Chapter 6 - The CIA and the White House

Summary

This chapter examines the ethics of psychological profiling in the CIA. Agency psychiatrists have routinely profiled foreign leaders from a distance – a practice that the APA regards as acceptable and outside the scope of its Goldwater Rule. During the Nixon administration, Agency psychiatrists created – at the request of the White House – a profile of antiwar activist Daniel Ellsberg. As recently declassified CIA documents make clear, CIA psychiatrists had misgivings about producing the profile but participated nonetheless, with the explicit approval of director Richard Helms. Led by Nixon’s aides John Ehrlichman, Howard Hunt, David Young, and Egil Krogh, the push for a profile was closely associated with the burglary of the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist Lewis Fielding. I examine tensions within the Agency, media and congressional response to the eventual disclosure, and the work of former CIA psychiatrist Jerrold Post. Post had a role in the Ellsberg profile, but then developed reservations about it. He later wrote “Ethical Considerations,” an article that represents an enduring contribution to the debate over the ethics of psychiatric comment without interview.