Dr. John W. Gittinger
Programmers
[2014 July] CIA Bonded With Nazis To
Sex Traffic, Kill Naked Children At Human Hunting Parties?
The Ninth Circle Satanic Child Sacrifice Cult could easily hide their crimes.
They were well trained by Hitler’s mind control experts from Nazi Germany.
Barnett’s Nazi grandfather’s pedophile network included Mullen and Nicola’s
perpetrator Dr. John W. Gittinger. In the Independent
Australia she stated that as a young child, “Gittinger abused and raped
me.”
10. The Gittinger Assessment System
With one exception, the CIA's behavioral research—whether on LSD or on
electroshock—seems to have had more impact on the outside world than on Agency
operations. That exception grew out of the work of the MKULTRA program's
resident genius, psychologist John Gittinger. While on the CIA payroll, toiling
to find ways to manipulate people, Gittinger created a unique system for
assessing personality and predicting future behavior. He called his
method—appropriately—the Personality Assessment System (PAS). Top Agency
officials have been so impressed that they have given the Gittinger system a
place in most agent-connected activities. To be sure, most CIA operators would
not go nearly so far as a former Gittinger aide who says, "The PAS was the key
to the whole clandestine business." Still, after most of the touted mind
controllers had given up or been sent back home, it was Gittinger, the staff
psychologist, who sold his PAS system to cynical, anti-gimmick case officers in
the Agency's Clandestine Services. And during the Cuban missile crisis, it was
Gittinger who was summoned to the White House to give his advice on how
Khrushchev would react to American pressure.
A heavy-set, goateed native of Oklahoma who in his later years came to
resemble actor Walter Slezak, Gittinger looked much more like someone's kindly
grandfather than a calculating theoretician. He had an almost insatiable
curiosity about personality, and he spent most of his waking hours tinkering
with and trying to perfect his system. So obsessed did he become that he always
had the feeling even after other researchers had verified large chunks of the
PAS and after the CIA had put it into operational use—that the whole thing was
"a kind of paranoid delusion."
Gittinger started working on his system even before he joined the CIA in
1950. Prior to that, he had been director of psychological services at the state
hospital in Norman, Oklahoma. His high-sounding title did not reflect the fact
that he was the only psychologist on the staff. A former high school guidance
counselor and Naval lieutenant commander during World War II, he was starting
out at age 30 with a master's degree. Every day he saw several hundred patients
whose mental problems included virtually everything in the clinical textbooks.
Numerous tramps and other itinerants, heading West in search of the good
life in California, got stuck in Oklahoma during the cold winter months and
managed to get themselves admitted to Gittinger's hospital. In warmer seasons of
the year, quite a few of them worked, when they had to, as cooks or dishwashers
in the short-order hamburger stands that dotted the highways in the days before
fast food. They functioned perfectly well in these jobs until freezing nights
drove them from their outdoor beds. The hospital staff usually called them
"seasonal schizophrenics" and gave them shelter until spring. Gittinger included
them in the psychological tests he was so fond of running on his patients.
As he measured the itinerants on the Wechsler intelligence scale, a standard
IQ test with 11 parts,[1] Gittinger made a chance
observation that became, he says, the "bedrock" of his whole system. He noticed
that the short-order cooks tended to do well on the digit-span subtest which
rated their ability to remember numbers. The dishwashers, in contrast, had a
poor memory for digits. Since the cooks had to keep track of many complex
orders—with countless variations of medium rare, onions, and hold-the-mayo—their
retentive quality served them well.
Gittinger also noticed that the cooks had different personality traits than
the dishwashers. The cooks seemed able to maintain a high degree of efficiency
in a distracting environment while customers were constantly barking new orders
at them. They kept their composure by falling back on their internal resources
and generally shutting themselves off from the commotion around them. Gittinger
dubbed this personality type, which was basically inner-directed, an "Internalizer"
(abbreviated "I"). The dishwashers, on the other hand, did not have the ability
to separate themselves from the external world. In order to perform their jobs,
they had to be placed off in some far corner of the kitchen with their dirty
pots and pans, or else all the tumult of the place diverted them from their
duty. Gittinger called the dishwasher type an "Externalizer" (E). He found that
if he measured a high digit span in any person—not just a short-order cook—he
could make a basic judgment about personality.
