Gittinger

[chiggerbit]

http://www.whale.to/b/testimony_of_john_gittinger.html
Testimony of John Gittinger, Former Employee, Central Intelligence Agency
http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/his ... /index.htm
Mr. GITTINGER. I am.

Senator INOUYE. Are you still an employee?

Mr. GITTINGER. No.

Senator INOUYE. Were you a member of the Agency at the time MKULTRA was in operation?

Mr. GITTINGER. Yes.

Senator INOUYE. Thank you. Senator Kennedy.

Senator KENNEDY. I want to welcome both of you to the committee. If we could start with Mr. Goldman. Were you the project engineer for the safe houses in either San Francisco or New York?

Mr. GOLDMAN. I know of no safe house in San Francisco.

Senator KENNEDY. How about in New York?

Mr. GOLDMAN. I knew of one facility that was established there, but I didn't know anything of its operation.

Senator KENNEDY. Were you a monitor on any testing of drugs on unwitting persons in San Francisco?

Mr. GOLDMAN. No.

Senator KENNEDY. Well, we have a classified document here that was provided by the Agency that lists your name as a monitor of the program and I would appreciate it if you would look--

Mr. GOLDMAN. I think the misunderstanding arises because I was project officer.

Senator KENNEDY. Well, would you take a look at that?

[Mr. Goldman inspected the document.]

Mr. GOLDMAN. This document as it states is correct. However, my--

Senator KENNEDY. That document is correct?

Mr. GOLDMAN. As far as I see on the first page, the project. But my--

Senator KENNEDY. Well, could I get it back, please.

That would indicate that you were a monitor of the program.

Mr. GOLDMAN. I was in charge of disbursing the moneys to Morgan Hall.

Senator KENNEDY. To whom was that?

Mr. GOLDMAN. To the individual whose name was listed at the top of that document.

Senator KENNEDY. And you knew that he was running the project in San Francisco?

Mr. GOLDMAN. I knew he was the person who was in charge out there.

Senator KENNEDY. All right.

Mr. GOLDMAN. But I had no knowledge nor did I seek knowledge of actually what he was doing, because there would be other things involved.

I did receive--

Senator KENNEDY. What were you doing?



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Mr. GOLDMAN. I was collecting -- I had to be sure that all the receipts that ever were turned in balanced with the moneys that were paid out to see that everything was run all right. There was no illegal use of funds as far as we could determine by the receipts and cash.

Senator KENNEDY. So even though the Agency document indicates that you were a monitor for the program, one of the few monitors of that particular program which you mentioned for San Francisco and Mill Valley, Calif., you described your responsibility only as a carrier of money, is that correct?

Mr. GOLDMAN. I would say as a disburser or carrying out -- seeing that the moneys were handled properly. There was within that -- I don't know what's done or what he did do in conjunction with other people.

Senator KENNEDY. Were you responsible for the disbursement of all the funds?

Mr. GOLDMAN. I was responsible for turning over the check to him.

Senator KENNEDY. And what did you know of the program itself?

Mr. GOLDMAN. The only thing I knew of the program was what he furnished us in terms of receipts and that sort of thing. I didn't indulge or concern myself in that.

Senator KENNEDY. You still wrote, and I'll let you examine it -- it's a classified document -- but you wrote a rather substantive review of the program in May of 1963, talking about the experiments, the factual data that had been collected, covert and realistic field trials, about the necessity of those particular -- and talked about the effectiveness of the various programs, the efficiency of various delivery systems. That doesn't sound to me like someone who is only--

Mr. GOLDMAN. Well, if you would refresh my memory, if I could read this I would certainly agree with whatever is said there, if it was written.

Senator KENNEDY. I am trying to gather what your role was. You've indicated first of all that you didn't know about -- you knew about a safe house in New York; now we find out that you're the carrier for the resources as well and the agent in San Francisco. We find out now that the CIA put you as a monitor. You're testifying that you only were the courier, and here we have just one document, and there are many others that talk about the substance of that program with your name on it and I am just trying to find out exactly what role you were playing.

Mr. GOLDMAN. The only thing I can tell you about this and I am drawing completely on my memory is that this individual who was in charge out there conducted these things and reported them back to the Agency. I didn't participate in any of them. All I know was that he furnished me with receipts for things that were done and told of the work that they had done.

Senator KENNEDY. Well, that document covers more than receipts.

Mr. GOLDMAN. Yes, it tells of what -- they had conducted work out there.

Senator KENNEDY. It describes, does it not? Read the paragraph 2.

Mr. GOLDMAN. "A number of covert"--

Senator KENNEDY. Well, you can't read it, it's a classified document, and I don't know why, quite frankly, but it relates to the substance



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of those programs and your name is signed to the memorandums on it. I am not interested in you trying to review for us now what is in the document, but I think it would be unfortunate if we were left with the opinion that all you were was a courier of resources when we see a document with your name on it, signed, that talks about the substance of the program. And what we're interested in is the substance of the program. We have the recent documents that were provided by the Agency, which do indicate that you were at least involved in the substance, and I'm just trying to find out whether you're willing to tell us about that.

Mr. GOLDMAN. I am perfectly willing to tell you everything that I can remember.

Senator KENNEDY. But you can't remember anything.

Mr. GOLDMAN. I can't remember the substantive parts of these, things, I really can't.

Senator KENNEDY. Of the program that was taking place.

Do you have any greater familiarity with what was happening in New York?

Mr. GOLDMAN. No, no.

Senator KENNEDY. And you have the same function with regards to New York?

Mr. GOLDMAN. The same function with regard to New York.

Senator KENNEDY. Did you ever go to San Francisco?

Mr. GOLDMAN. Yes.

Senator KENNEDY. Did you meet with the agent in charge?

Mr. GOLDMAN. Yes.

Senator KENNEDY. And why did you meet with him?

Mr. GOLDMAN. To discuss some of the receipts and things that were there to find out if these were indeed true expenditures and to find out if everything was going along all right for the work that was being done.

Senator KENNEDY. What work was being done?

Mr. GOLDMAN. No, the reports of these things and whatever was being done. I don't know who he reported to but he did report to somebody.

Senator KENNEDY. You travel out there to find out about the work that's being done, and what does he tell you, that the work is being done well and--

Mr. GOLDMAN. He told me that the work that they were doing was going along, progressing satisfactorily, but to be very frank with you--

Senator KENNEDY. But he didn't tell you what the work was?

Mr. GOLDMAN. To be very frank with you, Senator, I cannot remember the things that happened back in those days. I've been away from the company -- from the Agency for over 10 years, and that is even farther back than that, and that was just about the time when I first engaged in this, so it was my first--

Senator KENNEDY. Did they disburse a series of $100 checks, to your recollection?

Mr. GOLDMAN. I don't recollect it, but if you have it there, then they did.

Senator KENNEDY. Did you know Dr. Gottlieb?

Mr. GOLDMAN. Yes.



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Senator KENNEDY. How did you know Dr. Gottlieb?

Mr. GOLDMAN. He had been head of the division when I was recruited.

Senator KENNEDY. Did you talk to him about these programs? Did you have anything to do with him during this period of time?

Mr. GOLDMAN. I didn't have anything to do with him until I would say probably in the sixties.

Senator KENNEDY. And can you tell us what you had to do with him then?

Mr. GOLDMAN. Just what you see there, on the papers.

Senator KENNEDY. Well, that is the request for the money and he approves it.

Mr. GOLDMAN. That is the request for money and he approves it, and I am quite sure that I probably discussed with him whether the work was going along all right, whether his reports were being turned in, and whether he was satisfied with the way things were going and did he have any complaints about the way other people were requesting him, but I did not engage myself in anything he was doing.

Senator KENNEDY. Well, did you get the impression that Gottlieb knew what was going on?

Mr. GOLDMAN. I didn't ask.

Senator KENNEDY. But you told him that your impression that what was going on even though you didn't know what was going on, was going on well, I guess? [Laughter.]

Mr. GOLDMAN. I told Gottlieb what you saw in there was that the things appeared to be going along all right. I was repeating and parroting back the words that were given to me while I was there.

Senator KENNEDY. What was the money being spent for, do you know?

Mr. GOLDMAN. No; I can't recall that, sir.

Senator KENNEDY. Would you remember if we told you it was red curtains and can-can pictures--

Mr. GOLDMAN. No, sir.

Senator KENNEDY. Floral pictures and the rest.

Mr. GOLDMAN. No, sir.

Senator KENNEDY. Recorders.

Mr. GOLDMAN. No, sir.

Senator KENNEDY. Recorders and two-way mirrors.

Mr. GOLDMAN. Wait, hold on. You're slipping a word in there now.

Senator KENNEDY. But you would have authorized those funds, would you not, since you were the--

Mr. GOLDMAN. Did you say two-way mirrors?

Senator KENNEDY. Yes.

Mr. GOLDMAN. Where?

Senator KENNEDY. In the safe houses.

Mr. GOLDMAN. Where?

Senator KENNEDY. San Francisco.

Mr. GOLDMAN. No.

Senator KENNEDY. How about New York?

Mr. GOLDMAN. Yes.

Senator KENNEDY. You remember now that you approved expenditures for New York?



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Mr. GOLDMAN. Yes.

Senator KENNEDY. What were those expenditures for?

Mr. GOLDMAN. That was a transfer of money over for the use in an apartment in New York by the Bureau of Narcotics. It was for their use.

Senator KENNEDY. Do you have any knowledge of what was going on in the apartment?

Mr. GOLDMAN. No, sir, other than I know that it had been used, according to the information that I have been given, it was used by the Bureau of Narcotics to make meetings with individuals who they were interested in with regard to pushing dope -- not pushing dope, but selling narcotics and that sort of thing.

Senator KENNEDY. Well, I am sure you had many responsibilities and it's a long time ago, but the Agency does indicate that you were project monitor for that particular program.

Mr. GOLDMAN. That's correct.

Senator KENNEDY. Your own testimony indicates you went out to review the expenditures of funds to find out whether they were being wisely used, that you came back and talked to the project director, Mr. Gottlieb, to give him a progress report about what was going on out there.

Mr. GOLDMAN. Yes, sir, I did.

Senator KENNEDY. All those things are true, and yet you draw a complete blank in terms of what was the project itself. That's where the record is now.

Mr. GOLDMAN. I did not go out there to review the projects nor did I come back and talk with Mr. Gottlieb and review what I had observed in terms of any projects that they -- that is, other parts of the Agency might have in operation there. I simply reported back those things which were told to me by the individual out there who -- and I carried them back and they -- are contained in the report that you have in front of you, word for word, just as it was given to me.

