"In the Room with Peter Bergen" transcript: Episode 39

Episode 39: Being a Spy Can Be Pretty Stressful. The CIA is Trying to Help.

The job comes with all sorts of risks and responsibilities plus exposure to a lot of violence and trauma—whether that’s out in a war zone or in the office, where analysts may work on cases involving horrific human rights abuses. All of that can take its toll. CIA Director William Burns has acknowledged the agency needs to do more to “take care” of its officers. You’ll hear how stressful and crushing intelligence can be from former intelligence officers who did it and from the CIA’s top psychologist and the CIA’s new wellbeing chief, about what can be done about it.

Please note: Our show is produced for the ear and made to be heard. Transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and may contain errors. Please check the audio before quoting in print.

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Peter Bergen: So, Doug, Is the CIA a stressful place to work at?

Doug London: [LONDON LAUGHS] Yes. The CIA is a stressful place to work at; just consider the responsibilities intelligence officers working there bear. Their job is to keep the country safe.

Before he retired in 2019, Doug London spent 34 years at the Central Intelligence Agency, often working undercover. A big part of his job was recruiting foreign agents, getting people to agree to betray their own countries or organizations by providing intelligence that would benefit the U.S.

Doug London:You're collecting souls. But you can't collect souls without giving up a piece of your own. And that, that doesn't go away, and that kind of adds up over time, so that's absolutely a stress.

Those missions to collect souls took him all over the world, where he was often far away from friends and family.

At one point, he served as the Chief of Station in a South Asian city that at the time was considered one of the most dangerous in the world. He moved around constantly, frequently changing apartments so al-Qaeda wouldn't discover him.

Doug London: Our official facilities were regularly targeted. We had several car bomb attempts and car bomb attacks, several shootings. And that was apart from the constant threat when you were on the street by yourself trying to live underneath the surface where you're being a foreigner, particularly an American, and especially being a CIA officer, wasn't known and you were out there meeting your agents, cultivating new ones, and operating very much on your own wits.

Peter Bergen: Doug, I know you, so you're delivering this all in a very even tone, but like, you know, for most people, going to work and having your workplace attacked by car bombs, people shooting at you, and al-Qaeda kind of owning the turf around you, that surely must have been pretty stressful.

Doug London: Well, it’s disconcerting. We all knew what we had signed up for. It was considered the most hazardous place you could work for the CIA. And despite all that, people normalize their environments, and I find that you have to.

And that kind of normalization can actually be a problem. Because the kind of job Doug did, exposes a person to a lot of violence and trauma—whether that's out in the field, in a war zone, or in the office where CIA analysts work on cases involving horrific human rights abuses and often end up watching hours of extremely graphic violence, things like suicide bombings and beheadings. It’s a job where you might witness some of the worst things about humanity. A job that requires you to collect and help protect America’s secrets while often keeping that secret from the people you're closest to.

Doug London: I lived under official covers, which means I was somebody with the U.S. government, and sometimes I was maybe somebody else, and I still had to raise a family, and I still had kids, and they still had to explain where dad might be or might not be in any given particular moment, it's curiously abnormal, but becomes completely normal.

When you walk into the lobby of CIA headquarters, you notice there are 140 stars lining the walls. Those stars represent everyone who's died on the job. But just because people know the kinds of risks that can come with the job, that doesn't mean experiencing this level of trauma doesn't sometimes have consequences.

Some studies have shown that prolonged exposure to this kind of violence can lead to anxiety, PTSD, depression, and even suicide.And these are the people the U.S. relies on to help protect us from all types of threats.

[THEME MUSIC BEGINS]

I've been covering the intelligence community for three decades. And during that time, I've met my share of CIA officers and analysts, but until fairly recently, mental health wasn’t something anyone was really talking about.

Coming up we’re going to talk about it because having a healthy intelligence community is a matter of national security. You’ll hear how stressful and crushing intelligence work can be from people who’ve actually done it, and you’ll hear what the CIA is doing to help its employees deal with that stress.

I'm Peter Bergen. This is In the Room.

[THEME MUSIC SURGES, THEN FADES]

The very first Americans who arrived in Afghanistan after the 9/11 attacks weren’t U.S. soldiers. They were CIA officers. President George W. Bush ordered the CIA to launch operations to collect intelligence to help shape the battle against al-Qaeda. Intelligence gathering and military operations became intertwined in a new way. And as part of the global war on terror, CIA employees were deployed all over the world.

