With the prospect of a polygraph dragnet in search of a suspected White House leaker, it is worth noting what results such use of the polygraph has produced in the past. Professor David T. Lykken addressed this in the 2nd edition of
(at pp. 216-18)
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.