CyberWire Daily - A CIA Psychologist on the Minds of World Leaders, Pt. 2 with Dr. Ursula Wilder [SpyCast]

Episode Date: March 22, 2024

In honor of Women's History Month, please enjoy this episode of the International Spy Museum's SpyCast podcast featuring part 2 of Andrew Hammond's discussion with Dr. Ursula Wilder of the Central Intelligence Agency. Summary Dr. Ursula Wilder (LinkedIn) joins Andrew (X; LinkedIn) to discuss the intersections between psychology and intelligence. Ursula is a clinical psychologist with over two decades of experience working at the Central Intelligence Agency.  What You’ll Learn Intelligence How psychology can be useful to national security Historical examples of leadership analysis  Leadership personality assessments & the Cuban Missile Crisis Psychoanalytic theory and espionage  Reflections Human nature throughout history History repeating itself  And much, much more … Quotes of the Week “Together, these documents are quite powerful. The psych assessments are very, very carefully, tightly held and are classified at a high level. Every intelligence officer has this fantasy about seeing the file that's kept on them by the opponents.” – Dr. Ursula Wilder. Resources  SURFACE SKIM *SpyCasts* Agent of Betrayal, FBI Spy Robert Hanssen with CBS’ Major Garrett and Friends (2023) The North Korean Defector with Former DPRK Agent Kim, Hyun Woo (2023) SPY@20 – “The Spy of the Century” with Curators Alexis and Andrew on Kim Philby (2022) “How Spies Think” – 10 Lessons in Intelligence with Sir David Omand (2020) *Beginner Resources* What is Psychoanalysis? Institute of Psychoanalysis, YouTube (2011) [3 min. video] Psychologists in the CIA, American Psychological Association (2002) [Short article] 7 Reasons to Study Psychology, University of Toronto (n.d.) [Short article] DEEPER DIVE Books Freud and Beyond, S. A. Mitchell (Basic Books, 2016) Narcissism and Politics: Dreams of Glory, J. M. Post (Cambridge University Press, 2014) The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements, E. Hoffer (Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2010)  Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, D. K. Goodwin (Simon & Schuster, 2004) Leaders, Fools, and Impostors: Essays on the Psychology of Leadership, M. F. R. Kets de Vries (iUniverse, 2003)  Primary Sources  Charles de Gaulle to Pamela Digby Churchill (1942)  Blood, Toil, Tears and Sweat (1940) Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant (1885) Gettysburg Address (1863)  House Divided Speech (1858) Excerpt on Cleopatra from Plutarch's Life of Julius Caesar (ca. 2nd century AD) Plutarch’s The Life of Alexander (ca. 2nd century AD)  Appian’s The Civil Wars (ca. 2nd century AD)  Virgil’s The Aeneid (19 B.C.E)  *Wildcard Resource* On Dreams by Sigmund Freud (1901) In this simplified version of the father of psychoanalysis’ seminal book The Interpretation of Dreams, you can get a small taste for Freudian philosophy. Freud believed that dreams were a reflection of the subconscious mind and that studying a person’s dreams can elucidate their inner wants and needs. What are your dreams telling you?  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Welcome to SpyCast, the official podcast of the International Spy Museum. I'm Erin Dietrich, and your host is Dr. Andrew Hammond. Each week we explore some aspect of the past, present or future of intelligence and espionage. If you enjoy the show, please consider leaving us a five star review so other listeners can find us. Coming up next on Spycast. His first school experience, he was beaten severely, bruises all over his back and legs. And his nurse finally showed it to his mother, who just quietly moved him to another school. You think of a five-year-old going through that, and yet he became Churchill.

This week is part two of last week's episode with CIA clinical psychologist Dr. Ursula Wilder. We enjoyed this interview so much we just couldn't cut it down into one episode. Be sure to check out part one first if you haven't already. In part two, Andrew and Ursula dive deeper into psychoanalytic theory, where it comes from, why it can be so useful, and how contemporary practitioners can utilize it to nation-state advantages. They also take on a couple more historical examples, including the clashing personalities of Charles de Gaulle and Winston Churchill, and the fascinating correspondence between

King Philip of Macedon and Spartan leadership. The original podcast on intelligence since 2006, we are Spycast. Now sit back, relax, and enjoy the show. Just before we go on to the next example, Ursula, I think it would be good for our listeners that are unfamiliar with some of these terms that we're using, if we could just clarify them for them. Of course.

I realize this is very complex, but for a beginner's Cliff Notes version, what's the difference between psychology and psychiatry? Oh, of course. So I'm a psychologist. So of course, psychologists are better than psychiatrists. Of course. So to be a psychiatrist, you are a physician. You begin with an MD.

