“I am just an ordinary girl in a pink sweater, I swear,” says the Serbian politician Dijana Hrkalovic. In February of this year, the former state secretary of the Ministry of the Interior, who is on trial for alleged influence peddling, went on a television talk show to try to clear her name. She is accused of helping an organized criminal gang while she was in office.
“As a child, I dreamed of being a person who profiles the perpetrators of murder. I was trained by the FBI for this,” Hrkalovic tells the host on the pro-government Pink TV channel in a studio in the Serbian capital of Belgrade.
The heavily made-up host holds up a photo of Hrkalovic as a child, perched on Santa’s lap next to a Christmas tree. Her red manicured nails frame the picture, intended to show Hrkalovic’s proclaimed innocence, instead of someone associated with the soccer hooligan and cocaine trafficker Veljko Belivuk, whom she is accused of aiding.
“If I had ever met that man, I wouldn’t be sitting here,” Hrkalovic says. To remove all doubt, she adds, “Put me on any polygraph you want.”
It was not the first time that a Serbian politician had offered themselves up for a lie detector test in the court of public opinion. Investigative journalists have frequently linked organized crime and corruption to members of the ruling coalition, allegations that are often met by politicians with a willingness to take lie detector tests.
Over the last few years, several high-ranking officials have taken polygraph tests and talked about the results in state-controlled media. They include ex-spy chief and Deputy Prime Minister Aleksandar Vulin, the head of the anti-narcotics department in the Belgrade police, and President Aleksandar Vucic himself — also in relation to gang leader Belivuk. Politicians are — perhaps unsurprisingly, considering that viewers do not see the test results — declared innocent or uncompromised by their examiners.
Sometimes, politicians get hooked up to lie detector machines on live television, which has shot polygraph testing into Serbia’s mainstream, says private detective Nikola Novak.
Lie detector tests sell like ice cream on hot days, says 39-year-old Novak, who has carried out such polygraph tests on TV. “I could close my company tomorrow and live like a king for the rest of my life,” he told me in an interview in Belgrade in May of this year.
Novak’s customers range from people wanting to know if their spouses (or indeed lovers) are faithful, to companies trying to prevent employees from selling company secrets. The examination is also used by both charity and for-profit organizations that run rehabilitation programs, hiring Novak to test recovering gambling addicts.
Lie detectors measure changes in breathing patterns, heart rate, blood pressure and skin conductivity through sensors attached to the fingers and chest. The examiner first asks the subject a set of neutral control questions, then the questions in relation to which they wish to test the subject’s honesty, to measure potential physiological deviations. “When a person lies, then it shows in the results.” Novak points to his computer where thin black lines, recorded on a graph, record spikes in the different measures. A peak in the line indicates a lie, he explains.
As well as polygraph examinations, Novak’s private detective agency, which is called Anonimus, offers a range of other services to private clients and companies, including employee vetting and honey trap services. “Lawyers and state prosecutors don’t have enough resources. The police prioritize drugs, murders and rapes. We take care of the rest.” His agency is prospering: Novak employs around 15 people, has led over 1,000 investigations, and carried out around 3,000 polygraph tests in the last six years.
“I want to thank them for this free advertisement,” Novak says, jokingly, referring to Serbia’s ruling politicians. The private detective is sitting in his basement office in the hilly embassy district of Belgrade. Novak is short with blue eyes and, like thousands of other Serbian men, sports an extreme buzz cut and a neatly trimmed beard. He wears black sweatpants, a blue sweater and Nike sneakers. “I just came back from secret surveillance,” he says by way of explanation; he would not look out of place on the bustling streets of Belgrade.
The walls are adorned with stock photos of detectives, certificates of international polygraph associations and a poster of the actor Hugh Laurie from the TV series “House,” in which his character, Dr. Gregory House, also uncovers the truth, albeit fictionally.
Novak soon receives his first client of the day — a young woman who must take a polygraph test as part of the hiring process for a new job. She takes a seat and Novak drapes a cord around her chest and attaches two clips to her manicured fingernails. After 20 minutes of a series of yes-or-no questions about subjects ranging from telling company secrets to family members and whether she has stolen from an employer, he unties her. “If you have lied your employer will know,” he tells her in jest, before shutting the door.
Novak learned his craft from former agents of Serbia’s secret service and the American Federal Bureau of Investigation, or FBI. “The Americans invented the polygraph,” he says, “and so I traveled to San Bernardino, California, to get trained there.” He was trained by former members of the FBI, Novak says. The private detective is proud that he is the very first Serbian examiner accredited by the American Polygraph Association (APA), a Tennessee-based organization representing more than 2,800 polygraph examiners in the United States, including senior special FBI agents.
Novak has also become something of a celebrity: He is a sought-after guest on news and talk shows and has even had his own show on Blic TV, a popular Belgrade-based cable television station, where he hooked celebrities up to lie detectors, including Marija Serifovic, Serbia’s 2007 Eurovision Song Contest winner, and Sara Jovanovic, a model, singer and contestant in the TV music competition “Prvi Glas Srbije” (the Serbian version of “America’s Got Talent”). Recalling a show at the start of the polygraph craze, on which he oversaw a test on the leader of the Socialist Party, Ivica Dacic, he says, “I wanted to popularize polygraphs in Serbia, and it worked.”