Senator KENNEDY. The report that you examined here is a substantive report on the particular program and project. And I don't think anyone who wasn't familiar with the project -- this is a personal evaluation -- could write a report on the substance of it without knowing about it. Now, that's mine. Maybe you can't remember and recollect, and that's--

Mr. GOLDMAN. No; everything I put down in there is things that I was told while I was out there, and if there was any ancillary information involved in there I can tell you I just don't remember that. I really don't.

At the time -- that was some years ago. At the time -- a lot of time has passed since then and I have made quite sure that if I could recollect it at all, I would do it. If you have some papers and you want me to certify whether yes, this is so or that is so, I can do that, but I can't recall it mentally.

Senator KENNEDY. You just certified the principal. There are others up here.

I would like to go to Dr. Gittinger.

Mr. GITTINGER. It's Mr. Gittinger.

Senator KENNEDY. How long did you serve with the Agency?



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Mr. GITTINGER. Twenty-six years.

Senator KENNEDY. Excuse me?

Mr. GITTINGER. Twenty-six years.

Senator KENNEDY. Twenty-six years.

And at some point you moved into the operational support side, is that correct?

Mr. GITTINGER. Yes.

Senator KENNEDY. And did you know Sidney Gottlieb?

Mr. GITTINGER. Yes, sir.

Senator KENNEDY. And did he inform you about the research projects involving LSD?

Mr. GITTINGER. Yes, sir.

Senator KENNEDY. It is my understanding that you were also aware of some of the drug testing projects conducted on unwitting subjects on the west coast using the Bureau of Narcotics people in the operation. Is that true?

Mr. GITTINGER. I was.

Senator INOUYE. Excuse me. Would you speak into the microphone? I cannot hear you.

Mr. GITTINGER. Sorry.

Senator KENNEDY. Do you know which drugs were involved in those tests?

Mr. GITTINGER. LSD. And I can't remember for sure much of the others. What is the substance of marihuana, cannabis, is that right, that can be delivered by other than smoking?

Senator KENNEDY. Cannabis?

Mr. GITTINGER. There had been some discussion of that; yes.

Senator KENNEDY. And was heroin also used?

Mr. GITTINGER. Heroin used by CIA?

Senator KENNEDY. No. In the west coast operation.

Mr. GITTINGER. Absolutely not.

Senator KENNEDY. Now, to your knowledge, how were the drugs administered to the unwitting subjects?

Mr. GITTINGER. I have no direct knowledge.

Senator KENNEDY. Why did you go to the safe houses?

Mr. GITTINGER. It's a very complicated story. Just in justification of myself, this came up just, day before yesterday. I have not really had enough time to get it all straightened in my mind, so I ramble.

Senator KENNEDY. Well, you take your time and tell us in your own words. We've got some time here.

Mr. GITTINGER. My responsibilities which would involve any of the period of time that you were talking about really was not directly related to drugs at all. I was a psychologist charged with the responsibility of trying to develop as much information as I could on various cultures, overseas cultures, anthropological type data, if you follow what I mean. I was also engaged in trying to work out ways and means of assessing people and understanding people.

I originally became involved in this through working on Chinese culture, and over a series of time I was introduced to the problem of brainwashing, which is the thing that really was the most compelling thing in relationship to this, and became charged with the responsibility of trying to find out a little bit about interrogation techniques.



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And among other things, we decided or I decided that one of the best sources of interrogation techniques would be trying to locate and interview and become involved with experienced police interrogators in the country and experienced people who had real practical knowledge of interrogation. The reason for this is that we had become pretty well convinced after the experience of the brainwashing problems coming out of China, that it was the techniques of the interrogators that were causing the individuals to make confessions and so forth in relationship to this, rather than any kind of drugging and so forth. So we were very much interested in interrogation techniques, and this led to me being introduced to the agent in the west coast, and I began to talk to him in connection with these interrogation techniques.

Senator KENNEDY. OK. Now, that is the agent that ran the tests on the west coast on the unwitting people. That's where you come in, correct?

Mr. GITTINGER. If I understand -- would you say that again?

Senator KENNEDY. The name Morgan Hall has been -- that is the name that has been used.

Mr. GITTINGER. Yes.

Senator KENNEDY. And that is the agent that you met with.

Mr. GITTINGER. That is right.

Senator KENNEDY. And you met at the safe house.

Mr. GITTINGER. Yes, sir.

Senator KENNEDY. Whom did you meet with in the safe house?

Mr. GITTINGER. This is the part that is hard for me to say, and I am sorry that I have to. In connection with some work that we were doing, we needed to have some information on sexual habits. Morgan Hall provided informants for me, to talk to in connection with the sex habits that I was interested in trying to find information. During one period of time the safe house, as far as I was concerned, was used for just these particular type of interviews. And I didn't see the red curtains.

Senator KENNEDY. Those were prostitutes, were they?

Mr. GITTINGER. Yes, sir.

Senator KENNEDY. How many different times were you there that you had similar--

Mr. GITTINGER. I couldn't possibly say with any certainty on that. Four or five times.

Senator KENNEDY. Four or five times.

Mr. GITTINGER. Over -- you remember now, the period that I'm talking about when I would have any involvement in this is from about 1956 to 1961. So it's about a 4- or 5-year period which is the only time that I know anything about what you are talking about here today.

Senator KENNEDY. Did Morgan Hall make the arrangements for the prostitutes to meet with you?

Mr. GITTINGER. Yes, sir.

Senator KENNEDY. Did the interviews that you had have anything to do with drugs?

Mr. GITTINGER. Well, as I tried to explain earlier when this was being discussed a little bit beforehand, again I think it is pretty hard for most people now to recognize how little there was known about drugs at the period of time that we are talking about, because the



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drug age or the drug culture comes later on. Consequently, those of us who had any responsibility in this area were interested in trying to get as much information as we could on the subculture, the subculture drug groups, and obviously the Bureau of Narcotics represented a means of doing this. Consequently, other types of things that were involved in discussions at that time would have to do with the underground use of drugs. When I am talking about this I am talking about the folkways in terms of unwitting use of drugs. Did these people that I was talking to have any information about this and on rare instances they were able to tell me about their use, and in most cases this would largely turn out to be a Mickey Finn or something of that sort rather than anything esoteric.

I also was very much interested because we had relatively little information, believe it or not, at that time, in terms of the various reactions that people were having to drugs. Therefore, these people were very informative in terms of they knew a great deal of information about reactions.

Senator KENNEDY. At least you gathered -- or am I correct in assuming that you gathered the impression that the prostitutes that you had talked to were able to slip the drugs to people as I understand it. Did you form any impression on that?

Mr. GITTINGER. I certainly did not form the impression that, they did this as a rule or--

Senator KENNEDY. But they bad the knowledge.

Mr. GITTINGER. They had the knowledge or some of them had had knowledge of this being done. But again, as it turned out, it was largely in this area of knockout drops.

Senator KENNEDY. Looking back now did you form any impression about how the Agency was actually testing the broad spectrum of social classes in these safe houses? With the large disbursal of cash in small quantities, $100 bills and the kinds of elaborate decorations and two-way mirrors in the bedrooms and all the rest, is there any question in your own mind what was going on in the safe houses, or the techniques that were being used to administer these drugs?

Mr. GITTINGER. I find it very difficult to answer that question, sir. I had absolutely no direct knowledge there was a large number of this. I had no knowledge that anyone other than -- than Morgan Hall was in any way involved in the unwitting administration of drugs.

Senator KENNEDY. But Gottlieb would know, would he not?

Mr. GITTINGER. I believe so, yes, sir.

Senator KENNEDY. Could we go into the Human Ecology Foundation and talk about that and how it was used as an instrument in terms of the support of research?

Mr. GITTINGER. Yes, sir.

Senator KENNEDY. Could you describe it to us? Could you describe the Human Ecology Foundation, how it functioned and how it worked?

Mr. GITTINGER. May I tell something about how it evolved, which I think is important?

Senator KENNEDY. Sure.

Mr. GITTINGER. The Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology, so-called, was actually a -- I am confused here now as to whether I should name you names.



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Senator KENNEDY. Well, we're not interested in names or institutions, so we prefer that you do not. That has to be worked out in arrangements between Admiral Turner and the individuals and the institutions.

But we're interested in what the Foundation really was and how it functioned and what its purpose was.

Mr. GITTINGER. Well, it was established to undertake research in the general area of the behavioral sciences. It definitely had almost no focus or interest in, say, drug-related type of activities except in a very minor way, because it was largely set up to attempt to gain a certain amount of information and to fund projects which were psychological, sociological, anthropological in character. It was established in the sense of a period of time that a lot of us who are in it wish we could do it over again, but we were interested in trying to get together a panel of the most representative high-level behavioral scientists we could to oversee and help in terms of developing the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology type of program.

The Agency in effect provided the money. They did not direct the projects. Now, the fact of the matter is, there are a lot of innocent people who received the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology money which I know for a fact they were never asked to do anything for the CIA but they did get through this indirectly. They had no knowledge that they were getting CIA money.

Senator KENNEDY. Over what period of time did this take place?

Mr. GITTINGER. As far as I was concerned , it was the period of time ending in 1961. 1 believe the Human Ecology fund finally phased out in 1965, but I was not involved in this phasing out.

Senator KENNEDY. Can you give the range of the different sort of individual projects of the universities in which it was active?

Mr. GITTINGER. Well, it would have as many as -- I am very fuzzy on my memory on the number of projects. It is over 10, 20, 30.

Senator KENNEDY. After it made the grants, what was the relationship of the Agency with the results of the studies? The Foundation acquired the money to make the grants from the Agency, and then it made the grants to these various research programs.

Mr. GITTINGER. Yes, sir.

Senator KENNEDY. And that included eight universities as well as individual researchers?

Mr. GITTINGER. Yes, sir.

Senator KENNEDY. Then what follow-up was there to that, sir?

Mr. GITTINGER. Well, in every sense of the word, the organization was run exactly like any other foundation, and it carried with it the same thing in terms of making certain that the people that they had given money to used it for the purpose for which it had been granted, that they had access to any of the reports that they had put out, but there were no strings attached to anybody. There wasn't any reason they couldn't publish anything that they put out.

Senator KENNEDY. What, sort of budget are we talking about here?

Mr. GITTINGER. I honestly do not remember. I would guess we are talking in the realm of about $150,000 a year, but don't hold me to that, because I don't know.



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Senator KENNEDY. What is your view about such funding as a professional person, in terms of compromising the integrity of a university, sir?

Mr. GITTINGER. Well, obviously, sir, insofar as today there is no question about it. I will have to say at the time that we were doing this there was quite an entirely different kind of an attitude, and I do know for a fact that we moved to start towards phasing out the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology and the Human Ecology Fund for the very reason that we were beginning to recognize that it was moving into an area but this would be compromised.

