The Team House - Profiling Dictators with US Government Psychiatrist | Dr. Ken Dekleva | Ep. 185

Episode Date: January 16, 2023

Dr. Kenneth Dekleva served as a Regional Medical Officer/Psychiatrist with the U.S. Dept. of State from 2002-2016, and is a Senior Fellow at the George HW Bush Foundation for US-China Relations. He is also the author of the novel The Negotiator’s Cross. The views expressed are entirely his own and do not represent the views of the U.S. Government or the U.S. Dept. of State. Find Dr. Dekleva's book here: https://www.amazon.com/Negotiators-Cross-Kenneth-Dekleva/dp/B0BBY5G93D Today's Sponsor: Battling Blades For 20% off your Battling Blades order, go to https://BATTLINGBLADES.com and enter code "TeamHouse" at check. Learn the way of the blade at https://BATTLINGBLADES.com and get 20% off with the promo code "TeamHouse" at checkout!  SAP Gear (Stately Asset Protection)  https://SAPGEAR.com Veteran-owned company, Stately Asset Protection’s retail store specializes in handmade and unique survivability products. Use the code “TEAM” for 15% off your order! https://SAPGEAR.com Thank you for supporting the companies that support the show! To help support the show and for all bonus content including: -AD FREE AUDIO -AD FREE VIDEO -Access to ALL bonus segments with our guests Subscribe to our Patreon! ⬇️ https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouse Team House merch: ⬇️ https://teespring.com/stores/my-store-10474963 Social Media: ⬇️ The Team House Instagram: https://instagram.com/the.team.house?utm_medium=copy_link The Team House Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheTeamHousePod Jack’s Instagram: https://instagram.com/jackmcmurph?utm_medium=copy_link Jack’s Twitter:  https://twitter.com/jackmurphyrgr?s=21 Dave’s Twitter:  https://twitter.com/dave_parke?s=21 Team House Discord: ⬇️ https://discord.gg/wHFHYM6 SubReddit: ⬇️ https://www.reddit.com/r/TheTeamHouse/ Jack Murphy's memoir "Murphy's Law" can be found here:⬇️  https://www.amazon.com/Murphys-Law-Journey-Investigative-Journalist/dp/1501191241 The Team Room Reading Room (Amazon Affiliate links):⬇️  https://jackmurphywrites.com/the-team-room-reading-room/ Intro music by https://www.youtube.com/user/RemixSample Want to sponsor the show? Email: ⬇️ [e-mail] #cia #dictators #theteamhouseBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support.

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And if you're going to give us a not-so-good review, why don't you just send us an email and we'll talk about it. Special Operations, Covert Ops, espionage, the Team House, with your host, Jack Murphy and David Park. Hey, folks, welcome to the Team House. This is episode 185. I'm Jack Murphy with David Park, D back there producing. And we have a guest on the show, Ken DeCleva, who is a psychologist who worked for the United States government, worked with the intelligence community, worked for the Department of State, analyzed foreign leaders, and maintained, you know, help maintain the mental health of U.S. government employees in high stress situations, such as working out of the Moscow embassy. So, Ken, thank you so much for joining us tonight.

Thank you for having me, Jack and Dave. It's a pleasure to be on your show. I love your show. And I'm real honored because a lot of my close friends have been on the show, such as Shawnee Delaney, Jim Lawler, Jim Hawes, J.R. Seeger, and Doug Wise. So I'm honored to be in such good company. We're honored to have you. Yeah, we're going to get into some head games tonight.

Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. So, Kent, this is a, you know, you're a unique person and had a unique position and speak from a unique perspective. Can you tell us a little bit about sort of your upbringing and what brought you into this interesting nexus of psychology and national security? Sure, sure. Actually, I'm a psychiatrist, not a psychologist, but there's a lot of overlap, and I'll talk about that. I was, I'm the child of immigrants from the former Yugoslavia who, so my childhood was really steeped in the history of World War II and post-World War II communist Eastern Europe. My parents were both refugees fleeing communism who had grown up during World War II as the children of war. And I had relatives on both sides of my family who fought, like many wars,

they divided families. So there were, I have one relative who was a priest and a major in Tito's partisan army in Montenegro during World War II. He was known as the Red Priest because he wore his uniform of the Uyoslav National Army, the communist uniform, but he also wore a cassock. And then I had another relative on my mother's side who was German. I'm part German and part Sloven and part Serb. And that relative was drafted into the Wehrmacht in World War II and was captured in the Battle of Stalingrad, one of the 92,000 German soldiers that surrendered in that epic battle of 1943. And then he spent, I think, the next five or six years in a prisoner of war labor camp in Siberia, lost both his legs due to frostbite, and then was freed and returned to Germany,

where he became a businessman after the war. So I grew up steeped in history in foreign languages. My first foreign languages were Slovene, and then in college, I studied Serbo-Croatian, and I majored in history in college. So I was always interested in history, international relations. It was, frankly, part of a dinner table conversation in our home. So that's how I got into that part of it. The medical part was my desire to go to medical school a couple of years after finishing university. And while I was in medical school, I sort of wondered about having an international career, but such things were very rare back then. So I sort of forgot about it for a while. But when I was a psychiatry resident in Dallas at Parkland Hospital and UT Southwestern Medical Center in the 90s, we would have these luncheons, I think once a month for the residents where you'd have outside speakers from different hospitals or organizations come and tell you about where you might want to work when you graduated.

And one day we had a psychiatrist from the CIA. She was obviously open and declared. and she sort of told us a little bit about it, but the bottom line is she told very little. So most people had no real sense of what a medical officer working for the U.S. government overseas would do. I also called up the State Department. This is pre-cell phone, pre-Google,

and I called the switchboard and asked for the mental health division. I didn't even know it existed. And I got the phone number of the director at the time. Later became a mentor and friend, one of the legendary psychiatrists in the State Department, Dr. Esther Roberts. And she told me about the job, but she said, you're a resident. You're too young. You need several years of experience post-residency, so wait and see, so I forgot about it for a while. But she became a friend and a mentor later when I joined.

So I was really blessed to be able to fuse those two experiences in my early to mid-40s. and obtain a position with the U.S. Department of State as a regional medical officer, psychiatrist, and diplomat. And my first posting, I was assigned to a brand new posting at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow. At the time, they had about, oh, maybe 10 psychiatrists overseas covering 250 embassies and consulates, so it was a much smaller program. And when I was told you're going to Moscow, I thought I had died and gone to heaven. I thought it was the coolest thing in the world. And I had an exit interview with the then medical director who was a very influential person in the State Department's Office of Medical Services. A wonderful man named Dr. Cedric Dumont, who had grown up in Africa and then served with the Peace Corps, had a background in infectious disease in tropical medicine.

His father was an ambassador. And so he understood the corporate culture, if you will. he called me into his office and he said, you're going to a very important position in Moscow. It's a brand, brand new position in the region, the former USSR was my region. So about 18 or 19 different embassies, many of them had just been stood up in the previous five or six years. He told me, we expect you to do well and excuse my French, but he told me, don't fuck up. Right. And off I went.

Kent, out of curiosity, did you know you wanted to go into psychiatry when you went to medical school? Yes, I had an early interest in psychiatry, but many medical students come to medical school with different interests, but you really solidify your interest during your clinical years, which in my case were the latter two years of a four-year medical school education. And that's when you spend a couple of months on each different specialty medicine, pediatric, surgery, psychiatry, and I was drawn to really three psychiatry, surgery, and internal medicine. And so it was a tough choice, but in the end I ended up doing psychiatry, and I don't regret it. I've had a wonderful time. I still practice as a full-time psychiatrist. I enjoy the complexity of the work.

If I had to do it again, I'd probably do what they call a double-fetched. major where I do a combined residency and internal medicine and psychiatry. I like neurology a lot, too. So I'm really fortunate to have those experiences and great teachers, a great teaching hospital, and lots of very sick patients. That's how you learn. The motto in our hospital, times have changed, but the motto back then is one that folks with your background and the special forces, I think, will resonate with, which was see one, do one, teach one. Yeah. Yeah. What year was it that you landed in Moscow? I started in Moscow in 2002 in July of 2002, which was a challenging time because the previous year after the Robert Hanson espionage case, the arrest of Robert Hanson of the FBI, who is one of the worst spies in American history, there were a lot of PNG's diplomatic.

on both sides getting kicked out. We kicked out, I think, 51 Russians, and they kicked out 51 Americans. So about a quarter, a fifth of the embassy's workforce had been cleaned out. So it was a stressful time. And President Putin had just come to power in 2000s, so there were a lot of changes happening in Russia during that time. It's a very, very exciting and difficult place to work. I will share with your listeners. I was part of the country team there, which is led by the ambassador. It meets once a week in any embassy. And it was a large country team, probably people from 40, 50 different offices and agencies.

But being in Moscow was like playing for the Yankees. Everyone had to bat 300. There was no room for lightweights or people that weren't 100% committed to doing the mission and doing their job. Now, with your focus in psychiatry, when you're going into Moscow or things that you did prior to that or whatever, did you focus on, like, what we would consider like profiling the bad guys? Were you more concerned with treating, you know, people under your care? Was it a kind of a dual hat position? No, it's not a dual hat position. I had done, I had done leadership analysis and profiling. earlier in my career from about 1995 to 1972 with my mentor, the late Dr. Gerald Post, who founded that field at the CIA and led a unit that developed it for 21 years and then

moved on to George Washington University for the next several decades. He died about two years ago. Let's talk about that then before we get into Moscow embassy in 2002. Yeah, if that's okay. Yeah. Sure. No, Gerald Post, meeting Gerald Post changed my life. It changed the trajectory of my life. And he was a wonderful person, a remarkable, highly intelligent, visionary sort of guy.

I actually feel very strongly. I wrote a letter that was co-signed by about a dozen very, very senior retired CIA officials and current CIA officials, all senior at the senior ranks who believed Jerry Post should have been posthumously named a CIA trailblazer because he invented really a whole field that defines not only what he did but other people who have followed in his footsteps do so that was that that was terrific the way i met him was kind of serendipity again no google no internet i i had read his work as a resident he had done some study of profiling terrorist leaders and looking at group dynamics of terrorists, such as the Badr Mianov gang or terrorists associated with, I believe, Islamic jihad. He had partnered with some Israeli

researchers. So I had read those papers when I was a resident, and I was kind of curious about it. But what really got my attention was he had published a profile and presented it publicly of Saddam Hussein in 1991 before the House Armed Services Committee. And this got a lot of publicity and I read it. And I thought, wow, that a psychiatrist can use his expertise and knowledge to help us understand adversary leaders in a national security space and help policymakers. I thought that was just amazingly cool. I was kind of enthralled by it.

So I started reading more about it. And around 1994, 95, I was really struck by the case of Dr. Radavankarajic, the president, then president of the Bosnian Serb Republic, who had earlier in his career been a poet and a psychiatrist. And I actually translated, I got hold of all his poetry and translated it, and really wondered, how could a person who's a literate person won many poetry awards, a psychiatrist who treated people, turn into a genocidal mass murder? And his poetry is eerie and haunting. And I started writing up a paper, a profile of Kadajic.

