPI,¹⁵ described the directed-lie control test (DLCT) in "Psychophysiological Detection of Deception," Current Directions in Psychological Science, Vol. 3, No. 3 (June 1994). His description applies equally to the TES:

...The rationale of the DLCT is similar to that of the CQT ["probable-lie" control question test] except that the comparison question, the one expected to elicit response from the innocent, is a known lie. For example, the examiner may ask, "Have you ever told a lie, even one time in your life?" The subject initially answers "yes," but is then directed to answer "no" during the examination. In the DLCT, truthful and deceptive subjects are expected to respond differentially to the relevant and directed-lie questions.

The directed-lie control questions are prepared in the following manner. A subject is told that it is important for comparison purposes that he or she answer some of the questions on the test deceptively. The examiner also tells the subject that it is critical that he or she respond appropriately when lying. However, the nature of appropriate responding is not defined for the subject. Finally, the subject is told that if he or she does not react appropriately to the directed-lie questions, the examination will be inconclusive and will have to be repeated at another time. In this case, differential reactivity is expected because the innocent subject's attention has been focused on the directed-lie questions by the examiner's instructions and by concern over responding appropriately. The DLCT is evaluated in the same manner as the CQT.

As we have seen, the TES depends on your polygrapher/interrogator lying to and deceiving you, first about the "acquaintance" test, and then again about the "directed-lie" questions. And your polygrapher/interrogator will likely try to trick you into making damaging admissions, saying that certain relevant questions "seem to be troubling you." Leonard Saxe, writing about polygraph "tests" in general, observes:

Tests of deception, ironically, must themselves include a deceptive element. Polygraph tests present, perhaps, the most egregious problem. Validity depends on an examiner's ability to convince (deceive) a subject that he or she must respond truthfully because deception will be detected...¹⁶

Saxe (id.) also writes:

An examinee who believes that a test is accurate is likely to display arousal when responding deceptively or feel reassured (and therefore be nonreactive) when responding truthfully. In contrast, a subject who does not believe in the efficacy of the test is likely to be less aroused by questions answered untruthfully and highly anxious when answering honestly. The outcome of a polygraph test is, thus, dependent on the subject's belief in its efficacy.

The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence's 1 November 1994 report, An Assessment of the Aldrich H. Ames Espionage Case and Its Implications for U.S. Intelligence states:

A former polygrapher noted that without proper preparation, a subject has no fear of detection and, without fear of detection, the subject will not necessarily demonstrate the proper physiological response.¹⁷

But you are now aware of the deception involved in the TES. If you've read my 2 September 1999 Open Letter to Secretary of Energy Bill Richardson, you are also aware of the deception involved in "probable-lie" tests, which might be used as a back-up polygraph screening format. You will not be fooled by the lies that your polygrapher/interrogator will tell you. As a result, you may have a difficult time "passing" your polygraph interrogation without employing polygraph countermeasures.

David T. Lykken explains how to beat the polygraph through countermeasures in Chapter 19 of A Tremor in the Blood. He notes that innocent persons might have good cause to employ countermeasures, writing at p. 277:

...[I]f I were somehow forced to take a polygraph test in relation to some important matter, I would certainly use these proven countermeasures rather than rely on the truth and my innocence as safeguards...

It would behoove you to read Lykken's A Tremor in the Blood before submitting to any polygraph screening interrogation.

While those facing polygraph screening should be informed about the polygraph countermeasures described by Lykken, I would advise against actually using them. At least not at first. A better countermeasure, in my opinion, is to be honest with your polygrapher/interrogator, and show him that you know the secret rules of The Lying Game. Print out a copy of this article and bring it with you to your polygraph screening appointment. Confront your polygrapher/interrogator with it before he tells his first lie to you. I have heard from one government employee that his polygraph screening was waived because he "knew too much" about the polygraph. He was deemed "untestable" and kept his Top Secret SCI access.

If your polygrapher/interrogator still insists on "fluttering" you even after he knows that you are not his fool, you may well need to employ countermeasures to "pass."

