CIA Clandestine Operatives: Horizontal Thinkers or Just in Need of Ritalin?
Jeff Stein of Spy Talk had a fascinating interview with Dr. David Charney, a CIA psychiatrist specializing in treating professional spooks. The whole article is interesting but the following caught my eye:
….But for case officers at the tip of the CIA’s spear, he said, the problem tends to be A.D.D., Adult Attention Deficit Disorder.
“They seem to be highly functional A.D.D.’s,” Charney said. “You might think a person with ADD can’t tie their shoelaces, but quite the opposite.” To them, “boredom equals death,” Charney says, not really joking.“They’re energetic, restless, people who have to physically keep moving. Lock them to a desk, and they can’t deal with it. They can’t stand to be bored…”
But A.D.D. can be an asset, too. “They have the ability to absorb things from 360 degrees,” Charney marvels.
“Contrast that with people who are linear, like your book-keeper or accountant, who chug along in a
channel and get things done by going from one thing to another. But A.D.D. minds tend to be very synthetic. They reach out and pull things out of the air, or through other persons who are not linked in any way. They see patterns that other people don’t see. They can gather together unusual elements and bring them together into a whole that is a brilliant synthesis of things that would be lost on other people.
“They have a sensitivity to ambient thoughts going on that a good case officer needs to pick up, little nuances, little hues, little things said that let you know if the agent you’ve recruited is telling the truth, or which is partly the truth … which buttons to push to manage the person, how to absorb material and put it into a whole. And the good ones have that ability.”
This is classic horizontal thinking with an emphasis on connections, patterns and synthesis driven by an internal “restlessness” – the kind of persona seen in such disparate occupations as fighter pilots, inventors, physicists and artists. There has long been a comparative and to an extent correlative association of ADHD or “hyperactivity” with creativity, high levels of intelligence and depression though of course not everyone with ADHD is creative, intellectually gifted, depressed or working for an intelligence agency. The correlation though has also been noted in MRI brain scan studies of children so it would appear to have a physiological basis that might explain why the CIA needs to have its own psychiatrists for reasons beyond the stress generated by a career in intelligence work – self-selection bias in people who apply to become employees.
(Hat tip to….one of my twitteramigos….I can’t find the tweet, damn it!)
March 20th, 2009 at 5:11 am
Are there many examples of this wonderful "horizontal thinking" producing great results at the organizational level?
March 20th, 2009 at 1:04 pm
Hi FM,
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According to the psychiatrist Charney, the horizontal thinker types in the CIA are the field operatives of the D.O. while the senior managers of the CIA are "Espiocrats", about 180 degrees different in their thinking/personas and having all the unimaginative and risk-averse characteristics we associate with bureaucrats.
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"The CIA is like any other vast bureaucracy, which means it’s rigid, non-adaptive, stuck," he said. "The people who move into headquarters are classic — as they are in all agencies — for internal politicking and careerism and scoring points and thinking about promotions. And then they attain the bureaucratic mindset, which reacts to any initiative with ‘No.’ It’s the power to protect themselves from being wrong."
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To change the organization will require a change in culture; a change in culture requires a change in personnel and promotion policies.
March 20th, 2009 at 4:47 pm
"To change the organization will require a change in culture; a change in culture requires a change in personnel and promotion policies."
I am skeptical, the bureaucracy is in part shaped bu culture and the behavior of its members. But it also shapes individuals and culture, I would have very limited expectations for that kind of change.
By nature bureaucracy seeks predictability, routine and is averse to risk. A risk-taking bureaucracy is an oxymoron. Individuals are rewarded not only for doing the job but also respecting the procedure. In fact, procedure is an integral part of the organization and is critical for its proper operation.
The risk that strict adherence to procedure becomes an end is ever present. There’s always a tension between goals and procedures.
March 20th, 2009 at 5:36 pm
If you can’t make grandiose, speculative over-generalizations on a comment on a blog, where the Hell can you?
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With that warning flag planted firmly … .
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It seems like ad hoc operations work better than bureaucratic ones if you want "horizontal" thinking instead of checking boxes to operate a procedure that generates a mass of product that is outdated and useless when it is finally spat out of the end of the long, grey machine.
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The Special Operations Executive and the Office of Strategic Services were gangs of amateurs running around, and may have done more good work per dollar/pound invested than any of the more systematic institutions that have come into existence since then.
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Can there be a solution? Not clear. Maybe you have to give broad grants of authority to the people who will run the half-mad operatives, and allow them the elbow room to do what they need to do. You would need to have highly responsible yet highly sympathetic persons in that middle rung. Personnel selection would be everything.
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I think the old, favoritism based, ad hoc, personalized British system probably worked better than our more Taylorite approach.
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Both have their weaknesses, but there are some important things our approach seems to rule out completely.
March 29th, 2009 at 9:59 pm
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