How experts compile psychological profiles of world leaders - "Intelligence Matters"

In this episode of Intelligence Matters, host Michael Morell speaks with Kenneth Dekleva, a psychiatrist, former U.S. Department of State Regional Medical Officer, and Senior Fellow at the George H.W. Bush Foundation for US-China Relations, about how experts compile psychological profiles of world leaders. Morell and Dekleva discuss the formative experiences and core characteristics of Russian president Vladimir Putin, Chinese President Xi Jinping, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, and Supreme Leader of Iran Ayatollah Khamanei. They also discuss the character of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, as well as how other countries might approach similar profiles of U.S. leaders.  

HIGHLIGHTS:  

• Vladimir Putin: "I think he's pragmatic, he's ruthless. He has ambition. He has a goal to resurrect the former Soviet Union, the sphere of influence. And he wants to disrupt and rewrite the post-1991 Cold War order…his ruthlessness is not new. I'm sorry to say that… Putin abhors weakness. So I think we don't want to put him in a position of feeling weakened or beaten or humiliated because that that can lead to further problems down the road." 
• Volodymyr Zelensky: "I think it's probably easy to say that many people, including the Russians, thought that he was a lightweight. But he found a degree of courage that is just remarkable… I think he's also a heroic figure of our time, almost Churchillian, because after this horrid pandemic of the last two years, there's really - and many people would argue - that there's a lack of real leadership in many parts of the world, including, sadly, in the West. And Zelensky has taught us that leadership is real and that leadership matters." 
• Kim Jong Un: "I don't think he'll give up his nuclear weapons. I think he's a very ruthless leader. But I think he's also an aspirational leader. He's a millennial, if you will…And I think he's sent certain messages …that he's here for the long run and that he's going to figure out a way to try and resolve the conundrum of North Korea's economy and make it, as he put it in his speech about eight years ago, that people can loosen their belts. I think we see this in how he's recently taking care of his health over the last year. He's lost a significant amount of weight, likely due to bariatric surgery. He has multiple cardiac and stroke risk factors. He's a chain smoker. He was probably morbidly obese. He may have hypertension and diabetes, but he's lost about 40 or 50 pounds." 

Download, rate and subscribe here: iTunes, Spotify and Stitcher.

INTELLIGENCE MATTERS - Kenneth Dekleva transcript

PRODUCER: Olivia Gazis

MICHAEL MORELL: Ken, welcome to the show. It's great to have you on intelligence matters.

KENNETH DEKLEVA: Thank you very much, Michael, for having me. I've been a longtime fan of your show and I'm greatly honored to be on it.

MICHAEL MORELL: So let's dig right in - the analysis of foreign leaders that you do. What do you call that type of analysis? And then can you describe what it is? Can you describe what questions you are asking and answering about a particular individual?

KENNETH DEKLEVA: Of course. The analysis that I do is what I would call 'leadership analysis,' or others have called it 'leadership psychology.' It draws from a long tradition, starting with the process during World War II, when a psychiatrist, Dr Langer, at the request of General William Donovan, prepared with a team a psychological profile around 1943 of Germany's chancellor Adolf Hitler.

This tradition was later continued at the CIA by my friend and mentor, the late Dr. Jerrold Post, who founded such a unit in the mid-sixties and led it for 21 years. And again, from a national security perspective, the goal was to prepare psychological profiles of world leaders, particularly adversaries, for the national security community, the policy community and for our own leaders all the way up to and including the president.

MICHAEL MORELL: You know, I should mention that the most prestigious award that an analyst can earn at CIA is actually named the Langer Award after the individual who did that, that leadership profile of Adolf Hitler. Interesting.

So how long have you been doing this? When did you start? Take us through a little bit of that background.

KENNETH DEKLEVA: I became interested in this kind of work - interested is maybe a misnomer - fascinated when I first encountered the work of Dr. Post when I was a resident in psychiatry in the early '90s. You and your listeners may recall that Dr. Post prepared and published a profile of Iraq's then-leader Saddam Hussein, and testified before the House Armed Services Committee.

So I found this intersection of psychiatry, psychology and international relations really to be quite fascinating.