And your specialization is in people with severe mental illness, schizophrenia, people who are hospitalized because you have a medical degree. And you can also provide medical-type treatment, medication, electroconvulsive therapy. Medication management. All of that. All of that. And we shouldn't fool ourselves. There are many world leaders who do have genuine psychiatric conditions

like they do any other physical condition. So a psychiatrist in this business would be looking at what medication profiles a person, for example, is using, or perhaps would work with a psychologist to look at the person's cognitive decline or if the person has a stroke. You can remember the current North Korean father had a stroke. That's just an example. So the psychologists, so I'm a clinical psychologist. There are different kinds of psychologists. There's industrial, organizational, developmental, educational. Some are qualified to get a medical license to practice, provide psychotherapy,

and clinical psychologists such as myself do that. Now, our training is more philosophical and in personality development. So although we know how the brain and the mind can become unwell, can have conditions you mentioned, paranoia, for example, we also look at normal, healthy personalities and look at also, for example, what would characterize genius. So if you think of world leaders, they're outliers by definition to a degree. And then women world leaders, by the way, are outliers of outliers. And any world leader that's in a disadvantaged group from his or her context would be an outlier.

So you study what would make a person stand out like that. Motives, drives. A psychologist would study development through the lifespan. So we would be looking at what happens in childhood, what happens in puberty and adolescence, and then all the way through the lifespan, right before you die, there's developmental aspects that happen.

So when you're assessing a world leader, the first thing you have to do is place them in those adult developmental patterns and figure out where they are. You can't assess a six-year-old as if they're a 20-year-old and vice versa. So that's what the psychologists do. Now, social psychologists and industrial psychologists

look at broader patterns of human behavior, and that's necessary in this arena as well. But they're not licensed clinical psychologists because they don't provide treatment. So there's that group. You have to put in anthropologists as well and cultural theorists in this mix. So leadership analysis is engaged oftentimes with a social psychologist because they're looking at conflicts, they're looking at violence, they're looking at broader group factors. They might do assessments of the intergroup dynamics. There's a great book on Lincoln called Team of Rivals, and it's a beautiful book. I was awarded the Pulitzer. One of Obama's favorite books. Yeah, it was one of Obama's favorite

books. And so, yep, and she's written other Pulitzer Prize winning books. Doris Kearns, Goodwin. So that kind of is the field of psychology and psychiatry. Does that help?

That's really helpful. And just very briefly, tell our listeners, Carl Jung, why he's significant. Jungianism, I know this could be a hundred hour conversation. I will keep it succinct. Okay. I won't geek out too much on the kind of inner wars of psychology. So there are two main approaches and both are needed in the work of leadership analysis is behaviorism. And then there's what's called depth psychology, and Carl Jung is in that group. Behaviorism looks at behavior, something that can be measured.

And it's hard to do, actually. And they look at behavior and what the drivers are of that behavior, both external, environmental, and internal. Because thinking is behavior. You can force yourself to focus on something or to get distracted. So they're very focused on predicting behavior and studying behavior. And of course, it's a truism, but it's true. The best predictor of future behavior is past behavior. If that's all you have, then you work with that.

your behavior is past behavior. If that's all you have, then you work with that. Depth psychologists looked at everything else I just spoke about, which is the inner life of an individual. And that includes what's unconscious. That's why it's called the depth. And the two schools there are, although there are many sub-schools of this, would be the Freudian approach and the Jungian approach. But Jung is more generally useful in leadership analysis because he didn't think that the unconscious was just an individual factor. He felt and wrote extensively about how there's a collective unconscious that we all share with archetypes in them, which is why we're intelligible to each other across cultures. So, you know, to make this kind of amusing, you see all these cartoons about aliens landing on earth and saying, take me to your leader. And, you know, with the alien, this one far side cartoon where the alien is shaped like a human hand. And so the leader comes up,

grabs the alien and pounce him on the ground and starts this big war with the aliens. But the core concept of take me to your leader will happen anywhere because there's this archetype of the leader in everyone's minds. So that's a collective unconscious. And that is really necessary and important to be aware of when you're assessing leadership, particularly the parts that are germane to the culture that you're in. Great charismatics are the charismatic leaders for good or ill. The Hitlers, Dr. King, Kennedy, Reagan, Lincoln, Caesar. You can just go through history and find them. Obviously, Cleopatra, they have a

gift to perceive and manipulate the collective unconscious of crowds. They're like artists that way. So you have a performing artist who walks into a room, intuits the mood of the crowd, and then starts manipulating it for the good, right? Well, leaders can do that too if they have that gift. But to be able to do that, they have to understand the collective unconscious and the particulars of that collective unconscious in that particular group. So that's a very quick rundown through theory. I hope that helps.

Yeah, that's really fascinating. And let's move on to another example. So we've got a letter from Charles de Gaulle to Winston Churchill's daughter. So can you tee this one up for us? Of course, I'd be happy to. Okay, so Charles de Gaulle was obviously one of the great French leaders. He, from an early age, was absolutely fascinating with the military. His father was a philosopher. He, from early age, was absolutely fascinating with the military.

