McClellan indicated the White House would consent, if asked, to polygraph tests for staff. "We will cooperate fully, at the direction of the president ... Full cooperation is full cooperation."

Q Scott, in the past, the Justice Department has used polygraph examinations in sensitive leak investigations. The President has said he expects full cooperation. If I work at the White House and down the road in this investigation the Justice Department came to me and said, we want you to submit to a polygraph investigation, the President would expect the answer to be? 

MR. McCLELLAN: I appreciate the hypothetical, but that is a hypothetical and that is not where the process is. The process is that the Justice Department has asked the White House to preserve any and all material related to the specific information they put in their letter. And that's -- 

Q Well, let's set that specific hypothetical aside. If an FBI agent or the Justice -- somebody on the Justice Department team made a request of a White House official that is consistent with past practices in a similar investigation, would the President expect someone on his staff to comply with that request? 

MR. McCLELLAN: The President has directed the White House to cooperate fully, that message was sent as soon as he learned of the investigation. He made it clear to White House Counsel, and White House Counsel made it clear to senior staff the other day -- that was the President -- at the President's direction. We will cooperate fully with the investigation and make sure that we preserve the integrity of the investigation. So that's where things are right now.

While we know that Richard Nixon valued the lie detector as a tool of intimidation, it was during Ronald Reagan's incumbency in the 1980s that the president decided to "cry havoc and unleash the dogs of war," that is, to sic the FBI's polygraphers on administration officials suspected of leaking information to the press. In 1982, George Wilson, a veteran reporter for the Washington Post, revealed that the Defense Resources Board, a group of 30 high-level Pentagon officials that managed the defense budget, had secretly concluded that the Pentagon would have to ask Congress for $2.25 trillion over the next five years to accomplish what Reagan had said would be done for "only" $1.5 trillion. The outraged president decreed that most of the board members, including Navy Secretary John Lehman and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Gen. David C. Jones, would have to submit to polygraph "fluttering." It is interesting to imagine oneself in the place of the FBI polygrapher given this assignment.

Nearly every high official tested would be likely to make the polygraph pens do a dance when asked that question that could write finis to their careers. No examiner in his right mind would be likely to identify the alleged culprit until all had been tested. Then he could compare the charts, looking for the one that indicated the strongest reaction, and hoping that it would be a lower-level official than the Navy secretary or the chairman of the Joint Chiefs. All we know for sure is that the designated leaker turned out to be John Tillson, director of Manpower Management at the Pentagon. Tillson ended up flunking three separate polygraph tests, at which point he got hold of the first edition of this book and called me for advice. There was not much I could do, of course, but the journalist, Wilson, saved the day (and Tillson's job) by taking the unusual step of writing to Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger. "An honorable man stands falsely accused," he wrote. "...I give you my word, John was in no way connected with the story I gathered and wrote."

So strong is Washington's faith in the myth of the lie detector, however, that events like the Tillson debacle are brushed off as aberrations. After all, most people whose careers are smashed by the power of the polygraph do not have the good fortune to be able to prove that their test results were wrong. Toward the end of 1982, a Marine colonel, Robert McFarlane, failed a lie detector test seeking the source of a leak to the New York Times about a British spy scandal known to the American, British, and Soviet governments but which our National Security Council, for which McFarlane worked, wanted to conceal from the public. McFarlane managed to persuade the Times publisher, himself a former Marine, to assure Reagan by telephone that McFarlane was not the source. The highest-ranking official to be victimized (so far) was Michael Pillsbury, fired from his job as assistant undersecretary of defense in 1986 because he failed a polygraph test relating to the leak of a plan to sell Stinger missiles to the rebels in Afghanistan. In his case, too, a journalist revealed that it was two senators who had been the source of the leaked information. Pillsbury's reputation and his security clearances were ultimately restored, but not his job.²

2. Pillsbury described his unhappy experience with the FBI's polygraphic "leak detector" in an article in the Washington Post (November 10, 1991) as a warning to other officials about to be "fluttered" in the search for the leaker of Anita Hill's FBI report, on orders from then-President George Bush.