And I called Post Up, and he were talking, and he said, what are you working on? I said, Kadajic. He goes, that's funny, so am I. Why don't we get together? So he flew to Dallas for a wedding a month later. had a four-hour brunch where we just talked shop and thus began a wonderful collaboration and friendship. We published and presented those profiles in the mid-90s for academic conferences for the U.S. government and then later in 1999 published a similar profile of

Servius president, the late Sloane Milosevic. And that's how that collaboration was born. Can you? I'm sorry. That was an exciting part of my career. I'm just curious. How does the profile start? Is it art? Is it science?

Because we sit here and we look at somebody go, oh, he's cray cray. But obviously, you guys. That's a non-clinical term. You guys, yeah, that's our scientific turn for it. But you guys are able to pull apart these threads and compare and contrast. And like you say, you know, on one hand, he's writing this. he's a literate person who has the capacity to write this haunting poetry and he's also genocidal. How does that whole process start with a profile and how do you build a profile?

Parts of it are psychobiographical. The traditional approach to profiling because it was more heavily influenced by not only folks like Gerald Post, but Dr. William Langer in World War II really was the father. this he was a psychiatrist at Harvard who was asked by general William Donovan the head of the OSS to develop a profile in late nineteen forty two i think of Adolf Hitler because at that point the war was starting to turn and they wanted to know how Hitler would react as the tides of war turned against Germany and so Langer really did what posted or post borrowed from that model where he put together a multidisciplinary team of historians, psychologists, psychiatrists, internal medicine

doctors to review any medical data that you have, intelligence analysts, signals analysts, if you're getting any type of covert information about a leader. But most of the information is open source and over. And then you put together kind of a picture of, you're trying to understand what makes the leader tick, sort of what Dave was hinting at, trying to trying to understand how someone like Hitler, for example, could be obviously highly intelligent and intelligent enough to pull together all these business leaders in Germany in 1933 and take power, achieve the concordat, the diplomatic agreement with the Vatican in 1933, pull together all these parties, and then also harness the power afterwards, in 1934 with the brown shirts and other forces that led to him really having much more supreme power by 1936.

But trying to understand the trajectory of the leader's political behavior and how it's influenced by the leader's psychology. The traditionalists like Post and Langer would look more at childhood antecedents of that behavior. But I think you have to look at it both ways. And in my recent work the last couple of years, you sort of go backwards as well, a reverse engineering approach where you're looking at, we know where they are now. How did they get there? And how do they gain legitimacy? How do they govern?

How do they achieve governance outcomes, if you will? And that's an important point because our current adversaries, primarily President Xi Jinping of China, China, one of their propaganda arguments is basically our system works better than yours. We can get things done. We're not flawed. We're not broken. We're not as chaotic. We can achieve efficiencies of scale and governance outcomes. And you have to be fair and look at it that way. The Chinese for all of the harshness of their regime, the cruelties, the genocide of the Uyghurs comes to and many other aggressive behaviors, the CCP has lifted 600 million people out of poverty in the last 30 years. That's a remarkable achievement. So you have to look at it from both ends

of the spectrum of the leader's life. Ken, before we've moved past your work dealing with the former Yugoslavia, when you were speaking, it really reminded me of this book, Soldaten, which I read years ago. And it's taken from transcripts of German people. Ws during World War II that they secretly recorded them. And I can't remember if it's this book or it might have been Hitler's willing executioners, but there's an accountant there. You speak about like intellectuals, you know, someone who's an intellectual, who's smart and it's still a genocidal maniac.

There's a story in one of these books about the Nazi band. They were the band. They were clarinet and trombone players and they were playing for like an event or a wedding. And then the nearby like National Guard Commandant and said, why don't you come down to the concentration camp and help us out? And they spent the afternoon gleefully shooting Jews into a pit and then went back to playing music. And I mean, it's just stories like that that, like I'm interested in your analysis, like what you came away from that work. Like what was your conclusion about that type of person?

Sadly, what we've seen and I had studied, I had read Robert Lifton's classic work. He was a psychiatrist to read a book called The Nazi Doctors. And the saddest part of the Holocaust was that the dry run for the Holocaust was a program out in the open in German society in the mid to late 30s called the T4 euthanasia program where they basically murdered in hospitals and clinics hundreds of thousands of children who were mentally ill, mentally retarded and, you know, what we would call today developmentally disabled. And this program was developed and run by physicians from the leading institutions of Germany, the elites, and most of the people who ran the program were psychiatrists. And Lifton has talked about that exactly what you touch on. And I think that's something we don't understand that in genocide, you can get ordinary people doing horrible, abnormal things, just like if you look at the opposite,

its side something very altruistic and amazing if you've you've had a read about or had medal of honor winners on your show and i've read books about them and studies about them and they're really very ordinary but they don't say they're heroes they say i'm an ordinary person i was just doing my job in an extraordinary time so i think that's really important to understand the broad range of humanity one of one of the modos of my work is a quote from a Roman philosopher Terrence, which says nothing which is human is alien to me. Can you hear me?

Yes. Yep. Okay. So, and I, we don't, we try to, we don't get political on the show. And so I'm not going to mention any countries, but do you have, do you have caution about countries that promote like internal euthanasia, like voluntary euthanasia programs within their own borders and stuff. Like, do you feel that sets of precedence

or is it its own thing? That's a separate, you could have a whole separate conversation on that. I personally struggle with that. You know, I think, I think it really runs the risk of being a slippery slope ethically, and that's why we don't do it in this country. Yeah.

It's very interesting. So talk to us then about, you know, you do land in the foreign leaders analysis wing or department. I'm sorry, I don't remember the exact name of this section. What was it like actually working there with, you know, some of the, this doctor that you admired so much? You mean with Dr. Post? Yeah, I was, I was actually, when I worked with him, I was in Dallas. I was an academic psychiatrist. And the other, the other kind of path that led me to this was initially studying foreign leaders who were criminals, meaning like Karajic and Miloshvich, who had been indicted for war crimes. I was a forensic psychiatrist at the time. I worked in emergency

rooms. I worked in a large county jail. I was an expert witness in murder trials and sexual assault trials. And I also worked in a prison clinic, a conditional release clinic for prisoners with mental illness who had been released on parole for felony offenses. Many of them were violent offenses. If I remember correctly at the time, I had 15 murders on my caseload and I think 35 or 40 child sex offenders, drug dealers, armed robbers. And our job was to treat them and we work side by side with parole officers. And the goal was to keep the patients out of the hospital and keep them from reoffending

and going back to prison. So the forensic psychiatry, sort of you're getting into what makes the criminal mind tick. So that part probably played a role in my getting involved in understanding the cases of Karajitsch and Miloshavich. Was it challenging for you

to keep an open mind when you were dealing with those type of people? Were you able to see them as a person with an illness. Like how is that from a human experience? Yeah, again, as I, you have to, you have to see them as human beings to understand them. I, when I was, if you're treating them in the jail,

you, you, you know, they may have diagnoses such as antisocial personality, what people call sociopaths, but they also have anxiety or depression or they've had PTSD from traumatic experiences. they've had other medical problems traumatic brain injury many of these people have been in fights where they're hit on the head with a two by four or a chain or a bat or something like that so they've grown up around violence so you have to kind of tease apart what's what medically

and psychiatrically and neurologically and it's actually very challenging yeah to work in that clinical space but to do it you have to be able to sort of be empathic with them and try to understand them And that's true. That's true in forensic work. You have to kind of put yourself in the defendant's shoes and try to understand why would someone do this or what would drive them to do this kind of offense, this kind of crime.

And if you're judgmental, if you go in there with a judgmental attitude, prisoners are really good at picking up on those attitudes, and they just will shut down and won't trust you or talk to you. And that's true in profiling leaders. you have to put yourself in the mindset of the leader you're trying to understand, try to see them as a human being, empathize, and humanize them. That doesn't mean you agree with the horrible things that do, but you have to try to achieve that level of understanding.

So can you tell us a little bit about your work at that time, analyzing foreign leaders and like, how would the intelligence community use these profiles that you guys would develop? I think they're the best way. to look at them is they they feed into a larger puzzle. And I can probably talk more about that in my current work because there are many more threads. And now with social media in that, for example, the work that I've published in the Cipher Brief, the CEO and publisher, Suzanne Kelly, has told me they have a million readers a month. So you get a lot of people in the private sector,

in the government and think tanks and academia are going to read these profiles. I'll tell you a funny story. Our adversaries read these too. I've seen profiles of mine that were edited, translated, edited, cut and pasted and published in Russian, in Russian media. I've been quoted in the state North Korean media. So they're reading our stuff too. They want to know what we think. So the intelligence community really sees these as a piece of a very large puzzle. It's one component. and it's one piece. It's not the be all and end all. But it's designed to help our policy makers understand these leaders in times of crises, war,

and in diplomatic negotiations. And that, I think, is more important now than ever. And that's why the people in the government that do this kind of work are valued. And the unit that Dr. Post stood up in 1965 is still in existence today and functioning very actively. That's fascinating. Yeah, it really is. Was that about the same time that the FBI was starting with their sort of profiling serial killers,

trying to figure that whole thing out? That's actually a great question because the answer is yes. The other kind of role of psychiatry and psychology in profiling did come from the FBI in the 70s, but the first case and the famous one was a case of a psychiatrist named James Bucel, who was a psychoanalyst practicing in New York, and he had worked with the NYPD, and they had a case for many years of a guy known as the Mad Bomber who would send in these mail bombs to various offices and buildings, and he killed some people and caused damage, and they couldn't catch him. So they went to Dr. Broussel, who wrote a book called Casebook of a Crime Psychiatrist.

It's a classic. And they asked him, could you develop a profile of this guy? And his profile was uncannily accurate. Without ever seeing the eye, he just studied the crime scenes, read some of the writings. This gentleman, Metesky, was his name, the criminal, had written letters to a company. such as con ed and to the media. And he analyzed the writing, the content, the handwriting. And he deduced that this individual would probably be living alone,

that he was somewhat older in his 30s or 40s, and that if he didn't live alone, he would live with his mother, and that he may have been employed but was at the time of this unemployed, and that he was a white male. male. And then he added a very famous line in his profile and he said, when you arrest him, he will be very neat and he will be wearing a double-breasted suit. And that's exactly what happened. So that work of Bucel influenced later the beginning generations of FBI profilers, John Douglas and Roy Hazelwood in the 1970s and 1980s. And actually as a forensic psychiatrist, I've worked on cases

with some, at the time in the 90s, some FBI profilers, Alan Brantley comes to mind. And they're remarkable people. They have a lot of insight into the criminal mind. Honestly, the guy sounds like the first in-sell. But you mentioned handwriting. I mean, you can tell something about a person, like a psychiatrist or a psychologist can tell something about a person from their

handwriting? Yeah, there's a there's a whole art behind this. I'm not an expert on it. I don't comment. No people who do, but it's graphology. And they can sort of try to deduce personality traits, not disorders, but traits from someone's handwriting. So someone like Broussel looked at that as one more piece of a larger puzzle. The other thing that's important getting back to your question about intelligence analysis, leadership analysis is kind of a subset of that. Okay. And it really falls, it overlaps with medical intelligence because most leaders in the world aren't young. They're old. The people I've studied recently, Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, they're both 70. The Supreme Leader of Iran is in his late 80s and is dying of late stage prostate

cancer. Kim Jong-un is relatively young compared to these other leaders, but his father at the time when he died was 68, I believe, Kim Jong-il, and I wrote a profile about him in 2010 after he had had a stroke in 2008, a devastating stroke. So most leaders are older, and when they get older, they run into various medical problems. And so that's something where a medical input is very, very interesting and useful, but it's really hard to do because our adversary leaders, their medical health is a state secret. These aren't people who release their medical records from their doctor in the meeting, like our presidential candidates that's due, for example.