Doug London: Afghanistan, in Iraq, later in Syria and Libya, across South Asia.

Doug London was one of them.

Doug London:We were deployed in massive numbers around the world in very stressful, dangerous places after 9/11. And everybody was doing their time. Not just case officers or paramilitary officers, but I mean anyone. Communications officers, administrative assistants, logistics people who are assigned in these locations. And facing very much the same dangers.

Back then, Doug says there weren't a lot of resources dedicated to helping people deal with any sort of mental health issue. There were psychologists at the CIA but…

Doug London: They were there to help us with our cases, you know, to assess, monitor, evaluate, and support our operations, as opposed to our, our mental welfare.

And at that time, Doug says people worried about coming forward about how the stress of the job might be affecting them because they were concerned it could hurt their career.

Doug London: Because people were a little reticent to admit there was anything to be concerned about, the organization in kind was a little bit slow to aggressively reach out to see, uh, do we have issues we need to contend with. So I think they were slow until we found more and more people suffering. And there were consequences including at least one officer I knew personally who took her own life, who we should have seen, [LONDON SIGHS] we should’ve seen the tea leaves. And here was an officer in a conflict zone who was issued a weapon and would ultimately use her own weapon, service weapon, to take her own life. She should have never been in that situation.

[MUSIC SHIFTS]

And it wasn't just people out in the battlefield who were affected by the intelligence work involved in the global war on terror. People going into the office also dealt with the effects of exposure to violence and trauma.

Janaki Kates began working for the CIA shortly after 9/11, right out of college.

Janaki Kates: In the spring of 2002, I got a phone call in my dorm room from a manager from the CIA and we still have no idea how he got my information.

She'd been studying aerospace engineering.

Janaki Kates: I had heard a little bit about the CIA, I did some research. Analysis sounded really interesting. I thought, well, you know, I'll give it a shot.

And she ended up staying for 17 years, until 2020, when she left to become a national security consultant.

Janaki Kates: I just loved the work. I loved the people I worked with, the analysts that I worked with were some of the most brilliant minds that I've ever met. I worked on such interesting issues that varied across national security. And I really enjoyed having the impact of being able to inform our nation's policymakers.

And because she was working as an analyst in the office, not out in the field, there were no bombs going off nearby. So she really didn’t think about how stressful her job could be—especially having the kinds of responsibilities she had, which at one point involved briefing the White House, where decisions were being made that could put people’s lives at risk.

Janaki Kates: When I started, it was the global war on terrorism. Our friends were going out to Iraq and Afghanistan right into the middle of war zones. We were still afraid of what threats were coming to the homeland. I grew up in Sri Lanka, which is a country that has been war-torn for many decades. So that threat of war and terrorism was not new to me. I was only 22, but I was thrown into this environment and you kind of had to sink or swim.

Her job at the CIA was fast-paced. Sometimes there were so many things moving so quickly that she didn’t really think about the toll it might be taking on her. And also because the CIA, frankly, is a place that often draws a certain kind of person to the job. People that are high performers. People who don't complain, who tend to want to tough it out. People who are willing to make a sacrifice, including personal ones. But after the birth of her son, her second child, Janaki started noticing something about herself.

Janaki Kates: He had turned one and I kept thinking, I'm still crying all the time I keep having these irrational fears that he would die. And it was such a strange dichotomy because I would have these really, really strong emotions, but in my head, I would say, “Well, that's ridiculous.” But I couldn't quite control it. And then I remember, like, right after his first birthday, I had a panic attack, like a full-on panic attack, because I couldn't find my three-year-old's soccer shin guards.

And there were other physical symptoms. She was getting hives and developed a really itchy rash on her elbow.

Janaki Kates: I remember talking to my doctor and, um, you know, I was having an issue with this rash. And he said, I think it's psychological. And I was like, what are you talking about psychological?

And so she just pushed through.

Janaki Kates:I kept thinking to myself, well, I'm not the one who's in the line of fire. You know, what do I have to complain about? I'm sitting in this very nice office overlooking some beautiful trees. I'm not constantly afraid of IEDs or worried about how I'm going to get home tonight. But the way that I was handling my stress was not conducive to my mental health.

But she was very hesitant to admit she needed help or to seek it out.

