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Take a deep breath. That's supposed to be one way to undermine a lie detector. Inhale deeply before any questions that make you nervous. Applied breathing during polygraph tests is an old trick Russian agents were taught, a small deception in a business that knows all the big ones.

Harold J. Nicholson may have had good reason to be nervous last December. He was sitting down to his third lie-detector test in eight weeks. The first of them had been a routine examination, the kind given every few years to agency employees. Since coming on board in 1980, Nicholson had been...

Quotes of the Day »

RAY KELLY, New York City Police Commissioner, on the arrest of a New Jersey man in one of the nation's most baffling missing-children cases, the disappearance more than three decades ago of 6-year-old Etan Patz.
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