As noted yesterday
on the blog, recently retired Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) counterintelligence agent Scott W. Carmichael has accused Don Krapohl, a senior official at the National Center for Credibility Assessment (NCCA), of violating the Espionage Act by orchestrating the transfer of classified information to the government of Singapore. The DIA is NCCA's parent agency and would have had responsibility for investigation of counterintelligence concerns at NCCA.
This is a major development if true. However, the evidence I have thus far been able to obtain does not support Carmichael's theory of the alleged crime.
In an e-mail message to retired FBI special agent and polygraph examiner Robert Drdak, Carmichael theorizes that Krapohl convinced Donnie Dutton (a current director of the American Polygraph Association) and Jack Ogilvie (the former head of the Phoenix Police Department's polygraph unit) to sign on as co-authors of a paper that Krapohl had plagiarized from an unpublished graduate school paper by a Singaporean intelligence officer and polygraph examiner, V. Cholan Kopparumsolan. Carmichael further theorizes that Krapohl laundered classified information to Cholan out of fear that the latter might expose his alleged plagiarism.
Carmichael doesn't provide a citation for the article in his e-mail to Drdak, but it's clear that he's referring to Ogilvie, Jack and Donnie W. Dutton, "Improving the Detection of Physical Countermeasures with Chair Sensors,"
Polygraph, 2008, Vol. 37, No. 2, pp. 136-148.
The problem I see with Carmichael's theory that this article is plagiarized is that Cholan is credited both in the article abstract:
Quote:We conducted a reanalysis of unpublished data collected by V. Cholan Kopparumsolan to investigate whether specialized sensors would improve the performance of polygraph examiners in the detection of covert physical countermeasures. Five blind scorers evaluated the physiological data in two conditions. In the first condition they looked at 68 conventional polygraph cases for indications of countermeasures. In the second condition at least two months later they saw the same charts, this time with a channel that displayed data from a sensor designed to detect physical countermeasures. The addition of the countermeasure sensors significantly improved examiners’ performance in the detection of physical countermeasures. The presence of the sensor information did not affect the scores or countermeasure ratings of examinees that had not been programmed to perform countermeasures.
and again in an "acknowledgements" note on the first page of the article:
Quote:We are especially grateful to V. Cholan Kopparumsolan, who graciously allowed us to use the polygraph charts he had collected in an unpublished study he conducted at Michigan State University, and whose generous donation of charts and background made this project possible...
A PDF of Ogilvie and Dutton's article is attached to this post for discussion purposes. Incidentally, it's worth noting that the article cites my and Gino Scalabrini's book,
The Lie Behind the Lie Detector. In Cholan's research, test subjects were provided with a copy of the book. Oddly, however, subjects were instructed to use
toe curling as a countermeasure. Ogilvie and Dutton describe this as "consistent with the advice given in
The Lie Behind the Lie Detector." However,
that is not true. We have
never suggested toe curling as a countermeasure precisely because sensors attached to a polygraph chair might reasonably be expected to detect such activity.