Janaki Kates: The job that I was in, I was dealing with human rights violations and dealing with images and reports of destruction, and people were starving and dying. You are trained at the Agency to deal with stress. Everybody with national security has to deal with stressful situations. And I just kept working and working and working, thinking the harder that I work, the more impact I can have. And so if I kept focusing on that one part and then I came home and I just focused on getting my kids fed into bed, I didn't have to think about my emotions.

And there were other reasons. For one, she says there weren't a lot of women of color at the CIA, and there were even fewer women of color in any sort of senior position.

Janaki Kates: And, I didn't want anything else that was going to make me different, you know, I already walked into a room and I could always feel the eyes on me. Oh, you're different.

[MUSIC SHIFTS]

And then there was the stigma that came with admitting that you might be struggling.

Janaki Kates: It felt like a weakness. It felt like these are everyday things that you are flipping out over. If you're flipping out over that, how can we trust you with national security issues? How can we trust that you're making sound analytic judgments that you're providing to our policymakers?

Doug London: We're a spy service, right? And we take pride in, you know, pounding our chest and saying, “Oh, we're here to take risks.” And, and all that stuff. And that's true. But that comes with some unfortunate baggage. That comes with a reluctance to admit vulnerability. Case officers like myself, we're supposed to be predators. We're supposed to be hunting on the weaknesses of others that we can manipulate to try to identify and recruit agents, people that we could use to, to penetrate the institutions of our adversaries to find out what's going on.

Doug London: So, the idea that we are vulnerable to whatever it might be. It's, it's a bit of a tough pill to swallow, it's tough to admit.

And it wasn’t just the stigma, this fear of appearing weak that Janaki and Doug both describe. Until fairly recently, they say a lot of people working at the CIA weren’t even aware they had mental health issues or that they needed to pay attention to the signs that anything might be wrong. Doug says he never had any issues with stress or anxiety when he was out in the field. It's what would happen when he came home and had some downtime:

Doug London: As I look back years later, I manifested it more when I was home on breaks. You'd get to come home for a couple of weeks and see your family and decompress. And I was, among other things, driving like a complete fool. It was really excessive, sort of a bit of road rage, and, and I was really quick to, like, explode at any, any little thing, just very short-fused. And I didn't think about it. I just didn't, like, focus on it. I wasn't trying to be a martyr or, like, “Oh, I'm so tough.” I didn't realize it was happening until much later on.

Like this one time when his team had a really close call, but luckily the car bomb that was supposed to kill them, didn't blow up. But back when it happened, Doug didn't acknowledge how exposure to this kind of thing could have affected him.

Doug London: You know, I brought them together. I remember we, we bought Chinese food, you know, comfort food. You know, just kind of sat around and, and talked, but I never really thought of it for myself. That's part of maybe my generation and the Agency in which I grew up in. I just didn't recognize that these were symptoms, that I was exhibiting symptoms of what, you know, somebody may call PTSD.

And Doug thinks the CIA could have been much more proactive and done a much better job educating its staff about how to recognize the signs that they might need to get help.

Doug London: Lots of people are coming home from really difficult, stressful assignments. Not just in the war zones. I mean, if you're in Moscow, the pressure of living that life, or Beijing, I mean, that's super stressful. And not just on you, but on your entire family. And I think the Agency could have done more to communicate with the workforce and go, “Okay, you know, these are things you should be looking out for. And if you find, you know, you've got a shorter temper, or you're more irritable or your kids are complaining that you're this or you're that, you may want to talk to somebody about it.” The Agency was slow in, in doing that until we found more and more people suffering.

Peter Bergen: When you were working at the Agency, and you saw a colleague struggling, um, what did you personally do? How did you react to that?

Doug London: Uh, so my answer, I don't know if it's going to be satisfying. When we see an anomaly, our first concern is, uh oh, counterintelligence, there's something wrong. You know, every year, and I still take it because I do some consulting for the U.S. government still, I have to take, you know, insider threat training and, and, you know, CI training and all that. And basically, it's telling you, if you see somebody going through problems, report it. Because, you know, it could be a counterintelligence problem. And I'm not saying that's wrong, but there has to be sort of a balanced approach to, “Okay, what's going on here, and is this somebody struggling who needs help?”