So fast-forward a couple of years, I gave Dr. Post a phone call just to introduce myself and chat, and he asked me what I was writing about, and I said, 'I'm preparing a profile of Radovan Karadzic' - the leader of the Bosnian Serbs, who now sits in a prison cell in The Hague for war crimes. I speak fluent Serbian and I had translated Karadzic's haunting, eerie poetry to try to understand the psyche of this person - who was a notable psychiatrist and poet in in the former Yugoslavia and then turned into a genocidal war criminal.

Well, it turned out Dr. Post was also working on this. So thus began a collaboration, and we published profiles of both Dr. Karadzic and Serbia's leader, the late Slobodan Milosevic, in the late '90s.

MICHAEL MORELL: So Ken, how do you deal with a question that I'm sure you get from time to time, which is: it's hard enough to do this kind of analysis when you can actually meet with the person you're assessing, talk to them, have sessions with them. How is it then possible to do that from, say, 10,000 miles away? Never having had a discussion with the person - how do you how do you answer that question?

KENNETH DEKLEVA: It's very difficult, and it certainly can put some limitations on the conclusions that are drawn following the model of that I mentioned of Dr. Post. People like myself who do this kind of work will review all of the leaders' writings, speeches, videos; in today's day and age, social media posts - both primary sources that the leaders have written, secondary sources about the leader. 

And I've been fortunate in my work of being able to talk to high-level dignitaries who have been in the room with every single leader who I've profiled, so that helps a lot.

It's kind of a reality check: Is the profile that I'm creating off-base or off the mark or not even close to being realistic? The other thing I'm careful to do - I'm trained as a psychiatrist, and I think that that has value in this kind of analysis that it teaches one to empathize and humanize even people who have done horrible things - and my motto in this work is from the philosopher Terrence: 'Nothing which is human is alien to me.'

But I think having the ability to talk to people as well who've met with the leader can help understand some of the psychological traits of the leader, which can be useful in understanding a leader's behavior in crises, in negotiations, in diplomacy and in other political actions.

MICHAEL MORELL: Is the level of difficulty of analyzing a leader the same from leader to leader? Or does it differ by leader? Are some leaders tougher to analyze than others?

KENNETH DEKLEVA: That's a great question. The leaders that I've focused on for the last several years since I left my government service have been among what you would call the hardest of hard targets, such as Russia's President Vladimir Putin, China's President Xi Jinping and North Korea's Chairman Kim Jong Un.

These are hard targets because, even though in the case of Putin and Xi, they've been in power for a long time - Putin for over 20 years, and Xi Jinping for over 10 years - and we have many senior leaders in our administration and previous administrations that have met with them, they're still very opaque and very challenging. So that makes it very, very difficult to get a good read on on the leader's psyche and state of mind, their goals, their negotiating strategy.

So there's a lot of psychology besides just individual psychology. Negotiation psychology is very important. Understanding the context of international relations is very important. Rather than just using psychiatric labeling to call a leader a narcissist or a malignant narcissist, something like that, that's probably not as helpful.

MICHAEL MORELL: And who's the leader that you assessed who was the most difficult to understand?

KENNETH DEKLEVA: I would say Kim Jong Un, because I wrote a profile of Kim Jong Il back in 2010, after he had had his stroke and in August of 2008, and they were the hardest to access because there was simply less data available.

That being said, even though there's lots of data - Xi Jinping and Putin have met with many world leaders, they published their own writings, there's been a lot written about them. A lot of excellent stuff written about Putin; I would recommend Fiona Hill's book, 'Operative in the Kremlin.' Excellent biographies of Xi - there's still a degree of opacity that makes even these leaders a challenge to understand.

That's true now more than ever in the case of Vladimir Putin and certainly more salient than ever, as Europe is now facing a horrific war for the first time in decades.

MICHAEL MORELL: So, Ken, great transition because I wanted to go to Putin next. So tell us about him. And in answering that question, I'd love to get your perspective on if he has changed. If so, how he has changed, in what ways and why?

KENNETH DEKLEVA: Let me let me start with the last point. In one sense, he's changed in that he's a man in more of a hurry. And certainly the the current thinking is that he's slipped up, he's made a strategic error. But that being said, if the intelligence that he was fed had been correct, then we probably wouldn't be having this conversation, but there were several levels of error. And it may reflect his own cognitive thinking or rigidity, if you will, cognitive rigidity or lack of flexibility. But it may be that he was thrown a curve ball, to borrow a term from American intelligence about two decades ago.

