The Truth Machine

Questions of trust permeated the Cold War. Its dissipation among allies helped to break down the wartime alliance. In measured doses, it allowed reintegration of former enemies. Distrust became a hallmark of communist relations with the West. Over time, trust enabled allies to share their most treasured secrets, such as signals intelligence among the Five Eyes alliance of Anglophone countries. A trusted individual might hold security clearances that opened the most sensitive secrets about a country's defenses. But how could one know who to trust? How might trust be weaponized to protect the country? How could one be sure that a trustee was in fact trustworthy, especially in the face of efforts by others to compromise that trustee? Could one measure, really measure, one’s truthfulness and thus trustworthiness? John Baesler's Clearer Than Truth explores the opaque history of the polygraph machine (the vaunted “lie detector”) and its relationship to the evolution of the national security state in the United States during the Cold War. Baesler, a foreign relations historian at Saginaw Valley State University and scholar of Cold War ideology, espionage, and technology, has opened up a creative view into the culture of secrecy and security in the federal government in the twentieth century. He has not written a complete history of how the intelligence community and U.S. military have used the polygraph as a tool to protect the country. Such a history is, frankly, impossible, as the sources are unobtainable. Instead, what Baesler has provided is a parallel exploration of what we can know about how the U.S. government came to use this tool as part of a security process, what the perceived utility of that tool can tell us about the Cold War as understood in the United States, and how the public and Congress reacted to that use even as the security bureaucracy locked in the polygraph as a technology of control.

Adversary · Alliance · Communism · Computer security · Deception · Distrust · Espionage · Government (linguistics) · Ideology · Political science · Politics · Sociology · State (computer science) · Anthropology: Ethics, History, Culture · Computer Science · Cybersecurity and Cyber Warfare Studies · Intelligence, Security, War Strategy · Law · Philosophy