A recruitment horror story by the CIA
I was recently approached by the CIA for recruitment as a business analyst. I was excited by the opportunity to serve my country. However, things did not go as hoped.
I don’t have a clearance and nobody ever said that anything shared with me was classified so I am just going to share my own experience hoping for no further reprisal by the CIA.
As someone who recently underwent the CIA polygraph experience there are several types of questions that will be asked. The first day the exam is divided into two piece basically foreign contact and personal history. These questions are more or less what you can expect. “Have you had any contact with a foreign government?”, “Have you committed any major crimes as an adult?”, etc.
However, the actual questions don’t really matter that much as more they are used as a lever to pry into your life. Before the exam you will have a per-exam interview where the polygrapher will ask you if there is anything they should know. This will be a highly guided conversation with the polygrapher attempting to trap you into saying something you did not mean to say. This is done by interrupting you frequently. Asking, leading or misleading questions. Do you best to talk very clearly and slowly and think before you respond. If your words are at all muffled or unclear the polygrapher will use his/her own discretion to write down what you said even if not reflecting reality. I would suggest minimizing what you say.
Anything can and will be used against you no matter its basis in reality. If you say something like, “as a kid I stole a candy-bar from the corner store once” they will write “admits to regularly committing theft of small items.” Or if you say, “I filed taxes two years late due traveling abroad and not having access to the internet on tax day” the polygraphed might write “refused to pay taxes until prompted by the government” (this was something the guy wrote on my file even though I had paid the taxes only I hadn’t filed the form and the government wrote to me to tell me that I was at risk of losing my owed refund).
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Overall though, what you need to know is that the polygrapher is going to act as if you failed the polygrpah even if you didn’t. They will say the machine is 100% accurate (insert joke about 100% accuracy being an oxymoron) and you had best talk about anything that might be on your mind that is causing you to fail. Obviously this is a ruse if you like me did not have a guilty conscious.
The polygrapher will say ahead of time that you get to object to the wording of any question and there will not be any surprises. This is of course another misdirection. You can object to the wording of questions but the polygrapher will use that as a mechanism to further unsettle you. Even if you object to a question, he/she may refuse to modify a question’s wording.
In my case, the polygraph when he asked me the, “Have you committed any major crimes as an adult?” question he instead asked, “Other than the major crimes you have already admitted to, have you committed any major crimes as an adult?”. I objected to the wording of the question stating that I had not admitted to any major crimes, yet he refused to change it stating some bs about me accidentally scratching my work computer being a major crime. Obviously I reacted to his assertion that I had committed a major crime.
After the exam the polygrapher will leave the room and come back at some future time. They will often do this to give you some time to get nervous as they “review the results”. In my case, I fell asleep. Then they come back and start accusing you of failing this or that question and all the while they are “reading your body language” to gauge your response.
The second day, there was a follow up exam typically with someone who is a little less sociopathic. There might be questions which feel a little more free-form and ask stuff like “what kind of traits might the CIA be concerned about in potential employees”. Then the polygrapher will construct questions that reflect these traits. Of course they will say you failed one of these questions and that the test is 100% accurate and you had best confess if you want to get cleared, etc.
Going in I knew that the process was grueling. However, it was by far the most challenging and confrontational experience of my life. I have been the foster parent to 22+ kids most of them teens for six years so I am quite familiar with the adolescent self-righteous fever so strikingly similar to that found in my polygraph experience. Never though have I been strapped to a chair for hours at a time while being confronted with relentless and demeaning questions by a man with the emotional empathy and cognitive complexity of a teenage boy.
Don’t bother looking up the rules of ethics on polygraph administration as the CIA does not even give them lip service. I went in knowing I had nothing to hide and figuring the worse outcome could be not getting the job. Instead, I got a sociopath polygrapher who lied about the things I said, both to the CIA as well as in a CPS report which resulted in the loss of my and my wife’s two pre-adoptive children.
Obviously, not everybody is a foster parent who are particularly vulnerable to unfounded accusations. If you decide to apply for a job at the CIA, know that the polygraphers are a joke who lack the personal insight to see how their broken methods yield primarily false positives. But if you laugh at them they will say, “Aren’t you taking this seriously. Do you know where you are?” At which point, do your best to stifle your laughter.