His father was a philosopher. He fought with distinction under Marshal Pétain, actually, in World War I, the first war to end all wars, right? And was a prisoner of war for two and a half years and tried to escape five times, okay? He is known to have been famously irascible, imperious, arrogant. He said in his memoir that he had all his life a vision of France, and that was his true north. And he felt that embodying that as needed and protecting that was what he had to do. So after the fall of France in World War II, he became—he was one of the last military leaders out of France. He became a refugee, essentially, in London and didn't get along with most of the leaders except for some of the more preternaturally gifted leaders and attacked and calm. But he wasn't that way.

He was high-handed, imperious, aggressive, and highly effective at it. Okay, for France. So he worked for France, which was his duty. So there he is in London, and he and Churchill, I think predictably, didn't get along. At one point, he's quoted saying about his relationship with Churchill, says Charles de Gaulle, when I am right, I get angry. And when Churchill is wrong, he gets angry. So we're both angry a lot. He's very witty. He wrote some classics, also another great military leader. And so that's Charles de Gaulle. So there he is in London,

in the middle of the terrible war in London getting targeted. And he's insisting that he's the leader of France. He's not a humble refugee. He's the leader of France. And I'm pushing this. And yet, there was respect for that. Churchill understood that vision because, of course, Churchill was a visionary too. He also had a daughter. He had three children, and his youngest daughter, Anna, had Down syndrome. And friends and family who saw the great general with Anna said it was a completely different man. He was tender. He was kind. He played games with her, he pantomimed with her. There's a beautiful picture of her on his lap.

She has this cute little cap on there at the beach. And he's in a uniform looking like a stiff general, but he's holding her hands with such kindness. It's clear there was great love there. She died of pneumonia when she was 20 and her last words were papa. That was the only thing she could say. And he carried a picture of her for the rest of his life. and he credits it for saving his life during an assassination attempt because it was on the shelf of a car behind him, and it deflected a bullet. So that's Charles de Gaulle. Now, the letter that you're going to be reading was a letter that he wrote to the daughter of Winston Churchill Sr., the Prime Minister Winston Churchill. She had a son who was one years old,

also called Winston Churchill. So that's Winston Churchill, or young Winston Churchill. It refers to a book that he's giving as a gift. I'm not going to say too much of this because I don't want to ruin the letter. And it also notes, talks about Marlborough.

So I'll just tee up Marlborough because he's going to be mentioned in the letter. So Marlborough is one of the most famous generals in British history. And if I remember correctly, he's undefeated. He has a very obscure war, the war of the Spanish succession, which we're not going to go into. But the most famous battle there is the Battle of Blenheim. And he gets elevated to the peerage. So he becomes a lord in Britain. And his ancestor happens to be Winston Churchill. He's built a palace called Blenheim Palace after his most famous battle.

And it's at that palace that Winston Churchill was born. And if any listeners get a chance to go to England, I would strongly recommend going there and not too far from Blenheim Palace. There's actually a very modest churchyard, Bladon Churchyard, where Winston Churchill is buried, which I would also recommend going to. So here's the letter from de Gaulle. Dear Madame, I permit myself to send you an old book of pictures of Marlborough for your son Winston. It is about the only thing I brought with me from France. When the young Winston Churchill

later looks at these Caran d'Ache sketches, he will possibly think about a French general who was, in history's greatest war, the sincere admirer of his grandfather and the loyal ally of his country. Kindly accept, dear Madame, my very respectful regards. Charles de Gaulle." So how do you respond to that Andrew? Like the things we've discussed earlier, Veni, Vidi, Vici, the Gettysburg Address, Lickum Tomorrow, though I think that there's a lot that's said in a very small number of words and there's a lot that you can draw out there.

The only thing that I've brought with me, one of the few things I brought with me from France, but I'm giving it to you as a gift. Here's someone who's a general who's in the greatest war in history or is an admirer of your grandfather. What it captures is that tender side that no one would associate with de Gaulle. It's not sentimental because that trivializes the depth of feeling in this and also the adept politics, of course, because this was the grandson of the prime minister

that he was feuding with to a degree. But it communicates respect, kindness to the daughter, because many of the men of the Churchill family were in the war. So was de Gaulle's son in the Navy. And it communicates the love of family, mother to child, Winston Churchill Sr. to grandson. Maybe there's some sadness that he's missing his own family in this mix. So all of that is there. And it's a more complex picture of this person who we generally only see as Charles de Gaulle, the imperious, arrogant, Brits and American thought to France, but he wanted to be the first one into Paris, Charles de Gaulle, although he was right for France doing that. Okay, the rest of us weren't perhaps necessarily happy with their against.

So if you're working with, let's say, a leader like Churchill or others, and you have a copy of this letter, let's say it's, I don't know how this was released. Okay, I'm not implying that was incandescent.