Right. I want to ask you a follow-up question of that, but real quick, we need to give a shout out to our sponsors tonight. Yeah. The first one is battling blades. Honestly, guys, check out their website, Batting the Blaze. They have a lot of really phenomenal stuff. They have swords and, you know, all types of historical swords. They have...

Dice? Don't they have dives also? Yeah, yeah. So they have swords, knives, hatchets. They have amazing dice sets for any of you tabletop gamers out there. They also have some stuff if you're a rent-fair person or a, or a Comic-Con person. And they have some fantastic, fantastic gear for that. Where did that one come from, Ken?

That's a Hanjar dagger handmade from Oman. And this is a Georgian kanjali dagger. Very cool. You know, razor sharp. We have a kukri here from a Kathmandu that I bought. It's over on the other side of the office. Yeah. Cuckery right here, my friend.

That's the kind of the Gurkhas carried today, isn't it? Yes. When I was in Nepal for work on TDY, I bought, I collect knives. I'm a martial artist as well. Oh, really? So I went shopping after a day in the health clinic, and they took me downtown, and there was a store full of swords and kukri blades. And I was like the kid in the candy jar.

Yeah, I mean, in that case, Ken, you should probably check out Battle of the Blades, too. I mean, they have a gladys that I've got my eye on. Check them out, guys, battleblades.com, team house for the coupon go for 20% off. That's Battleblades.com, team house for 20% off, all one more team house. And we also have Sap Gear tonight. It's the other sponsor of this show. Sap Gear makes a lot of really cool, I would say gadgets, but gear. For people in the special operations community, people who work in the NGO space,

even people who work for like the United Nations, for example, a lot of things to escape unwaful kidnapping and restraints. They make a lot of E&E tools like necklaces and things that you can wear underneath your clothes that have like shims and lock picks and handcuff keys built into them. Yeah, they have some great tech gear just to keep yourself safe. Like tech gear that everybody can use to keep, like if you plug your phone into an Uber car to charge to make sure that that Uber driver isn't jacking your information. And it's just a plug.

I mean, it's simple stuff. And so that is, all that can be found at sapgear.com. And if you use the promo code team, you'll get 15% off your order. So sapgear.com and use the promo code team, you'll get 15% off. So, Ken, out of curiosity, like, what martial arts do you study? What floats your boat? I got interested in martial arts when I was a medical student, and I studied, I've studied Aikido for over 30 years.

And then when I was in Russia, when I was in Austria, I studied Bhujan Khan in Jutsu for two years. And when I was in Russia, I studied Sistama from the founder, Systema, a retired Spetsknottsk, Colonel Mikhail Wipkou. And I became, I think I was the first diplomat to be a student in Moscow, Now, certainly the first American. I studied there for three years, the second tour that I was there. And at the end of the tour, he made me a certified instructor.

That's pretty cool. And I've studied under his top student in Toronto, Vladimir Vassiliev, who was also a spetsnots soldier in his youth. That was a remarkable experience. Yeah, can I ask your, what's your opinion of Systema? Like, I've heard different things from different people over the years, but I've never heard from somebody with, like, your level of experience. who train directly under the guys.

I love it. I admit my bias. I think Sistema is a great martial art because it's a complete martial art because it involves elements not only of the movement and the strikes and the groundwork and working with weapons, but breathing and the health aspects, I think, are really good.

It was really, really good for my health. It really changed my whole way in which you view the mind and the body connection during that kind of training. The training was very demanding. The Russians were not easy on me. They didn't think I was a diplomat or a psychiatrist. They pounded the living daylights out of me,

tried to get me to quit. And I'm not the quitting type. I'm kind of an adventuresome person. I also forgot to mention I was a rock climber as a kid. I was a 5-11 rock climber. Wow. Really? So I like adventure and having fun.

and martial arts is a lot of fun. And I became very, I guess they accepted me. I learned about their culture. My Russian became very fluent. I actually was an interpreter for seminars where they would have attendees from all over the world. That was funny how that happened. I was standing around watching Mikhail talk

and one of the other teachers said, what are you doing there, you idiot? Translate. I go, me? He goes, yeah, you're bilingual, you. So that's how I started doing that. But it's a great art and it's it's the art of the spets knots. When you when you see videos of it and the way they move,

you can see they've borrowed elements from other arts such as like keto, jujitsu, Tai Chi, weapons work, sword fighting. Sambo. Sambo, yeah. Sambo, yeah, it's, it's, there are really two main schools. There's Mikhail Rikouz school, which is more Moscow-centric and, and they have, of schools in Tvierre. And he has, you know, people split off like Valentin Talano, one of his top students, split off and formed his own system. But very similar. And then they

have the Kadochnikov school, which is really tightly linked with the GRU. And I've trained, when I traveled in Russia, I trained with people who were linked with that school. But it's very similar. They have the same movement, the same style, the same style of training. One of the things that's interesting about the Russians is the first time I went to a systema school they were training with live blades it was slow and careful but still live blades you get cut you get hurt you would never do this in the US because of the risk of lawsuits so I asked one of the Russian teachers why don't you use plastic blades and aren't you worried about the risk of someone getting hurt and they said well if they got hurt it means they weren't paying attention right it's a different culture

funny because I think systema is sort of like Cromagat where if you study it at its root or if you study it from somebody who is actually taking it from that, it's valuable. They're very comprehensive, very effective arts and then

but by the time You get to the American strip mall karate. Yeah, by the time it's in an American strip mall, it's generally somebody who has rebranded, you know, they've like, they've just taken a bunch of stuff that they got from videotapes and they call it, you know, Systema or they call it Krav Maga. And they're like, yeah, it's a complete,

you know, it's a complete thing. Like, you're not getting the real stuff a lot of times here in the States. Well, the, the arts get diluted. My, my keto training was very, very, it involved elements of cross training with judo and jujitsu and boxing because my teachers, the late Bill Sosa and my other teacher, his son, Ricardo Sosa, they, they had Rick, uh, rich, uh, was, Sensei Rick was a Marine in Vietnam. And there were lots of soldiers that would, and former military that would take these classes. We had a lot of police officers and they want realism. They want to know, is this going to work? If I have to use it to deal with the situation on the job as a police officer. So it had to have elements of realism and the training.

The risk, the risk that you highlight is training can be diluted. And from what I've heard, the training in Systema under Mikhail was much harder in the 80s and 90s than it is now. It was still very hard. Right. When we rolled around, at first, there were no maths. You rolled around on a hard surface, and it's a cruel teacher. If you're not rolling softly and properly and breathing right, you get banged up very, very quickly. Right.

So I had to learn, I had to relearn how to roll. I thought I knew how to roll from rolling on maths in Aikido, but I didn't know how to work. line to relearn. Yeah, I mean, the problem is any art that starts out like that, if you want to pay the bills. Yeah. You can't just bring in the hardcore that are willing to get thrown on a on a tatami or on a hard floor. That reminds me the Jim West model. My friend Jim West taught martial arts to special forces. And he told me in the past, like, I was a good trainer, but I didn't really have the business acumen. Right. People would come in and get bloody noses and black eyes. Yeah, yeah.

It's good stuff. Yeah, but I loved every minute of it. And it was also one of the things that it helped me learn about dealing with real Russians. One of the risks you have when you work in an embassy, it got me out of the embassy, aside from my constant TDI travels, I was traveling every other week to a different country. But you talk to regular people, people from all walks of life, my Russian improved. you're getting out of the embassy where you tend to deal mostly with the contacts in the embassy tend to be elites who think like we do in many ways. They're well educated. They speak English. So it's different when you get out of the embassy and get on the street level. And I learned that

from many of my friends in the intelligence world. They said when you move to a big city like Moscow or Mexico or New Delhi, you know, learn the culture, learn your city and get out of the embassy. So I took that I took that mantra to heart. heart. And same with the book I showed you earlier by General Walters, Silent Missions. He would practice his languages and dialects with taxi drivers and motorpool drivers. So I do the same thing. In Moscow, the rides to the airports were long. You get stuck in traffic for an hour and a half, two hours. So you could have conversations with just regular people. And you learn a lot about the country, about the culture, and they ask you questions. And that opens your eyes to different.

cultures. I really enjoyed that part as well. Ken, I have to ask you, how many languages do you or did you speak at one time? At different times, let me guess. Slovian, which I no longer speak, I spoke as a child. Serbo-Croatian, that can come back pretty quickly and fluently. Russian, same thing. The only language I use right now in my work is Spanish. I learned it before I went to Mexico back in the 90s. And then when I was stationed in Mexico City and traveling in Mexico, Latin America, I mean Central America and the Caribbean, like the Dominican Republic, Cuba, then my Spanish improved. So I speak Spanish and a little bit of German. And I used to speak French, but I haven't used it. So let's dive into your time in Moscow at the embassy a little bit more. Correct me if I'm wrong. You were in charge of, you know,

kind of maintaining the, helping to maintain the mental health of the U.S. government employees who are also stationed there. Yes, and their families. And what was that experience like? I mean, the thing that jumps right out to me is some of the, you know, war stories I've heard from like crusty case officers about being under constant surveillance and what like a high stress environment Moscow is to operate in. Yeah, all of us, all of us were under high, stress surveillance because they assumed that every diplomat station there is a case officer. Right.

And as I told you, they didn't really know what to make of me when I was there because they thought you're not really a psychiatrist. You're into martial arts. You worked with the CIA profiler because that stuff was published in the open. And you speak Russian in these other languages. And I had three passports and I traveled all the time. So they didn't believe that I was just kind of a psychiatrist. So I had to deal with the same stressors.

You learn about the same stressors that are diplomats and intelligence officers and military officers go through. And it takes a real psychological toll on people. When I got there, I asked the pros in the diplomatic or intel community. These are Russia hands who speak Russian, and it often done multiple tours in Russia. or the former Soviet Union, I said, how do you deal with this? And I knew how to deal with it somewhat because in the 70s, I had lived in Eastern Europe

in Yugoslavia. I lived in Belgrade for a year in the mid-70s. And so I remember as a teenager getting harassed by the secret police and being under surveillance. But it's another higher order in a place like Moscow. And it takes a toll on people's psyche. So you have to, you can't minimize it. You have to hear it from the person's side, what it's like to never have privacy, to never be alone.

