CIA put world leaders on a virtual psychiatrist’s couch

(WMR)—WMR previously reported that in 1984, CIA deputy director for intelligence Robert Gates, who later became CIA director under George H. W. Bush, renamed the CIA’s Political Psychology Division the Political Psychology Center (PPC) and transferred the group from the Office of Global Issues (OGI) to the Office of Scientific and Weapons Research (OSWR).

In addition to having responsibility for the CIA’s overall psychological and behavioral science programs, the PPC and PPD, before it, also developed psychological profiles on various world leaders. The CIA continues to conduct such profiling today, especially on such leaders as North Korea’ Kim Jong Un, Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, and the new leaders of China.

WMR has discovered the product of such CIA psychological profiling from 1977, an analysis of the personality traits of various world leaders buried in the CIA archives. Only one of those profiled is still in power today, Shimon Peres, the current President of Israel.

Peres, the then-Prime Minister of Israel, was described as “arrogant” but also “articulate” and an “able administrator.”

James Callaghan, the British Prime Minister, was deemed an intellectual lightweight by the CIA. French President Valery Giscard d’Estaing’s psychological dossier was summed in two words: “aristocratic” and “cold.” West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt was described as “cocky,” Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau a “charmer” with a lot of personal problems with his marriage, Chinese leader Hua Kuo-feng, “shrewd” and not totally committed to Communist ideology, Syrian President Hafez al-Assad, “wily, skillful, and tactful,” and Ugandan dictator Idi Amin, “unpredictable” and a “potential mass murderer.”

Perhaps no world leader was under more psychological scrutiny by the CIA than was Soviet Communist Party General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev. He was described as “vain” with a penchant for fast cars, hunting, and the latest gadgets. Brezhnev was also determined to be an alcoholic, a person prone to pass gossip on other members of the Politburo, and a connoisseur of dirty jokes. Brezhnev also enjoyed the “services” of a masseuse named Olga, someone who also gave rubdowns to Soviet President Nikolai Podgorny.

The CIA considered Cuban leader Fidel Castro to be a shrewd expert on Latin American affairs. The CIA concluded that although Costa Rica’s three-times president Jose Figueres Ferrer was widely respected as a statesman, he and certain family members were nothing more than crooks. Figueres took money from the CIA in 1959 to publish a political journal called Combate and to organize a CIA front group called the Institute of Political Education. The CIA laundered funds through the Kaplan Fund and the Institute for International Labor Research (IILR) in New York before transferring it to Costa Rica for Figueres’s activities.

Figueres worked closely with the CIA’s Cord Meyer, who later became a Washington Post columnist, adding to the informed speculation at the time that the Post’s actual Editorial Board resided not at the newspaper’s office building on 15th Street in Washington but in Langley, Virginia. Figueres and Meyer set up the Inter-American Democratic Social Movement (INADESMO) in Costa Rica, which was used to formulate the plan to overthrow the Dominican Republic dictator Rafael Trujillo.

Figueres later admitted that he was a good friend of CIA director Allen Dulles. Figueres also owned a company called Sociedad Agricola Industrial San Cristobal, S.A., which received a sizable investment from fugitive American investor Robert Vesco, a man who was also used by the CIA as an operative. In 1973, Vesco was granted asylum by Figueres in Costa Rica. Vesco was later arrested by Cuba and he died in 2007 in a Havana hospital suffering from cancer. Vesco was tied to the Watergate conspirators as well as to Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands, the founder of the Bildberberg Group.

Previously published in the Wayne Madsen Report.

Copyright © 2012 WayneMadenReport.com

Wayne Madsen is a Washington, DC-based investigative journalist and nationally-distributed columnist. He is the editor and publisher of the Wayne Madsen Report (subscription required).