For example, he was likely told by his intelligence leadership in the FSB and SVR and GRU that this operation - that President Zelensky was weak and unpopular and would flee or fold quickly. He was probably told that, based on our humiliating withdrawal in Afghanistan, that the Western allies, including President Biden, would not rise to the occasion as they have.

He was likely told that this would be a mop-up operation - he even used the word 'operation' in his speech last night, that it would be over in a couple of days, and that most likely he would have installed a puppet regime.
But he didn't factor in the response of President Biden leading our allies, including new allies such as Chancellor Scholz - and also the real wild card here has been the courage of President Zelensky. Everyone got him wrong, including us. We offered him a plane ticket out and he said, 'I want ammunition, not a ride.' He's really kind of been the wild card here in a beautiful and courageous way. And his courage, his heroism has inspired the world, not just the Ukrainian people. I think that caught surely Putin and his leadership by surprise.

One other thing that I think President Putin miscalculated is he controls the information space in Russia, but he doesn't have control of the information space in the Ukraine, let alone Europe and the rest of the world. So this, in a way, is a huge strategic intelligence failure for Putin and his leadership.

MICHAEL MORELL: OK, so what about Putin, the man?

KENNETH DEKLEVA: Everyone by now knows his story of his hardscrabble upbringing and then Leningrad in the aftermath, the tragic aftermath of World War II, raised by a a hard working mom with a third-grade education and a disabled special forces veteran father who was very courageous and wounded in a special operation during World War II. They barely survived the siege of Leningrad, the 900-day siege; his mother almost starved to death. She lost a child during the war.

And so Putin basically grew up as an only child in a hardscrabble tenement - in Russia they called them communal - and the he was a street fighter, a street kid who was bullied. And there, like many people who do that, he took up martial arts - judo, which gave him a sense of order and discipline. And he also, as a young student, began his study of the German language.

And he evolved over time. His dream was to be a KGB officer. He did. And then after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, he shifted to politics and has become a highly successful politician. And I would say diplomat.
And of course, people have spoken about his mastery of judo and his tactical skills. But I think he's also very strategic.

Unfortunately, there's one other label that may get added to those labels, and it's very tragic for for Russia, even for Putin and for the world. And that label may be 'war criminal,' depending on what happens in the next several weeks with the indiscriminate bombing of civilian centers in Ukraine.

MICHAEL MORELL: Would you call him pragmatic?

KENNETH DEKLEVA: Yes.

MICHAEL MORELL: And do you think - that's certainly a label that I would have put on him, you know, 10 years ago -would you still put that label on him today?

KENNETH DEKLEVA: Yes, I would. I think he's a rational actor. I think he's pragmatic. I think he, again, I think it's a false assumption to think that he's somehow more erratic or that he's lost his mental faculties because an operation has gone wrong.

If any of those intelligence variables that I mentioned a few minutes ago have changed, if Zelensky had fled, I think Putin would would be rejoicing in in victory right now as we speak.

So those were the wild cards that even many people couldn't predict. So I think he's pragmatic, he's ruthless. He has ambition. He has a goal to resurrect the former Soviet Union, the sphere of influence. And he wants to disrupt and rewrite the post-1991 Cold War order.

He's also incredibly, incredibly ruthless, but we've seen that ruthlessness before, in the bombing of Grozny in Georgia in 2008 and the takeover of Crimea and the Donbass since 2014. In Syria in 2015, and 2016, his ordering, or sanctioning, at a minimum, the murders of Litvinenko in London in 2006 with Polonium 210, the attempted assassination of former GRU officer in Salisbury, England, Sergei Skripal, with Novichok a banned chemical weapon, his attempted assassination of Navalny, his other murders. Boris Nemtsov comes to mind. His ruthlessness is not new. I'm sorry to say that.

MICHAEL MORELL: So Ken, given how ruthless he is, how dangerous can he be here in terms of the types of tactics he might use in Ukraine, the types of weapons he might use in Ukraine, even chemical weapons and perhaps a tactical nuclear weapon? How do you think about that?