Peter Bergen:Well, that is a fascinating point. Which I had not considered, which is, okay, a colleague is exhibiting unusual behaviors. It's an anomaly. In a normal workplace, um, let's posit CIA is not a typical workplace, In a regular workplace, you'd say, “Oh, this, Person X is behaving weirdly for some reason or another,” you probably put it down to, okay, maybe it's a family problem, the stresses of the job. But in a CIA context, your first instinct might be, well, is somebody being recruited or is somebody being, is somebody susceptible to being recruited, and therefore should be reported in that context?

Doug London: Yeah, I never said it was normal or healthy. That's for absolutely sure, but that's, that's your gut instinct, because we hold secrets. Um, anyone who works in the CIA has secrets. In any job, people who are in the CIA have secrets that could kill people. So, our rivals, who don't shy away from coercive approaches, who aren't afraid, in fact, prefer blackmail because it gives them a sense of greater control. The Russians do it. The Chinese do it. The Iranians do it.

Doug London: So that's why we go through polygraphs every three to five years, and we have security investigations. Do we have vulnerabilities that could be manipulated? And if somebody's going through a difficult divorce, if somebody's in debt, if somebody has a substance abuse problem, if somebody's depressed, clinically speaking, that could present a vulnerability that a hostile service could manipulate. So, yeah, it's generally the default to go, ‘you know, something's wrong here, Is there a danger, you know, work-wise, operationally?’ And ideally, at the same time, it's, “Oh, how can we help Sam or Jane?” As opposed to, “Oh, we better keep an eye on Sam or Jane.”

[MUSIC SURGES BRIEFLY]

This could seem like a pretty tough problem to overcome for an organization that is built around secrecy. But the CIA is making changes. CIA Director William Burns has recognized that well-being matters. And has publicly acknowledged that the CIA needs to do more.

ARCHIVAL William Burns: A few weeks ago, I was briefed by a very impressive officer who was on his very first overseas assignment. He had just completed a successful operation in temperatures that got as low as 35 degrees below zero. Apparently, this was a new record for CIA's coldest operation. The story speaks to the lengths to which CIA officers will go when you put a mission in front of them. What we owe to them, what I owe to them, are the resources and support they need to take care of themselves and their families. That's why we aim to double the number of medical practitioners overseas and combat the stigma attached to making use of mental health resources.

And this priority has gone all the way to the top. President Joe Biden has said this is a question of national security.

ARCHIVAL Joe Biden:Your work can be incredibly demanding. For the last 20 years, we've asked you to keep a relentless pace serving in the face of physical dangers, daunting challenges. So let me just close by saying your health, your physical health, and well-being are critically important to me and to your leadership here at the CIA.

CIA Director Burns has made a lot of changes at the Agency. Things like adding additional mental health resources for officers and their families and making those resources easy to access no matter where someone might be working. The CIA has also increased education around mental health, with specific efforts focused on suicide prevention and PTSD. As part of its holistic approach to wellness, the CIA is offering more childcare subsidies, and identifying more flexible work options.

And Director Burns has created an entirely new leadership position at the CIA.

Jennifer Posa: I thought it was a tremendous opportunity and one that would allow me to actually support my country in the work that I do.

About a year and a half ago, the CIA hired Dr. Jennifer Posa.

Jennifer Posa:I am the Chief Wellbeing Officer at the CIA.

When Dr. Posa was first recruited by the CIA for this brand-new role, she didn't think it was real.

Jennifer Posa: I actually thought someone was playing a bit of a prank on me.

She picked up a phone call from a number she didn't recognize. The person on the phone said they were interested in talking to her about a job at the CIA and promised to send a follow-up email.

Jennifer Posa: That evening with my kids, of course, was asking, how was your day? They asked me how my day was, and I said, “Oh, you want to hear something funny? I got a call from the CIA.” And they said, “Really? And I said, yeah, but I think it's a joke.”

Peter Bergen:Were your family surprised that you took the job? What did they make of your decision?

Jennifer Posa: My father, he, he actually passed a year ago, but he was incredibly patriotic and someone who instilled in us, all of the values of what it means to be an American and the privileges that we have. And then my daughter who is now 15, who was 13 at the time and said, ‘Well, mom, you have to do this. It's the CIA.’ [BOTH LAUGH]

Peter Bergen: I'm familiar with, uh, CFOs and COOs. Is Chief Well-Being Officer, CWO, is that kind of pretty common now in a lot of corporations?

Jennifer Posa: I don't think it is. I think we're actually pretty advanced to have this position.

