Salon
1998
http://www.salon.com/news/1998/06/10news.html
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.
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.
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.
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.