It wouldn't be. But you get something like this, let's say, incandescent sources. You have a window into the person that can be worked with. And if the person the psychologist is talking with is a senior political leader, that person will know how to work with these sentiments. They will know. You just have to point it out and explain it. Would you have thought before you read it that he could write a letter this tender? No, I mean, one of the main things that I remember, the relationship between the Gaul

and Churchill as the, so the symbol of Free France during the war was the Cross of Lorraine. And the Gaul saw himself as the manifestation of the cross of Lorraine and Churchill said the heaviest cross I've ever had to bear in my life was the cross of Lorraine, in other words, de Gaulle. Yes, that was de Gaulle. But this is interesting because

in this letter there's also deference but there's also pride. I'm deferring but I'm not on my knees. But I am respectful, or that's what I'm reading from it as well. It's military royalty to military royalty. That's a good way to put it. It's royalty of European countries, ancient European countries,

to royalty of other countries. It's the exclusive club, both on the military level, but also on their world level. And it's also, it doesn't say anything directly, but there's a constant competition between France and England, a constant competition between France and England always. Okay, always. And it cuts through that in interesting ways, too. It's a highly effective piece of politics, but it's far more than that, too. Here is a short interlude to help you digest this episode.

Why were de Gaulle and Churchill feuding during World War II if they were on the same side, you might ask? Well, there are lots of reasons, one of which is mentioned in the letter in the form of the Duke of Marlborough and the ancient Anglo-French rivalry. John Churchill, the Duke of Marlborough, was Winston Churchill's ancestor and arguably the greatest European general in the period before the rise of Napoleon. Marlborough led a coalition against one of the most prominent kings in French history, Louis XIV, whose goal was to make his country the dominant power in Europe,

which he seemed to be on the way to doing. Marlborough's famous victory at the Battle of Blenheim in 1704 changed the balance of power in Europe, and he would remain undefeated as a general. Marlborough was awarded a dukedom and a palace in Oxfordshire called Blenheim after the battle, which is where Winston Churchill would be born in 1874. Besides centuries of inherited Anglo-French rivalry, these two were strong-willed and proud people who were united to defeat Nazi Germany, but who also had some divergent interests, such as the future of their respective countries and empires. They also had different views on Allied strategy, and in terms of leadership, de Gaulle's position was somewhat different from Churchill's.

Marlborough's ancestor was the prime minister of a country that was not at the time divided and occupied by the enemy. While de Gaulle, on the other hand, had started the war as a colonel and was the leader of a government then living in exile in London, which, as you can imagine, complicated the situation a fair bit. So let's just use this to talk about the difference between open source intelligence, so things that can be found out there in the world quite easily. So these days it would be things online, but back then it could be newspapers, radio, books, etc. The difference between that and things that are clandestine or secret or that are just not meant for public consumption. So this would be one example. It's not that it was a top secret letter, but it wasn't meant for general public consumption.

So what's the difference? Is one more valuable than the other? Or does it depend? Or walk us through how you think about these different types of information inputs. Okay. The very first thing you have to do, and you add in your experience to the extent that you're able to talk about it. You and I both have impediments because of our background and intelligence. But the first thing you always have to do with any piece of data that you get,

open or not open, is make sure you understand the validity of it. How close is it to the person? If it's valid and you know that and it's personal, then you have a gold mine as a psychologist to work with. Like this letter is an example. A good psychologist will work with, like this letter as an example. A good psychologist will work with all information. We do all spectrum, all source analysis, and you want as much as you can get of the individual as long as it's valid. So that's an important first consideration.

What you get in the clandestine channels is hidden behavior, like sadism. I have a good story to tell in a second about that. That's fully cleared, just so I can tell the story. And so you get behavior that isn't public, but you also get the opinions of expert interlocutors about the individual, diplomatic engagements, maybe some health engagements. So things that cannot be said publicly. You assume that whenever there's a diplomatic engagement, each goes home and writes the cable. But those cables or those communications are most helpful. Think Plutarch, but if that was a contemporary description of Cleopatra, how useful that would have been.

So let me give you an example of how this can work. I'll give two examples. And they've both been cleared. I want to make sure everybody knows that, okay? There was a leader who was famously physically fit and very masculine in his presentation, and he routinely got Botox, which was obviously hidden, okay? That's interesting. That's an interesting contrast between the focus on health and care of the body

and then injecting for purposes of vanity, okay, if you want to put it that way, or maybe the opposite, not feeling so secure in self and so wanting to keep a youthful appearance. So that's kind of an interesting piece of data and you can extrapolate forward about aging and how aging might affect this person because age catches up with everyone. Then there was another assessment I was doing on a leader who spoke multiple languages and had been, his communications had been translated and captured and translated for many years. And I thought I'd go and speak with the linguists who

were doing this because, of course, if you want culturally versed people, then linguists are the best. So I went and spoke with them and they were kind of uncertain, like, what is this all about? We've never done this and a little bit shy about whether they had anything to offer. So I started us off by saying to them, well, listen, what is the most interesting engagement you have heard in your years of, in different languages, translating this person for? to his leadership for not a mistake, but a getting out of the box kind of act that he had engaged in and it created big problems. And this person who'd been listening to him was struck by this tone of apology, which she felt was genuine and she didn't know what to do with it because that's the first and only time she ever heard any kind of lack of confidence or apologies. So that was interesting.

