CIA operational psychologists are, in John Kiriakou’s account, the part of the agency’s psychological staff that works alongside case officers rather than analysts. He described the structure in answer to a viewer’s question, calling it “a little bit sensitive.”[1]
The three groupings
There are, he says, a great many psychologists at the CIA — “A lot.” A small number are assigned to the Office of Medical Services, “there to make sure that the people the CIA sends overseas are not crazy. A lot of them are. You’d be surprised. And then they’re they’re put on a travel ban until they’re less crazy.”[2]
The rest divide by directorate. The intelligence side “work with the analysts to do psychological evaluations on foreign leaders … How we can then use the psychology of foreign leaders to get a leg up. Whether it’s in, you know, trade negotiations or, you know, issues of war and peace or whatever.” That work is treated separately under the CIA Political Psychology Division.[2] “The other ones are in operations.”[3]
What the operational side is for
Kiriakou states his own use of them plainly: “I worked very closely with the CIA’s team of operational psychologists.” The first function is vetting. Recruiting a terrorist, he says, “I want to make sure that the guy’s not nuts, that we’re not going to use him in an operation and he’s going to turn around and kill me in the middle of the operation” — or that “he didn’t make the whole thing up” when he volunteered that he belonged to a particular group.[3][4]
The second is calibration during the handling itself. “sometimes you need a psychologist to advise you as to just how far you can push a guy before he cracks. Maybe you want him to crack. Maybe you want to ruin his life cuz he’s an [expletive] or he’s a double agent or he’s a plant or whatever. Or maybe you want to push him so he gives you as much information as he can, but you don’t want him to crack. You don’t want him to ruin his life.”[5]
He mentions one operation run with a psychologist and “a hypnotist who was a psychiatrist” who hypnotised a subject — declining on that occasion to retell it, beyond saying he had never seen anything like it in his life.[4]
The relationship
The working closeness is the part Kiriakou dwells on. “you you find yourself becoming very close to the psychologist. There were a couple who were my go-to. Two psychologists who were my go-to partners on these operations, a man and a woman.” He adds, without naming them: “I still think about them all these years later. I I don’t even know if they’re still alive. They probably aren’t.”[6]