The Political Psychology Division (PPD) is a Central Intelligence Agency component that produces psychiatric and psychological evaluations of foreign leaders for the use of U.S. policymakers. It was founded in the 1970s by Dr. Gerald Post, who originally joined the CIA as a staff psychiatrist treating CIA case officers in psychological crisis.[1][2]
The division remains operational. “It’s a lasting legacy at the CIA — it’s still there.”[3]
Origin
Post’s original CIA role was as a staff psychiatrist treating case officers who suffered psychological breakdowns. After observing that “there aren’t that many that go crazy, really,” he proposed a new function: long-distance psychiatric evaluation of foreign leaders.[1] Kiriakou has independently confirmed the founder detail in a separate interview, describing the graduate-school professor who recruited him into the CIA as himself a former senior CIA officer and the founder of the division.[4]
Kiriakou’s own posting to the division
Kiriakou himself went to work at the division his recruiting professor had created. By the time he arrived, its name had changed to the Office of Leadership Analysis, and he was assigned as the leadership analyst for Iraq in the first week of January 1990.[5]
Function
The division’s principal output is short psychiatric profiles — typically 500 words — of foreign leaders, embedded in finished CIA intelligence products that are distributed to the President, Vice President, Secretary of State, Secretary of Defense, and National Security Advisor.[6]
Subjects profiled include Saddam Hussein, Deng Xiaoping, and other heads of state and government across the agency’s areas of interest.[6]
The division also produces operational recommendations for the exploitation of foreign leaders visiting the United States. Example: “Oh, President so-and-so is an alcoholic — so get him liquored up, and that’s when you want to start the trade talks.” In a documented operation involving an Allied leader during the Clinton administration — known to enjoy chess and to be an enthusiastic consumer of sausage — division analysts proposed that the leader be served sausage during a state visit to the point of satiation; the resulting drowsiness was expected to make him chatty as he attempted to remain awake during a subsequent chess match with President Clinton, who would ask a list of prepared sensitive questions.[2][7]
Ethics
Issuing a psychiatric determination on an individual without an in-person examination violates standard professional ethical guidance for psychiatrists and psychologists. The division proceeds on the basis that “this isn’t a perfect world.”[8]
In practice
A CIA case officer or analyst writing on a particular foreign country requests profiles from PPD as needed. “I’d call over there and say, ‘Hey, I need 500 words on Saddam Hussein,’ or ‘I need 500 words on Deng Xiaoping,’ and then they would do their psychiatric evaluation in 500 words and I would include it in my bigger piece, and then it would go to the President, the Vice President, Secretary of State, Secretary of Defense, and the National Security Advisor.”[6]
Assigned to the office his recruiter built
Kiriakou describes the placement as a direct consequence of the recruitment paper. Post “liked that paper so much” that Kiriakou was assigned to the office Post had himself created, the political psychology division — “they made me Saddam Hussein’s classified psychologist. And that’s what I did for the next … 4 years.” He was offered the job in 1989 and started on 1 January 1990, in the Directorate of Intelligence, the analytic wing.[9][10]
The Iraq account was regarded as a backwater when he got it. In the office director’s words, as he quotes them, “nothing ever happens there” — the same cabinet since the 1968 revolution — and the career advice attached was “work hard, learn the writing tradecraft, and then you can transfer onto something interesting like Romania.”[10][11] Iraq invaded Kuwait months later, and on the morning of 2 August 1990 he was taken to the Oval Office at twenty-five years old, with the president, vice president, national security adviser, CIA director and his own boss. George H. W. Bush asked the room “Well, now what do I do?”, everyone turned to look at him, and he briefed the crossing of the Kuwaiti border at two that morning and the ruling family’s flight to Saudi Arabia.[12][13]
His stated analytic breakthrough was against the house style of calling adversaries insane — “there’s a bad habit that American leaders have, and that is calling people with whom they disagree crazy.” His own framing was that “Saddam is not crazy. He’s not even angry. He’s a mob boss,” running the country the way a New York Mafia don runs a family, so that his behaviour could be anticipated the way Don Corleone’s could.[14][15]