From observation, Gittinger concluded that babies were born with distinct
personalities which then were modified by environmental factors. The
Internalized—or I—baby was caught up in himself and tended to be seen as a
passive child; hence, the world usually called him a "good baby." The E tot was
more interested in outside stimuli and attention, and thus was more likely to
cause his parents problems by making demands. Gittinger believed that the way
parents and other authority figures reacted to the child helped to shape his
personality. Adults often pressured or directed the I child to become more
outgoing and the E one to become more self-sufficient. Gittinger found he could
measure the compensations, or adjustments, the child made on another Wechsler
subtest, the one that rated arithmetic ability. He noticed that in later life,
when the person was subject to stress, these compensations tended to disappear,
and the person reverted to his original personality type. Gittinger wrote that
his system "makes possible the assessment of fundamental discrepancies between
the surface personality and the underlying personality structure—discrepancies
that produce tension, conflict, and anxiety."
Besides the E-I dimensions, Gittinger identified two other fundamental sets
of personality characteristics that he could measure with still other Wechsler
subtests. Depending on how a subject did on the block design subtest, Gittinger
could tell if he were Regulated (R) or Flexible (F). The Regulated person had no
trouble learning by rote but usually did not understand what he learned. The
Flexible individual, on the other hand, had to understand something before he
learned it. Gittinger noted that R children could learn to play the piano
moderately well with comparatively little effort. The F child most often hated
the drudgery of piano lessons, but Gittinger observed that the great concert
pianists tended to be Fs who had persevered and mastered the instrument.
Other psychologists had thought up personality dimensions similar to
Gittinger's E and I, R and F. even if they defined them somewhat differently.
Gittinger's most original contribution came in a third personality dimension,
which revealed how well people were able to adapt their social behavior to the
demands of the culture they lived in. Gittinger found he could measure this
dimension with the picture arrangement Wechsler subtest, and he called it the
Role Adaptive (A) or Role Uniform (U). It corresponded to "charisma," since
other people were naturally attracted to the A person while they tended to
ignore the U.
All this became immensely more complicated as Gittinger measured
compensations and modifications with other Wechsler subtests. This complexity
alone worked against the acceptance of his system by the outside world, as did
the fact that he based much of it on ideas that ran contrary to accepted
psychological doctrine—such as his heretical notion that genetic differences
existed. It did not help, either, that Gittinger was a non-Ph.D. whose theory
sprang from the kitchen habits of vagrants in Oklahoma.
Any one of these drawbacks might have stifled Gittinger in the academic
world, but to the pragmatists in the CIA, they were irrelevant. Gittinger's
strange ideas seemed to work. With uncanny accuracy, he could look at nothing
more than a subject's Wechsler numbers, pinpoint his weaknesses, and show how to
turn him into an Agency spy. Once Gittinger's boss, Sid Gottlieb, and other high
CIA officials realized how Gittinger's PAS could be used to help case officers
handle agents, they gave the psychologist both the time and money to improve his
system under the auspices of the Human Ecology Society.
Although he was a full-time CIA employee, Gittinger worked under Human
Ecology cover through the 1950s. Agency officials considered the PAS to be one
of the Society's greatest triumphs, definitely worth continuing after the
Society was phased out. In 1962 Gittinger and his co-workers moved their base of
operations from the Human Ecology headquarters in New York to a CIA proprietary
company, set up especially for them in Washington and called Psychological
Assessment Associates. Gittinger served as president of the company, whose cover
was to provide psychological services to American firms overseas. He personally
opened a branch office in Tokyo (later moved to Hong Kong) to service CIA
stations in the Far East. The Washington staff, which grew to about 15
professionals during the 1960s, handled the rest of the world by sending
assessment specialists off for temporary visits.
Hundreds of thousands of dollars in Human Ecology grants and then even more
money in Psychological Assessment contracts—all CIA funds—flowed out to verify
and expand the PAS. For example, the Society gave about $140,000 to David
Saunders of the Educational Testing Service, the company that prepares the
College Board exams. Saunders, who knew about the Agency's involvement, found a
correlation between brain (EEG) patterns and results on the digit-span test, and
he helped Gittinger apply the system to other countries. In this regard,
Gittinger and his colleagues understood that the Wechsler battery of subtests
had a cultural bias and that a Japanese E had a very different personality from,
say, a Russian E. To compensate, they worked out localized versions of the PAS
for various nations around the world.
While at the Human Ecology group, Gittinger supervised much of the Society's
other research in the behavioral sciences, and he always tried to interest
Society grantees in his system. He looked for ways to mesh their research with
his theories—and vice versa. Some, like Carl Rogers and Charles Osgood, listened
politely and did not follow up. Yet Gittinger would always learn something from
their work that he could apply to the PAS. A charming man and a skillful
raconteur, Gittinger convinced quite a few of the other grantees of the validity
of his theories and the importance of his ideas. Careful not to threaten the
egos of his fellow professionals, he never projected an air of superiority.
Often he would leave people even the skeptical—openmouthed in awe as he painted
unnervingly accurate personality portraits of people he had never met. Indeed,
people frequently accused him of somehow having cheated by knowing the subject
in advance or peeking at his file.