You know, to have phone calls late at night made to your apartment phone and then they hang up or, you know, you walk in, your phone is suddenly not working and then the next day it's working. And there's a whole new list of email addresses added to it, stuff like that. And you would see surveillance when I'd walk around Moscow just with my wife and my kid and go to go to the Red Square in the nice days, go to the Kremlin, ride the metro, that sort of thing, get a cup of coffee, be a shopper. You would at times see surveillance or you'd get pulled over because my first tour in Moscow, I lived about 18 miles from downtown. It was a very long commute. And the police would pull you over randomly for no reason.

And that creates a lot of strain when you've had a 10-hour workday and there's a blizzard and you're cold, you want to get home. And some 19-year-old cop who can barely read your papers and passport pulls you over, takes your passport in a little hut, disappears for half an hour, then comes back. It's designed to create stress. And that's exactly what it does. The Russians have two motives with our diplomats. The first one is to recruit you. The second one, if they can't recruit you, is to run you off.

Yeah. And I think, I mean, for people who have never been under surveillance, like one of the challenges with surveillance also is when you know you're under surveillance or when you know that is very possible for you to be under surveillance, you start seeing it everywhere. And, you know, the guy reading a paper who just happens to glance at you, like you're locked on and it's like you're always on edge even when there's not a reason to be.

Yeah, you have to, it's very difficult for people who are, who I know, who are friends of mine who served in different parts of the world with hard surveillance who were case officers because there it's a life and death thing. Right. If I'm out running around and I see surveillance or miss it, I'm just going shopping. It's not a, a life or death situation because I'm not meeting with the contact where if they get caught, I get P&Ged, but the contact gets jailed or executed. So that adds to the pressure on many of our employees in these types of places overseas that if they make a mistake, it can have really severe consequences. So that ratchets up the pressure on their psyche. And again, people would get used to being under surveillance every time.

they, even on the embassy compound, but even every time they left the embassy compound, whether they went to the gym or went to a cultural event or took the metro to go down to Red Square, you, you were always under surveillance. And I would, my surveillance would go up whenever I was a a control officer for medical visitors. Any visitor always has an officer who's their control. You make their hotel reservations. You meet them at the area. airport, you take them downtown. And so I remember I was a control officer for a senior medical officer. And he, I was waiting at one of the large airports in Moscow. And this gentleman came up to me and said, you must be Dr. Declayv. I said in Russian. I said, yes, how kind of you.

And he goes, are you waiting for Dr. So and so? And I said, yes, actually, I am. And he said, could I be of assistance? I said, no, you know, I'm fine. I've lived here for about a year, but if you give me a card, I'll call you if anything comes up. And then he disappeared like it goes. So the other thing I learned with surveillance is you have to sort of learn how to deal with them and not completely alienate them and piss them off because then they can ratchet up the pressure and kind of target you and just make you miserable and make your family miserable. That was the other thing I saw, the impact on families. Many of the diplomats and officers and military people and FBI and other agencies who serve in a place like Moscow,

they may have specialized training to deal with that, but their family members don't. Their kids don't. So that's, you know, the Russians can get very ugly and they'll add to the harassment of the spouses. and I often had to support the spouses and meet with them in a group in a proper setting, a safe setting in the embassy where we could try to understand how to help them, how to mitigate, and how to support them so that they could not feel terrified. Many, many people will describe being under surveillance as a violation. Those were the words patients would tell me in my office. I'm talking about people, you know, crying and sobbing and saying, I feel violent. violated because I have to show my ID or my passport, the police are always stopping me.

Because most Americans that live in a upper middle class suburb who are white have never had the experience of being pulled over by a cop and said, show me your papers. Now, sadly, in our country, you know, if you look at racial profiling and policing, many of our people of color, our friends who are people of color will tell you those experiences in their childhood adolescents and even adulthood. So they learn to adapt to it, many of them do. But most people who look like me don't learn to adapt to it. I only learned because I lived in those kind of settings before.

But I tried to share that knowledge with people so they could adapt and cope. The other way to cope is respite. And that's what the pros and the seniors told me, including people in the intel and military communities, said every two or three months, you need to take a break and get out of Russia and fly to Western Europe where you can let your hair down. And so that respite was very important.

Even for a few days, it allows diplomats and their families to recharge their batteries. But this is an important topic. I actually argued the State Department has a, all the other agencies follow what the State Department does. So they have a rating for every embassy in the world, the hardship scale. And Moscow at the time when I left was 20%, which is pretty significant. That means there's political hardship, other hardships, language isolation, people that don't speak English. And I argued that surveillance was an important, and harassment was an important metric of that psychological hardship, even though it's not as easy to measure as a hardship like there's piles of garbage on every street corner.

That's more measurable. Right, right. But I think there's a better understanding of that now in the state of place. department and the other agencies like they might say a third world country or developing country was a hardship where moscow wasn't but that was yeah like disease india where i served because of tropical disease and you're constantly sick uh with enteric illness so that would be a huge variable for an asthma you know new deli is the worst air pollution in the world right now even worse than china so i'm i'm curious you know uh when you had somebody

at the embassy in Moscow coming to your office and they're like stressed out on the, I mean, I've heard, you know, of case officers actually quitting because they couldn't handle it, you know, because it's such a demanding environment. I'm just interested, what were the techniques for like mental management that you tried to teach your patients? Again, as I said, respite was very important. You know, you would, sometimes some of the diplomats and officers would work a very long stretch without without getting a break, like not taking even a three or four day vacation to get away. And then the stress would build up. It'd be cumulative. It's like, it's like if you're an x-ray tech, you wear a little radiation badge in the clinic or a hospital.

Right. When you've had too much radiation, you can't be around any. Right. And you told them it's kind of like that. You're, you're not going to be effective in your mission, in your job. if you're under that much pressure. So we would teach them about, you know, breathing exercises, regular exercise, respite, trying to help them find what today, for lack of a better term, is called work-life balance. And that's hard to do because in many of the countries I've worked in,

the military and intelligence officers often had, you know, one and a half or two jobs. They had a job they did during the day and another job they did in the evenings and the weekend. And so the hours are very long and how to balance long hours with the mission. And this can be challenging because in a place like Moscow, regardless of whether you're with the State Department or another office or agency, the mission comes first. So that can be very, very difficult for people, as you pointed out. Now, as a doctor, you obviously have ways, you know, you're not judging these people for, you know, you're encouraging them to seek treatment.

Was there ever any kind of institutional resistance that you met with that? Yeah, unfortunately, all diplomats and their family members have to have a medical clearance to serve overseas. And that was a huge barrier to people seeking our care. The analogy would be with pilots don't go to flight surgeons and talk about their stressors because they're afraid they'll get grounded. The reality is that from the time I joined and on, and we've done studies and shared this data when I was with the State Department, the chances of being medically curtailed because of a treatable psychiatric illness were very, very low.

I mean, very low. Like I'm off the top of my head, maybe 2% of people I saw would be would be curtailed. So most would see me and go about their business. They'd get treatment, either therapy or medications or both. A lot of cases required reassurance and kind of stress management techniques, one or two visits, and that was good enough. But that stigma is there. Part of it is the corporate culture in places like the State Department, the law enforcement community, the intelligence community, which is, you know, you're a nice person, but I'm not going near your office. So it's a barrier that we have to overcome. So we would overcome it by education, by being visible, by kind of hanging out at the water cooler, eating in the cafeteria, letting people see that we are just regular people.

One of the things that helps is when you're a physician or nurse practitioner or psychiatrist with the State Department, the medical program has several hundred people in these different roles. Psychiatry is a very small number, though. You live and work among the community that you treat. So they see you in the gym. They see you at the commissary store. They see you in church. They see you at the airport.

Your kid goes to school with their kids. So you learn that. And that probably helps break down some of the barriers, but not totally. And then go ahead. The other thing you mentioned to us that you were involved in at the embassy was crisis response. I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit about that. Yeah, the program really had a, roots in crisis response in the late 70s when the first two psychiatrists, Elmore Rigimer,

was sent to Kabul as the first regional psychiatrist following the murder in Afghanistan of Ambassador Spike Dubs in 1979. And as you can imagine, the community, the small embassy community was traumatized by this and they felt that mental health need was a viable thing that needed that level of support. So Dr. Rigimer went out there and I think spent a year or two in Kabul until the embassy closed after the 1979, December 1979 invasion of Afghanistan by the Soviet Union. And around the same time, they had a second psychiatrist in Washington, who was a friend and mentor of mine, Dr. Esther Roberts, who was really a pioneer,

she's retired now, who was one of three psychiatrists that accompanied the 52 Iranian hostages from Alger to Wiesbaden Air Force Base in Germany for medical and psychological and psychiatric debriefings following their 454 days of being hostages in Tehran. So that that was kind of the beginning and model of responding to crises. But as when I joined the program, the types of crises that I and my colleagues, again, there were about a dozen of us at the time, now they're about two dozen overseas. We'll respond to crises such as terrorist attacks during the war on terror, earthquakes, tsunamis, like I had to respond in Sri Lanka after the 2004 tsunami. That was my region. The Fukushima earthquake in Japan in 2011.

the 2000, I think 13 earthquake in Kathmandu, and things like that, our people would respond to and provide support. Basically, whenever a crisis happened, we pretty much knew we would be showing up there within a couple of days as part of a medical team to provide behavioral health and mental health support. in addition to the routine clinical work that we did. And I forgot to mention the pandemic, obviously. I mean, talk about crisis response. That's been a worldwide crisis response. I retired in late 2016, but the pandemic has had to redo.

People have had to redo the whole paradigm of how they respond to crises, especially when you can't travel, when all travel shut down. With such a small number of psychiatrists kind of spread across the world handling these things, I'm sure that you've run across high performers, people who perform well in their field, whatever that is, but who are running on the ragged edge, but maybe are burying, like, their stuff in, you know, just with drive, with work. Have you encountered those types of people?

How do you handle those types of people? if they're not going to come see you or not, you know, like how do you save somebody from themselves when you see it? Well, the way you, the way I would do it in a place like Moscow, again, I would make myself visible, you engage with people, you, you give talks, you, you meet with small groups informally in different office settings. When I would go to an embassy on TDI, I would meet with everyone. In a small embassy, I might meet with every single employee. informally, not in my office, I'd go to their office where they're more comfortable and just not in a doctor-patient role, but just ask, how are you doing?

The military model of this is unit cohesion assessment, trying to get a picture of what are the stressors on people in that particular embassy? Are they internal, meaning inside the embassy because of poor leadership or people can't get along in different work units and do their job together? Are they external stressors from the environment? outside the embassy, i.e. the host country, or both. And so I found it really worthwhile to just talk to people informally, kind of a water cooler type of conversation, make them comfortable. And sometimes people with a higher level of symptomatology or stress would eventually find

my way to my office in a formal doctor-patient relationship. But it might start out informally. So you have to be comfortable with that, with giving advice to people who may say, Doc, you know, I'm doing fine. I don't need to see you, but I can't sleep. You know, they're going to ask you while you're at a picnic drinking a beer, you know, what can I do for my sleep? Well, I'm not going to, it's too rigid if I said, I'm sorry, I can't answer your question unless you come to my office.

