The polygraph examination is the last and most feared gate in CIA hiring. In John Kiriakou’s telling of his own recruitment, everything else — written tests, medical examinations, the background investigation — was preliminary; the message relayed to him was simply that he would be given a polygraph exam and “if you pass it you’re in.”[1][2][3] He describes himself as “a nervous freaking wreck” beforehand, having never taken one.[1]
The apparatus
The wiring-up takes a good twenty minutes: a blood-pressure cuff on the arm, electrodes on the fingertips, a belt around the chest to measure breathing, electrodes at the ankle, and at least one more Kiriakou no longer remembers — possibly at the temple.[4] The subject must sit as still as possible and answer only yes or no, because the instrument detects nothing else: increases in heart rate, in respiration, and — Kiriakou stresses — sweating, to which it is “very very sensitive.”[5]
The speck on the wall
Before the exam Kiriakou telephoned Jerome Post, the political psychiatrist who had spotted him at George Washington University, and asked for advice. Post declined to give insider tips but offered a psychiatrist’s counsel: the room will be bare and white with an observation window, and there is bound to be a speck on the wall. Focus on the speck and think about nothing else. The questions will be disturbing; answer them yes or no and do not picture the thing being asked. “If they say have you ever killed anybody say no — don’t think about what it might feel like to kill somebody.”[6][7] Wired into the chair, Kiriakou looked up and found the speck straight ahead of him.[8]
The questions moved from violent felonies and weapons offences to the mundane — financial responsibility, shoplifting, theft from an employer of anything worth more than twenty dollars — and then, in his account, one thrown “like a grenade”: had he ever had sex with a man. He answered no, truthfully, and felt his heart go.[9] The examiner stopped the test, observed that he was sweating profusely, and let him sit until his pulse slowed. When she resumed she told him he was reacting to one of the questions.[10]
The planted accusation
Kiriakou says he was not in fact reacting to any question, and that he came to understand the manoeuvre only later in his career: the false accusation is “a turd that they throw at you to see how you respond to it.”[11] The examiner left to consult her supervisor, returned, and identified the supposed reaction as the question about credit-card usage — an answer he still finds funny decades later, since he carried no balance and paid in full every month. He answered no a second time and the test ended. Asked how he had done, the examiner said she was not allowed to say, and winked.[12][13] His private fear had been the other question: not that failure would end the process, but that he would have to explain to friends that he had been cut over a question about sex with a man that he had answered honestly.[14]
What the box selects for
Kiriakou’s standing criticism of the polygraph is that it filters in the wrong direction. He attributes to a CIA psychiatrist the observation that the agency actively seeks to hire people with sociopathic tendencies — comfortable in moral, legal and ethical grey areas — rather than sociopaths, who are impossible to manage. The difficulty is that sociopaths slip through anyway, precisely because a person with no conscience registers no guilt and so “blows right through” the machine, while the merely conflicted candidate is the one who gets tripped up.[15][16] The consequence, in his account, is a selection effect running all the way to the top: “that’s why all the lunatics are the ones in charge — because they can pass the polygraph, they can pass the background investigation, and by God they’re going to convince you that they are patriots.”[17]
He applies the same argument to the agency’s chronic shortage of linguists. Periodically the CIA resolves to hire as many Arabic speakers as it can, but many of them are first-generation Americans or refugees who became citizens, “and so they have trouble with the polygraph or with a background exam and they end up not getting hired.”[18] The same officers, he notes, went through identical polygraphs and identical background investigations as everyone else and were still cleared several levels lower than he was, for no reason other than not having been born in the United States — a practice he says changed after 9/11.[19]
The examination recurs in his account of recruitment generally: the professor who spotted him could get the ball rolling, but the tests, the polygraph and the background investigation were his own to pass.[20][21]
Why the machine shapes the hiring profile
Kiriakou attributes to a CIA psychiatrist the observation that the agency actively seeks to hire people with sociopathic tendencies but not sociopaths. The distinction is operational rather than clinical: a sociopath has no conscience, blows straight through a polygraph examination, and is therefore impossible to control. A person with sociopathic tendencies has a conscience and does react to the polygraph, while remaining willing to operate in moral, legal and ethical grey areas.[22][23]
The polygraph is also the audit mechanism for money. An officer handling agent payments is asked whether he has ever misappropriated more than $20 — the detail that anchors agent payment mechanics.[24]
Why sociopaths are the wrong hire
Kiriakou reports a distinction drawn for him by a CIA psychiatrist: the agency looks to hire people with sociopathic tendencies, not sociopaths. The reasoning turns partly on the polygraph — “sociopaths are unable to feel empathy, and they can pass polygraphs very easily, but they can’t be trusted.”[25]
What the agency wants instead, on this account, are “people who are comfortable working in moral and legal grey areas” — someone who can be ordered to fly to a foreign country, break into a house or an office and steal a file, or talk a man into giving up his country’s secrets, and who then “can’t lay in bed at night and beat yourself up over the immorality of doing such a thing. You just have to do it.”[26]