Senator KENNEDY. Well, that is commendable, both your attitude and the reasons for it, but during that period of time it still was involved in behavior research programs, as I understand it.

Mr. GITTINGER. Yes, sir. On its own, in connection with this, it participated again, and these again were not CIA-directed projects, but these were all things which would theoretically contribute to the general knowledge at the time where the things like the study of the Hungarian refugees -- obviously, the study of the Hungarian refugees who came to this country after the Hungarian revolt was a very useful exercise to try to get information about the personality characteristics of the Communists and so forth.

Senator KENNEDY. Were there other foundations that were doing similar kinds of work?

Mr. GITTINGER. Not to my knowledge, sir.

Senator KENNEDY. You believe--

Mr. GITTINGER. You mean, CIA, other CIA?

Senator KENNEDY. Right.

Mr. GITTINGER. Well, my answer is in the sense that I know of no other CIA foundations, no. There were, of course, other foundations doing similar kinds of work in the United States.

Senator KENNEDY. Have you heard of the Psychological Assessments Foundation?

Mr. GITTINGER. I certainly have.

Senator KENNEDY. What was that? What function did that have?

Mr. GITTINGER. Now, this was bringing us up to a different era. I believe the functions of that organization have nothing whatsoever to do with the things that are being talked about here while I was associated with it.

Senator KENNEDY. Rather than getting into the work, it was another foundation, was it not? It was another foundation supported by the Agency?

Mr. GITTINGER. What, the Psychological Assessment?

Senator KENNEDY. Yes.

Mr. GITTINGER. No, sir, it was not.

Senator KENNEDY. It did not get any support at all from the Agency?

Mr. GITTINGER. Oh, yes, sir. It did get support, but it was a business firm.

Senator KENNEDY. It was a business but it got support from the Agency?

Mr. GITTINGER. It got money from it, but it definitely was not in MKULTRA or in any way associated with this.



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Senator KENNEDY. All right. I want to thank you for your helpful testimony, Mr. Gittinger. It is not easy to go back into the past. I think you have been very fair in your characterizations, and I think it is quite appropriately indicated that there are different standards now from what they were 25 years ago, and I think you have responded very fairly and completely to the inquiries, and I think with a good deal of feeling about it.

You are a person who is obviously attempting to serve the country's interest, so I want to thank you very much for your statement and for your helpful timeliness.

Mr. GITTINGER. Thank you, sir.

Senator INOUYE. Senator Case?

Senator CASE. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I am sorry that I had another committee that I had to complete the hearing with this morning before I got here.

I shall read the testimony with very great interest, and I appreciate your testimony as I have heard it. I would like to comment just on one point, and that is, it relates to a story in the press yesterday about part of this program involving the funding of a grant at a foreign university. I would like to elicit from you a comment as to the additional sensitivity and difficulty that that practice involves from your standpoint as a scientist, as well as a citizen, if you will.

Mr. GITTINGER. I will say it was after the fact thinking. It was utter stupidity the way things worked out to have used some of this money outside the United States when it was CIA money. I can categorically state to my knowledge, and I don't claim a complete knowledge all the way across of the human ecology functions, but to my knowledge, and this is unfortunate, those people did not know that they were getting money from CIA, and they were not asked to contribute anything to CIA as such.

Senator CASE. It would be interesting to try to examine this by turning the thing around and thinking what we would think if this happened from a foreign official agency to our own university. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Senator INOUYE. Senator Schweiker.

Senator SCHWEIKER. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Dr. Goldman, I wonder if you would tell us what your training and educational background is?

Dr. GOLDMAN. I have already given a biography for the record.

Senator SCHWEIKER. I have not seen it. Who has it? Is it classified? We may have it for the record, but may I ask you to briefly describe your training and background for us now? I hope it is no secret.

Dr. GOLDMAN. Well, I was told if I was asked this to say that. I was told that by your staff people, but I have no objection to telling you. I am a resident from Pennsylvania, southwest Pennsylvania, Lancaster County. I went to Penn State, and I am in nutrition.

Senator SCHWEIKER. In what?

Dr. GOLDMAN. Nutrition.

Senator SCHWEIKER. Were you in charge of a section or segment of the CIA in your past capacity?

Dr. GOLDMAN. During the time I was with that organization, I was in charge of one small section of it, one small segment of it; yes.



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Senator SCHWEIKER. What was the function or purpose of that section that you headed?

Dr. GOLDMAN. To provide support for the other parts of the division.

Senator SCHWEIKER. Where in the chain of command would that put you in relation to Dr. Gottlieb?

Dr. GOLDMAN. Pretty far down the line.

Senator SCHWEIKER. Mr. Gittinger, I would just like to ask you a few questions. We appreciate your frankness and candor with the committee, and we realize this is a very difficult area to go into. I am not quite clear on two matters that were raised earlier. First, were the safe houses we were talking about here used on occasion by the prostitutes you referred to?

Mr. GITTINGER. I really have not the slightest idea.

Senator SCHWEIKER. Were the prostitutes used in any way to slip the customers drugs for observation purposes?

Mr. GITTINGER. Not to my direct knowledge.

Senator SCHWEIKER. Would you have been in a position to know the answer to either of these questions?

Mr. GITTINGER. May I say, probably not, and may I make an aside to explain a little bit of this, please, sir?

Senator SCHWEIKER. Mr. Gittinger, a moment ago you mentioned brainwashing techniques, as one area that you had, I guess, done some work in. How would you characterize the state of the art of brainwashing today? Who has the most expertise in this field, and who is or is not doing it in terms of other governments?

During the Korean war there was a lot of serious discussion about brainwashing techniques being used by the North Koreans, and I am interested in finding out what the state of the art is today, as you see it.

Mr. GITTINGER. Well, of course, there, has been a great deal of work on this, and there is still a great deal of controversy. I can tell you that as far as I knew, by 1961, 1962, it was at least proven to my satisfaction that brainwashing, so called, is some kind of an esoteric device where drugs or mind- altering kinds of conditions and so forth were used, did not exist even though "The Manchurian Candidate" as a Movie really set us back a long time, because it made something impossible look plausible. Do you follow what I mean? But by 1962 and 1963, the general idea that we were able to come up with is that brainwashing was largely a process of isolating a human being, keeping him out of contact, putting him under long stress in relationship to interviewing and interrogation, and that they could produce any change that way without having to resort to any kind of esoteric means.

Senator SCHWEIKER. Are there ways that we can ascertain this from a distance when we see a captive prisoner either go on television, in a photograph, or at a press conference? In other words, are there certain signs that you have learned to recognize from your technical background, to tell when brainwashing has occurred? Or is that very difficult to do?

Mr. GITTINGER. It is difficult to do. I think it is possible now in terms of looking at a picture of somebody who has been in enemy hands for a long period of time. We can get some pretty good ideas of what kind of circumstances he has been under, if that is what you mean.



-63-


Senator SCHWEIKER. That is all I have, Mr. Chairman. Thank you.

Senator INOUYE. Thank you very much.

Before adjourning the hearings, I would like to have the record show that Dr. Goldman and Mr. Gittinger have voluntarily cooperated with the committee in staff interviews, that they appear this morning voluntarily, and they are not under subpoena.

Gentlemen, I realize that this experience may have been an unhappy one and possibly a painful one. Therefore, we thank you very much for participating this morning. We also realize that the circumstances of that time differed very much from this day, and possibly the national attitude, the national political attitude condoned this type of activity. So, we have not asked you to come here as persons who have committed crimes, but rather in hope that you can assist us in studying this problem so that it will not occur once again. In that spirit we thank you for your participation, and we look forward to working with you further in this case.

Thank you very much.

Senator KENNEDY. Mr. Chairman, I would like also to thank the witnesses. These are difficult matters, and I think all of us are very grateful.

Senator SCHWEIKER. I think the witnesses should know that though it may not always seem that way, what we are trying to do is to probe the past and look at the policies of the past to affect the future. I think our emphasis really is on the future, not the past, but it is important that we learn from the past as we formulate policies and legislation for the future, I hope that all of the witnesses who did come before us voluntarily this morning, including Admiral Turner respect the fact that we are questioning the past to learn about the future. I think it should be looked at in that light.

Senator KENNEDY. I think that is the spirit in which we have had these hearings. It seems to me that from both these witnesses and others, Gottlieb knows the information and can best respond, and we are going to make every effort in the Senate Health Committee to get Mr. Gottlieb to appear, and we obviously look forward to cooperating with Senator Inouye and the other members of the committee in getting the final chapter written on this, but we want to thank you very much for your appearance here.

Senator INOUYE. The hearing will stand in recess, subject to the call of the Chair.

[Whereupon, at 12:12 p.m., the hearing was recessed, subject to the call of the Chair.]


Appendix A: Testing and Use of Chemical and Biological Agents by the Intelligence Community

Appendix B: Documents Referring to Discovery of Additional MKULTRA Material

Appendix C: Documents Referring to Subprojects

[barracuda]

But by 1962 and 1963, the general idea that we were able to come up with is that brainwashing was largely a process of isolating a human being, keeping him out of contact, putting him under long stress in relationship to interviewing and interrogation, and that they could produce any change that way without having to resort to any kind of esoteric means.

Senator SCHWEIKER. Are there ways that we can ascertain this from a distance when we see a captive prisoner either go on television, in a photograph, or at a press conference? In other words, are there certain signs that you have learned to recognize from your technical background, to tell when brainwashing has occurred? Or is that very difficult to do?

Mr. GITTINGER. It is difficult to do. I think it is possible now in terms of looking at a picture of somebody who has been in enemy hands for a long period of time. We can get some pretty good ideas of what kind of circumstances he has been under, if that is what you mean.

I now have a much better idea of what the fuss is all about with enhanced interrogation, stress positions, Gitmo isolation, etc.

Thanks, chiggerbit.

[chiggerbit]

Gittinger is an interesting study. I tried to get DE to do a piece on him, but he had other fish to fry. Which is a shame, because I think Gittinger's impact on many fronts has been underestimated, not just with the CIA, but even in the area of psychological assessments today, although I think psychologists/psychiatrists looked down their noses at the man. He's another one of my creepy fascinations, right up there with Ed Luttwak.

[chiggerbit]

http://everything2.com/title/The%2520CI ... 20YOU%2521

(person) by riverrun Wed Nov 28 2001 at 2:10:11
When you think about it, once the concept of "Mind Control" or "Brain Washing" is approached scientifically, you just want to go berserk and call it a day. Where do you start when you decide to open the hood of that sleek and specialized machine we call the human brain? Do you dissect a couple thousand of them, in search of physical ways to get a handle on things? Do you experiment with drugs and hope to build up some sort of experiential matrix over time? Do you populate the nation's kindergartens with teachers who secretly work for the CIA and start building spies from an early age? Do you put stuff in cereal and Bosco that can change the world?

