Untitled Document

03 June 04

The Box

The daffodils are full up. It is going to be 80 degrees this weekend. Spring is on the verge of a riot, and so am I.

I flashed my badge- not the Washington area one, but the special one- and got past the bored security guard down in the basement of the rented commercial building where our Security division lives. It is a pretty fancy building, 10 stories of granite capped by a pyramid. Lots of polished surfaces that gleam and a great executive office suite on the top floor. The Agency is trying to move out of it; too vulnerable. They want to get the people out and put them behind the wire on a military base somewhere. The employees are ambivalent. They see the chance of an Oklahoma City-style attack as possible, but remote, and the neighborhood outside has dozens of cute little ethnic restaurants. So, there is a flavor of risk to those spices in your General Tso's chicken. Destruction or lunch. Most vote for lunch.

I was here unwillingly. I work in the big five-sided wind tunnel by the Potomac. But my number had come up and I was summoned for a periodic counter-intelligence polygraph. I sighed in resignation. This is considerably less fun than a root canal. They normally don't have the option of stripping your clearances and firing you after bad dental work. On a poly, if they decide you are demonstrating deception, they can send you to clearance hell. After all this Hansson spy-stuff the leadership is even more paranoid about who is selling the family jewels out the back door. Government work doesn't pay very well, but the stuff we handle routinely is worth a lot of money if your cities happen to be on an American target deck.

There have been a raft of spies over the last ten years. There are more people with access to classified information than you would think. Now, real Spooks are rare as hen's teeth, the ones who are actually doing spy business. But if you include all the rest of the community- analysts, satellite gizmo builders, Spy Plane hostages in China, contractors, there are probably a couple million people who know something "classified." All of them capable of walking up to the Russian or Chinese Embassy and making a pitch for cash. The potential vulnerability makes you blanch. Washington is a target rich environment, and it is where all the foreign legations are located. A match made in espionage heaven. The Reagan Administration freaked out after the Year of the Spy, 1985. Pollard and Pelton and the Walkers were all arrested, and what they gave up was staggering. Later came Ames and Nicholson and Pitts. And now Hansson. The list goes on, too, in all the Agencies and Services. People hemorrhaging information. The only thing they could think to do was mandate a polygraph for everyone with access to particularly damaging information.

That population was still big, and so the usual Washington solution was directed. They threw a program together, insisted on a one-size-fits-all solution, and hired some people off the street to make it work. The initial cadre, of course, was not very good. But there was a witch hunt to conduct, even if the system didn't know who the witches were and a lot of good people were going to get hurt. The fact that the polygraph is voodoo science is beside the point. The solution was mandated by people who didn't have to meet the standard.

I can't tell you how scary this is. When you get the call, suddenly your career, spouse, house, and kids are on the line. How you perform is based on how your blood pumps and how the electrons fire through your nerves. Get concerned. This is real cause-and-effect. An ambiguous poly can put you under a cloud. A real bad poly winds up with you under criminal investigation. Imagine that as a condition of service. Some people recognized this as marginal science at the time. George Shultze was Reagan's Secretary of State, and he told the polygraph guys to go screw themselves. All of State cheered when he did it. Unfortunately, most of us don't have the same option.

Don't get me wrong. I hate spies. I have spent a quarter-century in this business, and what the moles have leaked could have killed me and my buddies when the balloon went up. I suppose this is one of the things you need to put up with, along with the random urinalysis and other petty indignities. But it gets old, and intrusive.

And so I ring the buzzer at the anonymous door on the seventh floor. My appointment is at noon. It is a bad time, back it up, I have to take the Metro to get here. I have to eat lunch early to keep my body rhythms normal. This is worse than a sygmoidoscopy, a procedure in which they ram a garden hose into you. The worst they can tell you after that is that you are going to die. After a poly, they can fire you or throw you in the hoosegow.

No one answers the buzzer, so I have to call in from a phone mounted on the wall. They answer and buzz me in. The waiting room is pleasant, like a dentist's office. I am the only one here. A nice man comes out and tells me to wait until my poligrapher is ready for me. I wait. There is no choice. If you decline the test, they take your clearance. When the man appears, he is a wearing gold rimmed glasses and a crisp business suit. His name is Mark, and he says we are going to work through this together.

