The_Info_Web/10 - PEOPLE/(A-G)/John Gittinger.md

category	tags	summary	born	died	location	created	updated	relations
Medicine & Psychology	Person CIA MKULTRA PsychologicalAssessment TechnicalServicesStaff	CIA psychologist who developed the Personality Assessment System from Wechsler test scores and served as a key operational figure in MKULTRA alongside Sidney Gottlieb and Richard Helms.	1909	2003	Washington, D.C.	2026-06-03	2026-10-09	type with start role fn employed_by Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology 1957 field representative, per the 1957 annual report 3

John Gittinger was a heavy-set, goateed native of Oklahoma who in his later years came to resemble actor Walter Slezak, looking more like someone's kindly grandfather than a calculating theoretician. He had an almost insatiable curiosity about personality and spent most of his waking hours tinkering with and trying to perfect his Personality Assessment System (PAS). So obsessed did he become that he always had the feeling, even after other researchers had verified large chunks of it, that the whole thing was "a kind of paranoid delusion." Top Agency officials were so impressed that they gave the PAS a place in most agent-connected activities. During the Cuban missile crisis, it was Gittinger who was summoned to the White House to advise on how Nikita Khrushchev would react to American pressure.¹²

Origins

Gittinger started working on his system before joining the CIA in 1950, while he was director of psychological services at the state hospital in Norman, Oklahoma, Oklahoma. A former high school guidance counselor and Naval lieutenant commander during World War II, he was starting out at age 30 with a master's degree. Every day he saw several hundred patients with virtually every clinical problem. He measured itinerant workers on the David Wechsler intelligence scale and made a chance observation that became the "bedrock" of his system: short-order cooks did well on the digit-span subtest while dishwashers did not. The cooks maintained efficiency in distracting environments by shutting out commotion, which he called the "Internalizer" (I) type. The dishwashers could not separate from external stimuli, which he called "Externalizers" (E). He found that a high digit span in any person allowed a basic personality judgment.²

The PAS at the CIA

Gittinger built an office within the Agency that refined both Henry Murray's assessment function and Walter Langer's indirect analysis of foreign leaders. Once Sidney Gottlieb and other high officials realized how the PAS could help case officers handle agents, they gave Gittinger time and money under the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology. Although a full-time CIA employee, Gittinger worked under Human Ecology cover through the 1950s. He supervised much of the Society's behavioral research and tried to interest grantees in his system. A charming man and skillful raconteur, he convinced many grantees of his theories' validity. He would leave people openmouthed as he painted unnervingly accurate personality portraits of people he had never met.²

In 1962 Gittinger and his coworkers moved to Psychological Assessment Associates, a CIA proprietary company in Washington. He served as president and personally opened a branch office in Tokyo, later moved to Hong Kong. The Washington staff grew to about 15 professionals. Gittinger patiently taught his system to colleagues but was never able to show anyone how to use it as skillfully as he did. His system was full of interrelations and variables he instinctively understood but had not articulated. Even after Agency officials spent a fortune trying to computerize the PAS, the machine "couldn't tie down all the variables" that Gittinger carried in his head.²

Human Ecology Records

The 1957 annual report of the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology lists John W. Gittinger as field representative, under president Harold Wolff and executive secretary James Monroe.³ The report states that in October 1957 the Society made funds available to the Educational Testing Service "for the investigation of the interrelationships between two broad theories of personality: The John Gittinger Theory and the Isabel Briggs Myers Theory," and that the Service was administering the Wechsler-Bellevue Intelligence Scale and the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator to the same group of people, with the objective "to unify the Gittinger-Myers theories into a larger coherent picture." The project is listed under "Personality Studies" with Dr. David R. Saunders.³ Marks writes that the Society gave about $140,000 to Saunders, "who knew about the Agency's involvement."⁴

A CIA memorandum of June 9, 1961 on MKULTRA Subproject 134, a $22,000 body-typing study, states: "This work fits into our indirect assessment requirement and will contribute to the Wechsler-Bellevue work in which Dr." [redacted] "is engaging."⁵ A memorandum of August 24, 1961 on Subproject 137, a $2,000 graphology lexicon, states that the Technical Services Division "continues to approach the problem of handwriting identification and analysis in a number of ways" in support of its "general requirement to further the Agency's capability for the indirect assessment of personality."⁶

