A
CENTRAL
INTELLIGENCE
agency lawyer denied clearance to work at
the White House sues, and charges that the
CIA is purging Jews. BY JEFF
STEIN A LAWYER for the Central Intelligence
Agency, suspended from duty under
suspicion of unauthorized contact with
Israel, is preparing an unprecedented suit
challenging the validity of the spy
agency's "lie detector" test, which he
claims stereotypes Jews as security
risks. Adam Ciralsky, a 26-year-old
lawyer in the CIA's Office of General
Counsel, was placed on paid leave last
October after the agency's polygraphers
refused to clear him for an assignment at
the White House, where he was recruited to
work for Richard Clark, the
administration's new "terrorism czar" at
the National Security Council. Only months before, Ciralsky, who is
Jewish, had passed two previous polygraph
tests, including a CIA entrance exam, that
questioned him about his contacts with
Israelis. A 1993 test administered while
he worked at the Defense Intelligence
Agency specifically found no grounds for
suspicion concerning his tourist trips to
Israel, his attendance at Israeli embassy
cultural events in Washington, his wealthy
parents' donations to Jewish groups and
his close relations with his Hebrew
teacher. An employee of the CIA since late 1996,
Ciralsky also suggests he has been
victimized by a government wide "witch
hunt" for Israeli spies, launched last
March after U.S. intelligence intercepted
an Israeli diplomatic cable that mentioned
a secret agent in Washington code-named
"Mega." "They shook the tree," he told one
associate. "The question is, why was I on
a branch?" More than 10 Jewish federal foreign
policy and defense specialists were
suspended from their jobs in the wake of
the "Mega" cable, Ciralsky alleges in a
120-page affidavit prepared in
anticipation of a suit against the top
officials of both the CIA and the Federal
Bureau of Investigation, who jointly run
the CIA's counterintelligence center as a
result of a security shake-up following
the Aldrich Ames fiasco. |
2.
Ames, a Soviet
Russian mole for nine years, passed
several CIA polygraph examinations before
he was uncovered in 1995 and convicted of
espionage. Ciralsky's charge of a purge could not
be independently verified. Abraham
Foxman, head of B'nai B'rith's
Anti-Defamation
League, told Salon he knew of
"no pattern" of discrimination currently,
but that the Pentagon had sent out a
security memo in 1995 warning defense
contractors that their Jewish employees
might be susceptible to recruitment by
Israeli intelligence. The memo was
repudiated by the Pentagon as
"particularly repugnant" and the work of a
"rogue" employee, but Foxman said he was
"not satisfied" that the matter had been
adequately handled. According to a 1992 report in the
Wall Street Journal, the FBI at one
time kept lists of Jewish employees with
security clearances under a project
code-named "Scope." The FBI said then it
had abandoned the program. A 1994 book,
"The Secret War Against the Jews," by
John Loftus and Mark Aarons,
reported that the National Security
Agency, which intercepts and decodes
foreign government communications, banned
Jewish-American employees from a unit
known as "the Jew room," which monitors
coded Israeli communications. Ciralsky charges that the CIA uses an
"extraordinarily anti-Semitic" security
profile, or a list of criteria, such as
whether an employee speaks Hebrew, gives
money to Zionist organizations, attends an
Orthodox synagogue or has visited Israel,
to measure whether a Jewish employee is a
security risk. "That's why we're going to court," he
told an associate. He is demanding that
the CIA renounce the profile publicly and
discard it, release him for his White
House assignment and undertake a
"thorough" reevaluation of its polygraph
program, which began in 1952. Ciralsky, a graduate of George
Washington University and the University
of Illinois Law School, has not been
officially accused of anything, nor has he
been exonerated, sources said. For eight
months he's been in an employment limbo,
collecting his CIA check at his home in
Bethesda, Md. |
3. "They never said it had anything to do
with the polygraph," he told an associate.