And the next one said she heard him flirting with his mistress. And it was such a different tone. She thought maybe the recording came from somebody else and by mistaken, it had been mistakenly put in her translation queue. So she went and checked it, and sure enough, it was this person. And it's like, this is not the person I know, okay? And it was the one and only time this fluid, playful, pleasure-centered style came out. The rest of the time, it was all business and very rough.

And then the last linguist said it wasn't the content, but what he called the con laugh, the sadistic laugh that is featured in Hollywood movies and prisoners, psychopathic prisoners, that apparently Manson, the Manson family, had a very distinctive laugh that was of this type. The context was that a subordinate of this person had handed some materials to the person who had, and the subordinate had warned that the content was gruesome, a massacre of innocents. And the response was this laugh. of innocence and the response was this laugh and the linguist told me the hairs on he was military veteran so the hairs on the back of his neck went up that it was this eerie kind of evil sound coming out of the belly of the individual now right there you have three

pieces of behavior that'll keep you as a psychologist busy for a good long time, okay? And you put that against all the other things that we've been talking about, the history, the culture, the background of the person, what's known, and you have to account for each one. So the abject apologize and suggest that the person can yield, even though the person was not one to yield on anything.

The flirtation merely confirmed the fact that there was nothing else in this person's life other than this little moment that was in any way self-indulgent. And a sadistic laugh speaks for itself. It was in any way self-indulgent. And a sadistic laugh speaks for itself. There was this kind of, in the depth of the person was this violence just seething there and pleasure. And it was also contempt for softness. And he was laughing at the subordinate who dared to imply that he might be disturbed by really graphic images. So that's the kind of thing you can get in clandestine channels and very useful.

And it must be so much easier now. Like, for example, let's just say for me, there's a ton of YouTube videos for programs I've done with the museum. There's hundreds of podcasts. There's things that I've written, all kinds of things that are out there in the world. Before those types of things would have been much more difficult

to gather or to round up but now you can probably sit and through using the internet you can probably gather so much data. How do you boil all of it down because it seems like now the problem may be the abundance of data as opposed

to, you know, we're struggling to get enough. What you need more than anything is spontaneous behavior when the person is not observed, like the Charles de Gaulle letter. And that will give you that different optic that is not part of the public persona.

But the public persona is in and of itself interesting. And... I'm not suggesting anybody would be untrusted enough to observe me. I just thought that was a good example. You know what Zelensky said on this front? He said that publicly in the press that, I think it was a New York Times interview, that every leader now needs to be attuned to in a way of technology, because in part of what you're describing,

that all of this can be crunched together in an algorithm and fairly superficial assessments can be made. fairly superficial assessments can be made. Where it's more telling right now, anyway, is health. If the person is in good health, okay? So next time you're watching a leader, watch if the person's out of breath after they've walked up some stairs.

And so there is a lot of information. Every effort is being made to contain that by the entourage of every leader. That's difficult to do. You can't use speeches now as you used to because a speech written by others, but old speeches were not. They were written by Caesar himself and by Lincoln, et cetera. So it's a good thing if you can get private correspondence or a memoir that is more revealing of private moments. Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the Liberian leader, spoke about what it was like to be an abused wife. She carried scars on her body from having been beaten. And how, when you think how that might have informed her approach towards women and how she was a leader of women in general who were advocating, other women leaders who were advocating to focus on women's issues throughout the world, you can kind of begin to draw lines that are useful in an

engagement with her or with others like her. So there's a lot of information, but I have to tell you, personality is consistent if you've done a good psych assessment. It's when you see something that's completely different than anything else that you have both a challenge and usually a fake. I'm just thinking even from someone, like you get the average person's smartphone. I mean, there's so much of the mediated and unmediated self on there. Say someone's had a phone for 20 years, you could have a catalogue of the emails

from all of the relationships, text messages, voice memos, you know, all of that stuff. I mean, it's absolute gold dust in some ways. Well, if you want me to scare you a little bit, this is from a different life, okay? The technology focus that I have. We are now our own baseline.

So if you have sufficient records of my voice haptics, not the content actually, but the intensity, the vocabulary, the pace, all of that, then there's more that you can look at. And how different voice haptics coincide with different stress levels in my life, both positive stress, like buying a new house or having a baby, and negative stress, like getting fired. Not that I've ever been fired, but that would be a stress if I was, or having arguments with people. You can, just based on the haptics of a voice, predict the emotional state of the person.

