CIA psychological evaluations cover two distinct bodies of work inside the CIA, and John Kiriakou has described both from the inside. One is the recurring psychiatric screening every officer undergoes; its rationale he treats as obvious — “You have to be sane in order to go overseas and carry out these operations.”[1] The other is the long-distance psychological profiling of foreign leaders, done on the analytic side of the building.[2]
Where the psychologists sit
There are, Kiriakou says, a lot of psychologists at the CIA — “A lot” — and he calls the subject “a little bit sensitive.” A small number are assigned to the Office of Medical Services, OMS, and their job is “to make sure that the people the CIA sends overseas are not crazy. A lot of them are. You’d be surprised.” Those who are not are placed on a travel ban “until they’re less crazy.”[3][4]
Most of the rest are split between the two halves of the agency. The intelligence ones work with the analysts, doing psychological evaluations on foreign leaders so that the psychology of those leaders can be used to get a leg up — “whether it’s in, you know, trade negotiations or, you know, issues of war and peace or whatever.” The others are in operations.[4][5]
The schedule
The cadence of the officer screening is fixed. There is a pre-employment evaluation; another three years after hiring; and then one every five years “for the rest of your life.”[6]
Extra sessions are triggered by conduct rather than by the calendar — “unless you do something overseas that requires maybe a little bit of intermediate intervention. Like maybe you beat the hell out of somebody at a traffic stop or make a particularly inexplicable stupid decision in an operation. You’re going to have to get with the shrinks and work it out with them.”[6]
The screening sits alongside the rest of the entry process, which took Kiriakou about sixteen months — the polygraph, the background investigation, “a ton of tests”, and a procedure he calls very invasive and very time-consuming: “they take your hair and your piss and your blood.”[7]
’Sorry to hear you went nuts’
Kiriakou’s illustration of the consequence is the reason he was given a short-term overseas mission just after the 11 September attacks. A branch chief in the Counterterrorism Center approached him and asked whether he would go. Kiriakou agreed, then asked the obvious question — why not send Dave, who covered the issue?[1]
The chief’s answer was that “Dave went nuts. He didn’t pass the psych evaluation.” Kiriakou then went to find Dave to be briefed on the operation anyway, and opened with “Sorry to hear you went nuts.” Dave’s reply was equally matter-of-fact: “Yeah, what are you going to do? It’ll pass. I’ll be okay. I’ll be back up and at them in six months.” Kiriakou’s own assessment: “I don’t know how nuts he was. He was clearly too nuts to go overseas.”[8]
The operational psychologists
The third group is the one Kiriakou says he worked with most closely, and their subject is not the officer but the source. Recruiting a terrorist, he wants two assurances: “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” — and that “he didn’t make the whole thing up” when he volunteered that he was a member of a given group.[5][9]
He names one operation run with both a psychologist and a hypnotist who was a psychiatrist, in which the subject was hypnotised. He declines to retell it in that setting — “I won’t get into the story here, but oh my god, I’ve never seen anything like it in my life.”[9][10]
The rest of the advice is about calibration: “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 [ __ ] 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.”[10]
Kiriakou describes the working relationship as unusually close. Two psychologists, a man and a woman, were his go-to partners on these operations; he still thinks about them, adding that he does not know whether they are alive and that they probably are not.[11]
Evaluating foreign leaders
The other tradition begins before Kiriakou was hired. In graduate school at George Washington University he took a class called the psychology of leadership, taught by the psychiatrist Gerald Post — “Dr Jerry Post” — whom he describes as an eminent figure, on television constantly until his death, the author of more than a dozen books and “really one of the country’s acknowledged experts on longdistance psychological evaluations.” Post’s assignment was to shadow your own boss for a week and write a psychological profile of him; Kiriakou, then working at the United Food and Commercial Workers headquarters on K Street, drew an old-school union organiser whose back had been broken by scabs during a strike.[12][13][14]
When he was hired it was into the office Post had created. Assigned to the Directorate of Intelligence, the analytic arm, he went to the Office of Leadership Analysis — “a Psychology office where we did longdistance uh psychological evaluations of foreign leaders” — and notes that the office no longer exists, though he remembers it as “a very very fun job.”[2][15] Elsewhere he describes its staffing as the psychology, anthropology and sociology PhDs, doing long-distance psychological evaluations of world leaders.[16]
His own portfolio was Iraq. He served as Saddam Hussein’s intelligence-community biographer and worked with the psychologist and the psychiatrist to write psychological profiles of Saddam, his sons, and the members of his cabinet and military leadership.[15]
The office sat next to what was then called the political psychology division — psychiatrists, psychologists, a couple of anthropologists, a sociologist or two — and Kiriakou credits those colleagues with teaching him a great deal, including the agency’s preference for hiring people with sociopathic tendencies rather than sociopaths, on the reasoning that people with no conscience are impossible to control and “blow right through a polygraph because they’re unable to feel guilt.”[17][18]