Michael Flynn is involved in Trump’s weirdest scandal yet.
How the incoming national security adviser got tangled up in the Trump administration’s weirdest scandal yet.
Can brain waves be used to detect lies? What even is a lie?
The weirdest scandal of the Trump transition—the one involving brain electrodes, Russian spies, Hillary Clinton’s email server, and an expert in kung fu—probably should have been a bigger deal. But I’m sorry to say that Bloomberg reporters David Kocieniewski and Peter Robison’s gift to journalism, published on the morning of Dec. 23, barely registered before it disappeared into the tinsel.
Their delightful scoop, headlined “Trump Aide Partnered With Firm Run by Man With Alleged KGB Ties,” describes a business link between Donald Trump’s incoming national security adviser, Michael Flynn, and a shady biotech startup called Brainwave Science. In February, Brainwave, which sells a “helmet-like headpiece fitted with sensors” as a sort of lie detector for law enforcement and counterterrorism efforts, brought on Flynn as an adviser. At that point, a biotech entrepreneur named Subu Kota was serving on Brainwave’s board of directors. As Kocieniewski and Robison point out, Kota (whose name has since been scrubbed from the company website) happens to have been indicted for trying to sell hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of stolen micro-organisms, as well as classified information on missile-defense systems and stealth bombers, to KGB agents during the Cold War. (He signed a plea agreement admitting to the sale of the biotech material in 1996). Flynn, who has been criticized for his own coziness with Russian officials, allegedly promised to help Kota’s company sell its sensor helmet to U.S. agencies.
This would seem to be the perfect story for the Age of Trump, encapsulating as it does a sad mélange of foreign intelligence, questionable business deals, and suspect science. But a closer look at the Brainwave scandal suggests an even deeper resonance with our present, post-factual predicament. It’s a story, after all, that layers lies on top of lies about lies: whether lies can be detected in a person’s brain waves; whether people have been telling lies about that method of detecting lies; whether other people have been telling lies about the telling of those lies; and, finally, inevitably—insanely—whether it means anything to “lie” at all, since according to the neuroscientist at the center of this mess, each one of us has the mental power to bend reality to our will.
The Bloomberg story focuses on Subu Kota, but “Braingate” really starts with the neuroscientist, Larry Farwell of Seattle. Farwell comes from a family of professors and ship captains: His grandfather Raymond was an expert in naval transportation and commerce who wrote a classic book on how to avoid maritime collisions; his father, George, was a physicist who studied under Enrico Fermi and worked on the Manhattan Project; his sister Jacqueline is a pediatric neurologist. Like George, Jacqueline, and Farwell’s uncle Raymond Jr. (another noted seaman), Farwell got his bachelor’s degree at Harvard University. For 10 years after graduation he invested in real estate and studied transcendental meditation, among other avocational pursuits. (He’s also been a semiprofessional swing-dance performer and a broadsword-wielding black belt in kung fu with a penchant for the flying kick.) Finally, in 1984, Farwell went back to school for a Ph.D. in neuroscience in the lab of the brain-electrode pioneer Emanuel Donchin.
Farwell had shown that brain electrodes could be used to read a person’s mind—but only when the message had been spelled out on purpose. Could the P300 signal reveal information that a person meant to hide from view? Farwell had another project in development that aimed to do exactly this. He based his work on a classic form of lie detection called the “Guilty Knowledge Test” (or else, the “Concealed Information Test”), in which suspects are asked a series of multiple-choice questions related to a crime, for example: “Was the getaway car a red Ford, a yellow Toyota, a gray Chevy, or a white Plymouth?” The interrogator checks the suspect’s physiological responses to each potential answer. According to the theory of the test, a guilty person—and only a guilty person—would know the true answer to the question, and he might give himself away by responding to that answer in a subtle or unconscious way. His heart rate might begin to quicken, or his palms would start to sweat. Though such measures are widely used for lie-detector tests conducted by the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration, and other government agencies, they are not very reliable.
By the time that paper had been published, Farwell was already on the payroll as a full-time research consultant for the CIA. (The agency would provide him with about $1 million in research funding between 1991 and 1993.) Eventually he started up a company, the Human Brain Research Laboratory Inc., based around his guilty knowledge test and the notion that a suspect’s presence at a crime scene would leave an indelible trace, like a set of fingerprints, smeared across the circuits of his cortex. If an investigator could figure out the right questions to ask during a brain-recording session, she could, in effect, dust the suspect’s brain for evidence. Any hidden knowledge of the crime would reveal itself as a telltale P300.
Meanwhile, other EEG researchers (including Emanuel Donchin, who helped create the test) suggested that the P300 lie-detection method was not as reliable as Farwell was suggesting, and certainly not appropriate for real-world applications. Among other potential problems, the P300 signal seems to have more to do with a subject’s belief than actual fact—even false memories are known to yield a positive result. Then there’s the fact that the test is only as good as the questions that are used to probe for guilty knowledge. How would the investigator know exactly which specific details a guilty person is likely to remember, especially when the test may be given weeks, months or even years after a crime has been committed? Others argued that the brain-fingerprinting test, like the classic polygraph test, could be beaten by a savvy subject, or undermined by a subject who wasn’t that observant in the first place.
Farwell responded with his own display of scholarly indignation, accusing Donchin and the other authors of having distorted facts in their rebuttal and insisting that data could still be useful even if it wasn’t in a peer-reviewed journal. (Farwell notes that some of the data in question have since been published. The original studies were classified, he says, which led to some delays.) In any case, the latter point is true, no doubt; the published record carries just a small and biased sample of all scientific research, and it’s often very useful to consider work that hasn’t made its way to print.
