The house belongs to Mark Swanner, a forty-six-year-old C.I.A. officer who has performed interrogations and polygraph tests for the agency, which has employed him at least since the nineteen-nineties.
Defense and intelligence agencies use polygraph testing tens of thousands of times a year as part of the screening of prospective and current employees for espionage.
He said the agency had 31 polygraph examiners but needed 50 more to reach a goal of screening all new hires.
The agency fired the polygraph examiner and revoked the person's security clearance, according to the OIG's April 2014 case report.
In addition to agreeing to 75 interviews stretching over several hundred hours, he submitted to polygraph examinations conducted by two agencies, underwent psychological examinations and testing, and waived both a lawyer-client privilege and a priest-penitent privilege.
By relying on widespread polygraph tests to "flutter" its employees, the agency believed it was invulnerable to "moles".
In its statement, the Secret Service said that it was "utilizing all investigative techniques available," including polygraph examinations, and that investigators were interviewing agency employees and witnesses in Colombia.
Steven Aftergood, a scholar of the intelligence agencies with the Federation of American Scientists, suggested that the agency might need to study polygraph effects on its agents; evaluate their performance under conditions of stress; or study physiological indicators of deception.
Aldrich Ames, the most damaging mole in the agency's history, denied to polygraph operators that he was working for a foreign intelligence service, and the machine didn't bat an eyelid.
So the agency's headquarters sent a polygraph team and the CIA began to believe the Pakistani official only after he passed the test.