KENNETH DEKLEVA: I think he's very dangerous and because he's a bit unexpectedly cornered, that makes him more dangerous. This is a mixture of a war, a diplomatic negotiation that's going on behind the scenes, and a hostage negotiation where he's basically - because he has nuclear weapons, he's in a sense holding Ukraine and the West hostage. So it's very dangerous and it's very delicate. So I share the concerns of many of your listeners in this regard.

I think the attack on the reactor, if not accidental, there are certainly arguments that could be made that it was deliberate to show the ruthlessness and brutality that he's capable of. Because if that reactor core had melted down, all of southern Ukraine would become uninhabitable. So I think he seeks, in that sense, to destroy the idea of Ukraine as a country, and he's written and spoken about that for decades.

This is not new. In 2007, or 2008 he told then-President Bush Ukraine is not a real country. And he and his inner circle - his increasingly isolated inner circle - National Security Council chair Patrushev, FSB director Bortnikov, SVR Director Sergei Naryshkin, Minister of Defense Sergei Shoigu, are in alignment with that kind of thinking, so that's a very dangerous situation.

The other thing I would add, Michael, is I think it's important to realize that finding diplomatic solutions even while the fighting is going on and the sanctions are being strengthened and we're giving weapons to the Ukraine is very important, and I think the key to this, when it ends - I fear it will get worse before it gets better, as Mike Vickers said on your program earlier this week.

But when it when it ends, I think Putin needs an offramp or a face-saving way where he can quote, 'declare victory,' unquote and retreat back to his lair. Sometimes it's better to let the bear run out of the cage back into the forest.

MICHAEL MORELL: Ken, I want to ask you maybe two more questions about the current situation we face between Russia and Ukraine. Do you think that Putin sees a face-saving way out of this?

KENNETH DEKLEVA: I'm not sure - that's an excellent question. I think part of the job of our expert diplomats -and we're very lucky to have expert diplomats and intelligence officials at the most senior levels. And I especially want to highlight the role of CIA director Bill Burns, who served as a former ambassador to Russia, is if he doesn't see it to offer different solutions that he can grasp and make him think that they were his own.

This is what hostage negotiators trained in the FBI such as Gary Noesner, Christopher Voss and others such as Germany's Matthias Schranner called 'tactical empathy.' Empathy is a loaded word here because people are saying, 'How can you empathize with someone who does horrible evil things? How can you empathize with someone who may be a war criminal?'

But empathy doesn't mean sympathy or assent. It means you have to try to understand what he wants and what his ambition is and give him some kind of a tactical, face-saving way where he can delicately retreat without feeling humiliated.

A humiliated Putin is a dangerous Putin and part of his mindset, you may remember, Michael, after the horrific 2004 terrorist attacks in Beslan, a school in southern Russia where several hundred children were killed, Putin was very emotional on national TV, and he said, 'We were beaten because we were weak.' So Putin abhors weakness. So I think we don't want to put him in a position of feeling weakened or beaten or humiliated because that can lead to further problems down the road.

MICHAEL MORELL: And then, Ken, just one more question. You mentioned the strength of President Zelensky, of Ukraine and how he's surprised all of us. Why? Why did he surprise us? Why did we miss understanding who this person really was?

KENNETH DEKLEVA: I don't know, but I suspect it's because he's not a natural politician - although now he's shown that he is. But he was a famous actor and he was on TV programs and in a movie and he was thought to be weak and functioning in a government that has struggled with corruption for many, many years.

And I think it's probably easy to say that many people, including the Russians, thought that he was a lightweight. But he found a degree of courage that is just remarkable. And I would encourage your your listeners to watch his beautiful, moving, eight-minute speech last Saturday to the Russian people, where he talked about the ties that bind the Ukraine and Russia, the humanity of Russians.

He grew up speaking Russian. He's an ethnically Russian Jew. He talked about his best friends living in the Donbass, how they would go drinking and watch soccer matches together. And you know, he talked about the ties that bind, not the ties that divide.

I think he's also a heroic figure of our time, almost Churchillian, because after this horrid pandemic of the last two years, there's really - and many people would argue - that there's a lack of real leadership in many parts of the world, including, sadly, in the West. And Zelensky has taught us that leadership is real and that leadership matters.

