Philip Shenon, in a New York Times article entitled, “Public Lives: A Former Insider to Investigate the Investigators,” discusses among other things, Judge William H. Webster’s thoughts on expanding polygraph screening in the FBI. Excerpt:
WASHINGTON — When he was the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, William H. Webster figured that if he was going to demand that other people take lie-detector tests, he had better take one himself. “I wanted to know how I would feel,” he said.
So he allowed the bureau’s polygraph specialists to hook him up to one of the machines, which measured his blood pressure and pulse rate, and he remembered with a slight cringe that he suddenly found himself recalling some of the embarrassing moments of his life.
“They ask some typical questions, like, `Have you ever been ashamed of anything?’ ” he said. “And you begin to think of the things you wish you hadn’t thought of. Maybe years before, you were rude to your mother or something like that.”
It is hard to imagine there were many shameful events to remember in the life of Judge William Hedgcock Webster, who turned 77 last week and whose reputation for integrity has survived two of the most reputation-crushing jobs in Washington: director of the F.B.I. and director of central intelligence.
He has found himself back in government service, asked by the F.B.I. to lead an outside investigation of how a veteran agent — Robert P. Hanssen, a churchgoing father of six — could have spied for Moscow for 15 years, and how the bureau can ferret out traitorous agents in the future. The Justice Department’s inspector general is conducting a separate inquiry.
Judge Webster said his review was likely to call for expanded use of the polygraph on F.B.I. agents. In the past, the bureau has fiercely resisted the internal use of the so-called lie detector tests, even as they became routine for employees at the C.I.A.
“That’s certainly going to be a recommendation,” Judge Webster said in a conversation in his law office. “But how broad? How intensive? I think we need expert advice on what’s absolutely necessary.”
Judge Webster, who left a federal appeals court in St. Louis to become F.B.I. director in 1978 and who has always preferred to be called “judge,” acknowledged the concerns of civil liberties advocates, who denounce polygraphs as inaccurate and an invasion of privacy.
“I wish more money had been spent on making a better instrument out of the polygraph,” he said. “But they are accurate enough that a person exposing himself to something that could result in the death penalty is going to think very carefully.”
He said he believed that routine polygraphs at the F.B.I. would have been a deterrent. Mr. Hanssen “wouldn’t have taken the chance, I don’t think,” Judge Webster said. “The way he exercised his tradecraft tells me that he really worried about getting tripped up.”
Judge Webster needs to have a talk with the FBI’s top scientific expert on polygraphs, Dr. Drew C. Richardson of the Laboratory Division.