Gittinger patiently and carefully taught his system to his colleagues, who
all seem to have views of him that range from great respect to pure idolatry.
For all his willingness to share the PAS, Gittinger was never able to show
anyone how to use the system as skillfully as he did. Not that he did not try;
he simply was a more talented natural assessor than any of the others. Moreover,
his system was full of interrelations and variables that he instinctively
understood but had not bothered to articulate. As a result, he could look at
Wechsler scores and pick out behavior patterns which would be valid and which no
one else had seen. Even after Agency officials spent a small fortune trying to
computerize the PAS, they found, as one psychologist puts it, the machine
"couldn't tie down all the variables" that Gittinger was carrying around in his
head.
Some Human Ecology grantees, like psychiatrist Robert Hyde, were so
impressed with Gittinger's system that they made the PAS a major part of their
own research. Hyde routinely gave Wechslers to his subjects before plying them
with liquor, as part of the Agency's efforts to find out how people react to
alcohol. In 1957 Hyde moved his research team from Boston Psychopathic Hospital,
where he had been America's first LSD tripper, to Butler Health Center in
Providence. There, with Agency funds, Hyde built an experimental party room in
the hospital, complete with pinball machine, dartboard, and bamboo bar stools.
From behind a two-way mirror, psychologists watched the subjects get tipsy and
made careful notes on their reaction to alcohol. Not surprisingly, the observers
found that pure Internalizers became more withdrawn after several drinks, and
that uncompensated Es were more likely to become garrulous—in essence, sloppy
drunks. Thus Gittinger was able to make generalizations about the different ways
an I or an E responded to alcohol.[2] Simply by knowing how
people scored on the Wechsler digit-span test, he could predict how they would
react to liquor. Hyde and Harold Abramson at Mount Sinai Hospital made the same
kind of observations for LSD finding, among other things, that an E was more
likely than an I to have a bad trip. (Apparently, an I is more accustomed than
an E to "being into his own head" and losing touch with external reality.)
At Gittinger's urging, other Human Ecology grantees gave the Wechsler
battery to their experimental subjects and sent him the scores. He was building
a unique data base on all phases of human behavior, and he needed samples of as
many distinct groups as possible. By getting the scores of actors, he could make
generalizations about what sort of people made good role-players. Martin Orne at
Harvard sent in scores of hypnosis subjects, so Gittinger could separate the
personality patterns of those who easily went into a trance from those who could
not be hypnotized. Gittinger collected Wechslers of businessmen, students,
high-priced fashion models, doctors, and just about any other discrete group he
could find a way to have tested. In huge numbers, the Wechslers came flowing
in—29,000 sets in all by the early 1970s—each one accompanied by biographic
data. With the 10 subtests he used and at least 10 possible scores on each of
those, no two Wechsler results in the whole sample ever looked exactly the same.
Gittinger kept a computer printout of all 29,000 on his desk, and he would
fiddle with them almost every day—looking constantly for new truths that could
be drawn out of them.
John Gittinger was interested in all facets of personality, but because
he worked for the CIA, he emphasized deviant forms. He particularly sought out
Wechslers of people who had rejected the values of their society or who had some
vice—hidden or otherwise—that caused others to reject them. By studying the
scores of the defectors who had come over to the West, Gittinger hoped to
identify common characteristics of men who had become traitors to their
governments. If there were identifiable traits, Agency operators could look for
them in prospective spies. Harris Isbell, who ran the MKULTRA drug-testing
program at the Lexington, Kentucky detention hospital, sent in the scores of
heroin addicts. Gittinger wanted to know what to look for in people susceptible
to drugs. The Human Ecology project at Ionia State Hospital in Michigan
furnished Wechslers of sexual psychopaths. These scores showed that people with
uncontrollable urges have different personality patterns than so-called normals.
Gittinger himself journeyed to the West Coast to test homosexuals, lesbians, and
the prostitutes he interviewed under George White's auspices in the San
Francisco safehouse. With each group, he separated out the telltale signs that
might be a future indicator of their sexual preference in others. Gittinger
understood that simply by looking at the Wechsler scores of someone newly
tested, he could pick out patterns that corresponded to behavior of people in
the data base.
The Gittinger system worked best when the TSS staff had a subject's Wechsler
scores to analyze, but Agency officials could not very well ask a Russian
diplomat or any other foreign target to sit down and take the tests. During
World War II, OSS chief William Donovan had faced a similar problem in trying to
find out about Adolf Hitler's personality, and Donovan had commissioned
psychoanalyst Walter Langer to make a long-distance psychiatric profile of the
German leader. Langer had sifted through all the available data on the Führer,
and that was exactly what Gittinger's TSS assessments staff did when they lacked
direct contact (and when they had it, too). They pored over all the intelligence
gathered by operators, agents, bugs, and taps and looked at samples of a man's
handwriting.[3] The CIA men took the process of
"indirect assessment" one step further than Langer had, however. They observed
the target's behavior and looked for revealing patterns that corresponded with
traits already recorded among the subjects of the 29,000 Wechsler samples.