Have pity on the poor CIA, which was charged with just such a task back at the beginning of the Cold War. To be sure, there was a plethora of work already to be considered. The Nazis and the Japanese had some pretty hard science to digest, not to mention some hopelessly loopy theories which served to get the "Mind Control" ball rolling. Rest assured, the new American spy agency was not at a loss for data.

After World War II the blue-sky world of psychological possibilities was so enormous that the CIA evolved dozens of programs which, given the liberal application of money, might have panned out—but for the fact that the human brain is endlessly variable and ultimately unpredictable.

Operation Overcast became Project Paperclip which gave birth to ENIAC, the famous general-purpose computer which might help organize everything. The Cybernetics Group discussed Feedback Mechanism in Biology and the Social Sciences way back in 1946, even before the CIA had transformed from the Office of Strategic Services. Project Chatter was the Navy's study of mescaline as a "truth serum." The RAND Corporation was created by the Air Force in order to institutionalize the applications of mathematics to war. Project Bluebird and Project Artichoke were efforts to condition spies against interrogation. Sandoz Pharmaceuticals in Switzerland agreed to an exclusive contract with the United States government to deliver a hundred grams of LSD a week to the CIA—and not to give any to any Communist Country. By the Korean War, the human brain was definitely where the money was.

Project MK-ULTRA was initiated by Richard Helms, then an assistant director of the CIA, in 1953. For simplicity's sake, let's suppose that the serious government investigation into Mind Control coalesced about then.

One man came up with anything that made any sense at all. His name was John Gittinger and he was a genius.

Gittinger's fascinating journey through the science of personality to the halls of the CIA began in Norman, Oklahoma in the late 1940s. A former high school guidance counselor and US Navy Lieutenant Commander during World War II, he was the only psychologist on the staff of a state hospital there. He possessed only a master's degree and the sort of natural curiosity that often seems to be requisite for success in science and mathematics. On a daily basis he interviewed hundreds of mental patients whose symptoms ran the gamut of clinical textbooks.

There were many itinerant workers passing through Oklahoma in those days. Large numbers of them found employment as short-order cooks and dishwashers at the road-side burger stands that dotted the state's highways. When winter came, Gittinger's hospital took these workers in, since sleeping outdoors had become out of the question. The hospital staff referred to them as "seasonal schizophrenics" and carried on about their business.

Gittinger included them in his frequent psychological testing. He gave them the standard eleven-part Wechsler IQ test, with which you may be familiar, and during the course of the test he made a fateful observation: the short-order cooks tended to do well on the digit-span subtest, which rated their ability to remember numbers, while the dishwashers did not. Gittinger reasoned that since the cooks had to keep track of countless variations of hamburgers, fries, onion, lettuce, and mayonnaise, not to mention mustard and relish, etc, they possessed superior retentive memories.

At the same time, he noticed that the cooks had different personality traits than the dishwashers. They kept their composure in a distracting environment, falling back on their internal rhythms and generally avoiding the commotion around them. Gittenger gave this personality type, which was basically inner-directed, the designation "Internalizer," which he abbreviated "I."

The dishwashers, on the other hand, were unable to separate themselves from the external world. They had to be shunted off to a quiet part of the kitchen in order to do their jobs, otherwise they were diverted from their tasks. Gittinger called their type "Externalizer" (E), and he realized that if he measured a high digit-span in any person, not just a short-order cook, he could make a basic judgment about their personality.

Over time, after observation, Gittinger concluded that babies were born with distinct personalities which were then moderated by environmental factors. The "I" baby was internalized, caught up in himself, and was observed to be a "passive" child, a "good baby." The "E" baby was more interested in outside stimuli; he needed more attention, his parents tended to think of him as "demanding."

Gittinger believed that the manner in which parents, teachers, and other authority figures interacted with the child helped form his "personality," and that the child was constantly adjusting—compensating, depending on the authority's perceptions and reactions—in one direction or the other, internally or externally. He found he could measure this adjustment, or compensation, on the Wechsler arithmetic ability subtest. He noticed that later in life, when the adult was subjected to stress, these compensations tended to disappear and the person reverted to his original personality type.

Gittinger wrote that the system he evolved at this point "makes possible the assessment of fundamental discrepancies between the surface personality and the underlying personality structure—discrepancies that produce tension, conflict, and anxiety."

Additionally, he isolated two other fundamental sets of personality characteristics that he could measure with other Wechsler subtests. Depending on how the subject did on the block design subtest, Gittinger could tell if he were "Regulated" (R) or "Flexible" (F). The regulated subject learned easily by rote but usually did not understand what he learned, while the F person had to understand something before he learned it. R children could learn to play piano relatively easily, and they played moderately well, but the F child often hated piano lessons. Upon perseverance, however, the initially reluctant F child often evolved into a superior musician.

Now these sorts of generalized traits had been observed before, but it was the inclusion of a third personality dimension that Gittinger discovered he could measure, using the picture arrangement subtest, that set his study apart. He called this trait Role Adaptive (A) or Role Uniform (U), and it corresponded to what we might term "charisma," since other people were naturally attracted to the A person while they tended to ignore the U person.

Over time, Gittinger fine-tuned these basic concepts, coordinating them with other parts of the Wechsler test. What came to be a complex clinical study was generally not well-accepted by the professional psychologists of the world. The whole idea of genetic differences alone was problematic, of course. But perversely, the thing that kept Gittinger off the Big Time psychiatric radar the most was the fact that he was largely self-taught. He wasn't an M.D. He hadn't even earned a Ph.D.

Like Colonel Kurtz, regarding a not-dissimilar circumstance in Apocalypse Now, he just thought it up and did it.

And the CIA ate Gittinger's Personality Assessment System up Big Time. Because it worked. The agency would hand Gittinger a subject's Wechsler numbers and he would pinpoint with amazing accuracy how to turn that subject into a useful operative. His boss at the CIA, the man who considered Gittinger his protégé, was Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, the head of Project MK-ULTRA, the champion of the whole concept of LSD and "Mind Control."

Gittinger became a sort of CIA Superstar. A special proprietary company was set up for him in Washington, D.C., called Psychological Assessment Associates. Gittinger personally opened a branch office in Tokyo. Other scientists came on board: David Saunders of the Educational Testing Service (the company that prepares the College Board Exams) discovered a correlation between brain patterns and the results of the digit-span test, and was given almost $140,000 by the CIA for his efforts.

Psychiatrist Robert Hyde used the PAS as the platform for his own research. Hyde did studies for the CIA on the effects of alcohol on subjects. Not surprising, pure Internalizers became introspective after a few drinks. The E's became talkative, garrulous. Working with Harold Abramson at Mount Sinai Hospital, Hyde made similar observations with LSD subjects.

As time went by, using only the numbers from the ubiquitous Wechsler test, Gittinger built a huge database of profiles—businessmen and college students, actors and fashion models, doctors and lawyers—any discreet group of individuals he could find a way to test would find its way to the CIA. Gittinger personally kept a collection of 29,000 individual assessments at his desk, and he perused it constantly, perpetually looking for the truth of personality.

Because the CIA was footing the bill, it was only natural that Gittinger tended to concentrate his efforts on the dark side of human nature. He was especially interested in sexual peccadiloes. The Human Ecology Project at Ionia Hospital State Hospital in Michigan furnished him with Wechsler tests of sexual psychopaths. Harris Isbell, who ran the MK-ULTRA drug-testing program at the Lexington, Kentucky detention hospital sent in the scores of heroin addicts. Gittinger himself, tellingly, went to San Francisco to test homosexuals, lesbians and prostitutes. Assessing. Cross-referencing. Creating a matrix of behavior which the CIA would access from the outside whenever it had, say, a foreign agent who had not taken the Wechsler test.

Eventually, Gittinger's data was developed into a checklist of thirty to forty patterns that a trained observer could use to predict how a subject would have performed had he or she taken the test.

Finally, The Gittinger Personality Assessment System became standard operating procedure at the CIA. And why not? It was based on Wechsler, long-accepted in American society as an innocuous "Adult Intelligence Test." Chances are excellent that you've already got a Wechsler score. Ever wonder who's seen it?

In 1963, the Inspector General of the CIA described how the PAS fit into agency operations:
"The Clandestine Services case officer is first and foremost, perhaps, a practitioner of the art of assessing and exploiting human personality and motivations for ulterior purposes. The ingredients of advanced skill in this art are highly individualistic in nature, including such qualities as perceptiveness and imagination. The PAS seeks to enhance the case officer's skill by bringing the methods and disciplines of psychology to bear...The prime objectives are control, exploitation, or neutralization. These objectives are innately anti-ethical rather than therapeutic in their intent."
But the most telling assessment of Gittinger's work, I believe, came from a former CIA psychologist who felt guilty about his participation in certain agency operations. He believed that the CIA mirrors, in a more virulent form, the way Americans deal with each other generally:
"I don't believe the CIA is too far removed from the culture," he says. "It's just a matter of degree. If you put a lot of money out there, there are many people who are lacking the ethics even of the CIA. At least the Agency had an ideological basis."
When you think about it, hasn't America itself come to be totally about behavior modification? Too fat? Get skinny. Too weak? Get strong. Sad? Get happy. Horny? Get laid. We are a nation that is all about control. In the classroom. On the street. In the bedroom.

On the television we see them: our controllers. Our agents of change. Telling us what to think. How to act. Who to vote for. Whom to kill.

You might think about this before you sharpen up that classy pair of new #2 Ticonderogas you've been itching to use. Before you take the test that can change your entire life with the whir of a petabyte drive somewhere in Washington.

And oh yes. One other thing: will you be having fries with that?

[chiggerbit]

Wiki on the PAS:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personalit ... ent_System

Personality Assessment System
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Personality Assessment System (PAS) is a descriptive model of personality formulated by John W. Gittinger. The system has been used by scientists in studying personality and by clinicians in clinical practice. A major feature of the PAS is that a personality profile can by systematically interpreted from a set of Weschler Scales subtest scores. [1]

The PAS has two aspects which distinguish it from other personality models. They are the use of the Weschler subtests, an objective test, to determine a personality and the use of a developmental model in which the description of personality includes development through adolescence.

Krauskopf has proposed that differential aptitudes are the "cause" of personality differences. [2] The reason is that people prefer to use aptitudes they feel they are better at than ones where they feel weaker. Krauskopf calls this hypothesis "radical" because so little attention has been paid to the idea. With this "radical hypothesis", the use of an intelligence test, the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale to obtain personality information makes sense.

