For Foreign Spies, the President Self-Profiles

During World War II the Harvard psychologist Henry Murray was given the job of profiling Adolf Hitler. The CIA’s predecessor, the Office for Strategic Services, wanted to know how Hitler would respond to “the mounting successes of the Allies” and “how the U.S. government might influence his mental condition and behavior.” Murray was famous as the founder of the field of personality psychology so there was simply no one more qualified for this assignment. But Murray had limited information from which to extrapolate. His meager sources included Hitler’s Mein Kampf and a biography written by a disillusioned former Nazi.

Murray’s conclusions reflected both his sparse data points and the popular psychoanalytic notions of the day. For example, from the fact that Hitler was unmarried and various written remarks he concluded that he was impotent and that he feared contamination by a woman’s blood. No modern historian believes any of this was the case. Hitler’s repressed Oedipus Complex was said to have resulted in admiration of his father’s dominance and contempt for his mother’s submissiveness. Murray reported that his godfather was Jewish. Again, these conclusions go far beyond the biographical evidence, to say the least.

Regardless of its successes or failures, profiling of foreign leaders has been a core function of intelligence agencies ever since. The goals are exactly the same as they were for the OSS, to predict a leader’s behavior under various circumstances and perhaps to influence their behavior. Normally this requires gathering information from many sources, presumably better ones than Murray had to rely on. It’s generally appreciated that canny observers can glean important clues as to the inclinations of a head of state. By the same token, leaders have been well aware of the importance of shielding their intentions and certain personal characteristics from adversaries and even from allies, as was Hitler. The best situation is to have an agent placed close to the center of power but that rarely happens, so intelligence agents often find themselves reduced to assessing the significance of facts like the physical arrangement of Communist political figures observing the May Day Parade from the Kremlin wall or those surrounding Kim Jong-un at a missile test.

In this sense President Trump’s Twitter habit has been a gold mine for foreign intelligence analysts. He makes their job too easy. Little nuance or fancy psychological theory is required to identify his emotional hot spots. (This is one reason the ongoing debate about the “Goldwater rule” in psychiatry is largely irrelevant to the case of Mr. Trump.) Granted, for someone as familiar with managing media as President Trump it’s also possible that he’s sending out a lot of false signals. But it’s not that hard to connect the dots to determine if the apparent psychological profile is supported by other evidence.

Consider, for example, the not implausible prospect that an intelligence service in country A wanted to annoy the president about a country B. All the service would need to do is create a false Twitter account for someone purporting to be an insider high in the government of country B. That false Tweeter could engage in a series of 140-character “reports” about how his or her boss, the prime minister, is theorizing about the president’s genitalia or his discomfort about women’s blood. Maybe that account would attract a lot of followers and finally get the president’s attention and annoy him, and maybe it wouldn’t. But it would be very inexpensive to try and just might cause the president to give that prime minister an angry look at an international summit or, even better, help cause a change in U.S. policy toward that country.

Any intelligence analyst with even basic training in behavioral science has already been thinking about all of this for months. One result is that U.S. policymakers and counter-intelligence officials find themselves playing a game of three-dimensional chess in a public echo chamber. And no one can say how the game ends or what the echoes will be.