MICHAEL MORELL: You know, when I was managing and leading people at the agency, I often thought that you don't really understand who they are until they're put under significant stress. And maybe that's a little of what happened here, right. This was the first time where he was put under a tremendous amount of stress, and, you know, a man of character appeared before us.

KENNETH BEKLEVA: Yes. And I live in Texas. In Texas, they would say he's been river-baptized.

MICHAEL MORELL: Ken, what I'd love to do now, if it's OK, is I'd love to switch to other important world leaders. And what I'd love to do is to throw out a name and give you a couple of minutes to to talk about what what makes that person tick, how you think about them. And I'd love to start with Chinese President Xi Jinping.

KENNETH DEKLEVA: Xi Jinping is a fascinating leader and I think one of the most formidable leaders in the world today. He, unlike Putin, he's not a disruptor. I think he wants to work within the existing world order, but wants to shape it to one that is more China-centric or friendly to the national interests of China and the Communist Party of China.

He's a fascinating character in the sense that he grew up - he's in his late 60s. He grew up as a child of privilege. His father was one of the founders of the Modern People's Republic of China and was one of the Group of Eight on the Long March with Mao Tse Tung and was one of the youngest vice ministers during Xi Jinping's childhood.
But then, when Xi was a teenager, his father was purged and then Xi himself was arrested by the Red Guards at the height of the Cultural Revolution and threatened with execution. And he was 14 at the time. They held a gun to his head and said, 'We can kill you 100 times.' He said, 'I don't see the difference between a hundred and one, so, please proceed.' And then they let him go and sent him away to a rural, a remote rural area where he performed hard manual labor away from family friends for the next eight or nine years.

And he gave a fascinating interview in 2000, which was very little known at the time, to a journalist where he talked about the lessons that he learned from that and he uses a language of resilience. He says, 'a knife is sharpened on a stone.' He says, 'Whenever I have challenging situations in my current life, I always draw back to those years to find my strength.' So I think he certainly is formidable and remarkable in his tale of resilience and his ability during the - especially during his first term - to marry that personal narrative of resilience with his larger narrative of the great dream of China's rejuvenation, has been very successful.

MICHAEL MORELL: How do you think he perceives us in how we fit into his worldview?

KENNETH DEKLEVA: I think he mistakenly perceives us - and the head of one of the Chinese think tanks, Yuan Peng wrote last year, he's the head of the CICIR which is sort of their think tank of the Ministry of State Security - he gave a speech, and it was an essay where they basically say the east is rising and the west is foundering, or we're weak. And he sees our society as weak. He sees our leaders as weak, as Putin does.

I mean, with all due respect to President Biden, the week before the Ukraine invasion, his popularity ratings were 39 percent across multiple polls. Both the Russians, the Chinese and our other adversaries, such as the North Koreans, Iranians and others, are very well informed and read this stuff.

But they make a mistake, I think, because Xi, like Putin and perhaps like Chairman Kim, underestimate what America is. They underestimate American exceptionalism. They underestimate our history, our ability to rise from the doldrums and to bounce back. The classic example of this is President Reagan's term. So I think they have to be careful in that regard. They tend to - they run a very real risk of underestimating American leadership, American resilience and American history.

MICHAEL MORELL: So Ken, next on my list here is North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

KENNETH DEKLEVA: Kim Jong Un is a fascinating leader also, and one that has been easily misunderstood, and a very difficult target. Until 2018, he had not met with a foreign leader when he took power in December of 2011, when his father died of a massive cardiac arrest. So there was very little information about him.

But I think we know more now, based on the speeches that we've seen since since his ascent to power and information that comes out of official North Korean channels, information from South Korean intelligence, and our own information from President Trump's meetings with Chairman Kim during 2018 at the Singapore summit and Hanoi in 2019 and at the DMZ later in 2019.

My sense of Kim is that again, I don't think he'll give up his nuclear weapons. I think he's a very ruthless leader. But I think he's also an aspirational leader. He's a millennial, if you will. And I think he's sent certain messages over the last, if you will, implicit and explicit messages, that he's here for the long run and that he's going to figure out a way to try and resolve the conundrum of North Korea's economy and make it, as he put it in a speech about eight years ago, that people can loosen their belts, if you will.