Marks writes that "At Gittinger's urging, other Human Ecology grantees gave the Wechsler battery to their experimental subjects and sent him the scores," and, of the Society's graphology work, that it "wound up funding handwriting research and a publication in West Germany" and sponsored a comparison of handwriting analyses with Wechsler scores of actors, psychotherapy patients, criminal psychopaths and fashion models, after which "Gittinger went on to hire a resident graphologist."⁴

At the August 3, 1977 hearing Gittinger testified: "The Agency in effect provided the money. They did not direct the projects," that "there are a lot of innocent people who received the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology money which I know for a fact they were never asked to do anything for the CIA," and, asked over what period this took place: "As far as I was concerned, it was the period of time ending in 1961. I believe the Human Ecology fund finally phased out in 1965, but I was not involved in this phasing out." He estimated the budget at "about $150,000 a year, but don't hold me to that."⁷ A February 1963 CIA memorandum on Subproject 137 refers to "The Fund."⁶

Operational Applications

The TSS assessment staff used the PAS to recommend recruitment strategies and exploitation methods for agents. They contributed to psychological profiles of world leaders, continuing the Office of Strategic Services tradition of analyzing figures like Hitler. The system helped identify "soft spots" for approaching targets. "I've heard John say there's always something that someone wants," a former colleague said. "And with the PAS you can find out what it is. It's not necessarily sex or booze. Sometimes it's status or recognition or security." Gittinger himself journeyed to the West Coast to test homosexuals, lesbians, and prostitutes under George White's auspices in the San Francisco safehouse. In 1966, Gittinger personally took part in selecting members of an anti-terrorist police unit in Uruguay.²

The 1963 CIA Inspector General's report described how the PAS fit into operations: "The prime objectives are control, exploitation, or neutralization. These objectives are innately anti-ethical rather than therapeutic in their intent." In other words, the PAS amounted to its own academic discipline, the psychology of spying, complete with axioms and reams of empirical data. "The business of the PAS, like that of the CIA, is control."²

Later Years

In 1973 Gittinger and associate John Winne published a description of the PAS in a professional journal. In 1974 his work was featured in Rolling Stone. Gittinger was disturbed by the disclosure, asking, "Are we tarred by a brush because we worked for the CIA? I'm proud of it." In August 1977 he testified publicly in Senate hearings, where he felt "humiliated" by Senator Kennedy's questioning about prostitutes and drug testing. He returned to Oklahoma with his 29,000 Wechsler records but had lost his ardor for working with them. He hoped others would accept the PAS as an important contribution to science, but given his lack of academic credentials, the CIA taint, and the preconceptions of the psychological community, his wish would probably not be fulfilled.²

Footnotes

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1. John D. Marks, The Search for the Manchurian Candidate, Chapter 1. ↩︎

2. John D. Marks, The Search for the Manchurian Candidate, Chapter 10. ↩︎

3. Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology, 1957 Annual Report (officers and staff; Review of Projects, "Educational Testing Service, Two Theories of Personality"). Wayback Machine capture of https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/21090820/1957-annual-report-society-human-ecology.pdf ↩︎

4. John D. Marks, The Search for the Manchurian Candidate (Times Books, 1979), chapter 10, pp. 168 (Saunders grant), 170 (Wechsler scores), 171 n. (graphology). ↩︎

5. MKULTRA Subproject 134, CIA release DOC_0000017393, memorandum of June 9, 1961. https://archive.org/details/DOC_0000017393 ↩︎

6. MKULTRA Subproject 137, CIA release DOC_0000017396, memorandum for the record of August 24, 1961 and accounting memorandum of February 1963. https://archive.org/details/DOC_0000017396 ↩︎

7. Project MKULTRA, the CIA's Program of Research in Behavioral Modification, Joint Hearing, Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and Subcommittee on Health and Scientific Research, 95th Congress, 1st Session, August 3, 1977, testimony of John Gittinger. ↩︎