A horrific image haunts me: my father amputating a little girl’s leg to stop her from bleeding to death. The girl attended the same village school as my siblings and me. She was about my age, around 5. As blood flowed from her tiny body, my father’s snow-white lab coat turned bright crimson. The girl’s cries and her mother’s painful screams terrified me. I stood frozen, unable to turn away until my mother swept me to the safety of our home.

My father worked on countless victims of unexploded ordnance, or UXO—bombs that failed to detonate when they hit the ground—throughout Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam in the 1970s and ’80s. My mother altered clothes for people who lost their limbs. My parents’ work resonates with my own efforts leading Legacies of War, an advocacy and educational organization addressing the long unfinished legacies of war in Laos.

Laos has earned the title of being the most heavily bombed country per capita in history. For nine straight years, from 1964 to 1973, Americans carried out 580,000 bombing missions in a country roughly the size of Oregon. The equivalent of a planeload of bombs dropped every eight minutes, 24 hours a day. This carpet-bombing campaign was all part of the U.S. effort to destroy the supply routes of the North Vietnamese troops along the Ho Chi Minh Trail, which runs the entire length of the border between Laos and Vietnam. Despite having signed the 1962 Geneva Accords, which promised Laos’ neutrality in the war, the U.S. and North Vietnam interfered in Laos’ sovereignty, using force to illegally enter the territory and “impairing the peace.” The violent interference was dubbed the American Secret War, and Laos was collateral damage.

Up to 30% of the bombs the U.S. dropped in Laos failed to detonate, leaving the landscape littered with 80 million UXO, and rendering the land dangerous and unusable. Fifty years have passed and, according to the National Regulatory Authority for UXO in Laos less than 10% of the contaminated areas in Laos have been cleared.

These UXO are war trash laying dormant—material reminders of a brutal time, waiting patiently, ready to be torn open once again, prolonging the conflict and its casualties. The twin efforts to clean up UXO, and to recognize crimes committed require us to hold on to the memory of this war and to remember better, more fully, more publicly.

At Legacies of War, we are working to ensure that the U.S. commits funds for bomb removal, victims’ assistance, and explosive ordnance risk education in Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam. I meet with victims of ongoing UXO accidents and their families. Incidents have dropped from 300-plus in 2008 to fewer than 100 in 2023, but children remain the most vulnerable group, accounting for 60% of the victims in the past 10 years.

Last year, while visiting a demining site in Sepon, Laos, I met then-64-year-old Yong Kham. Most of his childhood was spent in muddy, foul trenches or dark caves, trying to avoid death. During one bombing raid, a cluster bomb exploded nearby. Yong Kham survived, but two of his siblings died right before his eyes.

Decades later, in 2003, his eldest son, 21-year-old Tong Dum, was killed when he came across a UXO while collecting wood and scraps. I asked Yong Kham why he wanted to share his story with me. “I don’t want it to happen again,” he told me. “No country should have to suffer from these bombs.”

Many visitors to Laos today are oblivious to the pains of its past. They notice only the warmth of its people, the pristine beauty of its waterfalls, and stunning sunsets along the Mekong River. But the wounds of war are hidden in plain sight—giant bomb craters, damaged historical sites, environmental contamination, cruel family separations and displacements, and thousands of injured victims. Trauma prevents survivors from speaking out.

Demining work is tedious, dangerous, and expensive. Terrain, weather conditions, equipment, methodology, number of teams required, and other factors make costs uncertain. Funding for UXO clearance is also unpredictable, hindering planning, development, and talent retention, and further compounding the difficulty of the work.

Koulabdara standing in a crater in Sepon, Laos that was created from a bomb dropped during the Secret War between 1964-1973. Photo by Kayleb Lee. Courtesy of Legacies of War.

In Sepon, Laos, "Pa" or Father Yong Kham, a victim of cluster munitions, shows the shrapnel that remains in his arms. Photo by Kayleb Lee. Courtesy of Legacies of War.

A recycled ordnance used as a school bell in Houaphanh Province, Laos. Photo by Anna Phommachanthone. Courtesy of Legacies of War.