Along this line, Gittinger and his staff had a good idea how various
personality types acted after consuming a few drinks. Thus, they reasoned, if
they watched a guest at a cocktail party and he started to behave in a
recognizable way—by withdrawing, for instance—they could make an educated guess
about his personality type—in this case, that he was an I. In contrast, the
drunken Russian diplomat who became louder and began pinching every woman who
passed by probably was an E. Instead of using the test scores to predict how a
person would behave, the assessments staff was, in effect, looking at behavior
and working backward to predict how the person would have scored if he had taken
the test. The Gittinger staff developed a whole checklist of 30 to 40 patterns
that the skilled observer could look for. Each of these traits reflected one of
the Wechsler subtests, and it corresponded to some insight picked up from the
29,000 scores in the data base.
Was the target sloppy or neat? Did he relate to women stiffly or easily? How
did he hold a cigarette and put it into his mouth? When he went through a
receiving line, did he immediately repeat the name of each person introduced to
him? Taken as a whole, all these observations allowed Gittinger to make a
reasoned estimate about a subject's personality, with emphasis on his
vulnerabilities. As Gittinger describes the system, "If you could get a sample
of several kinds of situations, you could begin to get some pretty good
information." Nevertheless, Gittinger had his doubts about indirect assessment.
"I never thought we were good at this," he says.
The TSS assessment staff, along with the Agency's medical office use the PAS
indirectly to keep up the OSS tradition of making psychological portraits of
world leaders like Hitler. Combining analytical techniques with gossipy
intelligence, the assessors tried to give high-level U.S. officials a better
idea of what moved the principal international political figures.[4]
One such study of an American citizen spilled over into the legally forbidden
domestic area when in 1971 the medical office prepared a profile of Daniel
Ellsberg at the request of the White House. To get raw data for the Agency
assessors, John Ehrlichman authorized a break-in at Ellsberg's psychiatrist's
office in California. John Gittinger vehemently denies that his staff played any
role in preparing this profile, which the White House plumbers intended to use
as a kind of psychological road map to compromise Ellsberg—just as CIA operators
regularly worked from such assessments to exploit the weaknesses of foreigners.
Whether used directly or indirectly, the PAS gave Agency case officers a
tool to get a better reading of the people with whom they dealt. CIA field
stations overseas routinely sent all their findings on a target, along with
indirect assessment checklists, back to Washington, so headquarters personnel
could decide whether or not to try recruitment. The TSS assessment staff
contributed to this process by attempting to predict what ploys would work best
on the man in the case officers' sights. "Our job was to recommend what strategy
to try," says a onetime Gittinger colleague. This source states he had direct
knowledge of cases where TSS recommendations led to sexual entrapment
operations, both hetero- and homosexual. "We had women ready—called them a
stable," he says, and they found willing men when they had to.
One CIA psychologist stresses that the PAS only provided "clues" on how to
compromise people. "If somebody's assessment came in like the sexual
psychopaths', it would raise red flags," he notes. But TSS staff assessors could
only conclude that the target had a potentially serious sex problem. They could
by no means guarantee that the target's defenses could be broken. Nevertheless,
the PAS helped dictate the best weapons for the attack. "I've heard John [Gittinger]
say there's always something that someone wants," says another former Agency
psychologist. "And with the PAS you can find out what it is. It's not
necessarily sex or booze. Sometimes it's status or recognition or security." Yet
another Gittinger colleague describes this process as "looking for soft spots."
He states that after years of working with the system, he still bridled at a few
of the more fiendish ways "to get at people" that his colleagues dreamed up He
stayed on until retirement, however, and he adds, "None of this was personal. It
was for national security reasons."
A few years ago, ex-CIA psychologist James Keehner told reporter Maureen
Orth that he personally went to New York in 1969 to give Wechsler tests to an
American nurse who had volunteered her body for her country. "We wanted her to
sleep with this Russian," explained Keehner. "Either the Russian would fall in
love with her and defect, or we'd blackmail him. I had to see if she could sleep
with him over a period of time and not get involved emotionally. Boy, was she
tough!" Keehner noted that he became disgusted with entrapment techniques,
especially after watching a film of an agent in bed with a "recruitment target."