The last time I took one of these things in 1992, there was a no-shit lie detector just like in the movies. It was about the size of a suitcase, and had four needles that squiggled across a moving piece of paper. You couldn't see it, but you could hear it, the needles scratching as the paper moved.

You hoped it wasn't moving too wildly.

And you have to understand The Room. There is a two-way mirror, covered by blinds. This is explained. There is no one on the other side, although there used to be, and besides, they couldn't see through the blinds. But this is all being videotaped anyway. How many views of me do they need?

"O.K. with you?"

"Yeah, sure."

I won't bore you with the whole sordid mess. The airless gray room. The patient, slow process leading you through the questions they will ask. We do them in detail, and I begin to think hard about each one. He starts with some controlled questions. Easy ones, like: "Is the sky blue?"

I answer "yes." They have several questions like that, and a couple they want you to deliberately lie on.

"Are you in Virginia?" " Yes."

"Is it Thursday?" "Yes."

Two they want me to lie on, to calibrate the other answers. "Have you ever lost your temper and said something your regretted?" " No," I dutifully lie.

"Make sure you have an event clear in your mind to recall when I ask you." I do.

"Has your conduct ever made someone angry?" "No," I dutifully lie again. As if.

Then he explains the real questions, the ones that we are here to answer to the Government of the United States of America, videotaped and wired on the Box:

"Do you intend to answer truthfully?" "Yes."

"Do you have any unacknowledged foreign contacts?" "No."

"Have you ever committed sabotage of Government property?" " No."

"Are you a member of a terrorist or espionage group?" " No."

"Have you ever deliberately mishandled classified information?" "No."

Sounds easy, right? Well, it is in the red chair. But six feet away is The Chair. It has a square steel frame, like an electric chair, and big padded arms. The padding is not for comfort. It is to ensure that the smallest vibration is dampened and isolated from the precision instruments. The test comes in three parts. The first is to calibrate the machine, and ensure that you have reactions sufficient to be measured. "Even Ted Bundy could be calibrated" Mark assures me, as if that were some consolation.

He hooked me up. There are two pneumatic tubes that encircle your chest and stomach. There is a blood-pressure cuff on the right biceps. There are two little electrical clips for the ring and index finger. "You need to remain completely still. The computer requires a six-minute session to get a good reading. That is more than the old machine. That only took four-and-a-half." I feel claustrophobic. Penned in. I can't remember how much I can breath. Is it only little shallow contractions of the chest?

"Do you consider yourself a trustworthy person?" Fuck you, I think.

The room is airless suddenly, and oppressive. Mark's voice is soft, and he speaks from over my left shoulder, behind the lap-top computer. He asks the soft-ball questions and I remember which ones I am supposed to lie about. We finish the session. I gulp for oxygen. Mark is pleased. I have been calibrated successfully, and the test can go on.

He tells me to be still again. And it begins. The real deal. Each movement of my chest is measuring my veracity, each pump of my heart forces blood through the tight cuff on my arm. The electrons of my nerves and the sweat of my body are contributing to the scientific assessment of my patriotism. I can't make six more minutes without breathing. I have to take a full breath of air. It ruins the session. We take a break, and he straps me up again. This session I force a shallow rhythm of breathing that I can sustain. Mark is satisfied that I am not a terrorist or saboteur. There is another break before we continue.

"How many of these are there?" I ask.

"As many as we need. But if you pass the next set that's it." I will myself to calmness. We work through it. He doesn't like my answer to the classified information question. There is a blip of some sort. He asks again and again and I begin to think hard. Is there something I have done? What could it mean. Am I going to register as deceptive? I can't see my watch. It must be six minutes. More, certainly.

And then he says I can relax and move. He unhooks me and tells me I can go to the waiting room. Is that it? Is it over? There is another government worker sitting there. He is on break from his first session. He rolls his eyes. Mark returns and asks me back into the oppressive gray room. He indicates the comfortable chair for me to sit in. "Well, looks like you passed" he said. "But I have a couple recommendations for you. Get more sleep. And next time, schedule your session for the morning, when you are better rested. It looked like you were going to sleep on me."

"Thanks. I can sleep in the dentist chair. Twenty-five years of sleep deprivation."

"You need to work on that."

"I'll change my commute." He handed me an evaluation and left the room. I praised his professionalism on the questionaire. I passed. I hated myself for feeling pathetically grateful. I felt like the Winston Smith at the end of Orwell's 1984.

I loved Big Brother.