I think we see this in how he's recently taking care of his health over the last year. He's lost a significant amount of weight, likely due to bariatric surgery. He has multiple cardiac and stroke risk factors. He's a chain smoker. He was probably morbidly obese. He may have hypertension and diabetes, but he's lost about 40 or 50 pounds. He looks a lot fitter than he did several years ago, when there were descriptions that he was even huffing and puffing while walking during negotiations with South Koreans and with President Trump in 2018.

There was a video this week on North Korean state television that showed him digging a large hole to plant a tree. He looked pretty energetic there. So I think he's going to be somebody that we have to contend with for quite some time. But I see him as an aspirational person in the long run for North Korea.

MICHAEL MORELL: And was it that aspirational aspect of his personality, his mindset, that led him into that special relationship with President Trump?

KENNETH DEKLEVA: Yes. And I would put not only with President Trump, but with President Moon. They met four times - and with President Xi - I think they've had three meetings in 2018 and they've had two in 2019.
You remember that in September of 2018, where President Moon and Chairman Kim and their wives climbed to the summit of Mount Paektu, which is a very sacred holy mountain in Korean and North Korean mythology and lore. And I think there was a sense of of triumphalism that he had come out on the world stage and held his own.
And the former Russian ambassador, I think Gleb Ivashentsov, to South Korea, said in 2019, 'Kim's remarkable, he went - during 2019, he emerged from his isolation to meet with the most powerful leaders in the world: President Trump, President Putin, President Xi and other leaders such as President Moon, the prime ministers of Vietnam and Singapore, and held his own as a statesman.'

So I think that's an important part of who he is and if he did it once, he can do it again.

MICHAEL MORELL: Ken, the Supreme Leader in Iran.

KENNETH DEKLEVA: I've not formally studied the Supreme Leader, but what we know about him is he's in his 80s and he has health issues. There are numerous reports that he's had prostate cancer for several years - treated, and, being a being a clinician, I can tell your listeners that I treat many cancer patients, and now with modern treatments available, patients that would have died in a year or two when I was a medical student or resident can now live for five or 10 years. I've had patients who have outlived their oncologists, with late-stage cancers, including late-stage prostate cancer.

So I think the Supreme Leader is taking a hard line in I think the the JCPOA talks, which President Biden is trying to revive. I think the Iranians have taken very, very tough, strong negotiating positions, and they're not likely to budge.

And that raises the issue of sanctions. Iran, of course, has been under crippling sanctions for a very long time. But one of the frustrations of leaders in the West, including President Biden and others who plan sanctions regimes against these adversarial leaders such as Putin, Xi Kim, the Supreme Leader of Iran, is that the adversarial leaders can adapt to sanctions over time to where they they figure out workarounds. And these are also countries that also have a civilizational aspect to them in their own proud history. And they have the capability, if you will, of digging in their heels.

MICHAEL MORELL: Yeah. So I'm wondering, given his given his age, given his health, given the fact that he made a deal once with the United States and had the rug pulled out from underneath him, if it's going to be pretty tough for him to agree to to another deal at this point,

KENNETH DEKLEVA: I think so, Michael, and I think he probably was a reluctant person to go along with that deal. But the new president, Raisi, who is likely to become the Supreme Leader when the current Supreme Leader dies, when Supreme Leader Khamenei dies, is as much of a hardliner as the current Supreme Leader. So I don't expect a change. And I think in the sense of broken deals like that, if you will, our adversaries never forget and they never forgive.

MICHAEL MORELL: Ken, it's been great to have you. I just want to ask you one more question. And I know you haven't formally studied him, but any thoughts about President Biden and his leadership styles, how a person who does what you do, maybe in another country, is looking at President Biden?

KENNETH DEKLEVA: Two points, Michael. One is because of the nature of my work and because I am a former senior diplomat, I don't profile American politicians. But what I will say is that there are people who do what I and others in the intelligence community do in China, in Iran, in Russia and in other countries, in the West, in Israel. And they will be studying President Biden's negotiating strategies, his biography, his psychology, if you will, his health in the same way that we study those of our adversaries.

MICHAEL MORELL: Yeah, I'd love to get a look at those.

KENNETH DEKLEVA: Me too.

MICHAEL MORELL: Ken, thank you so much for joining us. It's been a fascinating discussion and we'll have to get you back someday.

KENNETH DEKLEVA: Thank you for having me, Michael.