"In fact, they deny it. It's a new story
every time you talk to them." The CIA, which as a matter of policy
refuses to comment on personnel matters,
refused to discuss the case of Ciralsky,
who has retained Washington lawyer Neal
Sher, a former head of the Justice
Department's Nazi-hunting unit
[the
OSI], to represent him. Ciralsky has also enlisted the help of
David Lykken, a leading polygraph
critic, University of Minnesota psychology
professor and author of "Tremors in the
Blood: Uses and Abuses of the Lie
Detector" (Plenum Press). Last month
Lykken wrote to CIA Director George
Tenet on Ciralsky's behalf, pointing
out the contradictory results to the same
questions. "You should be aware that the polygraph
cannot detect lying," Lykken wrote. "With
respect to Mr. Ciralsky's situation, it is
patent that, if one believed that
polygraph testing produces valid results,
it would be impossible to make sense of
his having passed two prior tests and then
failing a third test referring to the same
prior events." No government employee or applicant has
ever challenged in court the unfavorable
results of a polygraph test, tens of
thousands of which are administered
annually by the FBI, CIA, Defense
Department and other government agencies,
although complaints of abuses have been
mounting in recent years. In Detroit, however, David
Tenenbaum, an engineer for the
Department of the Army, has notified the
government that he intends to sue over a
polygraph test that led to his highly
publicized arrest by FBI agents last year
on suspicion of giving classified
documents to Israel. He was exonerated and
has returned to his job in Army armor
design. In a brief telephone interview,
Tenenbaum said it was impossible for him
to determine whether he had been singled
out, or if he fit a polygrapher's
"anti-Semitic" security profile, because
he is Jewish. "How would I know?" Also last year, an Alabama man who held
the government's highest security
clearances for years was stymied for a CIA
job by an agency polygrapher. David
Keen, 42, who worked on supersecret
"Stealth" engineering projects for the
Pentagon for 18 years before accepting a
CIA invitation to apply for a job,
complained to Sen. Richard Shelby,
R-Ala., chairman of the Senate
Intelligence Committee, about the methods
of CIA polygraphers, who reduced him to
tears with "browbeating" questions about
his daughter and failed marriage. | 4. Keen,
who is not Jewish, flunked the "loyalty
questions" on the test twice, then read a
book called "How to Sting the Polygraph,"
by former Oklahoma policeman Doug
Williams. On the third try, he passed
easily. When his CIA interrogator wondered
aloud how he'd done it, Keen told him
about the book -- which sent the CIA
polygrapher "into a rage," Keen said. He was rejected for employment. Friends have told Keen he was "stupid"
to tell the CIA he studied how to beat the
"lie detector," but he replies: "I told
the truth, didn't I?" "Some of the most
bizarre and unprofessional events I have
ever seen," he said of his experience to
Shelby. Keen told Salon that another
applicant who failed the CIA test had
passed a polygraph exam at the National
Security Agency, which handles the
government's most secret codes, and had
gone to work there. The government is actually of two minds
about "lie detectors." While the CIA was
counting on the polygraph to determine the
veracity of Adam Ciralsky, the Justice
Department was at the Supreme Court
insisting that a defendant shouldn't be
able to use the results of a test as
evidence of his innocence. The polygraph,
argued the solicitor general, was
"unreliable." The justices agreed. Sher refused to discuss the particulars
of Ciralsky's case but called polygraph
tests "a goddamn farce ... When a
defendant wants to use it, they say it's
not worth the paper it's written on. But
when they want to use it to justify
discipline, or blocking someone from a job
or promotion, they use it. They want to
have it both ways." The White House is trying discreetly to
untangle the Ciralsky problem, sources
said, so it can avoid the spectacle of
having the Justice Department defend the
CIA's use of a test that it has just told
the Supreme Court was unreliable. Richard Clark refused to return several
calls asking for comment on the Ciralsky
case.
SALON | June 10, 1998 |
Jeff Stein covers national security issues
for Salon. |
write to David Irving