Cluster munition found by Humanity & Inclusion in Houaphanh Province. Photo by Anna Phommachanthone. Courtesy of Legacies of War.

An unexploded ordnance found by Norwegian People’s Aid (NPA) in Koulabdara’s home province Pakse in the town of Champasak. Photo by Anna Phommachanthone. Courtesy of Legacies of War.

At Spoon Village in Ban Naphia, a villager explains how war scraps are transformed into jewelry. Photo taken in 2022. Courtesy of Legacies of War.

I visited Humanity and Inclusion’s demining operation in Houaphan Province in August. Houaphan is green, wild, and full of mountains and endless hills. To get to the demining site, my team and I drove for 3.5 hours on a bumpy road with breathtaking views of the countryside. We saw villages with cows, goats, and other animals freely roaming.

At the clearance site, a team leader conducted a safety briefing and told us about the families living in the area, what types of UXO were there, and the intended use for the land once it’s cleared. We hiked up a steep hill with tall grass and trees. I got to test out the demining team’s scanner, used to detect metal—and which weighs 5 pounds. Each deminer carries a scanner, a shovel, and a bucket all day. This is tough work that’s made only more challenging by the heat of Laos’ generous sun.

The work of memory and awareness goes hand in hand with the on-the-ground work of demining. Growing up in a family that fled Laos for the U.S. when I was just 6, I, like many Americans, did not know much about the U.S.’ Secret War, nor its direct impact on the people of Laos. But refugees from the country fled to America then, years after the war, and will likely continue to arrive here or other places for decades to come. To tell this story, we launched our Legacies Library initiative, compiling a list of books, films, articles, and oral histories of the bombing. Remembering the war empowers us, and serves as a reminder against violence.

In 1994, the U.S. released bombing data that helped make survey and demining work more efficient. To date, it is the largest funder of UXO clearance efforts in Laos, contributing $45 million in 2022. Yet this is a minimal investment compared to the $65 million price tag of just one B-52 bomber, the plane used to fly bombing missions. The U.S. needs to show it is committed to funding UXO cleanup, supporting victims, and preventing further harm. With multi-decade funding, the U.S. could help Laos become UXO impact-free, and assist an estimated 25,000 survivors.

The Biden administration’s recent decision to send cluster munitions to Ukraine shows the difficulty the nation has learning lessons from its own history. The U.S. could—and should—accede to the Convention on Cluster Munitions, an international treaty that bans the production, use, transfer, and stockpile of cluster munitions. Thus far, 123 countries have adopted the treaty, including Germany and Canada. Our policy should be more aligned with our NATO allies than with Vladimir Putin’s Russia, another country that has not signed on.

As we mark 50 years of suffering caused by America’s Secret War in Laos, many who lived through it, including my 98-year-old grandmother, are getting older. They deserve closure, and to see justice served—America cleaning up all of its mess. They cannot wait another 50 years.

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“Any objection to taking a lie detector test?” Though I had a great many, I didn’t voice them, shaking my head. If this was a condition of the job, I’d do it. But I didn’t like it. … I had never felt so completely exposed, as if there was no privacy whatsoever. If at that moment someone had handed me a petition banning polygraphs forever from the face of the earth, I would gladly have signed it. When I was asked the last question and the straps were taken off, I vowed that never again, no matter what the circumstances, would I undergo such an insult to my integrity.

Yet Powers would later take another polygraph test, with even higher stakes.

Powers’ case would be an uncommon one, but the polygraph was considered an essential tool in that period, for reasons that had little to do with getting to the truth. The polygraph was more of an attempted answer to a central Cold War conundrum: How could Americans fulfill their pledges to oppose an allegedly totalitarian enemy without becoming totalitarian themselves?

To square this particular circle, federal agencies, first and foremost the CIA, began using a controversial technology developed by psychologists in the early 20th century, and then refined and applied by the police and private businesses since the 1920s. Polygraph measurements—derived from changes in blood pressure, breathing depth, and skin conductivity of an electric current—have never been proved to be reliable indicators of deception. Not only is genuine emotional turmoil hard to reproduce in laboratory studies, but such emotional responses are not uniform among humans and can be imitated by countermeasures (such as pinching yourself before giving a response). In large screening tests, significant numbers of “false positives” (innocent people being labeled deceptive) are unavoidable.