He pointed out that Agency case officers, many of whom "got their jollies" from
such work, used a hidden camera to get their shots. The sexual technology
developed in the MKULTRA safehouses in New York and San Francisco had been put
to work. The operation worked no better in the 1960s, however, than TSS
officials predicted such activities would a decade earlier. "You don't really
recruit agents with sexual blackmail," Keehner concluded. "That's why I couldn't
even take reading the files after a while. I was sickened at seeing people take
pleasure in other people's inadequacies. First of all, I thought it was just
dumb. For all the money going out, nothing ever came back."
Keehner became disgusted by the picking-at-scabs aspect of TSS assessment
work. Once the PAS had identified a target as having potential mental
instabilities, staff members sometimes suggested ways to break him down,
reasoning that by using a ratchet-like approach to put him under increased
pressure, they might be able to break the lines that tied him to his country, if
not to his sanity. Keehner stated, "I was sent to deal with the most negative
aspects of the human condition. It was planned destructiveness. First, you'd
check to see if you could destroy a man's marriage. If you could, then that
would be enough to put a lot of stress on the individual, to break him down.
Then you might start a minor rumor campaign against him. Harass him constantly.
Bump his car in traffic. A lot of it is ridiculous, but it may have a cumulative
effect." Agency case officers might also use this same sort of stress-producing
campaign against a particularly effective enemy intelligence officer whom they
knew they could never recruit but whom they hoped to neutralize.
Most operations—including most recruitments—did not rely on such nasty
methods. The case officer still benefited from the TSS staffs assessment, but he
usually wanted to minimize stress rather than accentuate it. CIA operators
tended to agree that the best way to recruit an agent was to make the
relationship as productive and satisfying as possible for him, operating from
the old adage about catching more flies with honey than vinegar. "You pick the
thing most fearful to him—the things which would cause him the most doubt," says
the source. "If his greatest fear is that he can't trust you to protect him and
his family, you overload your pitch with your ability to do it. Other people
need structure, so you tell them exactly what they will need to do. If you leave
it open-ended, they'll be scared you'll ask them to do things they're incapable
of."[5]
Soon after the successful recruitment of a foreigner to spy for the CIA,
either a CIA staff member or a specially trained case officer normally sat down
with the new agent and gave him the full battery of Wechsler subtests—a process
that took several hours. The tester never mentioned that the exercise had
anything to do with personality but called it an "aptitude" test—which it also
is. The assessments office in Washington then analyzed the results. As with the
polygraph, the PAS helped tell if the agent were lying. It could often delve
deeper than surface concepts of true and false. The PAS might show that the
agent's motivations were not in line with his behavior. In that case, if the gap
were too great, the case officer could expect to run up against considerable
deception—resulting either from espionage motives or psychotic tendencies.
The TSS staff assessors sent a report back to the field on the best way to
deal with the new agent and the most effective means to exploit him. They would
recommend whether his case officer should treat him sternly or permissively. If
the agent were an Externalizer who needed considerable companionship, the
assessors might suggest that the case officer try to spend as much time with him
as possible.[6] They would probably recommend against
sending this E agent on a long mission into a hostile country, where he could
not have the friendly company he craved.
Without any help from John Gittinger or his system, covert operators had
long been deciding matters like these, which were, after all, rooted in common
sense. Most case officers prided themselves on their ability to play their
agents like a musical instrument, at just the right tempo, and the Gittinger
system did not shake their belief that nothing could beat their own intuition.
Former CIA Deputy Director Ray Cline expresses a common view when he says the
PAS "was part of the system—kind of a check-and-balance—a supposedly scientific
tool that was not weighed very heavily. I never put as much weight on the
psychological assessment reports as on a case officer's view.... In the end,
people went with their own opinion." Former Director William Colby found the
assessment reports particularly useful in smoothing over that "traumatic" period
when a case officer had to pass on his agent to a replacement. Understandably,
the agent often saw the switch as a danger or a hardship. "The new guy has to
show some understanding and sympathy," says Colby, who had 30 years of
operational experience himself, "but it doesn't work if these feelings are not
real."
For those Agency officers who yearned to remove as much of the human element
as possible from agent operations, Gittinger's system was a natural. It reduced
behavior to a workable formula of shorthand letters that, while not insightful
in all respects, gave a reasonably accurate description of a person. Like Social
Security numbers, such formulas fitted well with a computerized approach. While
not wanting to overemphasize the Agency's reliance on the PAS, former Director
Colby states that the system made dealing with agents "more systematized, more
professional."
In 1963 the CIA's Inspector General gave the TSS assessment staff high marks
and described how it fit into operations:
The [Clandestine Services] case officer is first and foremost, perhaps, a
practitioner of the art of assessing and exploiting human personality and
motivations for ulterior purposes. The ingredients of advanced skill in this
art are highly individualistic in nature, including such qualities as
perceptiveness and imagination. [The PAS] seeks to enhance the case
officer's skill by bringing the methods and disciplines of psychology to
bear.... The prime objectives are control, exploitation, or neutralization.