That's just not going to work. Right. So I might say, you know, cut back on your caffeine, drink less liquor, work out, more, you know, don't drink too much coffee or energy drinks, practice good sleep hygiene, you know, take care of any other health problems, you know, primary care type health problems. You know, if you have high blood pressure, diabetes, you know, chronic pain, anything like that. You know, you sort of answered their question in a practical, matter-of-fact way, and that's how you gain trust.

Right, right. So you wouldn't go right into like, how was your relationship with your mother? I'm just kidding. But so, I mean, did people require a lot of reassurance that they weren't going to lose their job for talking to you? Yeah, but what would not yes and no. I mean, once they saw me and then what would happen is people would, people would, you know, a large number of people, someone in their family, be it the employee, the spouse, about a half the people I saw in my career were employees. The other half were spouses and kids. You know, once they realized that they would see you and life goes on, then that would help too. Yeah.

About a third of the patients I saw in my work overseas were children, children with ADHD, with learning disabilities. And we were a big help to them because we could, once we documented it, they could get U.S. government support, something called the special needs allowance to the tune of, you know, $75,000 a year for school, for specialized tutors. If they needed testing, we could get them psychologically, you know, tested and evaluated. So parents welcome that. If you have people in these high-stress positions, a diplomat, an intel officer, a military officer, a DE agent, an FBI agent,

and they're worried about their child who's flunking school because they can't learn because they got a learning disability or early autism, then they can't focus on their job and on the mission. So a huge part of our job comes from that motto. It's a special ops motto, really, which was developed in the special ops world by a legendary heroic doctor named Rob Marsh, who was the first flight surgeon for Delta Force. And he was very, very active. he deployed 300 days a year with his team, but he also knew back home at base, I guess Ford Bragg or where they were stationed. You had to take care of the family and the kids too.

Otherwise, the operators can't do their job. So I took that kind of thinking to heart. And I borrowed some of that. And I learned from special operations, medical models, took courses in that, to talk to people in that world. their motto for doctors was mooch and travel light. Ken, I wanted to, again, plumb your knowledge a bit here since you have such a unique view. And you worked in Moscow.

You mentioned that you were in Cuba at one point. I wanted to ask you about the Havana syndrome. And for the folks out there who aren't sure what I'm talking about, you can look it up. There's a lot of stuff in the news. But this phenomenon where we have members of the intelligence community appearing to have been affected by something. And I've heard the term directed beam used, but there's no clear conclusive evidence publicly. Our first interview with Mark Palermo, he talked about it a lot. He talks about it. There's no, as far as I know, there's no publicly available conclusive proof

of what this phenomena is. And it was denied by the government for a long time. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And, you know, guys are coming down with some, you know, debilitating symptoms to the point that they have to resign from government service. Ken, I was wondering if you could tell us about, you know, what you know about that, what your perspective is. Sure, I became interested in it because the first cases appeared in early 2017, a couple months after I had left government. And I've been to Cuba for work, on TDY work twice. And Cuba, Havana is a fascinating but very stressful place. And so I was kind of dumbstruck when I read about the first cases. And, read the first medical reports out of the University of Miami, University of Pennsylvania,

and a couple other centers where these folks were treated. Now most of them are going to Walter Reed, and finally they're getting uniform treatment in one place with a treatment model. But I also had an interest in this because in my current work in my clinic, I've seen about 200 patients referred to me by otolaryngology and neurology who have these kind of symptoms. Now, it's not called Ivana syndrome because they're not diplomats overseas, but they have syndromes with chronic neurovestibular syndromes with dizziness, vestibular migraines, trouble with concentration and memory, brain fog, headaches, anxiety, depression, and other other neurologic findings. So these patients get referred to psychiatry because some of the best

treatments for them are psychiatric medications in addition to specialized types of physical therapy called vestibular therapy and also cognitive behavioral therapies can be helpful if you start them early enough. So what happened overseas was, you know, you had this real puzzle, a real medical mystery puzzle, and it still doesn't have an answer of young, pretty healthy people. Remember, like I said, to serve overseas, especially in an austere place like Cuba, you have to have good health and a medical clearance to support that

because you don't have a lot of medical resources in Cuba compared to, let's say, in Western Europe. And that was a real challenge, because we saw in the 2017 reports in 20, 18 young healthy people in their 30s and 40s without prior health histories of significance suddenly coming down with these debilitating symptoms and and no no obvious cause and there was a panel the national academy of sciences chaired by dr david realm of stanford a very distinguished physician and infectious disease researcher chaired a panel a multidisciplinary panel of

and physicians, including neuroscientists, to look at possible causes. And one of the theories they came is that it looked like, at least for the people in Cuba, there was a directed microwave energy weapon that could have been used. But there was a lot of grief for many of these patients, many of whom, as you pointed out, have suffered. Some have been forced to medically retire from the U.S. government. And they've had really dramatic shows on 60 minutes. I encourage people to watch those.

And so it's still a mystery as to the cause. There's no obvious kind of smoking gun cause. Now, what's very interesting, and I follow this very carefully, and I actually helped organize a conference on this in Dallas earlier in 2022, so on Havana syndrome, where we had clinicians and outside experts like Mark Paul and Moropoulos, Dan Hoffman, Ambassador Eric Rubin, and Dr. James Giordano and Dr. Georgetown and DARPA and Dr. Jeff Stobb of the Mayo Clinic, who's a psychiatrist who's the leading expert on these Dizzyma syndromes.

So we kind of brought in clinicians to look at the bedside clinic view and then brought in outside experts to look at it from the policy view, from the 30,000-foot view how it's affecting government and diplomacy. And what's happened is many State Department and CIA officers at that time in 2020, 2020, were afraid to serve overseas. They were afraid they would be victimized by this. So thankfully, I think Director Burns at the CIA has done a very fine job of outreach to the victims and setting up novel programs for screening and pre-screening and more safety valves. That being said, we still don't know the cause.

And it's not only intel officers, but diplomats have also been affected by this. And I think more research is clearly necessary. The other thing I would add is bad actors such as the Russians have published in the open source bio physical literature, open source in English. For years, theories and papers about using electromagnetic radiation as a weapon that could disrupt the nervous system. So there are researchers in adversary countries that are interested in these technologies for potentially nefarious purposes.

Right. And they don't have to kill. In fact, it benefits them not to like, it's not an assassin's bullet. Right. Right. It's a deterrent. It's like these guys, these, you know, people come down sick. Who else?

Now who wants to go to Cuba? Who wants to go to Moscow? Who wants to go to these places? Yeah, there were about two dozen reports in 2019 and 2020 that, if I recall correctly, is that the time? Yeah, that we're out of Vienna, where I would also have been stationed. And so. There were cases all over the world in 2021.

Even a member of Director Burns team traveling with him to New Delhi, India was affected. And a member of Vice President Kamala Harris' team flying from Singapore to Hanoi was impacted. There were countless cases in other African, European, Latin American countries. So it really became a very, very dramatic. puzzle, but they felt it wasn't due to other agents such as crickets, for example, you know, or bees or something like that. It wasn't psychosomatic. And I think that was where the initial reports relied, over-reliad, sadly on an FBI behavioral analysis report that claimed all these people were psychosomatic. Given that they have the kind of symptoms that patients

I've seen in my clinic have with neurovestibular syndromes, they're not psychosomatic. The symptoms are real. They can be very disabling. They can be very scary and very dangerous. I've had patients that are so severely afflicted from these symptoms that they get suicidal. Then you have to put them in the hospital in the psychiatric unit. Yeah. So these are tough illnesses to treat.

The good news is with treatments, many of them get better. but treatments are like in any area of medicine they often work better if you catch the illness earlier if it's had more chronicity and more time to fester then it can be tricky but i was i was also glad that people like you know director burns has spoken publicly about getting behind this at the CIA mark palmeropolis a former senior leader at the CIA has been very public about this in his podcast writings and in his his book on leadership clarity in crisis, which is an excellent book. And Mark, you know, talked to us about how difficult, you know, how the, how the, how institutionalized the, it's sort of like the burn pit thing or Asian orange, where the government is going to deny it for as long as they can.

He had to go to the press, get it blown up in the Washington Post, I think, and that was when they started offering treatment to people. Well, part of the problem with medical things in a bureaucracy like the State Department, or the CIA, these are large bureaucracies, government bureaucracies, is that it's easier for senior people. I think Mark Palomaropoulos was the equivalent of an SIS three or four. He had the juice in the rank to go public and make statement. But a first or second tour diplomat without tenure is going to be, they're going to be a bit more queasy and cautious about bringing up personal health symptoms in the sense of the word for fear that it would hurt their career. Right. And they don't have the cloud, like, who's going to listen to a GS-13 about,

about their issues, right? I mean, they don't have the career stability. Yeah. Yeah. Let's get into the foreign leader analysis a bit. Should we start with Vladimir, or Putin? I'm open. Let's jump into it, Ken. What is going on inside the mind of Putin? Well, let me start by making a few general comments. One of the things I've learned from studying our adversary leaders, and I also want to

point out for your listeners and viewers, I don't profile American leaders, as colorful as they may be, and interesting as they may be. I play for the home team. So the, but the tradition I come from from Langer and Post is one of profiling foreign adversaries. And these adversaries that I've studied to have a lot in common, what I call the three R's, they're rational leaders, they're rational actors in their sense of rationality. They tend to be pretty ruthless. They're very resilient.

They have lots of staying power. And in the case of Putin, and we'll talk more about it, certainly revanchist of wanting to kind of remake uh make russia great again or remake the former soviet union in terms of its pre you know 1991 borders um the resilience is important to know because there's often a lot of wishful thinking in analyzing these leaders in in the media and even in think tanks and in the government that they're somehow going to go away But people, when Kim Il-sung, the founder of modern North Korea, died in 1994, if I'm getting my date right, people thought Kim Jong-il wouldn't last more than a few months. Well, he lasted until 2011.

When his son, the current leader, Chairman Kim Jong-un took over at the age of, we don't know how old these exactly. I think he was 26 at the time. people thought he was kind of a nothing burger and wouldn't last long and and that other more powerful elites would topple him. Well, that's not been the case. So we've had some real intelligence failures in terms of prediction of longevity. President Putin has been in power as president for now for almost 23 years. So they have longevity and resilience and they're very tough formidable adversaries. They're all highly intelligent. But that's true of most leaders when they get to that level. People, psychologists that

have actually done retrospective kind of hypothetical IQ tests on leaders find that these people tend to be people of very, very high intelligence and high political intelligence. So those are kind of the general concepts. So what's Putin like? I mean, by now Putin's story is well known. He was basically a single, you know, the only child. He had, his mother lost a child in childbirth and another sibling died during the war of infection. From born to kind of salt of the earth, hard scrabble parents. His mother had a third grade education, worked in a factory. And his father was a decorated but disabled special forces.

veteran of World War II in the siege of Leningrad in which Putin's mother almost died of starvation, the famous 900-day siege where a million Soviet citizens died. So that's what Putin, who was born in 52, grew up hearing about in common culture and in, he was surrounded by it. You couldn't escape it because Soviet Union lost 25 million people during the war. They lost more than anybody, right? I mean, Yeah. He was fired by his dreams and ambitions as a young man. And Dr. Post used to write about this, about dreams of ambition and glory that many of these leaders will develop, even when they're young, when their teenagers are young adults, where he wanted to join the KGB and join the pantheon of heroes. And he did join the KGB at a time when then chairman, Yuri Andropov, was kind of hiring people not just, from the elites, but from different sectors of life, from smaller cities and villages,

and plucking out more and more talent, if you will. And the other thing that shaped Putin as a youngster was his two things, his love of German, which he's mastered to real fluency, as shown in his 2001 really remarkable speech to the Bundestag. And his love of martial arts, he grew up studying Sambo and then he's been a lover of judo and he's ranked I think eighth Don and judo since he was about 10 years old. And now that he's he's been in power for so long, there's a lot of people who are also speculating that his mental health is deteriorated. I spoke to one analyst actually.