Peter Bergen: And CIA Director Burns has made this a priority because why?

Jennifer Posa: Director Burns really does see that our people are the key, and the special kind of ingredient behind us achieving mission. If I am not at my best each day, I will not perform at my highest level. This is a hard, hard world we're living in.

Peter Bergen: Yeah. And then of course, the United States has enormous technical, intelligence assets, which are not people, things like satellites and other things. But at the end of the day, if you're going to really find out what may be happening inside Hamas or the Kremlin or whatever, it's likely to be a person who finds out information, not just technical intelligence.

Jennifer Posa: I would ask you, Peter, too, when you think back on the teams that you've worked on in your professional career,

Peter Bergen: Yeah.

Jennifer Posa: If I asked you what was the characteristic or why there was success with a project you were on, you would likely go back to the team,

Peter Bergen: Yeah.

Jennifer Posa: That was part of it. It wasn't just the task. It was the team. It was the people.

Peter Bergen: But I think also a very clear sense of mission. I mean, I work at CNN. It's a great place to be when, when there's a big event. I mean, people know exactly what to do and they're very supportive of each other, and there's very little debate about, “Well, what are we supposed to be doing today?” [PETER LAUGHS]

Jennifer Posa: And if that wasn't clear, you would feel uncertain you wouldn't be sure what your role was. So it's that clarity of mission combined with I'm coming and being my absolute best today. That is that winning combination of being able to do this work. And I think we have to make sure that that sense of purpose and mission is supported by an equal sense of self-awareness and support of one another and prioritization of our wellbeing. The individuals that choose to work at CIA and our officers are human beings first. They have families at home, they have lives at home, they just do unique work.

Within the CIA, Dr. Posa is helping to make some big changes in the way that people who work there think about mental health and managing the stress and anxieties that come with the unique demands of this sort of job.

Jennifer Posa: It's incredibly important for us to help people understand the importance of recovery and having the ability to manage their days based on what the demands of their job are. So for us, what we do from a well-being perspective is we have a number of trainings and education opportunities so that we could help them understand, kind of the science of recovery and the science of resilience.

Peter Bergen: Recovery sounds like a term of art. What does that mean?

Jennifer Posa: You can think about your body and your mind from a physical, emotional, mental health perspective as a car, and you fill-up the car with gas. But that gas tank is only so large. So if you go for an extended period of time, you will start to run out of gas energy and you have to refuel. Your body is very much the same. Your mind is the same. Your body and your mind are not systems… that can just go on forever and ever and ever at 150 percent effort. You have to do what I call is the oscillation approach to manage your life and your days and your hours. Regardless of the role that you play at the Agency, it is absolutely imperative to safeguard your health and well-being where you yourself are learning those self-awareness strategies to say if I start to feel that my heart rate is going up, if I start to feel anxious or impatient, I might need to take a break and actually recover or build something else into my schedule to enable me to recover in a way that is effective.

She makes sure to explain the science behind these strategies she’s teaching because it can be hard to convince people at the CIA to take a break.

Jennifer Posa: High performers, especially our analysts, appreciate that level of detail and scientific backing. You're bringing the science to ensure people don't assume that you're just kind of making something up, or suggesting something soft because high performers don't actually want to rest, right? They want to keep on going and going and going.

Peter Bergen: And so you're teaching your officers and analysts to use this technique. I mean, I'll give you an example where obviously, you know, so 9/11 happened. You have an emergency, you have to deal with it. When you talk to your employees about this, do they recognize that you use this term oscillation that, you know, they're going to be more effective even in an emergency if they take a night off once every week or whatever it is?

Jennifer Posa: So I would answer that in two ways.

Peter Bergen: Yeah.

Jennifer Posa: First is to be prepared and ready, you need to be practicing these things before the crisis happens. That's really important. So we're teaching a lot of these things way ahead so that we are ready. And then the second piece of it is when you're a high-performing organization like we are, you are setting yourselves up so that when an unexpected crisis comes you have high adaptability to the situation where you say, “Hmm, we might need to surge here to ensure that Peter doesn't have to do 24/7s for seven days in a row.” You come in with the backup and make sure that you reinforced with additional support.

[MUSIC SHIFTS]

And another piece of that wellness includes a brand new 40,000-square-foot gym called Langley Field House. It took more than two decades for the CIA to finally get a modern gym. It’s all-accessible to accommodate staff who might have gotten injured on the job. There are all kinds of wellness classes, things like yoga.

