John Baesler
Beginning with the cold war, U.S. government agencies used the polygraph machine to protect the national security and integrity of the nation. Why was this particular technology endowed with such a political task? My goal is to map the social and psychological landscape created by practices aimed at making the inner self of the individual transparent through technologies of truth, and relate these findings to the political landscape created by the ensuing cold war. To this end I will investigate the governmental power of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), which utilized the polygraph extensively as a tool to screen employees and as an interrogation instrument almost from its inception in 1947.

My thesis is that the public and internal debates surrounding the appropriateness of the use of the polygraph highlight a significant tension inherent in American aspirations toward world leadership in contrast to its perceived political and moral identity: while the cold war was based on an ideological insistence on American truthfulness, expressed for example in immense public diplomacy initiatives beginning with Truman’s “Campaign of Truth,” the American national security state also insisted on claiming a transgressive authority over truth: authority to demand complete transparency while also exempting its own operations from these standards if deemed necessary. I argue that truth technology played a significant role in creating governmental attitudes toward truth and truthfulness, i.e. the authority to determine the appropriate uses of both.

My paper is a political history of technology that uncovers the relationship between technological, scientific, and political rationales and epistemologies. It hence draws on a number of different sources: scholarly publications on the veracity of the tests by psychologists; the trade publications of the polygraph community, especially the American Polygraph Association; and government documents, in particular Congressional reports and recently declassified CIA documents from the National Archives.

While psychologists throughout the period cast heavy doubt on the veracity of polygraph test results, politicians and national security bureaucrats found pragmatic justification for its use: its alleged deterrent effect; its ability to produce “results”; in short, its usefulness in creating what Michel Foucault has called “governmentality”, citizens with a subjectivity appropriate for modern society. Even in the face of failure, as when the polygraph failed to detect Soviet spies like Aldridge Ames, this rationale proofed so powerful that federal agencies entrusted with national security continued and expanded the use of the machine. To this day, even after Congress passed the Federal Polygraph Protection Act of 1988, which prohibits “lie detector” tests in private business, national security agencies use truth technology. Indeed, since 9/11 this use has expanded dramatically, underscoring the continued significance of political rationales toward certain technologies that were established during the cold war.