It might have been Aaron Schwartzbaum when we had him on that something that has affected his thinking actually was the pandemic and that it put him into isolation. and he did a lot of reading, a lot of reading that would be sort of like Russian QAnon, sort of, again, the delusions of grandeur of a greater Russian empire and a mythical Russian past that was stolen from them. And I was wondering what your thoughts are about where he is today. I think we have to be careful with Putin in this case. It's because Putin's decision to invade the Ukraine looks at this point in time like really a horrible

strategic intelligence failure, then when leaders make bad decisions or decisions that go wrong, there's a temptation then to think, gosh, they must be off their rock or they must be crazy. There must be something wrong with them. Because Putin has been seen as kind of a master, including by me, as a master tactician and a master strategist and a very good diplomat all these years to woo the leaders of the West from the UK in the early 2000s to Germany, to Austria, to France, to Italy, his relationships with multiple U.S. presidents dating back to President Clinton at the end of President Clinton's term and President Clinton met him, George W. Bush, President Obama, President Trump, and now

President Biden. So I think there's a temptation to use reasoning that can get flawed, which is to say, because they made a bad decision with bad outcomes, there must be something wrong with them mentally. That's way too superficial and simplistic, in my opinion. The other thing is to go farther and say there's something medically or neurologically wrong, like does he have dementia, or maybe he has Parkinson's disease with cognitive impairment, or maybe he has cancer and he is on chemotherapy. There's a lot of theories, but everything that I've seen in Stomachians, suggests that he is a fairly healthy 70-year-old. And whenever they've had these reports come out

of Putin dying or being in very ill health, you know, two days later you'll see him conducting a news conference or meeting with a group of people and looking pretty sprightly. I do think he's probably had athletic injuries from playing hockey for years. In the last decade and a half, he's taken up hockey, which is not, it's not a great sport for someone his age. For a 60 year to start, yeah. Yeah, he's good at it. I've seen videos of him playing hockey with his bodyguards. He's pretty good.

And he's a very talented and gifted martial artists. But we know from the martial arts literature in judo and Iketo and these kind of, and jujitsu with its groundwork. And judo has a lot of groundwork. You get a lot of back and knee injuries and neck injuries. So it wouldn't surprise me. that Putin's had too many breakfalls in his life. The other thing, I think, is the isolation is interesting. I do think he's more isolated, but I'm not sure that's because of COVID.

I think he's just politically more isolated over the last decade. He has a narrower inner circle compared to his first two terms when he had a much more diverse. There was much more diversity of opinion in his National Security Council. And he had very, very bright, talented people working for him that I think helped him and helped Russia. And I think now he's probably leaning in more on a very narrower circle of people like, you know, FSB director Alexander Bortnikov, defense minister Sergei Shoigou, and the chairman of the National Security Council, former AFSP chief Nikolai Patrushov. You might add Lavrov to that group,

Foreign Minister Lavrov, I'm not so sure. I think he goes along with it, but I'm not sure he's really part of that inner circle in the same way. Or SVR director of Sergei Naryshkin, but President Putin's humiliation in public on worldwide TV, the first week of the war, that famous meeting where he humiliated Naryshkin, would argue that Naryshkin is not completely trusted.

in that inner circle. Putin is really lean much more in the FSB. The other risk he's taken is, is like many autocrats as they get older, their thinking gets more rigid. It's what psychologists who study this call cognitive rigidity, where they see things more as black and white, less nuanced, less gray.

I think there's an element of that. And then the isolation with the pandemic. and we've seen the videos of the famous long table and things like that. I think that's probably more for dramatic effect and kind of a power play than anything medical or psychological per se. But I do think he's more isolated. I don't think when you look at the theories of the late Alexander Dugan, who died in a bomb blast. Well, his daughter did. His daughter, that's okay.

That's right. And when you look at, but the attempt was on him. Yes. You look at the theories that Putin is cited to justify the invasion. I think Putin has had these thoughts for a long time. He told President Bush, I think, way back in 2007, that Ukraine's not a real state, not a real nation, that it's really part of Russia. And he's just using these intellectual theories as kind of ballast to support his. ideology in this case.

And as somebody who grew up post-war two, at sort of the burgeoning and the height of the Soviet Union, like there's a reason he sees this Russian, this Soviet, this Russian Empire, right? I mean, it's not outside of his realm

of right or wrong. It's not outside of his realm of what the past was. Yes, and the past is very important to him. For him, it was a heroic past. And I think the breakup of the Soviet Union, which he's called one of the great political tragedies of the 20th century, was traumatic for him. He was stationed in Dresden around that time. And when the DDR ceased to exist kind of as a country and demonstrators were in the streets, potentially threatening to overrun the Soviet consulate.

where Putin worked a small consulate in Dresden, he cabled Moscow back for instructions, and there was no response. So his famous line was Moscow was silent. So I think one of the things that President Putin has always feared is the loss of a strong Russian state. And Fiona Hill, who was the national security director for the Russia desk under President Trump, has written about this marvelously in her book, Putin operative in the Kremlin, where Putin really is a statist who wants to rebuild a strong centralized Russian state. To some extent, I think he had done that successfully, his first two terms, but I think that that version of Putinism is running out of steam.

And he's tragically for Russia, for a whole generation, accelerated that with this horrible, tragic and wrong invasion of a sovereign state of the Ukraine. He misjudged the Ukrainians' will to resist. He misjudged NATO. He misjudged President Biden's ability to rally NATO in the EU around, uniting against Putin. And most of all, like everyone else, including us, he misjudged the courage and heroism of President Zelensky of the Ukraine. What's shift gears to talk about the Chinese Premier Xi? I'd love to hear your thoughts about his interior world. She is a fascinating leader who, again, like many of these leaders,

depending on which press you read, has been underestimated. But there was a cover of The Economist, and I still agree with that to some extent that he's probably the most powerful leader in the world today. That that cover was in 2017. She was a child of privilege whose father was one of Mao Zetung's closest advisors during and after the long march and the founding of the People's Republic in 1949 and was one of the youngest vice ministers in the early to mid-50s. So she grew up in Zhongnan-Hai as a child of privilege, kind of a communist elite under Mao.

But then in the early to mid-60s, his father was purged. And then shortly a couple years later, she, a teenager, got caught up in the Cultural Revolution, was himself perched, threatened with execution as a 14-year-old, Red Guard's arrested and said, we can kill you a hundred times. And he said, well, you really don't need to do a hundred when one will do. And they laughed and let him go, but sent him away to a faraway province where he lived among peasants and dug latrines for, for, seven or eight years, a time that really changed him. And this is a time, think about it, a teenager who's away from his parents, doesn't know if he'll ever see them again in the throes of a cultural revolution that killed 10 million people, according to best historical estimates, who's away from his family, away from Beijing, away from everything he's known. And he showed the resilience and fortitude to overcome that what psychologists and psychiatrists call post-traumatic growth. And to come back and win the trust of the villagers where he could get nominated to go to university back

in Beijing, which he did. And then he began his political career. So I think he's in a way of, it's a remarkable journey. He gave an interview in 2000 when he wasn't well known to an obscure Chinese newspaper. And he talked about how those experiences in the countryside strengthened his spirit. He used terminology like, you know, a knife is sharpened on a stone and, and things like that that make you stronger, solidify you in your character and your psyche. You learn a lot from being among ordinary people. So I think even before he was famous and more powerful, he was actually a late bloomer in many ways. He was only in the late 90s and early 2000s barely got elected to the Central Committee as an alternate initially.

His wife, who was a very famous opera singer and a major general in the music core of the military, was way more famous than he was at that time, Pen Ling Wan. So she's had a remarkable ascendancy in what former Australian Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, who's a sinologist, who's met, I think, every Chinese leader since Mao and speaks Chinese, and has now been nominated to be the Australian ambassador in the U.S. Kevin Rudd is called she kind of a remarkable character, a Nelson Mandela-like character in terms of his inner strength, and I agree with that.

And how does that experience shape how his relationship with, you know, the exterior world, with how he regards, you know, both regional areas around East Asia, but also, I mean, specifically the United States and how he negotiates with us and views us. I think, I think, I think she is, even though he's traveled to the states as, as vice president and as president since what, 2008, I've talked to other people who've met she, American diplomats and businessmen who met him, and they tend to agree with the portrait of him that he's really a rather remarkable figure. I think we have to be careful of biases like that famous cable from the U.S. Embassy in

2009, which said he had average intelligence. I was kind of shocked when I read that because to someone like me or to a psychologist, average intelligence suggests you have an IQ of 100, and you made it through high school. And she is fairly successfully running a country of 1.4. four billion people. A person with average intelligence couldn't do that. They don't have the mental aptitude to run a country like that, let alone a smaller country or even a organization or a business. So I think we have to be careful with our built-in, any analyst of foreign leaders, you have to try your best to shed your biases and stick to more objective data. I think the interesting thing about she is he knows more about America than we probably realize he he's visited America the famous

visit to Iowa in 1985 where he met with then governor Brandstad who later became U.S. ambassador to Beijing to China Terry Brantzad and and his daughter went to Harvard and a lot of the people around she have spent time in America including several of of the members of his first 10 years standing public bureau committee and even the current one, people have studied, several of them have studied in the United States and know and understand the United States. So I think the Chinese are, I think, well informed in that regard. I think they have their own bias where they have to be careful though. I think they're, she and his leadership, if you will, the standing public year committee are so caught up in their success.

their real success of China's rising that that whole mantra the east is rising and the west is in decline they need to be careful uh American exceptionalism is still a force that is not spent and I'm old enough that I've seen America go through the doldrums and bounce back I remember I remember Vietnam years I remember the early 70s I remember the late 70s and America has a resilience and a quality that our adversaries would be they'd be well well versed to read to tokoville and and to try and understand our country more broadly and because i think they get that wrong including she one more i wanted to drop on you uh of course maybe the maybe the most interesting in an eccentric way kim jang un of north khm khm un is a fascinating leader

microphone. We knew very little about him until he sort of had a diplomatic coming out, starting right around the time of after his New Year's speech in 2018 and the Winter Olympics of 2018, which were held in South Korea, where he sent a delegation, a team to the Olympics, and also a delegation, including his sister. And then president of North Korea, Kimio-John, who was 90, His sister was the de facto leader of the delegation Kim You Jong and sent them to meet with South Korean leaders and thus began a remarkable series of summits. Four summits that year between him and then South Korean President Moon Jae-in and his first meeting with President Trump in Singapore in June of 2018. And subsequent meetings in 2019 was President Trump and President Putin. And he also had three summits in 2018 with China's president Xi Jinping.