These objectives are innately anti-ethical rather than therapeutic in their
intent.
In other words, the PAS is directed toward the relationship between the
American case officer and his foreign agent, that lies at the heart of
espionage. In that sense, it amounts to its own academic discipline—the
psychology of spying—complete with axioms and reams of empirical data. The
business of the PAS, like that of the CIA, is control.
One former CIA psychologist, who still feels guilty about his participation
in certain Agency operations, believes that the CIA's fixation on control and
manipulation mirrors, in a more virulent form, the way Americans deal with each
other generally. "I don't think the CIA is too far removed from the culture," he
says. "It's just a matter of degree. If you put a lot of money out there, there
are many people who are lacking the ethics even of the CIA. At least the Agency
had an ideological basis." This psychologist believes that the United States has
become an extremely control-oriented society—from the classroom to politics to
television advertising. Spying and the PAS techniques are unique only in that
they are more systematic and secret.
Another TSS scientist believes that the Agency's behavioral research was a
logical extension of the efforts of American psychologists, psychiatrists, and
sociologists to change behavior—which he calls their "sole motivation." Such
people manipulate their subjects in trying to make mentally disturbed people
well, in turning criminals into law-abiding citizens, in improving the work of
students, and in pushing poor people to get off welfare. The source cites all of
these as examples of "behavior modification" for socially acceptable reasons,
which, like public attitudes toward spying, change from time to time. "Don't get
the idea that all these behavioral scientists were nice and pure, that they
didn't want to change anything, and that they were detached in their science,"
he warns. "They were up to their necks in changing people. It just happened that
the things they were interested in were not always the same as what we were."
Perhaps the saving grace of the behavioral scientists is summed up by longtime
MKULTRA consultant Martin Orne: "We are sufficiently ineffective so that our
findings can be published." With the PAS, CIA officials had a handy tool for
social engineering. The Gittinger staff found one use for it in the sensitive
area of selecting members of foreign police and intelligence agencies. All over
the globe, Agency operators have frequently maintained intimate working
relations with security services that have consistently mistreated their own
citizens. The assessments staff played a key role in choosing members of the
secret police in at least two countries whose human-rights records are among the
world's worst.
In 1961, according to TSS psychologist John Winne, the CIA and the Korean
government worked together to establish the newly created Korean Central
Intelligence Agency (KCIA). The American CIA station in Seoul asked headquarters
to send out an assessor to "select the initial cadre" of the KCIA. Off went
Winne on temporary duty. "I set up an office with two translators," he recalls,
"and used a Korean version of the Wechsler." The Agency psychologist gave the
tests to 25 to 30 police and military officers and wrote up a half-page report
on each, listing their strengths and weaknesses. Winne wanted to know about each
candidate's "ability to follow orders, creativity, lack of personality
disorders, motivation—why he wanted out of his current job. It was mostly for
the money, especially with the civilians." The test results went to the Korean
authorities, whom Winne believes made the personnel decisions "in conjunction
with our operational people."
"We would do a job like this and never get feedback, so we were never sure
we'd done a good job," Winne complains. Sixteen years after the end of his
mission to Seoul and after news of KCIA repression at home and bribes to
American congressmen abroad, Winne feels that his best efforts had
"boomeranged." He states that Tongsun Park was not one of the KCIA men he
tested.
In 1966 CIA staffers, including Gittinger himself, took part in selecting
members of an equally controversial police unit in Uruguay—the anti-terrorist
section that fought the Tupamaro urban guerrillas. According to John Cassidy,
the CIA's deputy station chief there at the time, Agency operators worked to set
up this special force together with the Agency for International Development's
Public Safety Mission (whose members included Dan Mitrione, later kidnapped and
killed by the Tupamaros). The CIA-assisted police claimed they were in a
life-and-death struggle against the guerrillas, and they used incredibly brutal
methods, including torture, to stamp out most of the Uruguayan left along with
the guerrillas.
While the special police were being organized, "John [Gittinger] came down
for three days to get the program underway," recalls Cassidy. Then Hans Greiner,
a Gittinger associate, ran Wechslers on 20 Uruguayan candidates. One question on
the information subtest was "How many weeks in the year?" Eighteen of the 20
said it was 48, and only one man got the answer right. (Later he was asked about
his answer, and he said he had made a mistake; he meant 48.) But when Greiner
asked this same group of police candidates, "Who wrote Faust?" 18 of the
20 knew it was Goethe. "This tells you something about the culture," notes
Cassidy, who served the Agency all over Latin America. It also points up the
difficulty Gittinger had in making the PAS work across cultural lines.
