I’ve got an idea: Let’s require CIA polygraphers to undergo regular psychiatric tests.

Since they claim to be able to read the inner thoughts of people they put “on the box,” shouldn’t they have their own heads examined from time to time?

The thought came to mind as I talked with John Sullivan, who spent 31 years in the Central Intelligence Agency giving “lie detector tests” to CIA employees, including foreign spies the agency hires.

Sullivan is a believer in the tests, of course: How could he not be? He’s devoted three decades to monitoring blood pressure and studying the squiggly lines that supposedly show whether his subjects are telling the truth. He is said to have been very, very good at his craft.

Some call it witchcraft — mostly people who have failed it, of course, but also a former FBI crime lab official with a Ph.D. in physiology, Drew Richardson, in congressional testimony

No doubt Sullivan has flushed out a lot of liars during his three decades as a CIA polygrapher. But it’s equally true that skilled liars can beat the tests (see Ames, Aldrich H., etc.), honest people fail them, and polygraphers have ruined the careers of many a flustered innocent.

One victim, who detailed his hellish CIA test at antipolygraph.org, a Web site devoted to debunking the “junk science” of lie detectors, painted a portrait of his examiner as Catwoman in Batman.

“The U.S. government has provided a safe haven for examiners to act out their sick dominance fetishes upon people,” he wrote, using the pen name False+.

Hoisted by His Own Petard

John Sullivan objects mightily to such aspersions, but he got a taste of the test’s potential for abuse when he sought a renewal of his CIA security clearance for a post-retirement job.

Sullivan had just written “Gatekeeper: Memoirs of a CIA Polygraph Examiner,” described as “a window to the often acrimonious and sometimes alarming internal politics of the CIA: the turf wars over resources, personnel, and mandate; the slow implementation of quality control; the aversion to risk-taking; and the overzealous pursuit of disqualifying information.”

He was turned down. Two job offers evaporated. Now, he’s suing.

His lawyer, Mark S. Zaid, said a distorted polygraph test was the key instrument in retaliating against Sullivan for his book.