Don Bohning reviews John Sullivan’s new book for the Miami Herald:
NONFICTION
CIA agent tells the truth about the polygraph
An insider reveals much about the secretive agency and its controversies.
BY DON BOHNING
GATEKEEPER: Memoirs of a CIA Polygraph Examiner. John F. Sullivan. Potomac. 288 pages. $27.95.John Sullivan’s job was ferreting out liars. During a 31-year career as a ”gatekeeper” for the Central Intelligence Agency, he hooked up a record 6,000-plus potential liars to polygraph machines in 40 countries. Gatekeeper is his story, and it’s fascinating and troubling.
Sullivan opens bare the controversy, including within the agency itself, over the validity of the polygraph, which Sullivan staunchly defends, but as ”an art, not a science.” What’s disturbing is that the book exposes the CIA as just another big organization replete with turf wars, petty personal jealousies, incompetents, bad bosses and just plain ”bad apples.” One wonders how its internal squabbles might have affected the agency’s overall performance, particularly regarding the 9/11 attacks and the faulty intelligence that led to the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq.
While the subject may be esoteric for general readers, Gatekeeper sheds considerable light on aspects of what was — and remains — one of the most secretive and controversial U.S. government organizations. Despite a glossary, the book would have been better if Sullivan had avoided some 75 or so acronyms.
Still, the insider analysis is intriguing. Sullivan, who left the agency in 1999, believes a three-decade decline for the CIA ”of prestige and capacity to provide good intelligence” began in 1973 when then-President Nixon pressured Richard Helms to resign as CIA director. “The post-Helms CIA has been characterized by escalating politicization, internal and external turf wars and a steadily growing bureaucracy, all of which diminished the Agency’s capacity to carry out its mission.”
Sullivan reports Helms was the last director to ”openly challenge an administration,” unlike George Tenet, director under presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush until he was forced out. Tenet had a reputation among insiders for telling his bosses what they wanted to hear.
Sullivan’s interesting account of the agency’s early years also reflects the country’s post-World War II atmosphere in the wake of the anti-Communist, anti-gay witch hunt by the late Sen. Joe McCarthy of Wisconsin. At that time, he writes, “the CIA’s polygraph program focused on detecting Communists and homosexuals. Early tests had more questions dealing with Communism than any other issue, but the homosexuality issue was pursued equally vigorously.”
Among the turf wars within the CIA in which Sullivan became entangled was one battle with the Cuban Operations Group, due ”in large part because none of its [Cuban] agents could pass their polygraph tests.” The group’s chief complained to the examiners that not all ”our agents can be bad” and ”you are doing bad tests.” Unfortunately, writes Sullivan, the “Cuban [exile] assets, with rare exceptions, were all bad.”
But in another widely shared opinion among U.S. officials, Sullivan writes that “of all the intelligence services against whom I worked, I found the DGI [Cuban intelligence] one of the best, second only to the East German Stasi. The only reason I put the DGI second is because the Stasi had much more manpower and was better funded. With limited resources, the DGI was very effective in neutralizing our efforts to penetrate them and identifying our agents.”
Sullivan concedes there are ”many questions about the validity and reliability of polygraph” and concludes that “polygraph is much more effective in determining that a person is being deceptive than it is in verifying that a person has been or is being honest.”
Don Bohning is a former Miami Herald Latin America Editor and author of The Castro Obsession: U.S. Covert Operations Against Cuba 1959-1965.