Spycraft - Melton [214]
The CIA’s primary direct assessment tool, a largely culturally neutral test, was developed by TSS psychologist John Gittinger in the 1950s. The test questions could be administered openly or covertly by a case officer or psychologist in any language and the responses fed an assessment method named the Personality Assessment System (PAS).7 Gittinger, who joined the CIA in 1950, had developed his skills as the director of psychological services at the Oklahoma State Mental Hospital in Norman, Oklahoma. By interpreting data derived from patients tested against the Wechsler intelligence scale, Gittinger determined that he could make basic judgments about personality. He eventually collected Wechsler data on 29,000 subjects representing social groups ranging from hobos to fashion models, and businessmen to students. He was an early user of computers for compiling large quantities of test data to develop comparative relationships. At the CIA, he refined the methodology and built a mature PAS model. By the time he retired in 1979, Gittinger’s conscious emphasis on cross-cultural orientation for assessments and a demand for systematic, rigorous research-based judgments had become the basis for the CIA’s acceptance of operational psychology as a technical tool for agent operations.
While Gittinger’s system had detractors ranging from those who thought all psychology was suspect to professional peers who questioned the methodology, the PAS proved valuable to case officers involved in operations where time for personal contact with their targets was limited. The PAS results were so strong that the test became the standard method for assessing and predicting agent motivation and situational behavior. The insight the OTS psychologists provided about foreign targets by interpreting data from the PAS earned them the nickname “the wizards.”8
Indirect assessment involves reviewing all reporting from case officers about a target’s personal history, behavior, demeanor, and reactions to his contact with the case officer. All information available from or about the target, including public and private speeches, publications, and letters, as well as news stories and commentary by associates or relatives, are factored in. Covert audio or video transcripts, when available, also become a valuable part of the assessment package. The psychologists apply accepted analytical tools to the material and conduct an internal peer review from staff colleagues with multicultural backgrounds and foreign language skills in addition to their professional credentials. Direct assessments yielded higher quality and more extensive data for analysis than did indirect assessments, but the latter were necessary when the subject proved to be inaccessible.
During the Cold War years, when many targets lived in countries with severe travel restrictions, OTS maintained a small staff of handwriting specialists called graphologists.9 Graphology, a discipline more respected in Europe than in the United States, seeks to identify psychological characteristics of an individual based on measurable letter formations and line strokes in handwriting. The graphologists measured three dimensions (the vertical, horizontal, and depth of strokes or letters) for as many as twenty-one different characteristics of writing. Handwriting analysis has demonstrated the ability to distinguish between mentally healthy persons and those with mental illness. The OTS graphologists applied the same methodology to identify essential characteristics of persons who were unidentified, would not agree to a structured assessment (such as VIPs), were writers of anonymous letters, or were held in captivity.10
Advocates asserted that by analysis of handwriting, which in graphology is called “brain writing,” psychological characteristics and personality traits important to the CIA on otherwise unknown people can be identified.11 Although psychologists disagree on the value of graphology as a stand-alone tool, many Agency operational managers agreed that, as a supplement to direct assessment