"Screwed" describes the use of a peak of tension test including my and Gino Scalabrini's names as a sort of counter-countermeasure (that is, to determine whether the subject has knowledge of countermeasures).
Such a technique is described in retired CIA polygrapher John F. Sullivan's new book,
Of Spies and Lies: A CIA Lie Detector Remembers (University of Kansas Press, 2002). Sullivan writes at p. 235:
Quote:As a senior examiner, I was given the opportunity to do some very good tests. In 1979, I did what I think was my best test. I caught an Eastern European double agent who had been working for the Federal Bureau of Investigation for five years. The agent was due to return to Czechoslovakia, and the FBI asked us if we wanted to take him over. The Agency was willing to take him, but he had to be polygraphed first.
During my tour with the [U.S. Army's] 513th Military Intelligence Group in Germany from January 1965 until July 1967, one of our polygraph examiners, S. Sgt. Glen Rohrer, defected to Czechoslovakia. While investigating his defection, we learned that the Czechs ran a polygraph countermeasures program and that the head of the program was a Dr. Miroslav Dufek. Going on the assumption that if an agent were a Czech intelligence officer he would probably know or at least recognize Dufek's name, I constructed a test in which I asked the agent if he knew or had any knowledge of a Dr. Miroslav Dufek or six other doctors whose names I had taken from a Prague telephone book. When I pretested the questions with the agent, he denied recognizing or having knowledge of the men whose names I used on the test. He also denied any contact with Czech intelligence before or since coming to the United States. The only name to which he reacted on the test was Dufek's. I confronted him, and after about an hour, he said, "I think Dufek debriefs diplomats when they return from overseas."
Based on his pretest denial of any contact whatsoever with Czech intelligence, this was information he should not have known. At that point, I brought the FBI agent and our case officer, Aldrich Ames, to the room where I was conducting the test and, without any hesitation, said, "This guy is a Czech Intel officer and has reported to them on his contacts with the Bureau."
The agent shrugged his shoulders and said, "Not me." I could not get him to confess, and the session was terminated.
Sullivan goes on to write that a week later, "the FBI called to let [him] know that it had determined that the agent [he] had tested was a Czech intelligence officer." However, Sullivan does not reveal how the FBI determined this to be so.