So he really is a remarkable young leader who showed the ability diplomatically and politically to go toe to toe as an equal with the most powerful leaders in the world. And a former Russian ambassador to South Korea, Ambassador Gle Bivansian, have pointed that out. And I think he's right. So Kim is a very remarkable. and kind of interesting person in that regard. Like the other leaders, he's utterly ruthless, and I do think he has an agenda that he's not going to give up nuclear weapons, and I've said this all along.

If anything, he's expanded his nuclear program and his missile programs and continues to test longer and longer range ICBMs, and there's real risk that he could do a seventh nuclear test. But North Korea has been a de facto nuclear power since 2006, And I think what Kim wants is acceptance on the world stage, their nuclear power in the same sense that India was after 1974 or Pakistan after 1998. And that's a tough challenge because of the risks of nonproliferation. The nonproliferation regime, it threatens the whole underpinning of the nonproliferation regime

and peace and security in Northeast Asia. So I think that's a real hard challenge. I've always, I thought President Trump did the right thing to try to break the ice and negotiate with Chairman Kim. I don't think there are any other good options. There never have been. Diplomacy is really the only option. And I know the Biden administration has tried to reach out, but to no avail at this point. I think President Trump was successful in 2017 with the strictest U.S.

UN sanctions in getting both China and Russia to go along with those sanctions. That would not happen today, of course. So I think that makes it more difficult. We're kind of a bit more on our own in that regard. But hopefully in the next couple of years, the dynamics on the ground will change and there'll be a return to diplomacy because that's the only hope. You see Kim Jong-un as, you know, you think deep down he has a desire to join, you know, let's say the quote unquote global community community of nations and be integrated not not as you know what we call them today as a rogue state i i think there was some hope of that in 2018 there was certainly hope that north korea could follow a development model you know a one-party system similar

to let's say vietnam uh and and and that was highlighted during his visits both to singapore and Vietnam where North Korea could be, could North Korea be the next Asian tiger if it opened up? Yes, I think so. The, once you unleash the kind of the hard work and the entrepreneurial spirit, the patriotism of the North Korean people, they're, they're Korean. So they're going to be like South Korea. The economy's going to take off. You're going to build infrastructure and rail and health clinics and, you know, and build

businesses and create legitimate businesses. But him has been at this point, sadly, has tightened up the economy after earlier years of reforms, of internal reforms, economic reforms, loosening up, if you will, of entrepreneurialism during the first couple years of his rule after 2012. And now it's a little tighter, but there's hope that once they get out of this kind of of pandemic, they were really under severe lockdown, the most severe in the world, that little by little they will experiment again with opening up. They've done it before, so I'm sure he'll do it again. He's what I've written about and called an aspirational leader where I think he has several desires. One is to stay in power and to keep his family, the Mount Pektu bloodline in power.

and the other is to build up North Korea's economy and have North Korea accepted as an nuclear weapon state. Is there a tendency for us as Americans to look at a state like North Korea similar to a state like Russia or Gaddafi or, you know, Tito or whatever when really he's a generational, like he inherited what he got and what he got, like he might want to be something different than what, what it has been, as opposed to a first generation leader who, like, grab control and, and has the reins. Like a revolutionary. That's an interesting question, because if you look at Tito, who I studied very well and grew up learning about Tito in the former Yugoslavia, Tito's kids and grandchildren are poor. There was no handover, there was no translation or,

But he died and it ended, yeah. Yeah, of power. So Kim, Kim is different because here you have a third generation ruler that has to has to seek his, he has to figure out his legitimacy. And it's different from that of his father and his grandfather. His grandfather, the founder of modern North Korea, had the legitimacy of fighting the Japanese during World War II. two in fighting the Americans during the Korean War.

Kim Jong-un doesn't have that same kind of legitimacy. The best legitimacy for him is going to be economic in the long run, because it's a new generation of the children of these young elites. And in terms of governance and leadership outcomes, he has to balance and keep not only the military happy and the whole nuclear weapons complex. if you will happy but he has to keep the the elites happy uh he he has more power at his control and ruthlessness but none of these autocratic leaders have complete absolute power they have to appeal

to constituencies and factions within the elites to maintain their power i read somewhere that there's some uh i guess informed speculation that he may have gone to boarding school in switzerland as a kid Oh, he did. That's not speculation. He spent several years in boarding schools in Bair in Switzerland, where he was kind of thought to be an average student, you know, typical kind of middle school kid who liked basketball and the Chicago Bulls and Michael Jordan and rap music and video games kind of didn't make a huge impression one way or another. And then that's interesting psychologically because he, he would, was like a boarding school kid away from his family for several years where he didn't see his parents. And then he came back and kind of over time became groomed to be his father's successor.

One of the false narratives, kind of an intelligence failure in the mid-de-late 2000s, was that when Kim Jong-un took power after his father's death from a sudden cardiac death in December 2011, was that he had not been groomed for a leadership role the way Kim Jong-il was for over 25 years in different party positions in the Korean Workers Party. But the fact of the matter is it became clear in hindsight that he had been groomed for several years for these type of leadership roles and that he took to them far more easily and far more ruthlessly than anyone would have predicted. So outside of what, and again, not to get political, because, but outside of what, you know, taking Trump as a person, Trump is a president, Trump's policies anywhere else, do you feel that his approach, his trip to North Korea was a positive step? And how should our government proceed from there if it was or wasn't?

It's hard to redo it. I think it was positive if you if you listen to then he was, I believe the special envoy at the time. Later Deputy Secretary of State Steve Began's very, very powerful speech at Stanford in January of 2019, right a month before the Hanoi Summit. That speech was clearly blessed by the White House. that he could give it publicly and it outlined what a what a relationship with American North Korea might look like and they looked at things like an end to a formal end to the war beyond the 1953 armistice the exchange of prisoners and or their remains if you will the opening of liaison offices in both countries

and and the first kind of tentative steps similar to the six-party talks in the mid-2000s of beginning processes of denuclearization. We got real close. And then in Hanoi, in the negotiations, it fell apart. And I think both sides lost the momentum. And President Trump, as he famously said in his book on negotiation, The Art of the Deal, sometimes you've got to walk away. And President Trump believed it and he did.

But so did Kim. Kim didn't walk. He took a very long train ride all the way from Hanoi back to Pion Yang. And then I think President Trump regained the momentum with his dramatic, symbolic visit to the DMZ in June of 2019. But then the momentum was lost. And then, you know, fast forward a few more months. and then you're in domestic politics take over a presidential election season.

Right. And it's hard to recapture the momentum. Right. That same thing happened. That sense of running out of time happened during the end of President Clinton's term when Secretary of State, out of the later, Albright, visited Tianyang. And they just ran out of time. And President Clinton wasn't going to be able to, because he was finishing his term.

and then the politics changed with President George W. Bush. What does it mean for a politician, regardless of their level, like Madeline Albright and Trump or whatever, what does it mean for them to actually cross the DMZ? What does it mean to the leader of North Korea when they do that? I think it's very important symbolically. If you look at the first meeting with then-President Mung Jay-in and Chairman Kim in, I believe, April of 2018,

where they held hands and took those steps back and forth across the DMZ, the symbolism was very powerful. So I think that's very, very important. And one of the things that it shows is a respect for the leader and for their country, that you're acknowledging them as the legitimate leader of a real country. We may not agree with their politics. We certainly don't. There are many horrific things that they've done.

in terms of human rights abuses. But there are many areas where we can cooperate. And I'm a strong believer in diplomacy. I think that we have to figure out how to negotiate with difficult people and cooperate and engage, if you will, in areas where we're able to. I'm not saying it's easy. My diplomatic colleagues will tell you it's very difficult. But we have very talented diplomats and people who are kind of,

hardwired to do this. They learn the languages. They learn the cultures. They become very specialized and it's important to keep trying, both with our adversaries such as North Korea, with Iran, with China, with Russia. Because when, for example, with the Ukraine war, when the war ends, we can't ignore Russia. It's the largest geographic landmass in the world. It's a huge producer of oil and natural gas. We can't really shut them out of the world economy. forever, we may have sanctions now, but we have to figure out a way to work with Russia. When I was in Russia in 2011, then Vice President Biden visited the embassy and gave a speech, and he said, a strong, prosperous Russia is in the U.S. national interest.

I still agree with that. I think the keyword there is prosperous. Unfortunately, it's not prosperous when you have a brain drain because of the, of President Putin's policies in which close to a million highly educated people aged between 20 and about 50 leave the country permanently. If you think of the competition, the multipolar world that even the ODNI report cited last year and Director Burns and Director Haynes have cited and President, she uses that language as well the the the multipolar world will also be a war for talent the cold war will be

a war for talent so if you lose a million people that are talented you've lost out big time i want to get to some viewer questions i think we have some uh yeah we do um but first could you tell us about you know what you've done in you know quote unquote retirement um you wrote a book yes i'm not retired i see patients uh full time 40 hours a week okay so you're still quite better than ever. And I've written a book, which I'll hold up. It's called The Negotiators Cross. And it's a novel, a mystery novel, kind of a mystery espionage thriller that's been very well reviewed by two of your previous guests on the show, Jim Lawler and J.R. Seeger and also Jim Haas. And it's a tale of an American priest who

grows up in Texas and is recruited into the military after high school. He grew up on a farm and a ranch. So he has a lot of different skills. And he's recruited into an elite military intelligence unit, the kind of unit that doesn't have a name and stationed all over, and he speaks fluent Spanish. So he's stationed all over Latin America, Mexico, Central America, doing intelligence and trying to catch bad guys, cartel leaders and recruit other people. And he has some traumatic experience there, which lead him to leave the unit after a few years, and he finds his way to his calling, the priesthood. And then he's then sent to Mexico City, where he's the priest to a small group of expats. And one day, one of his expats,

an American, a young Mexican-American businessman goes missing. They think he's been kidnapped. And this character, Father Ishmael, gets drawn into a world of hidden-knap negotiations with cartels, with the U.S. government, with Mexican government intelligence and law enforcement agencies, and it becomes very harrowing. And his skills get noted. And because of that, he's then transferred by the Apostolic Nuncio to Moscow, where an American priest has been seized.

And accused of espionage, and they want to get the priest back, but they have to use the Holy Ze, the Nuncio, the embassy of the Holy Ze, as the go-between, so they use him. And there he interacts with people from the U.S. government, CIA, the State Department, the FSB, the GRU. And there's some other subplots that involve a missing Russian Spetsknot's veteran and GRU officer, who was a material witness at the massacre of Srebrenica of 7,000 Bosnian Muslims, men, women, and children in July 1995. So the novel's set in the 90s, and it ends around the millennium. And it's the tale that tests this priests, not only different skills, diplomatic negotiation skills, but in the end is faith.