In any case, CIA man Cassidy found the assessment process most useful for
showing how to train the anti-terrorist section. "According to the results,
these men were shown to have very dependent psychologies and they needs d strong
direction," recalls the now-retired operator. Cassidy was quite pleased with the
contribution Gittinger and Greiner made. "For years I had been dealing with
Latin Americans," says Cassidy, "and here, largely by psychological tests, one
of [Gittinger's] men was able to analyze people he had no experience with and
give me some insight into them.... Ordinarily, we would have just selected the
men and gone to work on them."
In helping countries like South Korea and Uruguay pick their secret police,
TSS staff members often inserted a devilish twist with the PAS. They could not
only choose candidates who would make good investigators, interrogators, or
whatever, but they could also spot those who were most likely to succumb to
future CIA blandishments. "Certain types were more recruitable," states a former
assessor. "I looked for them when I wrote my reports.... Anytime the Company
[the CIA] spent money for training a foreigner, the object was that he would
ultimately serve our control purposes." Thus, CIA officials were not content
simply to work closely with these foreign intelligence agencies; they insisted
on penetrating them, and the PAS provided a useful aid.
In 1973 John Gittinger and his longtime associate John Winne, who picked
KCIA men, published a basic description of the PAS in a professional journal.
Although others had written publicly about the system, this article apparently
disturbed some of the Agency's powers, who were then cutting back on the number
of CIA employees at the order of short-time Director James Schlesinger.
Shortly thereafter, Gittinger, then 56, stopped being president of
Psychological Assessment Associates but stayed on as a consultant. In 1974 I
wrote about Gittinger's work, albeit incompletely, in Rolling Stone
magazine. Gittinger was disturbed that disclosure of his CIA connection would
hurt his professional reputation. "Are we tarred by a brush because we worked
for the CIA?" he asked during one of several rather emotional exchanges. "I'm
proud of it." He saw no ethical problems in "looking for people's weaknesses" if
it helped the CIA obtain information, and he declared that for many years most
Americans thought this was a useful process. At first, he offered to give me the
Wechsler tests and prepare a personality assessment to explain the system, but
Agency officials prohibited his doing so. "I was given no explanation," said the
obviously disappointed Gittinger. "I'm very proud of my professional work, and I
had looked forward to being able to explain it."
In August 1977 Gittinger publicly testified in Senate hearings. While he
obviously would have preferred talking about his psychological research, his
most persistent questioner, Senator Edward Kennedy, was much more interested in
bringing out sensational details about prostitutes and drug testing. A proud
man, Gittinger felt "humiliated" by the experience, which ended with him looking
foolish on national television. The next month, the testimony of his former
associate, David Rhodes, further bruised Gittinger. Rhodes told the Kennedy
subcommittee about Gittinger's role in leading the "Gang that Couldn't Spray
Straight" in an abortive attempt to test LSD in aerosol cans on unwitting
subjects. Gittinger does not want his place in history to be determined by this
kind of activity. He would like to see his Personality Assessment System
accepted as an important contribution to science.
Tired of the controversy and worn down by trying to explain the PAS,
Gittinger has moved back to his native Oklahoma. He took a copy of the 29,000
Wechsler results with him, but he has lost his ardor for working with them. A
handful of psychologists around the country still swear by the system and try to
pass it on to others. One, who uses it in private practice, says that in therapy
it saves six months in understanding the patient. This psychologist takes a full
reading of his patient's personality with the PAS, and then he varies his
treatment to fit the person's problems. He believes that most American
psychologists and psychiatrists treat their patients the same whereas the PAS is
designed to identify the differences between people. Gittinger very much hopes
that others will accept this view and move his system into the mainstream. "It
means nothing unless I can get someone else to work on it," he declares. Given
the preconceptions of the psychological community, the inevitable taint arising
from the CIA's role in developing the system, and Gittinger's lack of academic
credentials and energy, his wish will probably not be fulfilled.
Notes
The material on the Gittinger Personality Assessment System (PAS) comes from
"An Introduction to the Personality Assessment System" by John Winne and John
Gittinger, Monograph Supplement No. 38, Clinical Psychology Publishing Co., Inc.
1973; an interview with John Winne; interviews with three other former CIA
psychologists; 1974 interviews with John Gittinger by the author; and an
extended interview with Gittinger by Dr. Patricia Greenfield, Associate
Professor of Psychology at UCLA. Some of the material was used first in a
Rolling Stone article, July 18, 1974, "The CIA Won't Quite Go Public."