In addition, the question of whether deception during a polygraph test indicates a person is unsuitable for employment transcends merely technical issues. In the final analysis, American security agencies never arrived at a definition of what personal characteristics a model employee should have. Instead, the polygraph provided reasons for dismissing a person as a security risk or denying him or her employment.

Bureaucratic usefulness, rather than any scientific validity, goes a long way toward explaining why the polygraph became a standard instrument of the American national security state. The case of Powers and his history with polygraphs is instructive.

From 1956 to 1960, 24 U-2 flights over the USSR yielded invaluable strategic intelligence on Soviet military capabilities. But on May 1, 1960, disaster struck when Powers’ plane was shot down over Sverdlovsk (today called Yekaterinburg). American authorities issued a cover story about a weather balloon gone astray and were caught flat-footed when Nikita Khrushchev presented to the world the remnants of the plane, and then the pilot himself. Powers had miraculously survived and was subsequently put on trial in Moscow and sentenced to 10 years in prison for espionage. In February 1962, he was exchanged for Soviet KGB colonel Vilyam Fisher (alias Rudolf Ivanovich Abel).

Powers returned home a hero under suspicion. Unbeknownst to him and the American public, doubts about his truthfulness arose due to National Security Agency intercepts of Soviet responses to the U-2 flights. Tracked radar signals indicated that Powers’ plane had dropped below its regular altitude of 65,000 feet, making it vulnerable to surface-to-air missile attacks. But Powers vehemently denied that he had allowed the plane to decline. The CIA, fearing for its then-stellar reputation with the American public, insisted on Powers’ innocence as well.

CIA director John McCone set up a board of inquiry under a federal judge, E. Barrett Prettyman, to prepare a statement for public consumption. The document highlighted that medical tests, a background check, and an interrogation had confirmed that Powers “appeared to be truthful, frank, straightforward. … He volunteered with some vehemence that, although he disliked the process of the polygraph, he would like to undergo a polygraph test. That test was subsequently duly administered by an expert. … [Powers] displayed no indications of deviation from the truth in the course of the examination.”

Contrast this with Powers’ own version of his treatment: Getting frustrated by “doubts about my responses, … I finally reacted angrily, bellowing: ‘If you don’t believe me, I’ll be glad to take a lie detector test!’ … Even before the words were out of my mouth, I regretted saying them. ‘Would you be willing to take a lie detector test on everything you have testified here?’ … I knew that I had been trapped.”

Since shortly after its creation in 1947, the CIA has used the polygraph as part of its personnel security procedures to ascertain the truthfulness of job applicants and employees and to confirm the bona fides of agents. At the height of McCarthyism, utilizing a machine known by the public as a “lie detector” made sense, especially for a brand-new agency that had to be staffed quickly. To its proponents, the polygraph represented a promise of objectivity and fairness along with effective deterrence of spies and traitors. As a CIA inspector general report from 1963 emphasized, “We do not and could not aspire to total security. Our open society has an inherent resistance to police-state measures.”

When challenged by Congress, which investigated federal polygraph use repeatedly beginning in the mid-1960s, the CIA defended the polygraph aggressively. In 1980, the Director of Central Intelligence’s Security Committee insisted: “The utility of the polygraph interview as part of security processing has been demonstrated by empirical means. … These practical results, plus more than thirty years’ experience, make the use of the polygraph in security screening truly unique and indispensable.”

Yet internally, CIA bureaucrats admitted that the practice of sorting out job applicants and employees based on their test results was questionable at best. Even after decades of polygraph practice, the CIA could not define what exactly it meant by elusive terms such as “routine” and “voluntary” in its polygraph program. A 1974 list of questions from polygraph examiners to the gneral counsel included the following query: “What can a polygraph officer say in response to the question: ‘Do I have to take this test to get a job with the Agency?’ or ‘What happens if I don’t take the test?’” The relevance of the evidence produced during most polygraph tests was also unclear. “The precise yardstick for the measuring of security reliability of an individual continued to be elusive,” an internal CIA history on personnel security concluded in 1973.

