A National Agency Check is a good indicator of a person's past life, but is of no assistance in determining that person's present security risk. The use of a polygraph for this purpose would reduce materially the security risk involved in granting interim clearances. . . . A recommendation to allow the use of this machine is now pending before the director. | ||
| --AFSA-16 [Security Control Division] Monthly Operational Report, 12 January 1951 | ||
Authority for the purchase of two Keeler polygraph machines and the employment and training of five persons was granted by DirAFSA. | ||
| --AFSA-16 Monthly Operational Summary, January 1951 | ||
Effort is being made to take advantage of a release of keypunch operators from the Bureau of the Census. Ninety keypunch applicants will be interviewed on 5 April 1951. | ||
| --AFSA-02 Semi-Monthly Report for 16–31 March 1951 | ||
The confluence of increased hiring of African-Americans, primarily for low-wage jobs in machine processing and traffic processing, and the introduction of the polygraph as part of the security screening process resulted in a crack in the all-white Security Division of AFSA. Raymond Weir, Jr., a D.C. schoolteacher, had served in the Army in WWII under Captain Fred Hazard. In November 1951, now Major Hazard, a branch chief in the Security Division, recruited and hired Mr. Weir as a polygraph examiner – the black polygrapher for black applicants. He was a trailblazer, becoming the first African-American polygraph examiner in the United States, and arguably the first African-American in the profession anywhere in the world.
Note
"Notwithstanding the current personnel strength position of the Agency, the conclusion has been reached in this Division that to handle the employment problems of the Vint Hill Farms operation, the interim operation at the new site and the certain turnover of personnel which is anticipated at the time of the main move to Fort Meade,[66] we must at this time hire three additional interrogation technicians. . . . The three individuals hired should be one female and two white male technicians. Experience indicates that the requirement for an additional colored technician does not exist."
Monthly Operational Summary, Security Division, March 1953; NSA/CSS Archives Accession No. 42468
Nevertheless, the Security Division – populated by individuals with investigative or law enforcement training, including FBI veteran S. Wesley Reynolds as the chief from May 1953 to December 1961 – was viewed by many as the most conservative Agency organization.[67] For years Ray Weir was restricted to interviewing only blacks at NSA. Not until the 1960s, and then only in careful stages, was he assigned a demographic cross-section of the Agency's applicants.
In December 1998, long after retiring as chief of the Investigations Division (M54), Mr. Weir recounted his story, including an amusing anecdote that illustrates the incongruity of locating an arm of the supersecret, intelligence agency in the heart of the black community:
I was directly recruited into a program I'd never heard of. I was a schoolteacher in Washington at the time and the guy who did the recruiting was Major Fred Hazard, who was in Security. They wanted a black polygraph examiner. They were processing a lot of women at the time, key punch operators, most of whom were black, and somebody decided that it might be good if they had a black person be a polygrapher. Their problem was there were no black polygraph examiners anywhere. The Agency hired me and sent me to school in Chicago.[68] I graduated in, I guess, December 1951.
When I came, there were no blacks in Security and there were none in Personnel.[69] Personnel and Security were collocated because we had to process their applicants. We were in the old Post Office building on "U" Street, and the Agency was trying to be very inconspicuous in the middle of a black neighborhood. They were trying to be inconspicuous, but they deposited the training school there, where all these white kids were coming. My boss, Fred Hazard, the guy that hired me, was a former L.A. police officer, and he went around to a barber shop on U street to get his hair cut. He came back and said that when he went in the barber shop was full, but by the time he was finished, he and the barber were the only ones left. I told him that he must realize that the barber shop was the place where people met their neighbors for the day and heard the news, and he was in the way. Seriously, he looked like a cop, and so they made themselves scarce. Anyway, Security thought it was just wonderful that they were going to have a black person. But, of course, after I started to work for them, the problem was what did I do? Well, I was hired to test these black people who were being hired as key punch operators. I didn't mind; they were paying me the same salary, as if I were testing everybody. But there were days they weren't hiring [blacks] and I had nothing to do.
Well, I didn't think that would last. It finally came about that they had more people to interview than we had examiners, including me. I did work charts and that sort of thing to stay busy, but one day they said, 'Ray, do you think you could handle one of these white people?' I said, 'yes'. After the first one or two came in and I had no problem, it was understood that I could interview white men, preferably from the north. Then, that fell by the wayside a little bit later on, and I could interview white men from the south. [Eventually] there was nothing but young white girls to be interviewed, and my boss said, 'Ray, you think you can take one of these women?' and I said, 'yes'. I suppose this was in the 1960s, late '60s. This was the kind of thing that couldn't be rushed.
What the Agency wanted, what my supervisors wanted was to make sure that [whoever] I interviewed would not have a legitimate complaint about [the interview]. I don't think that most of what I ran into in the Agency was prejudice, per se. There was an unwillingness to do things which would create problems, an unwillingness to do things which would cause any kind of publicity.
Ray Weir rose to the top of his profession, becoming the first African-American president of the American Polygraph Association and a recognized industry expert who testified before the United States Senate Ethics Committee in its 1979 financial misconduct investigation of Senator Herman Talmadge (D-Ga).[70]