New York Times correspondent William J. Broad reports. Excerpt:
The Energy Department said yesterday in a surprise announcement that it was sharply cutting the number of lie detector tests it would give to people with access to nuclear secrets, particularly at the nation’s weapons laboratories.
The deputy energy secretary, Kyle E. McSlarrow, said at a Senate hearing that the new policy was likely to reduce the number of people given polygraph tests to 4,500, mainly in sensitive arms and intelligence posts, from some 20,000 now.
“No one,” Mr. McSlarrow said, “has suggested that we abandon their use, or that we hire people and entrust them with national defense information with no prior checks or reviews whatsoever.”
But he acknowledged that the department, which runs the nation’s nuclear weapons laboratories, had faced many criticisms of the polygraph technique in the last year and had come to agree with some of them. Thus, he said, officials proposed “substantial changes” in the tests’ routine use for trying to ferret out spies.
In 2001, Congress instructed the Department of Energy to adopt widespread polygraph screening in reaction to the case of Wen Ho Lee, the scientist at the Los Alamos weapons laboratory in New Mexico who was suspected of being a spy but was freed from jail in September 2000 after admitting to a security violation. That order raised an outcry from experts who ridiculed lie detector tests as pseudoscientific and a potential threat to national security.
Last October, in a report requested and paid for by the Energy Department, a panel convened by an arm of the National Academy of Sciences said polygraph testing was too flawed to use for security screening. The panel said lie detector tests did a poor job of identifying national security risks and were likely to produce accusations against innocent people.
The department’s retreat came as a surprise to members of Congress and scientific experts who were preparing to criticize the widespread testing yesterday before the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources. At the hearing, the panel’s chairman, Senator Pete V. Domenici, whose New Mexico constituents include thousands of employees of the Los Alamos and Sandia nuclear arms laboratories, praised the department’s announcement.
“This is a smart decision,” Mr. Domenici said. “I have been appalled by the D.O.E.’s continued massive use of polygraph tests in the wake of a national study condemning the reliability of these tests. Our national scientists deserve better.”