Up until his death in a helicopter accident in 1977, Powers insisted that he had acted as a loyal American under trying circumstances. No definite account of the incident has been established yet. We also don’t know what data Powers’ polygraph test produced. However, it is reasonable to conclude that the Kennedy administration found it advisable to assure the public of Powers’ truthfulness, and that announcing that Powers had passed a polygraph test was part of their public relations strategy.

Powers’ experience highlights three ambiguous characteristics of polygraph use by the CIA for purposes of “national security.” First, the claim by polygraph proponents that the test could be a witness for the defense, exonerating loyal citizens, often turned out to be less than clear-cut. Second, while the polygraph relied on the rhetoric of voluntarism, in reality the pressure to take the test often mocked the idea of a free decision. Third, polygraph exams often served to provide official cover rather than revealing the truth of events.

Other questions haunted the polygraph throughout the Cold War, and the often-traumatic experience of the test provoked fierce protests from Americans across ideological lines. Journalists Joseph and Stewart Alsop, two otherwise unrelenting Cold War boosters, compared the polygraph to the embrace of an octopus whose “electric tentacles” produced an “overwhelming impulse to tell all … in order to appease the octopus machine.” Even former chief of CIA counterintelligence James Olson called polygraph exams “an awful but necessary ordeal. We all hate them. … A polygraph examination … is rude, intrusive, and sometimes humiliating. … It’s a grueling process.” Whether the sheer unpleasantness of the exam did more to deter potential traitors, or kept otherwise upstanding citizens from joining the agency, is impossible to determine.

Ultimately, there is the question of whether the polygraph ever caught Soviet spies. Certainly no major communist spy was ever caught by the machine, and the most damaging one, Aldrich Ames, passed two routine polygraph exams after he had delivered deadly information about U.S. activities in the Soviet Union to his handlers.

While the Ames case almost fatally damaged the polygraph’s reputation, the technology was rekindled in the wake of the 9/11 attacks and the subsequent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, because, once again, it gave the appearance of a scientific way to test such elusive values as loyalty when doing the inherently risky jobs of screening employees and counterintelligence work. As the history of the polygraph makes clear, American policy makers place great trust in technological fixes to thorny political problems—even though they themselves question those fixes privately.

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As Madison well might have predicted, allowing America’s secret agencies to operate free of the checks and balances spelled out in the Constitution would lead to an abuse of power. In 1974, a domestic spy scandal carried out by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and exposed by The New York Times, challenged this intelligence exceptionalism and brought the espionage services into the framework of government accountability that has been a hallmark of America’s democracy.

In 1975, the Church Committee—led by Senator Frank Church (D, Idaho), for whom I served as an aide—uncovered CIA espionage operations directed against anti-Vietnam War protesters (Operation CHAOS); covert schemes perpetrated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to ruin the lives of these protesters and of individuals involved in the civil rights movement (Operation COINTELPRO); and National Security Agency (NSA) wiretapping aimed at the telephones of American citizens (Operation MINARET) and the reading of their international cables (Operation SHAMROCK).

The CIA accumulated files on 1.5 million American citizens; infiltrated media, academic, and religious groups inside the United States; and plotted assassinations against foreign leaders in developing nations. The smear tactics of the FBI were intended to blacken the reputations of antiwar and civil rights activists, from the lowliest volunteers to the top leaders. The NSA leaned on flimsy executive orders from the days of the Truman administration to pursue MINARET and SHAMROCK targets throughout the next five presidencies (Dwight D. Eisenhower through Gerald R. Ford), without obtaining renewed authority from any of these White Houses or from Congress.

In the aftermath of these intelligence excesses, in 1975 the Congress moved dramatically (and largely in a bipartisan manner) to stretch the constitutional canvas over the hidden side of America’s government. At the end of its inquiry, the Church Committee successfully advocated the creation of a permanent standing committee for intelligence accountability, known as the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI). The next year the House followed suit by establishing the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI).

Front page of the Sept. 2, 1963 edition of The Times of Viet Nam, published in Saigon. Photo courtesy of Horst Faas/Associated Press.

