Consider This from NPR - Coping With Trauma Is Part of the Job For Many In The U.S. Intelligence Community

Episode Date: December 23, 2022

Trauma is an inherent part of intelligence work. Think of undercover operatives deployed in dangerous places or investigating gruesome crimes. But getting help to process that trauma can be difficult.We speak with Heather Williams, a former U.S. intelligence officer, about her own experience with trauma and what she learned about how best to cope with it.In participating regions, you'll also hear a local news segment to help you make sense of what's going on in your community.Email us at [e-mail] more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

This message comes from Indiana University. Indiana University performs breakthrough research every year, making discoveries that improve human health, combat climate change, and move society forward. More at iu.edu slash forward. One night years ago, Heather Williams was out at a restaurant with friends. We were actually getting seated at a table to sit down for dinner, probably with about seven or eight of my friends. She says she doesn't remember quite why, but, and I need to warn, what is coming is graphic. For some reason in the conversation, I brought up the fact that suicide bombers, when they use a suicide vest, it tends to separate the head from the body

and the head is still intact. Williams worked in the U.S. intelligence community. She had deployed overseas more than once. She says for her and her work friends, the decapitation detail was a fact, something they had all seen either in videos or in person. But at this dinner, she was with her non-work friends. I definitely remember suddenly hearing that there was no other sounds. I had stopped the buzz of conversation and everyone was looking at me awkwardly. This awkward moment was the collision of two parts of William's life that she normally kept cordoned off from one another. She says people in the intelligence community do this all the time. They have one personality with or one

set of experiences that they talk about openly with, let's say, normal or everyday people, those that they don't work with, and then a whole other set of experiences that they can share, which they otherwise would sort of have to censor themselves constantly with people that they've worked with. Often, they're legally barred from talking about their work experiences with friends, even family. That can make it hard to get help when they need it. Consider this. Trauma is an inherent part of intelligence work. Heather Williams says U.S. spy agencies need to do more to address mental health. From NPR, I'm Mary Louise Kelly.

It's Friday, December 23rd. This message comes from WISE, the app for doing things in other currencies. Send, spend, or receive money internationally, and always get the real-time mid-market exchange rate with no hidden fees. Download the WISE app today or visit WISE.com. T's and C's apply. It's Consider This from NPR. Heather Williams was deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Her job included helping U.S. special forces to identify and target terrorist groups. In that work, we were often watching video footage of counterterrorist operations, and we were often going through material after terrorist attacks or after our operations.

That meant it was not unusual to see the sort of gore that she brought up at that dinner. But she emphasizes that many intelligence professionals routinely confront this sort of violence. My experiences are certainly not the worst. I think the point is to say that this is relatively normal when you live in this kind of abnormal world or have this unusual job. Williams has a different job now. She's a senior policy researcher at the Rand Corporation, where she's been studying the impact trauma has on people in the intelligence community. It's made her think critically about the way she herself dealt with the violence she witnessed in the field. There's a variety of techniques that I think everybody uses when dealing with these sorts of situations. You know, gallows humor, for example,

you know, treating things very casually. And I was quite young when I first deployed. I deployed a few times over a decade. So I reflect back on that, and even the casual nature that I approached the problem now doesn't sit well with me. And I think there's a really important point here, a general point, which is the role of empathy in intelligence work. And I don't think that empathy is often recognized for the professional asset that it is. And so what I mean by that is intelligence is very often about understanding people individually or collectively, whether it's someone you're trying to recruit, a foreign leader, a terrorist group, a national population. You're trying to understand what motivates them, what makes them tick, how they think. That's right. And empathy brings a lot of complexity and layers to that understanding. And so people can deal with the emotional stress of this job by putting in place mental buffers, by not feeling, by dehumanizing your targets. That's a good coping skill, but it actually opens mental health, how to cope with trauma, how often does this get last decade, the intelligence community has been changing the way that it asks people about mental health when they're pursuing their security clearances, for example, on the paperwork. The CIA just appointed a chief well-being officer two weeks

ago. And there are employee services, and I think those are recognized as valuable if there's direct trauma. Let's say a coworker commits suicide, you know, that there is a recognition that we need to bring in potential assistance there. But the risks that come from, you know, 20 years or more of just dealing with very distasteful, violent, you know, negative content, and particularly today where you are more often seeing that content, be it images or video, I think there's very poor understanding of the risks that that introduces for traumatic stress. You nodded there to a challenge specific to your field when talking about mental health, which is risk to your security clearance. Would you explain?