But at the CIA, which Dr. Posa says is a pretty competitive place, there’s another class that is very popular: “extreme hip hop.”

[HIP HOP MUSIC]

Jennifer Posa: A few weeks ago, I went to the Field House. And I wanted to try a new class and there was a choice at the time that I went of a yoga class or an extreme hip hop class. And I said, you know. I'm going to go to the extreme hip-hop and see what that's like.

[MUSIC SURGES]

Jennifer Posa: And Peter, I was probably the worst student in the class, no doubt.

[MUSIC SURGES]

Jennifer Posa:But, it's the sense of community that I felt when I was there because I was a new person in the class; they stopped the class three or four times

[MUSIC PAUSES, THEN RESUMES]

Jennifer Posa: to make sure that I understood the steps that I felt comfortable.

[MUSIC SURGES]

Jennifer Posa: I'm not sure you get that experience outside in a public gym, but you do get that at the Agency because everyone who's involved in the activity is just like you. We're all there for the same purpose. And that brings a sense of community that is incredibly important for the humanness of who we are. And quite frankly, our souls.

[HIP HOP MUSIC FADES]

And Doug London, who spent more than three decades at the CIA and still consults for the U.S. intelligence community is watching all these new initiatives—and he really hopes that all these new things are actually leading to REAL change.

Doug London: I hope with all the resources they’ve invested, the new office for wellness, the new wellness officer, I mean, there's a lot of people whose job revolves around the wellness of the workforce. So, that itself has to be a great start. I just want to make sure it's, it's, it's more action and, and less metrics and appearances.

Peter Bergen: You mentioned this female CIA colleague who took her own life with a firearm that she'd been issued. Was there a kind of inflection point where the CIA said, you know, “Look, we've got a problem here with people being very stressed out, potentially committing suicide if their problems are unaddressed?” Was there a particular moment in time, or was this sort of a gradual realization?

Doug London: Well, I'm trying to frame this question in the most fair way. The CIA is a U.S. government agency. It's a bureaucratic institution. And like many bureaucratic institutions within our government very often their reaction to something is due to, Uh oh, we got a problem. There's going to be lawsuits, there's going to be bad press. So, I think in this particular officer's case, there was a reaction, obviously. Unfortunately, one of the things the CIA doesn't do particularly well, and I think it's its nature as a secret organization, is it doesn't do accountability exceptionally well.

Doug London: Now, I say that with acknowledgment that I think there is less of that in the past few years. But it is sort of embedded in the agency's DNA. They don't like public criticism and I get the counterintelligence perspective that you don't want to do anything to empower your enemies, but we have an obligation to our workforce to own our mistakes so that we can correct them.

Dr. Posa works closely with Dr. Victoria Hoiles. She’s a clinical psychologist and the director of the Center for Global Health Services at the CIA. That’s the name of the office that oversees all the mental health and well-being efforts at the CIA Dr. Hoiles joined the agency nearly 24 years ago.

Victoria Hoiles: The mission is to protect national security and as a clinical psychologist, it represented a really unique way to practice and to apply my expertise.

She’s someone who knows the CIA’s history and how it's handled mental health. So we asked her to respond to some of the things Doug and Janaki said they’d experienced.

Dr. Hoiles says while some psychologists join the CIA to help with operations, the majority of psychologists who work at the CIA have always been dedicated to taking care of the people who work there. And she was quick to point out that the CIA has offered free, confidential counseling for decades.

Victoria Hoiles:As we were in war zones longer, and we had more of our officers serving in those types of environments, we certainly became focused on providing support to officers, kind of at all cycles of deployment. There are resources they can tap into before they go when they're out there. And then when they're coming back.

And these days they have psychologists who are embedded with teams across the Agency.

Victoria Hoiles: And I think having psychologists who are part of the team, it helps people feel more comfortable approaching them.

Dr. Hoiles says her team works hard to get the message out that coming forward and seeking help isn’t just ok, it’s encouraged.

Victoria Hoiles: The trends within CIA are similar to the outside community. but then certainly we have a unique mission and we ask our officers and their family members to do hard things.

What matters isn’t a person’s diagnosis. It’s whether they’ve sought treatment and have their condition under control. And that includes concerns about counterintelligence.

