THE LIE DETECTOR

But there are also gadgets that really could be a threat to civil liberties. I would not, for example, like to see the results of a lie detector used as evidence in court, though I can see no honest reason why George Shultz got so upset about it when Reagan tried to stop the leaks.

In reality the lie detector is merely an aid to sophisticated questioning and will work only if it is done right. The "technology" itself is trivial: it records heartbeat, rate of breathing, and moisture of the palms. If a question makes the subject nervous, there will be an abrupt change in the record of those values.

When I defected to the US 22 years ago, the CIA very understandably wanted to make sure that I was not a spy planted by the Czechs. That is something very difficult to prove, and it is quite easy to make you believe you are seriously being suspected of being one. I therefore welcomed the proposal of a lie detector test.

I was handed a list of perhaps a dozen questions that I would be asked, and encouraged to discuss those that I could not answer with a clear "yes" or "no." Except for a few that were probably used for calibration purposes (e.g., date of birth), there were none that I could answer unambiguously. "Do you completely reject the teachings of Marxism?" was one I (roughly) remember. No, I said, I still believe in social justice, and I still reject racism, for example. But that is not peculiar to Marxism, said the examiner. Then make that part of the question, I replied.

And so it went, maybe for an hour or more. After we had ironed out all the questions to both our satisfaction, I knew I could not have hidden the slightest misstatement, and he knew I was telling the truth. The actual strapping up in the gadget afterward was an almost unnecessary formality. The pens never budged from their regular rhythm.

But it is a method that depends critically on the skills of the questioner, and only quite secondarily on the objective measurement of an instrument. In the hands of a politician or other crook it could become a nasty instrument of repression.