So this has already been done, not by government, although it probably is, but by corporate sector types, okay, to look at sentiment analysis, to do targeted advertising. So the data that we are emitting is, there's a reason why it's being collected so ubiquitously. And of course, that would feed into leadership assessments too. But you have to be really careful with data because you don't know what the fantasy is that's driving that. So much of behavior is unconscious. And like I told you earlier that if you have a meeting and you're looking at the psychodynamics and let's say you're using an algorithm to look at this, so you're using an algorithm to look at this.

You might make a mistake because if one person in the room is having an affair with another person's spouse in the room, those dynamics are going to be driven by that. And now that's key intelligence, if you're in that room, but no algorithm is going to pick up on that. So these are powerful tools, but ultimately our behavior, inner and outer, is driven by our personality. That is a constant thing

we each walk around with. And just before we move on to the next example with King Philip to the Spartan leaders, I'm just wondering, how do you turn this off? Like this, the training that you have, the sensibility.

I mean, if your son says, you mentioned your son earlier, if he says, I'm going on a date with someone I really like, would you like, you know, turn your phone on and I'll listen in and I'll tell you like what's going on with this person? Or if you meet a new boss or, you know, if you're getting interviewed by the historian from the Spy Museum, are you sitting kind of like judging me and erin just now or that's a very good question okay um the truth is

it's hard to turn it off and uh it's it's this way of looking at the world you're born with to a degree so you might as well go with it and make it a profession. So you could look at it that way. But I also am human, and so I'm emitting all sorts of unconscious quirks and attitudes that are the same as everyone else. And when you're a graduate student with other psychologists, you quickly learn that it gets tiresome as we all start analyzing each other because we are no more aware of our unconscious than any other person is. So what you do is when you're on task, you enjoy the craft and you're doing it. You're using the trade craft, you're using the focus,

you're using the knowledge, but you also turn it off so that you can enjoy the people around you. It's an occupational hazard to not be able to do that. You know how I said paranoia is a political disease? Well, voyeurism is a psychological disease. All you do is watch, but you never live, right? So you have to know your own limits. You have to love what you do. And another way to manage it is to make sure. I make sure that I, for example, assess psychologically healthy leaders every time I do one who is more broken. If all you do is focus on the Stalins and the Hitler, then your baseline will get thrown off and you'll forget that they're really magnificent leaders. And so you have to

take care of yourself that way. But ultimately, my son will tell you that he learned long ago to tell me to knock it off and just be his mom. And so, you know, there it is. And I do that. Okay. That sounds like good advice. In the last interlude, we spoke about de Gaulle, the leader of Free France, the government in exile in London during World War II. The symbol of Free France was the Cross of Lorraine, which looks almost like a regular cross, but with an extra horizontal bar. So one vertical bar and two horizontal, usually the top bar being shorter than the lower.

The name refers to the region Lorraine in northeastern France, which has borders with Germany, Belgium, and Luxembourg, a location that has meant Lorraine has been at the crossroads of modern European conflict consistently. Germany twice annexed Lorraine from France, first in 1871 after German unification, which came to an end after World War I,

and then again during World War II when it was occupied by the Germans until the liberation of France. While its roots are much older, the annexation of Lorraine by an ascendant Germany in the modern period is where much of the Cross of Lorraine's power as a symbol of resistance comes from. Well, let's move on to this next example, which is fascinating. So a historical example. So the Spartans respond to a letter from Philip II of Macedon. So tee this one up for us. Why did you choose this one?

So Philip II of Macedon was Alexander the Great's father. And as we said earlier, he was consolidating Greece, all of Greece under his kingship. And a very good warrior. Truly, he was one of the first to use military engineers, which Alexander mimicked when he conquered the rest of the known world. So he had a famous holdout, and the famous holdout were the Spartans. And the Spartans are one of the great warrior cultures of the world. Okay. At age seven, the boys were given to the state and the state would train them to be warriors in a very rigorous, sometimes deadly regime of training, including literacy, actually. But they were taught and they were punished if they didn't follow through.

Remember I talked about analytic style, that very specific, tough style? Well, the Spartans were taught a very specific style of communicating. So that's kind of part of what you're seeing here. And I thought this was really interesting because there's one that is a famous example of communication between Philip, who is trying to get the Spartans in line, and the Spartans, and then the second one that is not so well attributed but is in the same vein.

In 346 before the current era, Philip wrote a letter to the leaders of Sparta, giving them the chance to give up without a fight. Quote, You are advised to submit without further delay, for if I bring my army into your land, I will destroy your farms, slay your people, and raze your city. It was a cheeky offer.

Sparta had been the dominant fighting force in the ancient Greek world for 300 years but his letter is chiefly remembered today for the reply that he received from the Spartans. Sparta simply replied F. Succinct as

can be. I like that. F. The big F. Philip is reputed to have approached the Spartans on another occasion Succinct as can be. I like that. F. Yeah. The big F. Yeah, the big F. Philip is reputed to have approached the Spartans on another occasion, writing, quote, Should I enter your lands as a friend or as a foe? Close quotes. This time the reply was just as terse.

