THE ANGELLA JOHNSON INTERVIEW
HANDS up anyone who has never told a lie. No takers, eh! That comes as no surprise. ”We are all liars,” says Bob Sienaert. ”The purpose of education is to teach us how to lie and get away with it.” He should know; his business is to catch liars.
Sienaert is a lie-detector man. Well, that is the generic term. More specifically, he is a polygraph expert, who insists that it’s damn nigh impossible to get even the smallest fib past him and his machine. ”In just five minutes I can tell if someone is not telling me the truth. No one has ever beaten my polygraph test.”
I’ve told a few whoppers in my time: take the day I ”broke down” hysterically and informed a policeman, who had stopped me for speeding, that my mother had been rushed to hospital. She is critical, I sobbed to the young motorcycle officer. I drove off with a lecture, but no ticket.
So it was with a sense of anticipation that I walked up several flights of stairs in a shopping mall in Edenvale, near Johannesburg, on a grey afternoon and entered the offices of Tell Investigations to pit my skills against Sienaert the inquisitor. Surely a wily person with my intelligence could beat a hunk of metal?
”Actually, the brighter you are the easier it is to catch you out,” he corrected. ”And a straight face is not worth a damn.” I felt my confidence slip slightly. ”You really battle with a stupid person. That’s why we don’t test people of poor intelligence – or children,” he continued. Apparently it has something to do with them not always knowing the difference between right and wrong, which might explain why, so far, the police service has been reluctant to subject its officers to the polygraph.
Undeterred, I took up the challenge. I had seen lie-detection machines on television, but Sienaert’s equipment was not the chunky, dated contraption I had expected. It was a sophisticated set-up, comprising a laptop computer, a mini-printer and electronic attachments which he connected to my body.
”I want you to write down a number from one to eight,” said Sienaert, handing me paper and pen. It used to be up to 10, but some cheat once insisted he had written six, not nine, during a test. I sat down and prepared to confuse the machine.
Sienaert explained that the principle, which is more than 100 years old, works on the subconscious and the parasympathetic nervous system. ”The machine listens to the answers your body gives to a question. It records lung function, picks up the pressure curve of the heart beat, blood volume” and the sweatiness of one’s hands.
”Your subconscious listens to your conscious being and if it does not agree with your responses the machine will pick up the signals your body sends out as it becomes less relaxed … Stress builds up as the intensity of the heartbeat changes, veins of the heart open to send blood through and breathing patterns change.”
All of this is registered on the computer screen by a series of squiggly coloured lines.
So there I sat wired up as if for a medical: a blood pressure-type gadget wrapped around my arm, a stethoscope attached to my chest and another coiled around my waist. Velcro was used to attach electronic probes to two fingers on my left hand – to register my perspiration level, but according to Sienaert, I have the driest hands of any woman he has ever handled.
After the first series of simple questions to find out what number I had written down (I was told to answer no to them all) Sienaert accused me of not taking the test seriously. ”You are trying to fool the machine,” he said. ”If this were real I would tell you that such attempted obstruction will be reported to the person who sent you here.”
He was right. I had been thinking about, among other things, SEX! Yes, you’ve read correctly. And it worked as a distraction, thus giving inconsistently high readings on the polygraph. My deception was aided by the fact that, for a brief moment or two, I had also forgotten what number I had written on the paper.
The next two tests (he usually does several before analysing the findings for consistent patterns) were my undoing. Even with my fertile imagination I was unable to keep up the fantasy. I was pegged; thank goodness my job was not on the line.
Most of Tell Investigations’s customers are companies seeking to screen prospective employees for sensitive positions or to find out if a member of staff has done something he or she is being accused of. They pay between R300 and R500 for the five-minute process.
”We do a lot of work for parastatals like the Post Office, Telkom and Spoornet, to prevent bad people coming into the organisation,” Sienaert told me. Take the guy who exaggerated his previous salary during his job interview from R3 000 to R10000 (does that ring any bells?) ”That’s not embellishment … it is a lie. It says this person is not of good character and should not be put in a position of trust.”
This does not mean that people who pass the test will stay honest.
Sienaert also has many examples of clients sending employees to be tested for fraud allegations – say if money goes missing from a supermarket till and the cashier professes his or her innocence.
There was the case of the warehouse foreman accused of charging money for staff to work overtime. He was tested along with his three accusers and all failed. ”The charge was true, but two of the accusers had embellished their stories and one had lied outright to back them up.”
But the most unusual case was that of a couple in the grip of a bitter divorce and custody battle. The man had accused his wife of sexually molesting their young son and daughter. ”The advocates for both sides called me in and the couple agreed to be polygraphed.” But surely the one who was lying would refuse to participate? ”It’s about arrogance,” suggested Sienaert. ”People come here believing they can beat the machine because they get away with lying all the time.” He found the husband’s accusation to be false.
Sienaert, who immigrated from Belgium in the 1960s, is no Hercules Poirot. With his bushy black eyebrows, mass of salt-and- pepper hair and beard, he looks more like a character from a Wagnerian opera. But he helps the police indirectly as the South African Police Service (SAPS) often asks companies to do their own pre-investigation before they open a docket.
Business is booming along with a growth in fraud and other white-collar crimes. ”Not that we are more crooked than any other nation,” he insisted ”No one has a monopoly, but I get slightly more whites coming here because, in cases of fraud, there is still a preponderance of whites in management.”
Used mostly in the United States, polygraph testing was developed for the military during World War II. It was revived in the 1970s and is now regularly used to test some US government employees.
The process is relatively new to South Africa because of the boycott years, but there are now about five companies offering the service and the SAPS is said to have its own polygraph gathering dust at headquarters in Pretoria.
Sienaert, an electrical engineer, has not always been a fan of polygraph testing. ”At first I was very sceptical, but it was difficult to argue with the positive results.” He liked it so much that he bought the business last year.
It’s a long way from working at Nasa’s deep-space tracking station in Hartebeeshoek in the years before sanctions. When he graduated from the National Radio Institute in Brussels in the 1960s his dream was to become head of a laboratory. He did research work on alternative energy for Siemens Electronics before leaving in 1992 to work for Telkom, where he was made redundant.
It was while acting as a consultant with a firm providing security for parastatals and big companies that he made the switch to lie-detection. ”You can put in all the security you want, but in the end it is down to people. Anyone has a price and many people get low salaries so can be bribed easily to turn a blind eye; most major crimes require insider help.”
Although he would not say exactly how many subjects pass his way every week (only that it is a constant flow) Sienaert estimates that more than 1000 tests are done across the country each month. ”If the test is inconclusive, then it goes in favour of the person taking it. About 85% are a clear yes or no; 10% will give an explanation and 5% are not co-operative or don’t know – maybe three or four in 100 are inconclusive.”
If crime continues to soar, lie-detecting could be a growth industry – ”but not something that will explode,” said Sienaert.
”It has limited application because basically we still take people at their word and it is only in special circumstances that a company will resort to subjecting workers to the polygraph.”