Political, Practical Barriers Face Lie-Test Order

President Reagan’s newly disclosed order requiring lie detector tests for thousands of federal workers with access to state secrets is likely to face many of the same practical and political barriers that halted a similar order in 1983, congressional and intelligence experts indicated Wednesday.

Those concerns--which surfaced only hours after Reagan’s latest order was made public--include fears that the tests will violate workers’ civil liberties and damage morale.

But the most serious objections, raised in a brief statement by the Senate Intelligence Committee, focused on the government’s ability to conduct the expected volume of polygraph tests without destroying their purpose: the ability to indicate deception.

Issued Nov. 1

“The bottom line,” one intelligence expert said, “is that you do not relax quality controls” in an effort to increase the number of examinations. “Without them, it will blow up in your face.”

Reagan’s order, secretly issued Nov. 1 shortly before a series of espionage arrests, would require lie detector tests for federal and defense industry workers with access to top-secret and “sensitive compartmented information.” Compartmented information clearances give workers access to only small parts of a secret document.

Hundreds of thousands of persons have such clearances, but the White House indicated Wednesday that about 10,000--mostly those applying for new access to secrets--could be subjected to tests.

The range of officials required to take tests could extend from relatively low-level workers to Cabinet officers, White House spokesman Larry Speakes said. He said the order was not directly linked to the spying arrests but added that the Administration was aware of some of the cases before the directive was signed.

Order Denounced

Civil liberties advocates quickly denounced what California Rep. Don Edwards (D-San Jose) called a “sudden secret order” that ran contrary to the government’s usual cautious stance toward polygraphs. Allan Adler, legislative director of the American Civil Liberties Union, called on the Administration to curtail the number of workers subject to the tests.

The Senate intelligence panel--which has been visibly annoyed by the government’s inability to shield secrets from accused spies--publicly warned the White House not to “precipitously . . . implement the new governmentwide program without further consultation with the Congress.”

Sen. Dave Durenberger (R-Minn.), the committee chairman, and Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.), the vice chairman, said the intelligence panel will review agencies’ plans to implement the order.

The intelligence committee and other experts previously have expressed serious reservations about polygraphs. Those doubts helped derail a national security order issued by Reagan in March, 1983, that could have subjected up to 3.7 million federal workers to polygraphs in an effort to weed out turncoats and unauthorized “leaks” to the press.

Comparatively Few

Thus, the number of tests envisioned by the new order is comparatively small. The General Accounting Office estimates that more than 4.5 million people hold security clearances.

The intelligence community and the Pentagon already conduct polygraph tests aimed at turning up foreign spies. Reagan’s new order is directed to a smaller population in the executive branch and in the defense industry where workers are not routinely tested.

The CIA and other agencies that conduct tests reportedly are strong believers in their effectiveness. A survey given to the Senate intelligence panel in 1984 counted 49 instances in which lie detectors had turned up “important security data,” including “a significant number of cases” in which foreign nations had tried to penetrate U.S. intelligence agencies.

But other agencies have been openly derisive, and the House Government Operations Committee cast doubt on the machines’ ability to detect liars in a 1983 report. And some intelligence officials have privately questioned their usefulness in the wake of recent U.S. espionage embarrassments, including the “re-defection” to Moscow of Soviet KGB agent Vitaly Yurchenko and the spying arrest of Larry Wu-tai Chin, who worked in a sensitive CIA post for more than 20 years.