Description

This very brief description is based primarily on the most recently published description of the PAS [3] although there is no disagreement with other descriptions. [4][5]

The PAS is based on premises (among others) that behavior is determined by both heredity and environment and behavior is determined by an interacting system of traits. Furthermore, these traits can be modified through learning to such an extent that some might be nearly opposite to the original genetic direction. Gittinger's original formulation defines three primitive dimensions to which must be added general ability level which is referred to in the PAS as Normal Level. There is an additional dimension related to psychological energy. In the theory, gender and age also affect the final personality description.

The first dimension is Internalizer-Externalizer which is an ability to manipulate internal stimuli or symbols without being distracted by the external world. This is similar, but not identical, to the familiar introversion-extroversion dimension. The internalizer relies more on his own experience and internal landscape and is likely to be less active than externalizers. The externalizer is dependent on input from the outside and is more dependent on relating for the sake of relating. Gittinger called this the intellectual dimension.

The Regulated-Flexible dimension can be viewed by thinking of a regulated person as one who can see details within a whole, but not the whole. The regulated person is more stimulus bound and less able to see the "big picture". The regulated person is more procedurally oriented and emotionally insulated. The flexible person is involved with relationships and has attention diverted from step by step procedures. In theory, the regulated person has a high sensory threshold which is therefore satisfied less often than a flexible person. Gittinger called this the procedural dimension.

The Role Adaptable-Role Uniform dimension refers to a person's skill in meeting demands that others make of him. It is thus a social dimension. The behavior related to this dimension is generally without awareness. The adaptable person easily plays a variety of roles, being charming and moving easily in many different situations always making good first impressions. The role uniform person is able to handle only a few social roles at best and is often said to be socially inept. The behavior is most apparent in new social situations, since the role uniform may comfortable and accepted in a very familiar situation. The role adaptive can suffer from making good first impressions and then not understanding the unrealistic expectations others place upon him. Gittinger called this the social dimension.

As the environment places demands upon a person to learn to compensate for weaknesses, the person may compensate to such an extent as to actually appear to have the opposite primitive trait. For example a primitive externalizer may compensate and appear more as an internalizer. However, there are differences between an uncompensated primitive externalizer and a compensated internalizer. The compensated adjustment is a more tense adjustment and requires more rehearsal and more display of consistency. Also, a person who is compensated often reacts negatively to seeing their primitive trait displayed in others. A person may compensate in none, one, two or all three dimensions. The PAS calls the adjustment including compensation the basic level.

The PAS defines an additional level of adjustment called the contact or surface level. At the surface level, there are four possible adjustments. A person who is not compensated may either become modifed, that is, attempt to display the opposite of their primitive trait on the surface or they may remain completely uncompensated and unmodified, retaining their primitive trait. A person who is compensated at the basic level may revert back towards their primitive trait on the surface (this is called a controlled adjustment) or continue to move towards the opposite (this is called a repressed adjustment). A person makes adjustments in all three dimensions independently. For example, a person might have a modified adjustment in one dimension, a controlled adjustment in another, and a repressed adjustment in the third.

A key feature of the PAS is that the profile of a particular person may be derived from their scores on the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale. The development of the PAS actually began when John Gittinger noticed certain behaviors which seemed to relate to subtest scores on the Weschler. Over the years, as he observed may people, he developed the full theory and the method of translating Weschler scores into PAS profiles. Many refinements in the method used to produce PAS profiles from Weschler scores were made with the 2001 method and one much older method the most extensively used by psychologists using the PAS.
[edit]
Applications

The PAS has been used for many applications over the years. A sample of applications include education, career analysis, self-help, and intelligence gathering.

DuVivier [6] discusses the importance of working with individual differences when analyzing college student success and drop-out rates with particular attention to avoiding drop-out. She uses an "Impressionistic Model Analysis" based on the PAS.

Downs [7] studied college students majoring in mathematics and mathematics education. In the study, most students in both groups were primitive regulated, in fact, compensated regulated. Pure mathematics majors tended to be primitive and basic role uniform whereas mathematics education majors tended to be primitive role adaptive.

Meyers [8] studied several police forces and discovered that police tended to be either primitive role adaptive or compensated role uniform people.

Wilton [9] describes an entire toolbox of building life skills, everything from child training to dealing with obnoxious people to building security. She bases her work on her understanding of indidual differences which she credits foremost to John Gittinger and the PAS.

DeForest [10] describes the use of the PAS in two aspects of intelligence gathering in Vietnam. One use was to develop interrogation methods appropriate to the personality type of the subject. According the DeForest's report of the work, Vietnamese were very similar to each other, especially at the primitive level, and this led to develop of a consistent method of interrogation. The PAS was also used to identify personalities which were likely to remain loyal, as opposed to ones who would flip-flop according to who they were dealing with at the moment. This was used to select subjects from among captives or deserters to return to enemy locations to gather intelligence.
[edit]
The CIA Connection

John Gittinger, the developer of the PAS, worked as a psychologist for the Central Intelligence Agency during the time he developed the PAS. Early publications describing the PAS appeared in academic publications and did not mention Gittinger's employer. [11] While the PAS has been used in many contexts such as education and clinical work, it was developed by John Gittinger who worked with a number of other CIA employees. Gittinger and his PAS work were related to a wide range of projects, some of which were part of the set of projects called MKULTRA. When there were Senate hearings on the MKULTRA project, Gittinger was a witness and identified as a CIA psychologist. [12] The relationship of Gittinger, the PAS and MKULTRA is discussed by Marks in chapter 11 of his book based upon examination of 1000's of documents.[13]. Earlier articles on the PAS in professional and academic journals never mentioned John Gittinger's employer. While Marks' book is critical of the CIA and the MKULTRA project, Marks reports of Gittinger's passion for his personality system and describes it quite thoroughly. Marks also reports that Gittinger was very concerned that Marks' 1974 article connecting Gittinger, the PAS, and the CIA would damage Gittinger's professional career. Marks also reports that Gittinger was "humiliated" by the 1973 hearings saying Gittinger was interested in talking about his personality system, not the drug and sex scandals being pursued by the Senate committee. Note that Gittinger retired from government service in 1978.

The use of the PAS by a CIA psychologist in the field is described in DeForest's book.[14] The book describes the work of a psychologist, Bill Todd (a pseudonym) in Vietnam. Treverton says that this book "is one for intelligence fans, not an assessment but a lively tale of a spymaster and his agents-" [15] Manning's review in the New York Times says, "Orrin DeForest, the principal author of the book, certainly comes across as a disaffected C.I.A. person, and its contents are certainly self-serving. Whether the book is also misleading is difficult for someone outside the spook fraternity of hired dissemblers to ascertain. Nevertheless, Slow Burn has its virtues anyway."[16]
[edit]
Literature

The PAS was developed primarily during the 1950's and 1960's with continued refinement since then. Due to the uniqueness of the developer, John W. Gittinger, and the nature of John Gittinger's career, the literature is somewhat unusual in two ways. First, while there are many journal articles published about the PAS and research using the PAS, only a small number are authored or co-authored by John Gittinger. Second, much research has been conducted which has not been published. Krauskopf and Suanders' book [17] has the most thorough discussion of the theory of the PAS, how it relates to other theories in psychology, and of research concerning the PAS. This book has a very extensive bibliography of both research on the PAS itself and works using the PAS. Gittinger's major work, a 1964 work called the PAS Atlas contains the most complete description of the wide range of possible personality profiles. The PAS Atlas was never formally published by Gittinger. A revised version, which improved readability and usability, was published in 1992. [18] Gittinger did publish two shorter descriptions of the PAS in academic journals with coauthor J. F. Winne in 1973. [19] [20]

[chiggerbit]

http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/LSD/marks10.htm

The Search for the Manchurian Candidate
John Marks
10. The Gittinger Assessment System