That's right. So, you know, your security clearance is granted to you as an individual who has good judgment and is trustworthy. And you don't know exactly what criteria is applied that deems you worthy of things that you cannot do. You can't disclose classified information. But I think many intelligence professionals don't know what the consequences might be if they started to ask questions about mental health. What can they say to a therapist? What do they have to disclose if they go see a therapist, you know, worry that even asking questions could raise some red flags, and then not knowing what the consequences are for their ability to retain their security clearance. And without a security clearance, they essentially cannot have their jobs. I mentioned that you've now left government work, you work at the RAND Corporation, and you all have studied the effects of trauma on people who do intelligence work. What have you heard as you interview people?

Right. I think one thing that is very clear to me from that work is just how much people want this issue to be talked about more. Also, that people don't actually have the right vocabulary sometimes to describe what they're feeling and recognize what they are feeling as traumatic stress that they have been exposed to. And the consequences vary, but there are consequences for individuals, but there are also consequences for the institution. So retention is a really big one. I've heard many stories of individuals who needed to move inside of their jobs or leave the community because they weren't being appropriately supported. And retention, I think, is a really important issue for the intelligence community because of how much it costs to hire and to train intelligence professionals. And the fact that there's no machine like Men in Black with the flashy red light that, you know, deletes all the secrets from your brain when you leave. So you want to minimize how many people

have worked in this community. That's interesting. So it's obviously in the interest of any employer to retain good staffers. But in this case, there's a security risk as well when you lose people. That's right. It's higher stakes. Are you getting much reaction to this piece? There has been an incredible reaction to this piece. So many of my former colleagues have approached me to say thank you, to say how much they appreciate attention being brought to this issue. And so many strangers have come to me, but members of the intelligence community. And I've heard lots of stories of people who, even if the traumatic exposures that they had didn't have direct negative consequences on their relationships or their jobs, just them recognizing that this is a problem and

more needs to be done, I think, is the universal message. And stay with that, the more needs to be done. What specifically? Are there recommendations? What would you like to see intelligence community leaders do differently? There are existing programs that the intelligence community could model after. So the good news here is that these problems are not unique to the intelligence world, but there are some unique dimensions to them when it comes to intelligence work. And so I think it would be important for the community to look at what those differences are, how you might adapt those programs. I think it's important to look at how to reduce stigma for seeking services would be a really big, important step.

Before I let you go, how are you doing? Has it gotten easier? I mean, I think I'm doing well. And I think it has gotten easier in the sense that I don't live in this world every day. I still do a lot of work on mass violence in the course of my research at RAND, but we've actually been thinking about secondary trauma exposure because of that type of work that we also do because I work alongside clinical psychologists to think about this. And so we talk about it a lot, and we talk about the need to take breaks, the need to be aware of your mental state. I have a rule that I

don't do mass violence after 10 p.m. But I think that in the midst of the work I was doing, the counterterrorism work I was doing and deployments, it was too rushed to kind of really be thinking about these things. So I think now that for the most part, most of the intelligence professionals who were forward in the thick of the fight in Iraq and Afghanistan who are no longer there, they're at home, there's a little bit more space to reflect on what the consequences were for the way in which intelligence became very forward positioned in those conflicts and how that is different than perhaps how intelligence and the intelligence community was involved in military conflicts in the past. Heather Williams, thank you.

Thank you. She was a deputy national intelligence officer at the National Intelligence Council. She's now at the RAND Corporation. If you or someone you know may be considering suicide or is in crisis, call or text 988 to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. It's Consider This. From NPR, I'm Mary Louise Kelly. This message comes from Indiana University. Indiana University is committed to moving the world forward, working to tackle some of society's biggest challenges. IU makes bold investments in the future of bioscience and cybersecurity, cultivates visionary work in the arts and humanities, and prepares students to become global citizens by

teaching more languages than any other university in the country. Indiana University. Nine campuses, one purpose. Creating tomorrow, today. More at iu.edu.