I think readers will enjoy it greatly. I'm working on a sequel that involves a high-level missing North Korean. defector. It's not so far out there. I heard a story very recently about an American nun that was taken by terrorists in an African nation, and we recently repatriated, and none of that really hit the headlines at all, but it happened. So, I mean, the plot of your novel is not so far out there from reality. People have asked me how I got into it. One of my roles overseas, was providing medical support to hostages to diplomats or family members who'd been taking hostage. And so I became familiar with that world of hostage negotiation, not as a negotiator.

Doctors aren't negotiators. They're medical support. But I had to understand that world. And, you know, I've attended and presented at Sears Psychology conferences organized by the Department of Defense. And so I learned about that world and had a lot of fascination with those kind of negotiations. A lot of people have asked me, why is the protagonist a priest? That sort of came to me by serendipity one day while I was sitting on my porch, having a drink and smoking a cigar. Because most hostage negotiators in fiction are going to be like law enforcement, FBI agents,

or if it's overseas, a diplomat, a lawyer, or a CIA officer and intelligence officer. And I thought, I'll make mine different. No one's ever made a priest do this. But I later found out, after I had written the first couple drafts of the book, there's a book by Victor Gaetan called God's Diplomats, where there have been priests in this type of role as negotiators, for example, in Nigeria and in Central America. And there's a famous movie about a priest who gets drawn into the world of terrorism and counterterrorism with the IRA called A Prayer for the Dying, starring Liam Neeson. Yeah.

And the priest is played by Bob Hostens. I had seen this movie when it came out, gosh, 25 years ago. And I must have repressed it in my consciousness, but I remembered it later after I had written a novel. And it involved a priest who struggles with his faith in those kind of choices as the protagonist in my novel. I just also want to say, unfortunately, Jack and I haven't read this, but we will.

And the book is, if you have Kindle Prime or Amazon Prime with the Kindle Prime, like you can read this book for free and you still get paid. So check it out for sure. Thank you very much. Yeah, I hope readers will like it. And if you like it, please post a review on Amazon. It's also been reviewed in the Cipher Brief recently by Joe Augustin, a retired senior CIA officer.

Fantastic. So here are the questions. Danny, thank you very much for the donation. I'm pretty sure we got to your question on the Havana syndrome. Scott, thank you very much. Thoughts of Putin cover up being born in Georgia. What? There's no evidence to support that. Every biography I've read of Putin, and they're very good. And the more recent ones have even more detail is, Putin is a child of Leningrad. Okay. Thank you. Brady, thank you very much. How many psychopaths do you think hold positions of power? That's a great question. I recently heard a lecture by a friend of mine and colleague who had been actually an opposing expert,

and he's written a lot about psychopathy. And he's a psychiatrist named Dr. Bill Reed. And I actually, we talked about this. We had kind of an after, after he gave a grand round's lecture for a group of psychiatrists, this question came up. And the answer is probably not too many. Here's why. Because if you're a full-blown psychopath, according to Dr. Robert Hare's psychopathy checklist, if you get a score of 30 or higher out of a 40-point scale, which is, for example, what,

in capital murder cases where I've testified, I've testified several of those defendants met the full criteria. One guy that I testified about was 39 out of 40, for example. You, they don't, if they're that psychopathic, they won't have the skill set and staying power and resiliency to be successful and to attract people around them. They damage too many relationships, and they often lack the staying power in politics, the patience, like Xi Jinping's patience, to achieve a lifelong dream over decades of achieving power and achieving the things he wants to achieve. But certain psychopathic character traits may be more, I guess, in certain professions. and I've said this publicly, I was cross-examined about this once on a capital murder case, you will find people in certain professions, the legal profession, politics, where they have these kind of traits, business that can appear to be adaptive. I would argue they're still destructive

in the long run, but superficially can appear to be adaptive, and you may get people that appear to be successful. But eventually even those people with those kind of traits, they can't build real lasting relationships, which you need in politics and in business and in government to get things done. So in the end, they falter as well, I think. Ken, out of curiosity, is there a medical or psychological difference between a sociopath and a psychopath? Yeah, psychopaths are a subset, really of any social personality or sociopath. And they're less common. You see them in the prison population.

You'll see a certain percentage of patients who commit violent crimes or psychopaths. The key difference in the medical and psychiatric and psychological literature is most people that are called sociopaths are any social personalities, he's they kind of burn out by the time they get to be 40 or 45 they get tired of it that explains being in jail they get tired of getting in trouble start a podcast I've seen I've evaluated I saw a patient once who I evaluated for a transplant who was a retired he was a hitman for the mob in in doubts and I asked him what do he goes I was a hitman I'm like what and he goes yeah I had to kill people. I did it for a living. I'm like, oh my gosh. But I said, do you do that now? He goes, no, no, I retired. I'm old. I'm sick. I got failing liver. I got failing this. I got failing that.

He wanted a transplant. He said, I just like playing with my grandkids. So he hadn't been in trouble with the law for many, many years. But psychopaths don't burn out. The characteristics stay with them forever. So if you see people that are like that, they can't really form. relationships. They lack the emotional ability and empathy to form relationships. And I tend to tell people, if you see them, you want to run the other way. So probably any person who has ever been a SOTIC or taken the M.M. Special Operations Target Indiction, but taken the MMPI has been told that they have sociopathic tendencies, but they're not a sociopathism like that. What does that mean? that i think this is an interesting question uh in in his podcast with you guys and in his other

podcast in his talk called soul catcher uh jim lawler who's one of the who's the cia trailblazer and one of the uh greatest case officers of our generation who who was responsible for building a team that took down the a q con nuclear proliferation that network has said you need a little bit of those kind of manipulative traits in order to to you know skate around the law what but what he really means is you're hiring people who within the organization and with each other and with their families and friends have to have high levels of integrity truthfulness and honesty but they have to have the ability to persuade a foreign asset or agent to put their life at risk and to break the law of the country in which they live.

So that's kind of threading a line there that it takes a certain type of psychological character trait to be able to do that. Not all people can do that. But in certain professions, you need people who can, you know, kind of shade the truth. We all shade the truth. We all shade the every day in our everyday conversations. People, little kids learn to do it. Teenagers do it. Anyone who's raised a teenage kid understands lying. But you have to, there's certain professions where that may be adaptive behavior,

like being a defense attorney or being a politician. You have to be able to hide some of your emotions and manipulate and highlight others. Yeah. And I think the good case officers are going to be people who can. But even in the end, someone like Jim Lawler will say, you can't rely solely on manipulation. In the end, you rely on building the relationship. Right. Someone like Jim Lawler has exceptional patience and the ability to build a relationship with an asset

who they dedicate themselves to and whose life they're dedicated to protect. You know, they live by the Protect All Sources and Methods motto, just like an FBI agent will say, I protect my sources, my informants. They have to have those relationship building abilities and, frankly, emotional intelligence plays into that. And does that also play into, like, on the more military, like direct action aside, like the ability, the ability to engage in combat or the ability to take a life and not be so aversely uh direct or you know adversely affected by it yeah i i i can't i'm i'm i'm not familiar with that because i didn't work in the military the the most famous book about this is david grossman's book on killing right where he really gets into that um and and

and i think the the it's something that the special forces for example uh select, they have to select for the ability, and that's why these people undergo in their selection process, different types of psychological tests and specialized courses to select someone who, when the moment comes, if they're taking down an airliner with terrorists in it, they have to be able to shoot the terrorists. Like a SWAT team person has to be able to do that and do it because they're taking a life to save other lives. So that's how they work around it morally without being traumatized by it. Interesting.

So I think it's a certain, the special operators have that unique skill set of, you know, having the mentality, somebody who's been in the Rangers like you guys are Delta 4s or SEALs. And I've known many such people, you know, will, you know, will, you know, you know, feel that they're, they're really preserving life in the end. They're saving lives of citizens by taking out, let's say, terrorists. With your work on this vast spectrum of both like people working for their country, intelligence officers, and also like talking to, you know, these criminals who, you know, people who have been in jail for whatever, do you feel that they all have,

all have morals in their own world in the sense of this is right and this is wrong and i might do this but i would never do this or or is there a percentage of population that just whatever goes goes well the psychopaths true psychopaths are completely amoral they're they only act in their own self-interest but even even if i've i've had patients who are gang members for example they have their own they have their own codes of behavior. They have rules. And they, and I learned about them from treating them. They would educate me about that. And I had one gangbanger and I had to put him in solitary because he was threatening a young inmate who didn't know the rules, who was quote unquote dissing him and disrespecting him. And I said, is that something you can blow off?

He goes, Doc, you don't understand. In my world, I can't blow that off. That kind of thing, it makes, he's not only attacking me, he's attacking my gang. And, and, you know, and that cannot stand. So he said, I have no choice then, but to hurt him or worse. So he agreed. He said, put me in solitary because I don't, I don't want to go back to prison. I want to get out and try to have a normal life. But that code was so instilled in him because he'd been a gang member for 15 or 20 years since he was, what, 10 or 11 years old. And I've had gang members tell me to my face when I evaluated them for, as an expert witness, would say, you know, if right now you're helping me, you're the expert. But if I had to kill you,

I'd do it in a heartbeat. That's fascinating. And Danny, thank you very much. How difficult is was it to do a profile on Iran's supreme leader? According to the general public, he's very inaccessible. He's a very inaccessible, mysterious figure. That's a very good question. The leaders where we have less data are by definition harder. Kim Jong-un was certainly like that the first several years of his rule. The only American who had met him was Dennis Rodman.

Now, did the U.S. government talk to Dennis Rodman and get his impressions I'm sure they did and and you know I've I myself have talked to people who were part of that entourage so you can form certain impressions with with the supreme leader it's it's very difficult because he's elderly he's ailing he's sick he recently had surgery he's thought to have late stage prostate cancer so So it's very, very difficult to get a current, in those kind of cases, you don't have the raw data. And again, most of the data is going to be through open sources, people who've met with them, secondary sources. But in this case, you don't have that.

So you'd probably inside the U.S. government have to rely more on classified methods. Any data you could get from recruiting a source close to the leader. or through signals intelligence. That, Ken, thank you so much. It's incredible. Really, it is. It's a totally different view from, you know, inside this world than what we normally get from even people who are spies or certainly special operators or whoever it is through really unique insights.

I want to thank you all for hosting me and think I tip my hat and thank all the members who I've worked with and gratitude to the people in the military, the intelligence community and the diplomatic community who serve tirelessly, often without kudos, often for many years in remote, austere, and dangerous faraway places to help keep our country safe. So I'm very grateful to them and was really privileged and honored to be a physician diplomat for 14 years, mostly overseas, 14 of the best years of my life. And folks out there next Friday, we're going to be talking to Larry Chambers. He was a lurp in Vietnam, long-range reconnaissance patrol guy, predecessor to the Ranger

companies later on in the war. He wrote the book Recondo. I'm halfway through it right now. You guys are going to love it. He also worked with another former guest, Ken Miller. They were out on patrol and Vietnam together. So really excited to have Larry on the show. Ken, again, thank you so much for doing this.

Please stay in touch. And everybody, check out negotiators cross wherever you buy your books. But if you have Kindle, if you have the Amazon Prime, you can get it for free on Kendall Prime. Read it. He still, he still. The link's going to be in the description. It's also in the chat right now. Negotiators cross. All right, guys.

Thank you very much. See you guys next Friday.