But Farwell has been making some fishy-sounding claims. First and foremost, that his lie-detector test has near-perfect accuracy—a finding that is out of whack with other research in the field. A recent meta-analysis of P300 lie-detection research finds the test has an accuracy of about 88 percent. That isn’t bad at all, but it’s also not much better than what you’d get from more conventional lie-detector tests that measure people’s sweaty palms and blood pressure. (In fact, a version of the Guilty Knowledge Test based on standard polygraph measures is widely used by police in Japan.) Farwell answers that this meta-analysis surveyed all versions of the P300 test, not just his. When the test is run the way he does it—according to his list of 20 standards for the field—he claims the error rate does indeed drop close to zero.
Farwell has drawn some rather more adventurous conclusions from other work that never made its way through peer review. In the 1990s, as he wound down his research contracts with the CIA and FBI, Farwell took a break to spend a year working in an inpatient mental institution—“just to round out my experience,” he told me, “and get more hands-on experience of people who were really very seriously deranged.” He also said that he used leftover money from the government contracts to support himself as he pursued a private line of research into the nature of reality.
In 1999, Farwell wrote up the results of these experiments in a scientific treatise on quantum theory and the power of the mind, called How Consciousness Commands Matter: The New Scientific Revolution and the Evidence That Anything Is Possible. The book begins with a description of the brain-computer interface that he’d invented with Donchin in the 1980s—the device that enabled people to control a keyboard with their brains, by sending signals through a set of EEG electrodes. But Farwell had begun to wonder whether the electrodes might be extraneous. What if we could control the world, starting at the quantum level, just by thinking hard enough?
Subu Kota, the espionage-linked businessman, joined Brainwave as a board member in 2013. In August 2014, Ika announced Brainwave’s official worldwide launch, claiming to have sold Farwell’s technology to police in Singapore and to a police department in Florida. In February 2016, Brainwave added Michael Flynn—who had been fired from his post as head of the Defense Intelligence Agency around the time of the company launch—to its advisory board. Two months after that, a friend of Flynn’s named Brian McCauley, who had just retired from the FBI, joined the board as well.
McCauley’s presence on the board would soon provide evidence for the interconnectedness of all things, or at least the interconnectedness of all scandalous shenanigans in Washington. In mid-October, the Washington Post reported on McCauley’s link to Hillary Clinton’s private email server and to documents related to the attack in Benghazi. In 2015, while still at the FBI, McCauley had proposed trading favors with the State Department, whereby the bureau would agree not to classify a Benghazi-related message from Clinton’s server. (He says that he quickly rescinded the offer when he learned the contents of the email.) Both McCauley’s and Flynn’s names have lately disappeared from the Brainwave website. Ika says they had to sever ties because both had taken jobs in the Trump administration.
According to Ika, that story has it backward: Farwell is the one who lied. Ika says that most of Farwell’s patents had already expired when their deal was signed—and that Farwell hid this fact from him. In October 2013, Farwell reassigned the (mostly expired) patents from Brainwave Science back to their original owner, a company called American Scientific Innovations, run by one of his high school classmates from Seattle. (The patents have since been offloaded to another company affiliated with Farwell.) Ika claims that Farwell did not have the authority to make this transfer and that he falsely presented himself to the U.S. Patent Office as a “managing member of the company” so as to steal Brainwave’s intellectual property. After discovering the reassignment in July, Ika says, he called the FBI and terminated the consulting contract with Farwell.
Ika also stands behind his claim of having signed brain-fingerprinting contracts with police in Singapore and Florida—though it turns out that the latter deal, at least, began and ended with a free-trial period. No money was exchanged., and the technology was never put to use.
“I’ve told you the truth about Mr. Ika, and I take no pleasure in telling you those things,” Farwell told me in response to these claims and counterclaims of fraud. Ika’s version is rife with misinformation, in his telling. The original deal from 2012 was never signed, he says, so the original transfer of the patents was itself a fraudulent attempt to pilfer his intellectual property. Also: He and his business received 49 percent of Brainwave Science, not 45 percent as Ika claimed; and his consulting contract had been for $11,000 per month, as opposed to $10,000.
By this point what I’d understood to be the truth now seemed to be, as Farwell might say, “a tiny portion of reality.” I had no idea exactly who was lying and to what extent. Did Brainwave really sell its product to police in Singapore? Does Brainwave’s lie detector really work as advertised? Does Farwell’s? Who owns those patents, and why should that matter if they’re all expired anyway? How involved was Michael Flynn? Did Subu Kota sell secrets to the KGB? And while we’re at it, how much did Hillary Clinton know about Benghazi?
It would be nice if we could just slap EEG arrays on everybody’s heads and find the truth in the dips of their P300s. In fact, that’s just what Farwell proposed to me: “We can resolve all this,” he said, “if everyone would agree to a brain-fingerprinting test.” Someday, perhaps. Whatever one thinks of Farwell’s science, recent academic research on the P300 lie-detection method has been somewhat promising. A version of the test developed at Northwestern University, for example, has now delivered greater than 90 percent accuracy in lab experiments. In October, an independent group of researchers in Hungary successfully replicated that work. We may yet find a way to use our brain waves to navigate through squishy facts.
Until that dream is realized, though, we’re all stuck here on this lowly plane of consciousness—where it often feels like anyone can make his own reality, and even find great success, living by the facts inside his head.