Trying to ‘read’ enemy led Allies up the garden path
Comment The psychological profile has been a weapon of war, espionage and diplomacy since ancient times, a tool to probe inside the mind of an opponent and, in theory, defeat him. The ancient Chinese military strategist, Sun Tzu, believed that an adequate understanding of the other side’s mental makeup was a prerequisite for victory: ‘‘If you know your enemies and know yourself, you will not be imperilled in 100 battles.’’
In modern times, intelligence services have drawn up classified psychobiographies of hostile leaders including Muammar Gaddafi, Kim Jong Il and Robert Mugabe in an attempt to forecast which way they may jump. You may be certain that a psychological profile of the Syrian president Bashar al-assad is circulating within MI6 and the CIA.
Drawn up by psychologists using public information about a given leader, such ‘‘at-a-distance profiles’’ depend on speeches, writings, biographical details, gleaned secrets and observed behaviour.
Inevitably, they also rely in part on rumour, gossip and speculation.
Sometimes the psychologists get carried away. In 1943, the American Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the predecessor of the CIA, commissioned a psychological profile of Hitler by the eminent Harvard psychologist Dr Henry Murray. Given free rein, and no access to the patient, Murray went over the top by some distance, speculating freely about Hitler’s ‘‘infinite selfabasement’’, oedipal tendencies, ‘‘homosexual panic’’, hysteria, paranoia, fear of contamination by women, impotence, masochism and effeminacy.
Indeed, in Murray’s assessment, there was hardly a complex Hitler did not suffer from, and while this doubtless helped to stoke disdain for Hitler, it had no practical impact on the war. However, Murray did get one thing right, predicting that Hitler might commit suicide in his bunker due to a ‘‘powerful compulsion to sacrifice himself and all of Germany to the revengeful annihilation of Western culture’’.
Although the psychologists can get it wrong – the CIA assessment of Saddam Hussein, for example, predicted that he was a pragmatist who would back down under pressure – in some circumstances, psychological profiling can be extremely useful.
President Jimmy Carter maintained that the CIA’S psychological profiles of Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin gave him valuable insights during the 1978 Camp David peace negotiations.
But Britain’s wartime efforts to peer into the dark recesses of Hitler’s mind also led down some blind alleys. MI5 became convinced that Hitler believed in astrology, and even employed a bogus Hungarian clairvoyant named Louis de Wohl as a secret weapon.
The problem with this plan was that Hitler had no interest whatever in stargazing, and regarded astrology as nonsense.