In a 28 July 2001 article titled "FBI describes polygraph failure rate as 'surprisingly low,'" Lenny Savino of the Knight Ridder Washington bureau reports that fewer than 25 of the more than 500 FBI personnel recently polygraphed had failed to pass. This article may be read on-line at:

http://www.krwashington.com/content/krwashington/2001/07/28/washington/BC_FBI_EX... 

Savino reports, "There's no way to tell what a normal failure rate would be for the FBI, but a senior official characterized the preliminary failure rate as 'surprisingly low.'"

Creating the public impression that the FBI polygraph failure rate is "surprisingly low" just before confirmation hearings (which may address polygraph screening) begin for FBI Director designate Robert S. Mueller III seems to be the very purpose for which Savino's anonymous FBI sources leaked this information.

But does less than 25 "deception indicated" or "inconclusive" outcomes (both constitute failure to pass) out of approximately 500 counterintelligence-scope polygraph interrogations constitute a "low" failure rate? It could only be considered "low" in absolute terms if one expected to find more than 25 spies among 500 FBI agents!

In relative terms, let's compare FBI's failure-to-pass rate of roughly 5% with the failure rate in FBI pre-employment polygraph "testing." According to C.S. "Steve" Rogers, a retired FBI polygrapher who is now Counterintelligence Officer at the Office of Internal Security, Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), less than 1% of FBI applicants polygraphed failed the counterintelligence portion of their pre-employment polygraph examinations. (Note that for applicants, an outcome of either "deception indicated" or "inconclusive" constitutes failure to pass and results in rejection of one's application.) Rogers is reported to have made this point at an 18 January 2001 meeting of the LANL Employee Advisory Committee, the minutes of which are available on-line at:

http://www.lanl.gov/committees/eac/minutes/0001Minutes/18Jan01.html 

If high-level FBI employees are failing to pass their polygraph interrogations on counterintelligence issues at five times the rate of applicants, can such a rate truly be considered "low?" Perhaps only by a self-interested FBI official hiding behind the cloak of anonymity as he/she tries to manage public opinion.

According to the minutes of the LANL Employee Advisory Committee, Steve Rogers also told the Committee that the Department of Energy's (DOE's) Albuquerque test center "hasn't had a false positive result in the over 1800 tests they have performed." The FBI's roughly 25/500 failure rate seems rather high by comparison.

If the FBI were to require periodic polygraph screening of all employees, then a 5% failure rate applied to a work force of roughly 28,000 would mean some 1,400 failures to pass. And this situation would be repeated every five years with successive rounds of polygraph interrogations.

If FBI management treats those who fail to pass their pseudoscientific truth test the same way they treated former FBI Special Agent Mark Mallah, they are going to have a serious morale, retention, and recruitment problem. For more on the case of Mark Mallah, see his recent letter to the Senate Committee on the Judiciary at:

http://antipolygraph.org/articles/article-016.shtml 

and his earlier public statement at:

http://antipolygraph.org/statements/statement-002.shtml 

Newspapers across America, including The Washington Post, are carrying the Associated Press' latest article on FBI countespionage measures under the title, "Possible Problem FBI Agents ID'd."

To any of those "possible probem" FBI agents who may be reading this, congratulations on winning the FBI's version of The Lottery.

Rock,

To be sure, my congratulations to the winners of the Bureau's polygraph lottery were intended in the way of black humor, not schadenfreude, and I in no way see their plight as a source of merriment.

There's something of the Orwellian in the reasoning behind the following line from the Associated Press article:

Quote:


In the minds of FBI counterintelligence officials, those who "fail" a polygraph seance seem to be presumed guilty until proven innocent -- and the possibility that the polygraph was simply wrong seems to be excluded.

The FBI officials who told the Associated Press that those who fail "may eventually be cleared because things like medical conditions can cause anomalies on the tests" are deluded. As Dr. Alan P. Zelicoff, M.D. of the Center for National Security and Arms Control observed in his 14 June 2001 letter to DOE counterintelligence chief Michael H. Waguespack:

Quote:


As I noted in a list of questions presented to panel members of the National Academy of Sciences Study to Review the Scientific Evidence on the Polygraph:

Quote:


The FBI (and other agencies) seem to be unable to grasp the concept that a truthful person can indeed "fail" in the absence of some special circumstance that might explain the "failure."

It's high time that this superstitious "polygraph lottery" were ended.