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"The U.S. is, so far as I know, the only nation which places such extensive reliance on the polygraph. It has gotten us into a lot of trouble."
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"Because interrogations are intended to coerce confessions, interrogators feel themselves justified in using their coercive means. Consistency regarding the technique is not important; inducing anxiety and fear is the point."
"When I got the money, the whole burden descended on me, and the realization of what I had done. And it led me then to make the further step, a change of loyalties."
"In my professional work with the Agency, by the late '70s, I had come to question the value of a great deal of what we were doing, in terms of the intelligence agency's impact on American policy."
"The FBI, to its credit in a self-serving sort of way, rejects the routine use of the polygraph on its own people."
"I came into the Agency with a set of ideas and attitudes that were quite typical of people coming into the Agency at that time. You could call it liberal anti-communism."
"The use of the polygraph has done little more than create confusion, ambiguity and mistakes."
"There are so many things a large intelligence espionage organization can do to justify its existence, that people can get promotions for, because it could result in results."
"Historians don't really like to carry on speculative debates, but you could certainly argue that the likelihood of a Soviet invasion of Western Europe was extremely, extremely low."
"The difficulties of conducting espionage against the Soviet Union in the Soviet Union were such that historically the Agency had backed away from the task."
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