John
F. Sullivan was
a polygraph examiner with the CIA for thirty-one years, during which time
he conducted more tests than anyone in the history of the CIA's program.
The lie detectors act as the Agency's gatekeepers, preventing foreign
agents, unsuitable applicants, and employees guilty of misconduct from
penetrating or harming the Agency. Here Sullivan describes his methods,
emphasizing the importance of psychology and the examiners' skills in a
successful polygraph program. Sullivan acknowledges that using the
polygraph effectively is an art as much as a science, yet he convincingly
argues that it remains a highly reliable screening device, more successful
and less costly than the other primary method, background investigation.
In the thousands of tests that Sullivan conducted, he discovered double
agents, applicants with criminal backgrounds, and employee misconduct,
including compromising affairs and the mishandling of classified
information.
But Gatekeeper is more than Sullivan's memoirs. It is also a window
to the often acrimonious and sometimes alarming internal politics of the
CIA: the turf wars over resources, personnel, and mandate; the slow
implementation of quality control; the aversion to risk-taking; and the
overzealous pursuit of disqualifying information. In an age when the
intelligence community's conduct is rightly being questioned, Sullivan
contributes a fascinating personal account of one of the Agency's many
important tasks.
From the Publisher
"The polygraph is a much-maligned procedure, but I shudder to think
what security and counterintelligence at the CIA would have been without
it. John Sullivan was a virtuoso of the `box,' the best examiner we ever
produced. He has an amazing inside story to tell, as only he could tell
it. His book is a major contribution to the intelligence literature. I
found it absolutely riveting." --James M. Olson, former chief of
CIA counterintelligence and author of Fair Play: The Moral Dilemmas of
Spying
"I learned more
about the workings of the CIA's polygraph program from reading Gatekeeper
than I learned during the twenty-seven years I served in the Agency's
Directorate of Operations. The polygraph is the CIA's most important tool
for validating the intelligence information it collects and for protecting
itself from hostile penetration and peddlers of false information. This
book provides a wealth of detail about the growth and maturation of the
Agency's polygraph program." --Merle Pribbenow, former CIA case
officer and translator of Victory in
"Only John
Sullivan would have written Gatekeeper. He had the experience of
the perfect insider, and his conscience did not make him a coward
unwilling to tell the bad as well as the good. Having often worked closely
with John, I agree with his premise that evaluating polygraph results is
much more of an art than a science. Among the examiners I have known, John
Sullivan was a Rembrandt." --Charles Gillen, former CIA case
officer and author of Saigon Station
"CIA's most
experienced polygrapher lifts the shroud surrounding an instrument which
plays a pivotal and often greatly misunderstood role in the agency's
personal vetting and agent validation systems. Sullivan demystifies many
of the misconceptions about this instrument and the role played by its
practitioners. Counterintelligence historians will learn much new and
useful information as to how the polygraph was employed in the
investigations of CIA turncoats