With one exception, the CIA's behavioral research—whether on LSD or on electroshock—seems to have had more impact on the outside world than on Agency operations. That exception grew out of the work of the MKULTRA program's resident genius, psychologist John Gittinger. While on the CIA payroll, toiling to find ways to manipulate people, Gittinger created a unique system for assessing personality and predicting future behavior. He called his method—appropriately—the Personality Assessment System (PAS). Top Agency officials have been so impressed that they have given the Gittinger system a place in most agent-connected activities. To be sure, most CIA operators would not go nearly so far as a former Gittinger aide who says, "The PAS was the key to the whole clandestine business." Still, after most of the touted mind controllers had given up or been sent back home, it was Gittinger, the staff psychologist, who sold his PAS system to cynical, anti-gimmick case officers in the Agency's Clandestine Services. And during the Cuban missile crisis, it was Gittinger who was summoned to the White House to give his advice on how Khrushchev would react to American pressure.
A heavy-set, goateed native of Oklahoma who in his later years came to resemble actor Walter Slezak, Gittinger looked much more like someone's kindly grandfather than a calculating theoretician. He had an almost insatiable curiosity about personality, and he spent most of his waking hours tinkering with and trying to perfect his system. So obsessed did he become that he always had the feeling even after other researchers had verified large chunks of the PAS and after the CIA had put it into operational use—that the whole thing was "a kind of paranoid delusion."
Gittinger started working on his system even before he joined the CIA in 1950. Prior to that, he had been director of psychological services at the state hospital in Norman, Oklahoma. His high-sounding title did not reflect the fact that he was the only psychologist on the staff. A former high school guidance counselor and Naval lieutenant commander during World War II, he was starting out at age 30 with a master's degree. Every day he saw several hundred patients whose mental problems included virtually everything in the clinical textbooks.
Numerous tramps and other itinerants, heading West in search of the good life in California, got stuck in Oklahoma during the cold winter months and managed to get themselves admitted to Gittinger's hospital. In warmer seasons of the year, quite a few of them worked, when they had to, as cooks or dishwashers in the short-order hamburger stands that dotted the highways in the days before fast food. They functioned perfectly well in these jobs until freezing nights drove them from their outdoor beds. The hospital staff usually called them "seasonal schizophrenics" and gave them shelter until spring. Gittinger included them in the psychological tests he was so fond of running on his patients.
As he measured the itinerants on the Wechsler intelligence scale, a standard IQ test with 11 parts,[1] Gittinger made a chance observation that became, he says, the "bedrock" of his whole system. He noticed that the short-order cooks tended to do well on the digit-span subtest which rated their ability to remember numbers. The dishwashers, in contrast, had a poor memory for digits. Since the cooks had to keep track of many complex orders—with countless variations of medium rare, onions, and hold-the-mayo—their retentive quality served them well.
Gittinger also noticed that the cooks had different personality traits than the dishwashers. The cooks seemed able to maintain a high degree of efficiency in a distracting environment while customers were constantly barking new orders at them. They kept their composure by falling back on their internal resources and generally shutting themselves off from the commotion around them. Gittinger dubbed this personality type, which was basically inner-directed, an "Internalizer" (abbreviated "I"). The dishwashers, on the other hand, did not have the ability to separate themselves from the external world. In order to perform their jobs, they had to be placed off in some far corner of the kitchen with their dirty pots and pans, or else all the tumult of the place diverted them from their duty. Gittinger called the dishwasher type an "Externalizer" (E). He found that if he measured a high digit span in any person—not just a short-order cook—he could make a basic judgment about personality.
From observation, Gittinger concluded that babies were born with distinct personalities which then were modified by environmental factors. The Internalized—or I—baby was caught up in himself and tended to be seen as a passive child; hence, the world usually called him a "good baby." The E tot was more interested in outside stimuli and attention, and thus was more likely to cause his parents problems by making demands. Gittinger believed that the way parents and other authority figures reacted to the child helped to shape his personality. Adults often pressured or directed the I child to become more outgoing and the E one to become more self-sufficient. Gittinger found he could measure the compensations, or adjustments, the child made on another Wechsler subtest, the one that rated arithmetic ability. He noticed that in later life, when the person was subject to stress, these compensations tended to disappear, and the person reverted to his original personality type. Gittinger wrote that his system "makes possible the assessment of fundamental discrepancies between the surface personality and the underlying personality structure—discrepancies that produce tension, conflict, and anxiety."
Besides the E-I dimensions, Gittinger identified two other fundamental sets of personality characteristics that he could measure with still other Wechsler subtests. Depending on how a subject did on the block design subtest, Gittinger could tell if he were Regulated (R) or Flexible (F). The Regulated person had no trouble learning by rote but usually did not understand what he learned. The Flexible individual, on the other hand, had to understand something before he learned it. Gittinger noted that R children could learn to play the piano moderately well with comparatively little effort. The F child most often hated the drudgery of piano lessons, but Gittinger observed that the great concert pianists tended to be Fs who had persevered and mastered the instrument.
Other psychologists had thought up personality dimensions similar to Gittinger's E and I, R and F. even if they defined them somewhat differently. Gittinger's most original contribution came in a third personality dimension, which revealed how well people were able to adapt their social behavior to the demands of the culture they lived in. Gittinger found he could measure this dimension with the picture arrangement Wechsler subtest, and he called it the Role Adaptive (A) or Role Uniform (U). It corresponded to "charisma," since other people were naturally attracted to the A person while they tended to ignore the U.
All this became immensely more complicated as Gittinger measured compensations and modifications with other Wechsler subtests. This complexity alone worked against the acceptance of his system by the outside world, as did the fact that he based much of it on ideas that ran contrary to accepted psychological doctrine—such as his heretical notion that genetic differences existed. It did not help, either, that Gittinger was a non-Ph.D. whose theory sprang from the kitchen habits of vagrants in Oklahoma.
Any one of these drawbacks might have stifled Gittinger in the academic world, but to the pragmatists in the CIA, they were irrelevant. Gittinger's strange ideas seemed to work. With uncanny accuracy, he could look at nothing more than a subject's Wechsler numbers, pinpoint his weaknesses, and show how to turn him into an Agency spy. Once Gittinger's boss, Sid Gottlieb, and other high CIA officials realized how Gittinger's PAS could be used to help case officers handle agents, they gave the psychologist both the time and money to improve his system under the auspices of the Human Ecology Society.
Although he was a full-time CIA employee, Gittinger worked under Human Ecology cover through the 1950s. Agency officials considered the PAS to be one of the Society's greatest triumphs, definitely worth continuing after the Society was phased out. In 1962 Gittinger and his co-workers moved their base of operations from the Human Ecology headquarters in New York to a CIA proprietary company, set up especially for them in Washington and called Psychological Assessment Associates. Gittinger served as president of the company, whose cover was to provide psychological services to American firms overseas. He personally opened a branch office in Tokyo (later moved to Hong Kong) to service CIA stations in the Far East. The Washington staff, which grew to about 15 professionals during the 1960s, handled the rest of the world by sending assessment specialists off for temporary visits.
Hundreds of thousands of dollars in Human Ecology grants and then even more money in Psychological Assessment contracts—all CIA funds—flowed out to verify and expand the PAS. For example, the Society gave about $140,000 to David Saunders of the Educational Testing Service, the company that prepares the College Board exams. Saunders, who knew about the Agency's involvement, found a correlation between brain (EEG) patterns and results on the digit-span test, and he helped Gittinger apply the system to other countries. In this regard, Gittinger and his colleagues understood that the Wechsler battery of subtests had a cultural bias and that a Japanese E had a very different personality from, say, a Russian E. To compensate, they worked out localized versions of the PAS for various nations around the world.
While at the Human Ecology group, Gittinger supervised much of the Society's other research in the behavioral sciences, and he always tried to interest Society grantees in his system. He looked for ways to mesh their research with his theories—and vice versa. Some, like Carl Rogers and Charles Osgood, listened politely and did not follow up. Yet Gittinger would always learn something from their work that he could apply to the PAS. A charming man and a skillful raconteur, Gittinger convinced quite a few of the other grantees of the validity of his theories and the importance of his ideas. Careful not to threaten the egos of his fellow professionals, he never projected an air of superiority. Often he would leave people even the skeptical—openmouthed in awe as he painted unnervingly accurate personality portraits of people he had never met. Indeed, people frequently accused him of somehow having cheated by knowing the subject in advance or peeking at his file.
Gittinger patiently and carefully taught his system to his colleagues, who all seem to have views of him that range from great respect to pure idolatry. For all his willingness to share the PAS, Gittinger was never able to show anyone how to use the system as skillfully as he did. Not that he did not try; he simply was a more talented natural assessor than any of the others. Moreover, his system was full of interrelations and variables that he instinctively understood but had not bothered to articulate. As a result, he could look at Wechsler scores and pick out behavior patterns which would be valid and which no one else had seen. Even after Agency officials spent a small fortune trying to computerize the PAS, they found, as one psychologist puts it, the machine "couldn't tie down all the variables" that Gittinger was carrying around in his head.
Some Human Ecology grantees, like psychiatrist Robert Hyde, were so impressed with Gittinger's system that they made the PAS a major part of their own research. Hyde routinely gave Wechslers to his subjects before plying them with liquor, as part of the Agency's efforts to find out how people react to alcohol. In 1957 Hyde moved his research team from Boston Psychopathic Hospital, where he had been America's first LSD tripper, to Butler Health Center in Providence. There, with Agency funds, Hyde built an experimental party room in the hospital, complete with pinball machine, dartboard, and bamboo bar stools. From behind a two-way mirror, psychologists watched the subjects get tipsy and made careful notes on their reaction to alcohol. Not surprisingly, the observers found that pure Internalizers became more withdrawn after several drinks, and that uncompensated Es were more likely to become garrulous—in essence, sloppy drunks. Thus Gittinger was able to make generalizations about the different ways an I or an E responded to alcohol.[2] Simply by knowing how people scored on the Wechsler digit-span test, he could predict how they would react to liquor. Hyde and Harold Abramson at Mount Sinai Hospital made the same kind of observations for LSD finding, among other things, that an E was more likely than an I to have a bad trip. (Apparently, an I is more accustomed than an E to "being into his own head" and losing touch with external reality.)
At Gittinger's urging, other Human Ecology grantees gave the Wechsler battery to their experimental subjects and sent him the scores. He was building a unique data base on all phases of human behavior, and he needed samples of as many distinct groups as possible. By getting the scores of actors, he could make generalizations about what sort of people made good role-players. Martin Orne at Harvard sent in scores of hypnosis subjects, so Gittinger could separate the personality patterns of those who easily went into a trance from those who could not be hypnotized. Gittinger collected Wechslers of businessmen, students, high-priced fashion models, doctors, and just about any other discrete group he could find a way to have tested. In huge numbers, the Wechslers came flowing in—29,000 sets in all by the early 1970s—each one accompanied by biographic data. With the 10 subtests he used and at least 10 possible scores on each of those, no two Wechsler results in the whole sample ever looked exactly the same. Gittinger kept a computer printout of all 29,000 on his desk, and he would fiddle with them almost every day—looking constantly for new truths that could be drawn out of them.