Neither. Then he's ultimately assassinated. Alexander takes over, but the postscript is that the Macedonian army never did invade Sparta. No, they didn't. What do you take from that? It's two words. Yeah, they're just two words, but so consistent and also defiant. Consistent with their succinct way of communicating. But you could almost say they were parodying themselves, okay?

And the if has behind it a whole lot of insulting kind of content that they just can't be bothered to say. That they just can't be bothered to say. So it's very consistent with the Spartan culture. Also, because of all the domestic turmoil, you'd have to say, now they're so defiant. If you were the psychologist to Philip, or it would be more like Aristotle to Philip, right? Assessing how all of this domestic turmoil that Sparta was enduring, okay, squabbles, internal squabbles, hadn't cut their fighting spirit and their vision of who they were. So you'd start with that. And now Alexander the Great would send back,

he couldn't get the Spartans to send warriors, which he'd really want to conquer in his conquests, okay, in his many, many campaigns of conquest. They refused. The rest of Greece ponied up, not lawyers, warriors. So Alexander would send back the armor-captured leaders to be put on display in Greece. And then there'd be a note, this is the armor of so-and-so captured by the glorious fighters of, I'm paraphrasing here, who are with Alexander. And he'd always said, except for Sparta. Okay, because they had to be used. And so that shows Alexander's kind of wit too.

And so the psychology behind this is very, very interesting. And when we apply it now to Khrushchev versus Kennedy and others. I mean, you mentioned there like your understanding of who you are, whether that be a collective group like the Spartans or an individual like Alexander the Great I mean I'm just wondering it's really fascinating how much of the way in which we understand ourselves is determinative of the outcomes that we end up with so if I for example if I think that you know I wasn't treated very well growing up I don't have a very good sense of self

I don't think I'm going to make very much of myself I'm probably going to get by and be okay then that is what's going to happen but if I think that you know I am amazing and I'm going to do amazing things with my life and I'm going to make lots of money and

lead etc like how much does that then lead to that outcome or how much I, this is like a $64,000 question, right? But how much does our thinking determine the outcome? It's a necessary precondition to whatever unfolds, but it's not necessarily sufficient because events do intervene. So you really need both to understand both. But somebody who has low self-esteem and doesn't think that he or she can account to anything

will not try unless somebody steps in and says, you have something. Let's make something of that. And then it changes because the external stepped in. Okay? So let me give you a very good example. There have been studies of personality using twins, identical twins separated at birth. And it's uncanny how much their personality and their choices mimic each other. Unlike other siblings who are separated at birth

and don't have the same overlap. And so the studies have concluded that 50%, 5-0, 50% of personality is inherited. It begins with temperament. But where that goes depends on the nature of the upbringing. Okay, so let's talk about Saddam Hussein. His mother rejected him at birth. She wouldn't cradle him. And in that culture, the baby suckles immediately. She just rejected the baby at birth. She was depressed. And he went through an abusive, rejected time with her until about age two. Remember, you're not thinking chronologically even at that age.

And sent off to an uncle who abused him, perhaps sexually. And then he's sent back to another uncle who sees something in him and gets him educated. Saddam Hussein was driven to be educated. He was one of those, he knew he had something like Lincoln, right? It's funny to say both names together, but they have this vision of themselves. And then he became Saddam Hussein that we know. Clearly, they had psychopathic features in his personality. He had two sons, Uday and Hussein. If you remember them, in his personality. He had two sons, Uday and Kuse, and if you remember them,

they were very disturbed. But they told stories about how their father took them at age seven, which is the age of maturity or first step of maturity in that culture, as a kind of a birthday present to participate in tortures and to kill people in the basements of the dungeons. Now, those who didn't have a chance to become anything other than what they became, that doesn't mean they're not responsible for that. But it's a combination of genetics and circumstances and will and drive, because Lincoln was also abused. Churchill had very serious neglect growing up, what we would call neglect, okay, although it was a standard way of raising children. Then his first school experience, he was beaten severely, bruises all over his back and legs. And his nurse finally showed it to his

mother, who just quietly moved him to another school. But you think of a five-year-old going through that, and yet he became Churchill. And so what carried him through was a beloved nanny who became his mother figure, and he loved her till the end. So it's both, okay? The danger isn't saying it's one or the other. It's both. Like chicken and eggs, it's always both. It's an interplay. I mean, Churchill's a fascinating example because he said, I remember he said, all men are worms, but I do believe that I am a glow worm. So even from when he was young, he believed that he was destined for greatness.

And he encountered so much, you know, failures. Lincoln's another good example. So many failures along the way, but they have this vision of themselves and i guess for every lincoln in churchill there's probably a thousand people that don't end up and you know manifesting that vision but for those that they actually did do it well i would say that world leaders of that ilk are genuine geniuses and it's a lonely thing to be a genius you know you're different.

