Washington Post staff writers Vernon Loeb and Walter Pincus report on a planned Department of Defense review of the Naval Criminal Investigative Service’s investigation of Petty Officer 1st Class Daniel King. Excerpt:
The Defense Department inspector general is investigating the Navy’s failed prosecution of Daniel M. King, a chief petty officer who was held for more than 500 days on suspicion of spying for Moscow, Pentagon officials said yesterday.
Two weeks ago, Navy officials dropped the case after a military judge cited “severe” prosecutorial problems. King, 41, is retiring from the service with an honorable discharge; his lawyer said he intends to sue the Navy for damages.
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The case began in late September 1999 when King, a decorated enlisted man whose job as a Navy “cryptologic analyst” was to help decode other countries’ secret communications, registered possible indications of deception on a routine polygraph examination.
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Lt. Cmdr. Cate Mueller, a Navy spokeswoman, said the investigation was conducted “according to regulations” after King failed a polygraph and “repeatedly and freely admitted to serious security violations, including mailing a computer disk with highly classified information to a foreign embassy.”
Mueller said King “unequivocally” waived his right to counsel after being advised of his rights and told investigators that “he wanted to hurt the Navy because he thought the Navy had been unfair to him” and “considered going to Russia to hurt the Navy by revealing sensitive information.”
Mueller also said that King gave investigators a series of sworn statements during a lengthy process in which he was allowed to make “changes, additions and deletions.”
“King reviewed each statement, made the changes that he wanted to make, and signed each statement,” Mueller said. “He swore to the voluntariness and truthfulness of each statement.”
[PO1C King’s attorney Jonathan] Turley responded that Navy investigators lied to King by telling him he had failed his first polygraph examination, on Sept. 29, 1999, when in fact a polygrapher indicated that he could reach “no opinion” about King’s truthfulness, which Turley called an “extremely common result.”
During King’s initial interrogations, Turley said, a Navy investigator asked him to write down “any fantasies of espionage he has ever had during his career.” Turley said King did not sign a formal confession until 3:30 a.m. on Oct. 6, 1999, after 19 hours of interrogation.
Turley said that King subsequently recanted and can be heard on audiotapes in a distraught voice telling investigators that his confessions “were just dreams.” During a 45-minute videotape of an Oct. 19 interrogation, Turley said, King is seen telling investigators that he has no memory of any of the espionage activities to which he had earlier confessed.
As noted in Chapter 4 of The Lie Behind the Lie Detector, it is in the interest of anyone accused of deception during a polygraph screening “test” to make no admissions. Indeed, as noted by George Maschke in his open letter to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld dated 29 January 2001, the only persons who “failed” their Department of Defense counterintelligence-scope polygraph interrogations in Fiscal Year 2000 were those who made admissions. Everyone who made no admissions ultimately passed! Some test, huh?