Before we end this discussion of the TES, let us consider the fate that befell the designer of this polygraph screening format, Dr. Sheila D. Reed. Reporter Jeff Stein, in a 1997 Washington Post article critical of polygraph screening writes:

Some put slightly more credence in the "directed lie" test developed by Sheila Reed when she was a researcher at DoDPI. That test requires a subject to state an obvious lie -- "I have sex with my brother every day" -- on the premise that any lie produces indications of stress, which gives examiners a better "base" from which to measure a subject's later, deliberate attempt at deception.

But the directed lie test does not necessarily separate "the anxious innocent from the anxious guilty," says Lykken. "Perhaps you're anxious because you're guilty, or perhaps you're anxious because you're anxious about the topic." Either way, he says, the charts come out hopelessly muddy -- except to examiners who believe they've "found something."

And that's the fatal flaw of all lie detector tests, argues Reed, who says the Pentagon institute is run by an "old-boy network" of military detectives and private investigators who care little about the science behind the tests. In 1995, Reed was stripped of her security clearance, interrogated by Army detectives and relieved of her responsibilities after questioning the teaching methods at DoDPI.

"I made the statement that I thought the whole security screening program should be shut down," Reed told me. "It was impossible to convince the instructors to follow the exact procedures. Every time a class came in to be trained, I am sure each instructor added his own interpretation to the process and once examiners went back to the field, they all included their own little pet approaches."

Reed recommended that "if they were going to do this screening at all, they should shut down all the [screening programs], do more research, then train qualified people who have no ingrained bad habits and prejudices, and who understand psychology and psychometric testing."¹⁸

Dr. Reed based her opinion that polygraph screening should be stopped on a study she conducted which examined polygrapher influence on TES outcomes. The results were not as favorable as her two earlier studies of the TES. The only published reference to the results of Dr. Reed's third experiment appeared in an abstract in the Society for Psychophysiological Research journal Psychophysiology:

...The third study was designed to (a) test examiner influence on test outcomes, (b) expand the parameters of the TES format, and (c) collect digitized physiological data to develop a scoring algorithm.

Preliminary analyses indicate that the accuracies were 84.8% for innocent examinees and 77.9% for guilty examinees.¹⁹

DoDPI -- whose motto is "Justice and Security Through Truth" -- never published any report of this third study. And it forbade Dr. Reed from doing so.

Michael H. Capps

Those facing polygraph screening may also wonder why the current director of DoDPI, Michael H. Capps, promptly dismissed the Institute's entire scientific advisory board upon becoming director. This independent board had reviewed and provided comments on DoDPI's academic curriculum and intramural research program. The dismissed members were John Furedy, William Iacono, Ed Katkin, Christopher J. Patrick, and Stephen W. Porges. They were provided no explanation for their dismissal.

I e-mailed Mr. Capps asking about the fate of the scientific advisory board. While he did not explain the reason for his dismissal of the board, he assured me that "[t]he Department of Defense Polygraph Institute continues to have a Scientific Advisory Board comprised of scientists with outstanding credentials in the fields of Psychology, Psychophysiology, and Statistics." But he never replied to repeated requests for the names of the new board members.

Closing Thoughts

During DOE's public hearings on polygraph screening, Mr. Renzelman told employees, "We are here to verify that the DOE's trust, faith, and confidence in the people taking the test is warranted..."²⁰

But is your trust, faith, and confidence in the people requiring you to take the test warranted?

Is America's security strengthened when the government lies to and deceives the very men and women it entrusts with its most sensitive secrets?

I leave you with this final thought from President Bill Clinton:

"The road to tyranny, we must never forget, begins with the destruction of the truth."²¹

***

Acknowledgement

© 1999 by George W. Maschke. All rights reserved. This article may be freely copied, distributed, published in any print media, and/or included on any website provided the text is unaltered and this copyright notice remains attached. Send comments to the author at <maschke@antipolygraph.org>

Notes: