A Useless Person

A psychologist studies how to break people and is driven to madness

Jim Keehner waited until just the right moment to tell his co-workers what he thought of them. He chose a time when they were all gathered in one place; all of the psychologists happened to be in the lunchroom that day with their divisional head in attendance. Keehner sat down barefoot in the middle of the room, crossing his legs in the lotus position. He began: “I want to talk about the dirty sons of bitches who work in this place. I want to tell each and every one of you what I think of you…”

Following Orders

Through his work for the Technical Services Division (TSD) at the CIA in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Keehner had knowledge of and access to many sensitive files related to domestic politics and the foreign policy of the United States. Some of his colleagues had taken up the task of studying Lee Harvey Oswald voluntarily and concluded he lacked the capacity to assassinate the President without assistance. The CIA also examined letters sent from prisoners of war in North Vietnam, scanning their handwriting for evidence of torture—they determined there was, along with hallucinations. Their assessment of Robert F. Kennedy’s assassin Sirhan Sirhan was straightforward: they concluded he was insane. Keehner also had the opportunity to glance over Fidel Castro’s assessment, which noted that when he had sex he kept his pants on.

A slight, short thirty-year-old man who joined the Agency in 1968, Keehner learned early on that the main ethos of his workplace was: “Every man has price.” His job was to assist CIA case officers in the recruitment of agents, those who would provide intelligence or conduct dirty work on their behalf. This was accomplished through identifying weak spots in the character of individuals and the means to exploit these vulnerabilities.

Keehner assessed a wide variety of people across the globe, pretending he was testing their aptitudes, searching for areas of exploitation in farmers, journalists, religious devotees, bankers, and drug smugglers. “We liked some people with low intelligence who would follow orders,” he recalled. “Then there were some mean ones, the killers. But basically, I tested nondescript middle-class people who did it for the money.” While he would pass his assessments on to case officers back at Agency headquarters in Langley, Virginia to teach them how to recruit for espionage purposes, he also tested the case officers themselves, looking for signs of how susceptible they would be to work for enemy spy organizations. Keehner concluded based on these assessments: “There are some very warm people in the CIA, but they block off their feelings…they compartmentalize their own work in their minds. They can do horrible things all day and then go home and forget about it. It was amazing to see how well they functioned considering the amount of tension their tests displayed.”

Assessments by CIA psychologists were not limited to in-person interviews; these could also occur indirectly on unsuspecting foreigners. Their information would be collected through a variety of means: tapping their phones, reading their mail, and bugging their bedrooms to discover their secrets, the aspects of their personalities or personal lives that could lead them to commit treasonous acts against their country of origin. The challenge became to identify their breaking point, what it would take to turn them into assets. Keehner also felt the challenge morally: “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 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.”

Behind the Locked Door

“I am very proud of what I have done for the Agency over a long period of time in the assessments field. There is nothing I am ashamed of, nothing I have to hide.”

-John Gittinger, 1974

Keehner was considering becoming a priest when he received a job offer from Psychological Assessments Associates (PAA), Inc. Started in 1965, this organization had an office in Washington, DC with others across the globe and promised his role would involve testing business executives for their suitability to assume high-level posts. After receiving a top security security clearance through the firm, they contacted Keehner while he was working a stint in a mental hospital ward. Their DC office was locked, inaccessible to the outside world and candidates were buzzed into the secretive location. The private firm offering him a job was in fact an Agency front. “This is the CIA,” the interviewer told him. “Do you want to go on or do you want to stop?” Keehner’s thoughts turned to spies darting in the shadows and he felt a mixture fear, thrill, and shock. With minimal hesitation, he said yes. He noted with curiosity that the Agency never probed his thoughts on morality or the Vietnam War in his polygraph sessions, which were regularly undertaken as a condition of employment.

Reporting to the PAA office in Washington, Keehner began to learn the Psychological Assessment System (PAS), which had been developed by his new boss, John Gittinger, a CIA psychologist. Modifying one of the most widely used IQ tests, the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale, Gittinger in the 1950s had developed a test that the Agency hoped could predict behavior based on personality types. The PAS contained a total of three dimensions to assess personality: Externalizer-Internalizer (the ability to manipulate stimuli, similar to extroversion and introversion), Regulated-Flexible (those who see the details vs. the big picture), and Unacceptable-Acceptable (those who adapt with difficulty and those who do not).

After hiding his role in creating the PAS for many years due to his CIA employment, Gittinger attached his name to an article introducing the PAS in the April 1973 edition of The Journal of Clinical Psychology. The testing method had several real-life applications, including career analysis, self-help, marriage counseling, education, health treatment, policing, in addition to the CIA’s intelligence gathering and agent recruitment. Prior to the revelation of its CIA origins in the 1970s, most who used the PAS had no idea where it came from. Keith Davis, a Denver clinical psychologist, said of PAS in 1976: “If I were getting into the torture business, I’d think of the PAS. I use it in a psychological program aimed at helping patients. But people skilled in subtle manipulation can use it for negative purposes.”

The Agency itself amassed a total of nearly 30,000 personality formulas from its work in the field. Keehner revealed they not only assessed people, but entire countries as a whole. The U.S. was assessed as ERA: externally driven, detail-oriented, and adaptable. The country’s closest match was the U.S.S.R.: “The Russians are EFUs,” recalled Keehner, “like us, but unadaptable. They follow authority blindly.” China was assessed as IRU: internalized, regulated, and unadaptable; coincidentally, possessing the same assessment result as Richard Nixon.

Keehner had been under the impression that the CIA’s charter did not permit the Agency to work on assessing American citizens and he was understandably surprised when news broke that the Agency at the request of the White House had developed a psychological assessment of Daniel Ellsberg, who had leaked the Pentagon Papers. Publicly, Gittinger feigned outrage when he was accused of having contributed to the CIA’s assessment of Ellsberg: “It’s an absolute, positive lie,” he told the press. Privately, Keehner’s boss admitted he would have undertaken the work if asked. Keehner recalled: “he told me that we probably would have done it if the White House had asked us to.”

Graphology

As the head of the CIA’s Technical Services Division, Sydney Gottlieb had to select the right poison when it came to assassination. In 1960, he presented his superior, Richard Bissell, with six choices of bacteria and diseases: tularemia (“rabbit fever”), tuberculosis, anthrax, smallpox, African trypanosomiasis (“sleeping sickness”), and brucellosis (“undulant fever”). The two selected options thought to be local and fatal, later personally delivered by Gottlieb to the CIA’s Chief of Station in the Congo, who was then tasked with assassinating Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba.

Gottlieb had gained the moniker “Dr. Death” in the press following his retirement from the CIA, when his role as chief chemist for the Agency came to light in 1975. He sought the services of a lawyer, Terry Lenzner, but had to reassure himself that Lenzner could be trusted. His prospective lawyer suggested that they meet in a Rosedale Park in Northwest, Washington, DC. It would be more difficult for his former employer to plant surveillance devices and eavesdrop on their conversation, Lenzner thought. He expected a “devilish monster” to approach him while seated on a park bench, but instead Lenzner was greeted by a man with a stutter, who dragged a club foot behind him. After some initial conversation, Gottlieb cautioned: “I am going to need legal counsel, but before we work together, I’m going to need a sample of your handwriting.”

“Why is that?” Lenzner asked.

“I have someone at the Agency who can analyze it and tell me whether I should trust you,” Gottlieb revealed.

Lenzner was instructed to write down a series of random sentences on a piece of paper and Gottlieb stored it in his pocket. “I’ll get back to you. Nice to meet you,” Gottlieb remarked, before disappearing.

Lenzner was somewhat familiar with handwriting analysis being a method used in other countries to assess the character of job applicants, but had no idea of its longstanding use in the CIA. In the 1950s, a member of Gottlieb’s team was assigned to ascertain the meaning of doodles Joseph Stalin had made during a meeting with U.S. diplomats. The drawings were clearly wolves, the graphologist noted, but he could not ascertain any further meaning or determine Stalin’s mental state from them.

After describing the Agency’s direct and indirect psychological assessment methods, a statement submitted by the CIA to a U.S. Senate committee in 1977 went on to explain the Agency’s process with regard to graphology:

The other psychological assessments involve handwriting analysis or graphological assessment. The work is done by a pair of trained graphologists, assisted by a small number of measurement technicians. They generally require at least a page of handwritten script by the subject. Measurements are made of about 30 different writing characteristics, and these are charted and furnished to the graphologist for assessments.

The CIA at the time privately claimed graphology could provide incredible results. Agents in the Soviet Union would forward their New Year’s cards from friends and associates to Langley to obtain and store the results of handwriting analysis. There was almost nothing the analysis could not do in the Agency’s eyes. Certain diseases could be detected through a handwriting sample. “If you take the test and we see your writing, there’s no way we can be wrong about you,” Keehner remarked. Their spending on the practice internally, however, reached the level of boondoggle. The Agency spent $500,000 at the time ($4 million today) on a machine to process handwriting through a computer. The purported benefit was to cut the analysis time in half (from eight hours to four), but they could never get the machine to work.

While mainstream sources shunned graphology, the Agency never stopped its graphology practice in the ensuing decades, continuing this work as part of the successor to the TSD, the Office of Technical Service (OTS). In the 1980s, the CIA used the evolving signatures of Soviet leader Yuri Andropov to develop a psychological assessment that concluded that the former KGB leader was inflexible and disinterested in compromise, possessing potential stress and physical health problems. Within six months he died, having led the country for only 15 months. In the 1990s, the CIA analyzed writing contained on piece of silk and was not told the provenance of the message. The OTS graphologist wrote a flattering portrait and a presidential envoy used the information to prepare for an encounter with Burmese leader Aung San Suu Kyi.

Several others methods the CIA had explored, however, were abandoned. These included hypnosis, LSD, “truth serums” such as sodium pentothal, and palmistry. The paranormal ability of extrasensory perception, Keehner noted however, in his day was “still up in the air.”

Sexual Blackmail

Gittinger visited the infamous CIA Project MKULTRA safehouse in San Francisco several times, consulting with the prostitutes working there on behalf of the Agency regarding sexual practices and how they could be exploited in Agency operations. The prostitutes’ liaisons with unsuspecting victims were filmed by the CIA through hidden mirrors; publicly, the Agency admitted this was part of a drug testing operation but evidence also suggests part of the work extended into blackmail operations of foreign diplomats. One agent recalled Gittinger having a series of pipe cleaners strewn across a table for him to capture the various sex positions he was discovering. “I come back to the pad and the whole joint is littered with these pipe cleaners,” Ira Feldman recalled. “I said, ‘Who’s smokin’ a pipe?’ Gittinger, one of those CIA nuts, was there with two of my girls. He had them explaining all these different sex acts, the different positions they knew for humping. Now he has them making these little figurines out of the pipe cleaners—men and women screwing in all these different positions. He was taking pictures of the figurines and writing a history of each one. These pipe cleaner histories were sent back to Washington.”

Another officer explained how little the Agency knew about sexual practices in those days and, to some extent, the purpose of gathering this information:

We didn’t know in those days about hidden sadism and all that sort of stuff. We learned a lot about human nature in the bedroom. We began to understand that when people wanted sex, it wasn't just what we had thought of—you know, the missionary position....We started to pick up knowledge that could be used in operations, but with a lot of it we never figured out any way to use it operationally. We just learned....All these ideas did not come to us at once. But evolving over three or four years in which these studies were going on, things emerged which we tried. Our knowledge of prostitutes’ behavior became pretty damn good.

…This comes across now that somehow we were just playing around and we just found all these exotic ways to waste the taxpayers’ money on satisfying our hidden urges. I’m not saying that watching prostitutes was not exciting or something like that. But what I am saying was there was a purpose to the whole business.

In front of a U.S. Senate committee in 1977, Gittinger had the embarrassing task of explaining his research in this domain, without going into detail:

Mr. GITTINGER: This is the part that is hard for me to say, and I am sorry that I have to. In connection with some work that we were doing, we needed to have some information on sexual habits. Morgan Hall provided informants for me, to talk to in connection with the sex habits that I was interested in trying to find information. During one period of time the safe house, as far as I was concerned, was used for just these particular type of interviews. And I didn't see the red curtains.

Senator KENNEDY: Those were prostitutes, were they?

Mr. GITTINGER: Yes, sir.

Keehner recalled that despite public obfuscations from the Agency, sexual blackmail remained on the table as a method for agent recruitment. In 1969, he was assigned with assessing an American nurse who had volunteered her body for the cause. “We wanted her to sleep with this Russian,” he recalled. “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 was more disgusted than many of his colleagues in learning about this type of entrapment, particularly after watching one of the Agency’s hidden camera films of an agent having sex with a target for recruitment. He believed that fellow officers “got their jollies” from this work and he found this blackmail tactic to be not only repulsive but also ineffectual. “You don’t really recruit agents with sexual blackmail,” he claimed. “That’s why I couldn’t even take reading the files after a while. I was sickened at seeing people take in other people’s inadequacies. First of all, I thought it was just dumb. For all the money going out, nothing ever came back. We don’t recruit that many people. Most of our agents are walks-ins, people who are easy to buy anyway.” Another of his former colleagues, psychologist Ann Herndon, agreed that sexual blackmail did not work as a recruitment method: “I never once saw anyone recruited in the work I did,” she furthermore explained. “I saw 70 to 80 cases a month. We haven’t yet recruited our first Mainland Chinese, and there are at least 100 people working full-time on it.”

PAS in Vietnam

Keehner noted that the Agency headquarters seemed to always have a constant presence of senior Pentagon military officers, with an active war being fought in Southeast Asia. “I couldn’t stand the waste of money being poured into Vietnam,” he recalled. In 1971, he was ordered to work on assignment there to employ the PAS approach on the Vietnamese. He refused and one supervisor responded: “Go over anyway and sabotage it from the field.” Keehner still refused to go; as a consequence, his days of receiving promotions were over.

Instead of Keehner, another of Gittinger’s protégés, Bill Todd, was sent to Vietnam. Along with his intellect, he was noted by military intelligence officer Orrin DeForest as being “one of the horniest men I had ever met, and a wild, unpredictable drunk.” DeForest wondered why Todd did not have a higher rank in the CIA. “Well,” Todd whispered, glancing around furtively, “I had some trouble in Hong Kong. But I don't want to talk about it, so let’s just let it drop.” DeForest was impressed with the PAS after seeing the results on himself and his closest colleagues, believing the assessments to be accurate and perceptive. Before angering his Chief of Operations and being sent away to work on drug trafficking at Saigon base, Todd left DeForest with some advice on how to identify defectors using the test: “The classical defector is an IF [Internalizer-Flexible]. People who perceive that maybe their situation is wrong...He might have it in mind for years, he might fantasize about what it could mean, and eventually he's the one who is going to say, ‘Screw it, I’m leaving.’”

For Keehner, by this time, the veil had been pulled off and the true nature of his profession and employer were revealed: “My job was becoming more disgusting to me every day. But I was overwhelmed by the CIA. The first year is confusion. The second is bewilderment. The third it just kind of dawns on you what’s happening.” A devout Catholic, he sought advice during confessionals but found no solace or definite answers: “Masturbation was a mortal sin, but when I talked about sexual blackmail and manipulating people, the priest said it was a grey area.”

Sensitivity

Keehner saw a psychiatrist once a week; however, he tried to keep his CIA work hidden given his oath of secrecy, speaking of it only in positive terms. This fooled his psychiatrist to such a degree that he became convinced it was a great place to work, expressing a desire to leave his practice and join the PAA himself. “I thought I could just talk about my personal problems and set my work aside,” Keehner admitted. “But the more I got into it, the worse it got. I felt like I was on a sinking ship.”

In his growing despair, Keehner was consoled by the sensitivity courses being offered by the Agency. Making officers more sensitive to others was seen as another possible method of increasing changes of agent recruitments, if they could seek to understand and manipulate their targets better. There were also potential uses for psychological assessments; both of Keehner’s superiors had taken the training and found it to be of interest. Enamored of the concept, Keehner applied to become a group training leader for the sensitivity courses and was accepted.

The junior CIA case officers assembled watched as Keehner, their new sensitivity trainer, stood before them holding up a lemon. “I want you to take this lemon,” he told them, “and never let it leave you for the next three or four days. Smell it, touch it. Tell me your feelings about it. Get to know your lemon like you’ve never known another lemon in your life. This is an order.”

Through this lemon exercise, Keehner attempted to measure and enhance the sensitivity of the officers, who were required to return with a report on their observations several days later. Some were able to write a three-page narrative about their lemon and could identify theirs out of a bowl containing several dozen. One unimpressed member of the training group returned with a large drawing of a lemon with a question mark. Keehner was pleased nonetheless with the results. “I was trying to get them in contact with their feelings,” he explained. “Feelings had been left out of their previous training, which is all cognitive.” The Agency was less than impressed with the request for 40 lemons from their supply group and his methods, which also included blasting the Broadway cast recording of the musical Hair and having his trainees move around the room to experience the music. He played more music as they stood in the center of the room and pretended to be flowers in the breeze. Keehner told them “to go to their favorite place in the room and imagine they were coming up out of the earth.” He referred to their movements as being “like corn blowing in the wind.” His classes were soon monitored by senior instructors and later he was not asked to return as teacher for the next sessions.

Keehner was undaunted: “95% of the people who took my course gave it an excellent in their evaluations. I hoped the course would make them face the reality of what they were doing and make them think about the theory that ‘every man has his price.’ Later some of them said it helped them to get closer to people so they could recruit agents better.” His next idea was to offer sensitivity training courses lasting an entire week to new recruits as part of their standard in-agency curriculum. The Agency approved, but not before William Colby, then head of clandestine services, delivered a warning to Keehner: “Don’t let the press know we’re running these groups. Time or Newsweek will get a hold of this and make it sound like we’re doing something crazy.”

Keehner had one distinct memory from his time as instructor in the sensitivity training that stuck with him: “I remember this one lawyer who had been passed over for promotion. All of a sudden he started to cry and cry. He said he felt isolated from all the other flowers in the room. His one fantasy was that he was a daisy and that he was going to die all alone. A couple of days later he brought me a colorful poster. It said, ‘Thank God someone is crazy enough to care for a daisy.’” One aspect that particularly struck Keehner about his workplace was how it all seemed to be like a game. “People took pleasure in the gamesmanship,” he remarked. “Everybody was looking for a promotion.”

Primal Scream

As if Keehner’s previous experiences were not strange enough, they were to become more bizarre with his foray into primal therapy. A psychotherapy based on trauma, primal therapy gained significant attention in the early 1970s with the publication of Arthur Janov’s book The Primal Scream. Though the book was light on evidence and heavy on testimonials, celebrities such as John Lennon underwent primal therapy sessions after being sent the book by Janov, propelling it to instant fame. Touted as “the cure for neurosis,” the goal of the therapy was to re-experience childhood trauma with the intent of resolving pain through processing these emotions. This release would usually involve a scream from the patient; a sound, Janov wrote, similar “to what one might hear from a person about to be murdered.” For Keehner, primal therapy would come to represent his downfall with the CIA.

Janov wrote that a variant of “marathon” or all-night therapy included “the nude marathon. Professional societies often now include an expert in these techniques when workshops are given. The nude marathon is regular group therapy done without clothes. It stresses the sensual and is often conducted part of the time in swimming pools, where a great deal of fondling and caressing takes place so that members may get the ‘feel’ of another person. The general aim of the nude marathon is to help people strip those artificialities which separate them, to eliminate shame about the body, and to bring people closer together.” Keehner ended up in this kind of swimming pool with a practitioner of primal therapy while exploring its potential utility for the Agency. He was required to stay nude there for six hours. He became more disturbed as someone put on “Agnus Dei” or “Lamb of God” prayer music on nearby loudspeakers as he stood in the pool. Keehner thought he would be better served to be at mass at that hour rather than in a pool with several individuals at varying stages of losing their minds.

Keehner concentrated on holding back his feelings, essentially the antithesis of the therapy. A instructional leader made this resistance disappear by pressing on Keehner’s neck, which caused him to start screaming. “Then he started pushing on my genitals,” Keehner remembered. “Well, boy, I let out a scream. I don’t know if it was a Primal Scream or not. That’s what they called it.”

Following this episode, Keehner began his final downward spiral. Full of anxiety the next day, he took three types of tranquillizers to calm his nerves. He found working to be impossible and then had a six-week bout of appendicitis added to the mix. When he finally did return to the CIA, he refused to do his assessment work. He felt like a an out-of-place country boy, surrounded by Ivy League elites in the Agency. He approached Gittinger: “Why did you ever recruit me?” he asked. Gittinger replied simply: “I don’t know.”

Instead of his assigned psychological assessment, Keehner kept plugging away at his preferred training work on human interaction. One day, someone revealed to him that he had been placed on a “useless person” list. He responded with ferocious rage. Why had no one told him? He was unable to grasp that his insubordination had let him to this persona non grata status.

Keehner planned his method of attack, waiting until all of the Technical Services Division was assembled in the lunchroom, including the divisional head, Sidney Gottlieb. His verbal onslaught against his co-workers was delivered from the middle of the floor, sitting in the lotus position. “You could have heard a pin drop,” his colleague Ann Herndon remembered. “The tension was so thick. No conflict ever comes out in the open there. Everything is kept undercover. Everyone was horrified. Jim began to make waves. That was the last thing they wanted. Everyone was supposed to be like everyone else.”

Keehner left the Agency approximately a month later. “The CIA never fires anyone,” he believed. “They’re afraid of vindictiveness.” To bolster his point, despite his erratic behavior, he was offered a $15,000 contract for a year to continue running his sensitivity training sessions. After being promised an extension for a second year, his tenure was cut short and he was finally let go in the summer of 1974. He wrote a letter of protest to William Colby, who had since risen to the top of the organization. Three days later, Keehner was accused of a security violation: writing his memo at home. Despite claiming to have evidence he wrote it at the CIA’s headquarters, Keehner was asked to turn in his badge.

Following his departure from the CIA, Keehner found it difficult to adapt to regular life. He was consumed by paranoid thoughts, chain smoking and staring out of his window looking for a three-agent (“ABC”) team surveilling his every move. He confided to an interviewer in 1976, whispering and pointing out of his window: “See that guy over there across the street? He could be part of an ABC surveillance pattern. On the other hand, he looks just like my Gestalt leader.” The interviewer commented that Keehner “fears that anything written about him and the CIA will be subject to instant sabotage by his former superiors. His natural wit is almost drowned in a terminal case of paranoia.”

Social Engineering

Even when he had been employed by the CIA, Keehner had tried to avoid conducting assessments of the case officers taking his training courses. His boss became aware of this and called Keehner into his office. He was not providing enough support to these officers, he was told, by not teaching them “how to manipulate and destroy.” Remaining indignant, he expressed his reservations with the practice: “No, it makes me sick to my stomach,” Keehner objected. His boss replied: “It bothers all of us, but we don’t articulate it.”

Every morning when he entered CIA headquarters in Langley at 8:30 am, he was greeted by a Bible quotation engraved on a wall near the entrance: “And Ye Shall Know the Truth and the Truth Shall Make You Free.” Seeing these words day after day began to get on his nerves: they began to symbolically represent the hypocrisy he witnessed a continual basis. There was also the morality of his actions to be considered and what the PAS testing method could mean for the future. He wondered what would happen if the government decided one day to test everyone in the country en masse and run them against the formulas the CIA had collected. The results could be analyzed in a large supercomputer and be indexed against everyone’s social security numbers. “There are horrible possibilities,” he stated in 1976. “It’s social engineering and we don’t know yet if people can beat the test.”