Dr. Jerrold “Jerry” Post was an American psychiatrist and Central Intelligence Agency officer who ran the agency’s covert campus recruiting effort and founded its Political Psychology Division (also referred to by Kiriakou as the Office of Leadership Analysis). Kiriakou describes him as one of the most highly decorated officers in CIA history and calls himself a “political psychiatrist” — holding a bachelor’s degree, a master’s degree, and a PhD in psychology from Yale, a further PhD in political science from Yale, and an MD from Harvard, and the author of a dozen books on the psychology of world leaders and terrorists.[1][2]
For decades Post worked under cover as a professor at George Washington University, teaching a course on the psychology of leadership — Psychology of Leadership — that doubled as a recruitment funnel: he used it to identify students likely to fit CIA culture. He recruited John Kiriakou this way in 1988, while Kiriakou was a GW graduate student.[1][3][2]
Teaching and recruitment
Post’s GW course examined how governments manipulate other world leaders into doing what they want. A signature lecture used the Yalta Conference: the conference was held at Yalta — rather than in Cuba or Tehran as originally proposed — because Stalin’s intelligence services had reported that Roosevelt was sick and dying. Forcing Roosevelt to travel from Washington to Morocco, then to sub-Saharan Africa, then to Tehran, and finally north to Yalta exhausted him; Stalin insisted on beginning talks immediately, and Roosevelt — too tired to negotiate — conceded Poland to the Soviet sphere simply to be allowed to sleep. “He said that is how you manipulate somebody’s psychology.”[4][5]
Post’s recruitment of Kiriakou began with a final-week assignment requiring students to shadow their employers and produce a psychological evaluation: as a graduate student working at the United Food and Commercial Workers Union, Kiriakou wrote a heavily footnoted profile concluding his boss was “a sociopath with psychopathic and possibly violent tendencies.” Post used the assignment as a screening instrument; students whose evaluations demonstrated the requisite insight were invited to his office. Kiriakou’s paper came back with an A and a note in the margin: “Please see me after class.”[3][6][7][8][9]
The profile grew out of a blow-up with his boss, a tough old union organizer who — Kiriakou says — had once had his back broken by strikebreakers. During an argument in which Kiriakou called him a racist, the boss raised his fists and shouted “my penis is bigger than yours, my penis is bigger than yours,” prompting Kiriakou to quit on the spot and write up the profile from memory that same day.[10][11]
In his office, Post closed the door and disclosed his CIA cover: “I’m not really a professor here. I’m a CIA officer undercover as a professor here, and I’m here to find people who would fit into the CIA’s culture. I think you would fit into the CIA’s culture. Would you like to be a spy?” Kiriakou said yes.[3][12][13][14] Kiriakou calls this practice of a recruiter openly “breaking cover” — commonplace in 1988 but illegal today under the 1993 Equal Employment Opportunity Act, which required applicants to formally apply rather than be personally tapped through an old-boy network.[15][16][17]
Post then placed a telephone call from a Rolodex on his desk — among the cards visible was one reading “Oliver North, home” — dialing a contact named Bob: “Bob, this is Jerry. I’ve got a good one for you. Do you have some time?” He wrote an address on a scrap of paper and told Kiriakou to be there in twenty minutes.[18][19][13]
The address was one subway stop away in Rosslyn, Virginia. Kiriakou was met there by “Bob” — described as 6’6” and 350 pounds, and who turned out to be the CIA’s director of HR — and was scheduled for testing at the GW Medical School auditorium the following Saturday with roughly two hundred other candidates.[20][21] The vetting process — testing, polygraph, and background investigation — took about sixteen months before Kiriakou entered the CIA.[22]
CIA career: the Political Psychology Division
Post’s initial role at the CIA was as a staff psychiatrist treating case officers who suffered psychological breakdown. He observed that “there aren’t that many that go crazy, really” and pitched the agency on a more expansive function: long-distance psychiatric evaluation of foreign leaders.[23]
This evolved into the Political Psychology Division — which Kiriakou elsewhere calls the Office of Leadership Analysis — which Post founded and led. The division produced short psychiatric profiles of foreign leaders, typically 500 words, embedded in finished intelligence products that went to the President, Vice President, Secretary of State, Secretary of Defense, and National Security Advisor.[24] Profiled leaders included Saddam Hussein and Deng Xiaoping.[24]
The division also produced exploitation plans for visiting foreign leaders. One documented case concerned an Allied leader, a friend of Bill Clinton’s, who “loved to play chess and loved, loved, loved to eat sausage.” Post’s analysts proposed that during the leader’s state visit he be served sausage to the point of satiation; the resulting drowsiness was expected to make him chatty as he attempted to stay awake, at which point Clinton — already invited to play chess with him — would ask a list of sensitive prepared questions.[25][26]
The practice of issuing psychiatric determinations on foreign leaders without an in-person examination is regarded as unethical under standard psychiatric practice. Post and the division proceeded on the basis that “this isn’t a perfect world.”[27] Per Kiriakou, the division endures: “It’s a lasting legacy at the CIA, it’s still there.”[28]
Outside the agency, Post built a public academic profile writing on the same subject matter: he authored a biography of Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda and was a frequent television commentator, appearing on outlets including the Discovery Channel, National Geographic, and CNN — a public visibility Kiriakou says continued throughout and after his own CIA career.[22]
”Sociopathic tendencies” and continued mentorship
Post — via the Office of Leadership Analysis, where Kiriakou was ultimately placed at his urging — saw in Kiriakou not only writing talent but “sociopathic tendencies.” Kiriakou draws a distinction, per Post’s own framework: true sociopaths lack a conscience and can pass a polygraph unaffected by deception, while people with sociopathic tendencies still register a conscience on the polygraph yet remain willing to work in moral, legal, and ethical gray areas.[29]
Post remained available to Kiriakou throughout his CIA career and offered specific tradecraft advice — including the technique of focusing on a fixed point on the wall during the agency’s polygraph examination and answering yes-or-no without reflection — that Kiriakou credits with helping him pass his entry polygraph.[30] “Jerry was good to me, really good to me, even later in life he was even better to me.”[21] Regarded as a legend at the agency, Post told Kiriakou directly that while he himself could open certain doors, Kiriakou alone would have to walk through them and perform once inside.[31]
Years later, when Kiriakou blew the whistle on the CIA’s torture program, Post called to congratulate him: “You did the right thing,” he said — and told Kiriakou that very reaction proved he was not, in fact, a true sociopath.[32]
Death
Post remained a dear friend to Kiriakou until his death, of COVID-19, in 2021.[33][34] Among his last pieces of advice to Kiriakou was to do the New York Times crossword puzzle every day to keep his mind fresh — advice Kiriakou says he followed while writing a book in prison, in longhand.[34]