Novak is not the only private detective in Serbia making money from the booming industry of lying. Over the last few years, the demand for private security services — many offering polygraph tests — has surged. Companies are “sprouting like mushrooms after rain,” says an ex-police officer turned criminology professor in the district of Zemun, Belgrade, who has trained tens of Serbian police investigators. He spoke with New Lines on condition of anonymity as he is not authorized by his managers at the Ministry of the Interior to speak to the press. He says that the police use the technology in criminal investigations, for example, to hone in on or exclude suspects.
There is a professional private detective association, the Serbian Association of Detectives, which represents entrepreneurs and companies. The Belgrade-based association cooperates with the Justice Ministry, the Ministry of the Interior and Serbian universities, its website says. They helped Dacic draft a Detective Agency Law when he was minister of internal affairs that allows private detectives to offer polygraph testing to their clients. Before the law was approved in 2013, only the state police could use polygraphs as part of their criminal investigations.
Novak also set up a private institution, the European Polygraph Academy in Belgrade, that offers training. The institute is recognized by the APA and trains people in the art of lie detecting. Anyone with a higher education degree can apply, except for applicants with felony convictions. The school’s curriculum is based on the U.S. Department of Defense Polygraph Institute, a federal agency that trains the FBI, the CIA, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), the National Security Agency and U.S. military services on how to use polygraph testing. A range of instructors, including former police officers, ex-secret service personnel and ex-military staff, have provided their insights. One instructor, Tom Kelly, a U.S. citizen, spent six years in the U.S. Marine Corps and worked for the DEA, including in Colombia and Venezuela, for 20 years.
While law enforcement and private detectives often gravitate toward polygraphs, scientists are more skeptical. “Today, there is solid empirical evidence showing that the use of the polygraph has no scientific validity and is not considered a scientific procedure, nor are the results obtained reliable,” says clinical psychologist Leposava Kron from the Institute of Criminological and Sociological Research in Belgrade.
The underlying assumption is that when a person lies, they experience stress or anxiety, which triggers changes in these responses, says Kron. The problem is that those reactions can also be influenced by a range of factors other than lying, such as fear or anger, alcohol or drug use, or medical conditions.
The subjective interpretation of results by the polygraph examiner may also lead to inaccuracy, scientists say. This can lead to false positives, where truthful people appear to be lying, as well as false negatives, where deceptive individuals remain calm and go undetected. “Sociopaths skilled at manipulation can ‘fool’ the polygraph, since the act of lying for manipulative purposes is not a problem for psychopaths,” Kron explains.
This is why in Serbia, like in most countries in the world, lie detector tests can’t be used as evidence in criminal trials. In some jurisdictions, however, such as the U.S. state of New Mexico, Japan and Russia, polygraph results may be considered by the courts under specific conditions or at the discretion of the judge. In India and Israel, they can be used in civil cases.
This criticism, however, has not reduced Serbian politicians’ interest in lie detectors. If they are lying, inaccuracy is a feature, not a bug.
“Politicians use polygraphs to scrub their biography of accusations or prove someone innocent or guilty. They roll out experts, have talk shows — it’s all part of a media spectacle,” says researcher Sasa Djordjevic of the Global Initiative against Transnational Organized Crime. A polygraph can’t change a judge’s decision. But with an ineffective judiciary, it can be a handy tool to mask real problems or deflect attention. “When there’s a scandal or accusation, it’s like a political race to get out in the media to clear someone’s name or point fingers,” he tells me when we meet in a cafe in Belgrade.
In Serbia, while corruption is rife, accused politicians rarely end up in the courtroom. Even when they do, court cases can continue for many years without judges reaching a verdict. The judiciary is subject to political pressure and influence, according to the European Commission’s most recent report on Serbia’s bid for accession to the European Union. Legal loopholes and inefficiencies in judicial processes also result in lengthy trials and low conviction rates for corruption offenses.
In his office in downtown Belgrade, Miroslav Milicevic, the president of the Anti-Corruption Council, explains that politicians’ use of polygraphs to gain attention feeds into a media ecosystem dominated by fake news, pro-government bots and propaganda. Independent journalists find it hard to compete with the stream of misinformation, he says, and politicians exploit this chaos to their advantage, driving mistrust in the system. By using polygraphs on TV, the ruling party attempts to whitewash their criminal connections with political spin, says Milicevic.
It helps that a large part of the media is controlled by the ruling party. After the Yugoslav Wars, Serbia endured nearly a decade of international sanctions, and crime became an easy route to wealth. During this time, in the 1990s, a new class of nouveau riche emerged, with “a lot of money, political power and contacts with the parties,” Milicevic explains. These “tycoons bought the media,” he says. “The result? They are above the law.”
Corruption has flourished and public distrust of politicians continues to grow. Columnists make fun of Vucic’s obsession with the polygraphs, memes about which do the rounds on social media. In 2021, a survey by the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts in Belgrade suggested that 1 in 3 people in Serbia believed that polygraphs show the truth — a large proportion but far from the vast majority.
Novak is not fazed by the criticism. “Here people are jealous when you are successful,” he shrugs. It is a Saturday but his phone is ringing constantly. “Not a moment of rest,” he sighs.
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