You know you see things differently. You know that you can work with people differently. You know you have gifts. All four of us are not in our head. Yeah. Yeah, we are. Oh, yeah. Hey, being a genius is not fun.

Okay, they really suffer. At one point, Einstein and Freud were in a room together and they just sat with each other because Einstein didn't know anything about psychology or psychiatry or neuropsych and Freud didn't know anything about physics. But they were just so comfortable with each other because of the burdens that they carried by being so lonely. Because when you have that, Churchill knew that he was a glowworm because he was. I mean, he just was. Lincoln knew that he had the mind he had. He almost killed himself and drove himself into depression because he knew he had a mind that was unique.

So when you're dealing with world leaders, you're dealing with outliers, the good ones and the evil ones, and we always have to remember that, but we're also dealing with humans. And we have to remember that as well. Okay, so let's wrap up here. I think it would be quite interesting for our listeners to know, say they want to go into this field,

what should they do? Imagine there's probably not like thousands and thousands of jobs for people that do this but if they're interested in this more generally or or if they genuinely do want to go into the intelligence community to do this like what do they do i'm assuming they have to get a phd in clinical psychology to start with that is if you want to do pure leadership assessment and be part of that unit, then you do have to have a degree in psychology that's relevant to assessing world leaders. So that can be developmental

psychology. So how people develop through the lifespan. It can be clinical psychology, such as myself. It can be social psychology or industrial organizational psychology is useful as well. The good news is these, well, the bad news is it takes a decade to get there, but the good news is that there are other jobs, okay, as well. So that's to do the psychology assessments. Okay, but to be a leadership analyst, you can go a different route. But to be a leadership analyst, you can go a different route. Now, you have to remember, you'll be working with psychologists to do the psychological part, but you get to do the political part. And every great biographer, I say to people, if you want to understand what this feels like, pick a leader that you love or love to hate and find a very good, it's got to be a good biography on that leader and read it. and find a very good, it's got to be a good biography on that leader and read it.

They're all, they all say, well, psychology doesn't help. And then every other word they use is psychology, which is kind of funny. They've read a lot of bad psychology and they don't want to ever go there. But that is more akin to how you would be thinking if you were going to be a leadership analyst. And job in political theory and really anything that gets you in the leadership analytic track would get you doing this. And some move on to other things because analysis, at least at the agency, you rotate through different types of work or some just love it so much that they stay there. Wow, that's really, really fascinating. much that they stay there so wow that's that's really really fascinating and and just briefly to close out where where could they go just to so that they can make this decision or so they can

educate themselves more is there somewhere they can go to is there like a v book that's on this or i know you mentioned gerald post and gerald post is my dissertation advisor along with Lynn Offerman, and he is the classic psychiatrist on this topic. And some of my work, too, is oftentimes used now. My unclassified work, I can always tell when the semester has started because people start reaching out to me on LinkedIn because they've been assigned my work. So any of his works, particularly, though, the one on illness and leadership and what that does and the dynamics around that, that's a true classic. There are just so many. I mean, Eric Hoffer, he was a longshoreman and a farm worker and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom for his writings on politics. And he's written the book on charisma in 1958, I think.

So that would be a place to go. If you want to learn more about the different types of job at the agency particular, I would suggest the website. The website describes the specific jobs and what you would be doing. So that's just a place to get some practical information. I think it's CIA.gov CIA.gov

and no, we don't monitor people who come to it unless they make threats, so don't make a threat. It's pretty easy to find, doesn't it? The website, just put in CIA. If you go to the Culinary Institute of America you've reached the wrong place. Yeah, that's right. Culinary Institute.

We sometimes do that ourselves. For a while there they were working in our agency dining room. It was fun. CIA and CIA. We had extents there. Well, thanks ever so much for your time. This has been fascinating and stimulating

and could easily go on for another four hours but I think we've done a pretty good job. I think so too and I really enjoyed chatting with you. Thank you so much, Ursula. Thanks for listening to this week's episode of Spycast. Please follow us on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Coming up next week on Spycast, we'll begin our month-long series on James Bond to celebrate the International Spy Museum's new temporary exhibit, Bond in Motion. If you have feedback, you can reach us by email at spycast at spymuseum.org

or on Twitter at intlspycast. If you go to our page, thecyberwire.com slash podcasts slash spycast, you can find links to further resources, detailed show notes, and full transcripts. I'm Erin Dietrich, and your host is Dr. Andrew Hammond. The rest of the team involved in the show is Mike Mincy, Memphis Vaughn III, Emily Coletta, Emily Renz, Afua Anakwa, Ariel Samuel, Elliot Pelsman, Trey Hester, and Jen Iben. This show is brought to you from the home of the world's preeminent collection of intelligence and espionage-related artifacts,

the International Spy Museum.