John Gittinger was interested in all facets of personality, but because he worked for the CIA, he emphasized deviant forms. He particularly sought out Wechslers of people who had rejected the values of their society or who had some vice—hidden or otherwise—that caused others to reject them. By studying the scores of the defectors who had come over to the West, Gittinger hoped to identify common characteristics of men who had become traitors to their governments. If there were identifiable traits, Agency operators could look for them in prospective spies. Harris Isbell, who ran the MKULTRA drug-testing program at the Lexington, Kentucky detention hospital, sent in the scores of heroin addicts. Gittinger wanted to know what to look for in people susceptible to drugs. The Human Ecology project at Ionia State Hospital in Michigan furnished Wechslers of sexual psychopaths. These scores showed that people with uncontrollable urges have different personality patterns than so-called normals. Gittinger himself journeyed to the West Coast to test homosexuals, lesbians, and the prostitutes he interviewed under George White's auspices in the San Francisco safehouse. With each group, he separated out the telltale signs that might be a future indicator of their sexual preference in others. Gittinger understood that simply by looking at the Wechsler scores of someone newly tested, he could pick out patterns that corresponded to behavior of people in the data base.
The Gittinger system worked best when the TSS staff had a subject's Wechsler scores to analyze, but Agency officials could not very well ask a Russian diplomat or any other foreign target to sit down and take the tests. During World War II, OSS chief William Donovan had faced a similar problem in trying to find out about Adolf Hitler's personality, and Donovan had commissioned psychoanalyst Walter Langer to make a long-distance psychiatric profile of the German leader. Langer had sifted through all the available data on the Führer, and that was exactly what Gittinger's TSS assessments staff did when they lacked direct contact (and when they had it, too). They pored over all the intelligence gathered by operators, agents, bugs, and taps and looked at samples of a man's handwriting.[3] The CIA men took the process of "indirect assessment" one step further than Langer had, however. They observed the target's behavior and looked for revealing patterns that corresponded with traits already recorded among the subjects of the 29,000 Wechsler samples.
Along this line, Gittinger and his staff had a good idea how various personality types acted after consuming a few drinks. Thus, they reasoned, if they watched a guest at a cocktail party and he started to behave in a recognizable way—by withdrawing, for instance—they could make an educated guess about his personality type—in this case, that he was an I. In contrast, the drunken Russian diplomat who became louder and began pinching every woman who passed by probably was an E. Instead of using the test scores to predict how a person would behave, the assessments staff was, in effect, looking at behavior and working backward to predict how the person would have scored if he had taken the test. The Gittinger staff developed a whole checklist of 30 to 40 patterns that the skilled observer could look for. Each of these traits reflected one of the Wechsler subtests, and it corresponded to some insight picked up from the 29,000 scores in the data base.
Was the target sloppy or neat? Did he relate to women stiffly or easily? How did he hold a cigarette and put it into his mouth? When he went through a receiving line, did he immediately repeat the name of each person introduced to him? Taken as a whole, all these observations allowed Gittinger to make a reasoned estimate about a subject's personality, with emphasis on his vulnerabilities. As Gittinger describes the system, "If you could get a sample of several kinds of situations, you could begin to get some pretty good information." Nevertheless, Gittinger had his doubts about indirect assessment. "I never thought we were good at this," he says.
The TSS assessment staff, along with the Agency's medical office use the PAS indirectly to keep up the OSS tradition of making psychological portraits of world leaders like Hitler. Combining analytical techniques with gossipy intelligence, the assessors tried to give high-level U.S. officials a better idea of what moved the principal international political figures.[4] One such study of an American citizen spilled over into the legally forbidden domestic area when in 1971 the medical office prepared a profile of Daniel Ellsberg at the request of the White House. To get raw data for the Agency assessors, John Ehrlichman authorized a break-in at Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office in California. John Gittinger vehemently denies that his staff played any role in preparing this profile, which the White House plumbers intended to use as a kind of psychological road map to compromise Ellsberg—just as CIA operators regularly worked from such assessments to exploit the weaknesses of foreigners.
Whether used directly or indirectly, the PAS gave Agency case officers a tool to get a better reading of the people with whom they dealt. CIA field stations overseas routinely sent all their findings on a target, along with indirect assessment checklists, back to Washington, so headquarters personnel could decide whether or not to try recruitment. The TSS assessment staff contributed to this process by attempting to predict what ploys would work best on the man in the case officers' sights. "Our job was to recommend what strategy to try," says a onetime Gittinger colleague. This source states he had direct knowledge of cases where TSS recommendations led to sexual entrapment operations, both hetero- and homosexual. "We had women ready—called them a stable," he says, and they found willing men when they had to.
One CIA psychologist stresses that the PAS only provided "clues" on how to compromise people. "If somebody's assessment came in like the sexual psychopaths', it would raise red flags," he notes. But TSS staff assessors could only conclude that the target had a potentially serious sex problem. They could by no means guarantee that the target's defenses could be broken. Nevertheless, the PAS helped dictate the best weapons for the attack. "I've heard John [Gittinger] say there's always something that someone wants," says another former Agency psychologist. "And with the PAS you can find out what it is. It's not necessarily sex or booze. Sometimes it's status or recognition or security." Yet another Gittinger colleague describes this process as "looking for soft spots." He states that after years of working with the system, he still bridled at a few of the more fiendish ways "to get at people" that his colleagues dreamed up He stayed on until retirement, however, and he adds, "None of this was personal. It was for national security reasons."
A few years ago, ex-CIA psychologist James Keehner told reporter Maureen Orth that he personally went to New York in 1969 to give Wechsler tests to an American nurse who had volunteered her body for her country. "We wanted her to sleep with this Russian," explained Keehner. "Either the Russian would fall in love with her and defect, or we'd blackmail him. I had to see if she could sleep with him over a period of time and not get involved emotionally. Boy, was she tough!" Keehner noted that he became disgusted with entrapment techniques, especially after watching a film of an agent in bed with a "recruitment target." He pointed out that Agency case officers, many of whom "got their jollies" from such work, used a hidden camera to get their shots. The sexual technology developed in the MKULTRA safehouses in New York and San Francisco had been put to work. The operation worked no better in the 1960s, however, than TSS officials predicted such activities would a decade earlier. "You don't really recruit agents with sexual blackmail," Keehner concluded. "That's why I couldn't even take reading the files after a while. I was sickened at seeing people take pleasure in other people's inadequacies. First of all, I thought it was just dumb. For all the money going out, nothing ever came back."
Keehner became disgusted by the picking-at-scabs aspect of TSS assessment work. Once the PAS had identified a target as having potential mental instabilities, staff members sometimes suggested ways to break him down, reasoning that by using a ratchet-like approach to put him under increased pressure, they might be able to break the lines that tied him to his country, if not to his sanity. Keehner stated, "I was sent to deal with the most negative aspects of the human condition. It was planned destructiveness. First, you'd check to see if you could destroy a man's marriage. If you could, then that would be enough to put a lot of stress on the individual, to break him down. Then you might start a minor rumor campaign against him. Harass him constantly. Bump his car in traffic. A lot of it is ridiculous, but it may have a cumulative effect." Agency case officers might also use this same sort of stress-producing campaign against a particularly effective enemy intelligence officer whom they knew they could never recruit but whom they hoped to neutralize.
Most operations—including most recruitments—did not rely on such nasty methods. The case officer still benefited from the TSS staffs assessment, but he usually wanted to minimize stress rather than accentuate it. CIA operators tended to agree that the best way to recruit an agent was to make the relationship as productive and satisfying as possible for him, operating from the old adage about catching more flies with honey than vinegar. "You pick the thing most fearful to him—the things which would cause him the most doubt," says the source. "If his greatest fear is that he can't trust you to protect him and his family, you overload your pitch with your ability to do it. Other people need structure, so you tell them exactly what they will need to do. If you leave it open-ended, they'll be scared you'll ask them to do things they're incapable of."[5]
Soon after the successful recruitment of a foreigner to spy for the CIA, either a CIA staff member or a specially trained case officer normally sat down with the new agent and gave him the full battery of Wechsler subtests—a process that took several hours. The tester never mentioned that the exercise had anything to do with personality but called it an "aptitude" test—which it also is. The assessments office in Washington then analyzed the results. As with the polygraph, the PAS helped tell if the agent were lying. It could often delve deeper than surface concepts of true and false. The PAS might show that the agent's motivations were not in line with his behavior. In that case, if the gap were too great, the case officer could expect to run up against considerable deception—resulting either from espionage motives or psychotic tendencies.
The TSS staff assessors sent a report back to the field on the best way to deal with the new agent and the most effective means to exploit him. They would recommend whether his case officer should treat him sternly or permissively. If the agent were an Externalizer who needed considerable companionship, the assessors might suggest that the case officer try to spend as much time with him as possible.[6] They would probably recommend against sending this E agent on a long mission into a hostile country, where he could not have the friendly company he craved.
Without any help from John Gittinger or his system, covert operators had long been deciding matters like these, which were, after all, rooted in common sense. Most case officers prided themselves on their ability to play their agents like a musical instrument, at just the right tempo, and the Gittinger system did not shake their belief that nothing could beat their own intuition. Former CIA Deputy Director Ray Cline expresses a common view when he says the PAS "was part of the system—kind of a check-and-balance—a supposedly scientific tool that was not weighed very heavily. I never put as much weight on the psychological assessment reports as on a case officer's view.... In the end, people went with their own opinion." Former Director William Colby found the assessment reports particularly useful in smoothing over that "traumatic" period when a case officer had to pass on his agent to a replacement. Understandably, the agent often saw the switch as a danger or a hardship. "The new guy has to show some understanding and sympathy," says Colby, who had 30 years of operational experience himself, "but it doesn't work if these feelings are not real."
For those Agency officers who yearned to remove as much of the human element as possible from agent operations, Gittinger's system was a natural. It reduced behavior to a workable formula of shorthand letters that, while not insightful in all respects, gave a reasonably accurate description of a person. Like Social Security numbers, such formulas fitted well with a computerized approach. While not wanting to overemphasize the Agency's reliance on the PAS, former Director Colby states that the system made dealing with agents "more systematized, more professional."
In 1963 the CIA's Inspector General gave the TSS assessment staff high marks and described how it fit into operations:
The [Clandestine Services] case officer is first and foremost, perhaps, a practitioner of the art of assessing and exploiting human personality and motivations for ulterior purposes. The ingredients of advanced skill in this art are highly individualistic in nature, including such qualities as perceptiveness and imagination. [The PAS] seeks to enhance the case officer's skill by bringing the methods and disciplines of psychology to bear.... The prime objectives are control, exploitation, or neutralization. These objectives are innately anti-ethical rather than therapeutic in their intent.