In addition, Congress passed legislation to give those two new committees meaningful authority. And with the enactment of the Intelligence Oversight Act of 1980, the executive branch was required to report to Congress not only on covert actions but also all other significant intelligence activities prior to their implementation. This was a powerful standard of ante facto reporting. With these changes, lawmakers became genuine partners in the intelligence domain, just as the Constitution had prescribed for every other policy pursuit.

Since then, the vigor and success of congressional accountability over intelligence activities has fluctuated from then until now, with a series of high points during the Carter years—the 1980 Intelligence Oversight Act among them. There were several low points: the Iran-Contra scandal of the Reagan administration, followed by NSA violations of the law (including the collection of social media “metadata” and the use of warrantless wiretaps against U.S. citizens), and the CIA’s adoption of a torture program in the crucible of fear that followed the 9/11 attacks.

Still, the difference in accountability between the pre-Church Committee era of benign neglect toward the nation’s secret agencies and these post-Committee problems was as stark as night and day. With the Trump Administration, though, intelligence accountability has encountered serious new setbacks.

The President has co-opted the HPSCI Chairman Devin Nunes (R-California), who was a member of Trump’s transition team. And the SSCI Chairman, Richard Burr (R-North Carolina), has been a weak overseer, until very recently. Now, to his credit, Burr is leading a relatively bipartisan probe into possible Russian pro-Trump interference in the 2016 presidential election, but he, too, has periodically displayed a fawning posture toward the White House.

This current moment is a good time to think about the fundamental ingredients for the success of spy accountability, of which there are two. Unfortunately, both ingredients are often in short supply.

The first requirement for effective intelligence accountability is that the executive branch and its intelligence apparatus must embrace the concept in good faith—an acknowledgment that the constitutional principles extolled by the nation’s founders apply to the veiled agencies of government, too, not just to the more open departments like Agriculture and Commerce. Lawmakers only know about intelligence activities to the extent that the president and the attorney general, plus the nation’s intelligence chiefs—the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) and the Director of the CIA (D/CIA), and other intelligence agency managers—keep them informed.

Nevertheless, even this basic requirement is often absent. A vivid illustration occurred during the Church Committee inquiry, when a Defense Department truck delivered reams of documents to the panel’s guarded doorstep at the Senate Dirksen Office Building—enough to keep the staff busy for weeks. The problem was, as DOD well knew and the committee soon found out, the mountain of papers was merely a gimcrack devoid of a single useful paper. For the Defense Department—fortified by the triple steel of practiced evasiveness—stonewalling was the name of the game as it single-mindedly hindered and obstructed the committee at every turn. More recently, the second Bush Administration waved off congressional concern by assuring the SSCI Chairwoman, Dianne Feinstein (D-California), that the CIA’s torture tactics merely involved a bit of “tummy slapping.” In fact, the Agency was engaged in widespread waterboarding and other cruel interrogation methods.

That’s another reminder of the vitality of the second ingredient for successful intelligence accountability: the will of individual members of Congress to engage in a meaningful examination of spy programs. That requires aggressiveness. One former special assistant to Director of Central Intelligence William J. Casey (of the Reagan Administration) urged the 9/11 Commission to pursue its investigative responsibilities with a “helicopter-raids-at-dawn, break-down-the-doors, kick-their-rear-ends sort of operation.”

Unfortunately, oversight is rarely like that. The truth is that most lawmakers on SSCI and HPSCI rarely even make it to executive-session hearings, let alone conduct helicopter raids on the CIA or the NSA. Only approximately one-third of the total SSCI and HPSCI membership participated, on average, in executive session hearings during recent years, according to my interviews with staff on these committees. While a professor at Princeton University, Woodrow Wilson famously wrote that “Congress in committee-rooms is Congress at work.” When it comes to intelligence accountability, a good many legislators have failed to show up for work.

Ultimately, it is incumbent upon all Americans to take a more active role in demanding the protection of this nation’s fundamental constitutional liberties, electing only those who vow to take intelligence accountability seriously. The security side of the equation is well represented by the intelligence bureaucracy and its allies in the private sector (such as drone and satellite manufacturers). But the counterbalance of a well-organized and well-funded coalition of privacy groups has yet to form coherently in the United States.

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