Robert Hyde's alcohol research at Butler Health Center was MKULTRA Subproject
66. See especially 66-17, 27 August, 1958. Subject: Proposed Alcohol
Study—1958-1959 and 66-5. undated, Subject: Equipment—Ecology Laboratory.
The 1963 Inspector General's report on TSS, as first released under the
Freedom of Information Act, did not include the section on personality
assessment quoted from in the chapter. An undated, untitled document, which was
obviously this section, was made available in one of the CIA's last releases.
MKULTRA subproject 83 dealt with graphology research, as did part of
Subproject 60, which covered the whole Human Ecology Society. See especially
83-7, December 11, 1959, Subject: [deleted] Graphological Review and 60-28,
undated, Subject [deleted] Activities Report, May, 1959-April, 1960.
Information on the psychological profile of Ferdinand Marcos came from a
U.S. Government source who had read it. Information on the profile of the Shah
of Iran came from a column by Jack Anderson and Les Whitten "CIA Study Finds
Shah Insecure," Washington Post, July 11, 1975.
The quotes from James Keehner came from an article in New Times by
Maureen Orth, "Memoirs of a CIA Psychologist," June 25, 1975.
For related reports on the CIA's role in training foreign police and its
activities in Uruguay, see an article by Taylor Branch and John Marks, "Tracking
the CIA," Harper's Weekly, January 25, 1975 and Philip Agee's book, Inside
the Company: CIA Diary (London: Penguin; 1975).
The quote from Martin Orne was taken from Patricia Greenfield's APA
Monitor article cited in the last chapter's notes.
Gittinger's testimony before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and
the Kennedy subcommittee on August 3, 1977 appeared on pages 50-63. David
Rhodes' testimony on Gittinger's role in the abortive San Francisco LSD spraying
appeared in hearings before the Kennedy subcommittee, September 20, 1977, pp.
100-110.
Footnotes
1. Developed by psychologist David Wechsler, this
testing system is called, in different versions, the Wechsler-Bellevue and the
Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale. As Gittinger worked with it over the years,
he made modifications that he incorporated in what he named the
Wechsler-Bellevue-G. For simplicity's sake, it is simply referred to as the
Wechsler system throughout the book.
2. As with most of the descriptions of the PAS made in the
book, this is an oversimplification of a more complicated process. The system,
as Gittinger used it, yielded millions of distinct personality types. His
observations on alcohol were based on much more than a straight I and E
comparison. For the most complete description of the PAS in the open literature,
see the article by Gittinger and Winne cited in the chapter notes.
3. Graphology (handwriting analysis) appealed to
CIA officials as a way of supplementing PAS assessments or making judgments when
only a written letter was available. Graphology was one of the seemingly arcane
fields which the Human Ecology Society had investigated and found operational
uses for. The Society wound up funding handwriting research and a publication in
West Germany where the subject was taken much more seriously than in the United
States, and it sponsored a study to compare handwriting analyses with Wechsler
scores of actors (including some homosexuals), patients in psychotherapy,
criminal psychopaths, and fashion models. Gittinger went on to hire a resident
graphologist who could do the same sort of amazing things with handwriting as
the Oklahoma psychologist could do with Wechsler scores. One former colleague
recalls her spotting—accurately—a stomach ailment in a foreign leader simply by
reading one letter. Asked in an interview about how the Agency used her work,
she replied, "If they think they can manipulate a person, that's none of my
business. I don't know what they do with it. My analysis was not done with that
intention.... Something I learned very early in government was not to ask
questions."
4. A profile of Ferdinand Marcos found the Filipino
president's massive personal enrichment while in office to be a natural
outgrowth of his country's tradition of putting loyalty to one's family and
friends ahead of all other considerations. Agency assessors found the Shah of
Iran to be a brilliant but dangerous megalomaniac whose problems resulted from
an overbearing father, the humiliation of having served as a puppet ruler, and
his inability for many years to produce a male heir.
5. This source reports that case officers usually
used this sort of nonthreatening approach and switched to the rougher stuff if
the target decided he did not want to spy for the CIA. In that case, says the
ex-CIA man, "you don't want the person to say no and run off and tattle. You
lose an asset that way—not in the sense of the case officer being shot, but by
being nullified." The spurned operator might then offer not to reveal that the
target was cheating on his wife or had had a homosexual affair, in return for
the target not disclosing the recruitment attempt to his own intelligence
service.
6. While Agency officials might also have used the
PAS to select the right case officer to deal with the E agent—one who would be
able to sustain the agent's need for a close relationship over a long period of
time—they almost never used the system with this degree of precision. An Agency
office outside TSS did keep Wechslers and other test scores on file for most
case officers, but the Clandestine Services management was not willing to turn
over the selection of American personnel to the psychologists.