In other words, the PAS is directed toward the relationship between the American case officer and his foreign agent, that lies at the heart of espionage. In that sense, it amounts to its own academic discipline—the psychology of spying—complete with axioms and reams of empirical data. The business of the PAS, like that of the CIA, is control.
One former CIA psychologist, who still feels guilty about his participation in certain Agency operations, believes that the CIA's fixation on control and manipulation mirrors, in a more virulent form, the way Americans deal with each other generally. "I don't think the CIA is too far removed from the culture," he says. "It's just a matter of degree. If you put a lot of money out there, there are many people who are lacking the ethics even of the CIA. At least the Agency had an ideological basis." This psychologist believes that the United States has become an extremely control-oriented society—from the classroom to politics to television advertising. Spying and the PAS techniques are unique only in that they are more systematic and secret.
Another TSS scientist believes that the Agency's behavioral research was a logical extension of the efforts of American psychologists, psychiatrists, and sociologists to change behavior—which he calls their "sole motivation." Such people manipulate their subjects in trying to make mentally disturbed people well, in turning criminals into law-abiding citizens, in improving the work of students, and in pushing poor people to get off welfare. The source cites all of these as examples of "behavior modification" for socially acceptable reasons, which, like public attitudes toward spying, change from time to time. "Don't get the idea that all these behavioral scientists were nice and pure, that they didn't want to change anything, and that they were detached in their science," he warns. "They were up to their necks in changing people. It just happened that the things they were interested in were not always the same as what we were." Perhaps the saving grace of the behavioral scientists is summed up by longtime MKULTRA consultant Martin Orne: "We are sufficiently ineffective so that our findings can be published." With the PAS, CIA officials had a handy tool for social engineering. The Gittinger staff found one use for it in the sensitive area of selecting members of foreign police and intelligence agencies. All over the globe, Agency operators have frequently maintained intimate working relations with security services that have consistently mistreated their own citizens. The assessments staff played a key role in choosing members of the secret police in at least two countries whose human-rights records are among the world's worst.
In 1961, according to TSS psychologist John Winne, the CIA and the Korean government worked together to establish the newly created Korean Central Intelligence Agency (KCIA). The American CIA station in Seoul asked headquarters to send out an assessor to "select the initial cadre" of the KCIA. Off went Winne on temporary duty. "I set up an office with two translators," he recalls, "and used a Korean version of the Wechsler." The Agency psychologist gave the tests to 25 to 30 police and military officers and wrote up a half-page report on each, listing their strengths and weaknesses. Winne wanted to know about each candidate's "ability to follow orders, creativity, lack of personality disorders, motivation—why he wanted out of his current job. It was mostly for the money, especially with the civilians." The test results went to the Korean authorities, whom Winne believes made the personnel decisions "in conjunction with our operational people."
"We would do a job like this and never get feedback, so we were never sure we'd done a good job," Winne complains. Sixteen years after the end of his mission to Seoul and after news of KCIA repression at home and bribes to American congressmen abroad, Winne feels that his best efforts had "boomeranged." He states that Tongsun Park was not one of the KCIA men he tested.
In 1966 CIA staffers, including Gittinger himself, took part in selecting members of an equally controversial police unit in Uruguay—the anti-terrorist section that fought the Tupamaro urban guerrillas. According to John Cassidy, the CIA's deputy station chief there at the time, Agency operators worked to set up this special force together with the Agency for International Development's Public Safety Mission (whose members included Dan Mitrione, later kidnapped and killed by the Tupamaros). The CIA-assisted police claimed they were in a life-and-death struggle against the guerrillas, and they used incredibly brutal methods, including torture, to stamp out most of the Uruguayan left along with the guerrillas.
While the special police were being organized, "John [Gittinger] came down for three days to get the program underway," recalls Cassidy. Then Hans Greiner, a Gittinger associate, ran Wechslers on 20 Uruguayan candidates. One question on the information subtest was "How many weeks in the year?" Eighteen of the 20 said it was 48, and only one man got the answer right. (Later he was asked about his answer, and he said he had made a mistake; he meant 48.) But when Greiner asked this same group of police candidates, "Who wrote Faust?" 18 of the 20 knew it was Goethe. "This tells you something about the culture," notes Cassidy, who served the Agency all over Latin America. It also points up the difficulty Gittinger had in making the PAS work across cultural lines.
In any case, CIA man Cassidy found the assessment process most useful for showing how to train the anti-terrorist section. "According to the results, these men were shown to have very dependent psychologies and they needs d strong direction," recalls the now-retired operator. Cassidy was quite pleased with the contribution Gittinger and Greiner made. "For years I had been dealing with Latin Americans," says Cassidy, "and here, largely by psychological tests, one of [Gittinger's] men was able to analyze people he had no experience with and give me some insight into them.... Ordinarily, we would have just selected the men and gone to work on them."
In helping countries like South Korea and Uruguay pick their secret police, TSS staff members often inserted a devilish twist with the PAS. They could not only choose candidates who would make good investigators, interrogators, or whatever, but they could also spot those who were most likely to succumb to future CIA blandishments. "Certain types were more recruitable," states a former assessor. "I looked for them when I wrote my reports.... Anytime the Company [the CIA] spent money for training a foreigner, the object was that he would ultimately serve our control purposes." Thus, CIA officials were not content simply to work closely with these foreign intelligence agencies; they insisted on penetrating them, and the PAS provided a useful aid.

In 1973 John Gittinger and his longtime associate John Winne, who picked KCIA men, published a basic description of the PAS in a professional journal. Although others had written publicly about the system, this article apparently disturbed some of the Agency's powers, who were then cutting back on the number of CIA employees at the order of short-time Director James Schlesinger.
Shortly thereafter, Gittinger, then 56, stopped being president of Psychological Assessment Associates but stayed on as a consultant. In 1974 I wrote about Gittinger's work, albeit incompletely, in Rolling Stone magazine. Gittinger was disturbed that disclosure of his CIA connection would hurt his professional reputation. "Are we tarred by a brush because we worked for the CIA?" he asked during one of several rather emotional exchanges. "I'm proud of it." He saw no ethical problems in "looking for people's weaknesses" if it helped the CIA obtain information, and he declared that for many years most Americans thought this was a useful process. At first, he offered to give me the Wechsler tests and prepare a personality assessment to explain the system, but Agency officials prohibited his doing so. "I was given no explanation," said the obviously disappointed Gittinger. "I'm very proud of my professional work, and I had looked forward to being able to explain it."
In August 1977 Gittinger publicly testified in Senate hearings. While he obviously would have preferred talking about his psychological research, his most persistent questioner, Senator Edward Kennedy, was much more interested in bringing out sensational details about prostitutes and drug testing. A proud man, Gittinger felt "humiliated" by the experience, which ended with him looking foolish on national television. The next month, the testimony of his former associate, David Rhodes, further bruised Gittinger. Rhodes told the Kennedy subcommittee about Gittinger's role in leading the "Gang that Couldn't Spray Straight" in an abortive attempt to test LSD in aerosol cans on unwitting subjects. Gittinger does not want his place in history to be determined by this kind of activity. He would like to see his Personality Assessment System accepted as an important contribution to science.
Tired of the controversy and worn down by trying to explain the PAS, Gittinger has moved back to his native Oklahoma. He took a copy of the 29,000 Wechsler results with him, but he has lost his ardor for working with them. A handful of psychologists around the country still swear by the system and try to pass it on to others. One, who uses it in private practice, says that in therapy it saves six months in understanding the patient. This psychologist takes a full reading of his patient's personality with the PAS, and then he varies his treatment to fit the person's problems. He believes that most American psychologists and psychiatrists treat their patients the same whereas the PAS is designed to identify the differences between people. Gittinger very much hopes that others will accept this view and move his system into the mainstream. "It means nothing unless I can get someone else to work on it," he declares. Given the preconceptions of the psychological community, the inevitable taint arising from the CIA's role in developing the system, and Gittinger's lack of academic credentials and energy, his wish will probably not be fulfilled.


Notes
The material on the Gittinger Personality Assessment System (PAS) comes from "An Introduction to the Personality Assessment System" by John Winne and John Gittinger, Monograph Supplement No. 38, Clinical Psychology Publishing Co., Inc. 1973; an interview with John Winne; interviews with three other former CIA psychologists; 1974 interviews with John Gittinger by the author; and an extended interview with Gittinger by Dr. Patricia Greenfield, Associate Professor of Psychology at UCLA. Some of the material was used first in a Rolling Stone article, July 18, 1974, "The CIA Won't Quite Go Public." Robert Hyde's alcohol research at Butler Health Center was MKULTRA Subproject 66. See especially 66-17, 27 August, 1958. Subject: Proposed Alcohol Study—1958-1959 and 66-5. undated, Subject: Equipment—Ecology Laboratory.
The 1963 Inspector General's report on TSS, as first released under the Freedom of Information Act, did not include the section on personality assessment quoted from in the chapter. An undated, untitled document, which was obviously this section, was made available in one of the CIA's last releases.
MKULTRA subproject 83 dealt with graphology research, as did part of Subproject 60, which covered the whole Human Ecology Society. See especially 83-7, December 11, 1959, Subject: [deleted] Graphological Review and 60-28, undated, Subject [deleted] Activities Report, May, 1959-April, 1960.
Information on the psychological profile of Ferdinand Marcos came from a U.S. Government source who had read it. Information on the profile of the Shah of Iran came from a column by Jack Anderson and Les Whitten "CIA Study Finds Shah Insecure," Washington Post, July 11, 1975.
The quotes from James Keehner came from an article in New Times by Maureen Orth, "Memoirs of a CIA Psychologist," June 25, 1975.
For related reports on the CIA's role in training foreign police and its activities in Uruguay, see an article by Taylor Branch and John Marks, "Tracking the CIA," Harper's Weekly, January 25, 1975 and Philip Agee's book, Inside the Company: CIA Diary (London: Penguin; 1975).
The quote from Martin Orne was taken from Patricia Greenfield's APA Monitor article cited in the last chapter's notes.
Gittinger's testimony before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the Kennedy subcommittee on August 3, 1977 appeared on pages 50-63. David Rhodes' testimony on Gittinger's role in the abortive San Francisco LSD spraying appeared in hearings before the Kennedy subcommittee, September 20, 1977, pp. 100-110.


Footnotes
1. Developed by psychologist David Wechsler, this testing system is called, in different versions, the Wechsler-Bellevue and the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale. As Gittinger worked with it over the years, he made modifications that he incorporated in what he named the Wechsler-Bellevue-G. For simplicity's sake, it is simply referred to as the Wechsler system throughout the book. (back)
2. As with most of the descriptions of the PAS made in the book, this is an oversimplification of a more complicated process. The system, as Gittinger used it, yielded millions of distinct personality types. His observations on alcohol were based on much more than a straight I and E comparison. For the most complete description of the PAS in the open literature, see the article by Gittinger and Winne cited in the chapter notes. (back)
3. Graphology (handwriting analysis) appealed to CIA officials as a way of supplementing PAS assessments or making judgments when only a written letter was available. Graphology was one of the seemingly arcane fields which the Human Ecology Society had investigated and found operational uses for. The Society wound up funding handwriting research and a publication in West Germany where the subject was taken much more seriously than in the United States, and it sponsored a study to compare handwriting analyses with Wechsler scores of actors (including some homosexuals), patients in psychotherapy, criminal psychopaths, and fashion models. Gittinger went on to hire a resident graphologist who could do the same sort of amazing things with handwriting as the Oklahoma psychologist could do with Wechsler scores. One former colleague recalls her spotting—accurately—a stomach ailment in a foreign leader simply by reading one letter. Asked in an interview about how the Agency used her work, she replied, "If they think they can manipulate a person, that's none of my business. I don't know what they do with it. My analysis was not done with that intention.... Something I learned very early in government was not to ask questions." (back)
4. A profile of Ferdinand Marcos found the Filipino president's massive personal enrichment while in office to be a natural outgrowth of his country's tradition of putting loyalty to one's family and friends ahead of all other considerations. Agency assessors found the Shah of Iran to be a brilliant but dangerous megalomaniac whose problems resulted from an overbearing father, the humiliation of having served as a puppet ruler, and his inability for many years to produce a male heir. (back)
5. This source reports that case officers usually used this sort of nonthreatening approach and switched to the rougher stuff if the target decided he did not want to spy for the CIA. In that case, says the ex-CIA man, "you don't want the person to say no and run off and tattle. You lose an asset that way—not in the sense of the case officer being shot, but by being nullified." The spurned operator might then offer not to reveal that the target was cheating on his wife or had had a homosexual affair, in return for the target not disclosing the recruitment attempt to his own intelligence service. (back)
6. While Agency officials might also have used the PAS to select the right case officer to deal with the E agent—one who would be able to sustain the agent's need for a close relationship over a long period of time—they almost never used the system with this degree of precision. An Agency office outside TSS did keep Wechslers and other test scores on file for most case officers, but the Clandestine Services management was not willing to turn over the selection of American personnel to the psychologists. (back)