Victoria Hoiles:Thinking about it from a counterintelligence perspective is something that we do talk with officers about. We do understand that if there's a condition that affects somebody's judgment or affects somebody's reliability, that can be a counterintelligence risk. And so our goal is to intervene kind of early and often to mitigate the risk of an untreated, uh, mental health issue.

Sometimes, Dr. Hoiles says, no matter how good someone might be at their job, people still get hurt or even die on their watch. And that can affect someone’s mental health.

Victoria Hoiles: When an asset’s cover is blown or someone being detained or killed, and certainly I think you know, as leaving Afghanistan and we worked, you know, really closely with some of our partners there. Our psychologists, our psychiatrists are knowledgeable about this area and how to help folks and how to support people who have had these experiences.

One of those 140 stars that line the walls of the CIA lobby that I mentioned earlier honors the officer who died by suicide in 2013. When that star went up, it generated some controversy because the wall is dedicated to people whose death is of an “inspirational or heroic character.” Dr. Hoiles said she couldn’t comment on any specific case due to privacy concerns. But the agency takes suicide prevention very seriously.

Victoria Hoiles: Our hearts go out to any family who faces the aftermath of a loved one dying by suicide. Nobody should have to suffer alone. And it's exactly what our mental health providers are there for, and why we will go anywhere in the world to support our colleagues. I think folks understand maybe more than they did decades ago, um, that, um, the importance of wellbeing, the importance of kind of paying attention to someone's whole person, and that includes their family as well.

[MUSIC SHIFTS]

Janaki Kates did eventually reach out for help.

Janaki Kates: I knew that the agency had therapists, psychologists on staff to help our employees and their families. I was a little afraid of going myself, but I finally just took that jump and so I went and met with a psychologist within the agency first, which was kind of a safe environment. He had a clearance. I could talk to him about what was going on at home, going on at work. And then he was able to refer me to an outside doctor who… I had to be a bit more careful about what I said. But really at that point, what I was talking about was my interactions with people or the stresses that I was feeling. And it didn't have to do with the specifics of the national security issues I was working on at the time.

And she's hoping that more and more people at the CIA will seek help the way that she did.

Janaki Kates:We had a psychologist on staff in that particular office because of the stressful work that we were doing. I was concerned at how few people were going in to see him, even though he was sitting there, right there in our spaces. I know Director Burns named a chief wellness officer, which I think is a huge step. She was named after I left, but with friends that I've spoken to that are still in, you know, they see a remarkable change, and people are given time off during the day to go work out and take care of themselves. They've doubled how many people can receive childcare; that was a huge thing. If we want to have a strong workforce, we have to take care of the people that make up that workforce. And I think that message is starting to permeate.

It’s why she’s come out so publicly about her own experience. Because she wants people to know that talking about her mental health struggles didn’t wreck her career.

Janaki Kates: I went through it. I got the help. People now know that I got the help, and I still had a flourishing career, and still I'm doing amazing things. I wanted to get out there and say, you know what, you can ask for help, it's going to be okay. You know, I don't think that some of the women that came before me felt like they had the support or ability to do that. And, I, I think the Agency is changing. I think that we are going in a more positive direction, and I wanted to be part of that change.

I asked Dr. Posa whether there had ever been a stigma in the past about having a mental health issue at the CIA and whether that’s become a nonissue today.

Jennifer Posa: I would never say it's a nonissue. I think we continue globally to have stigma around mental health. I do think it's generational as well., I had a conversation about a month ago with an officer, and I was delighted to hear him say, You know, I, I would love and welcome having an opportunity to talk with, my therapist once a month. [PETER LAUGHS] You would never hear that from my generation when we started in our 20s working in the field. So that delights me um, when I hear those comments. but I do definitely feel as though there's still concern, you know, about my medical clearance, you know, is that going to be a concern? But, you know, the way that,

Peter Bergen: Meaning, meaning what?

Jennifer Posa: Well, would it impact my ability to, you know, do the work that I want to do if I had any type of, um, mental health condition?

Peter Bergen: Because it might affect your clearance.

Jennifer Posa: Sure. Yeah.

Peter Bergen: Yeah.

Jennifer Posa: And I think there is, you know, in all honesty, still discussions around that. But I will tell you that we have done a tremendous job educating and making sure people understand that openly reaching out for support, if support is needed, is actually a sign of reliability, of being incredibly smart and self-aware. And seeking support is a good thing.

Janaki Kates agrees—taking care of the mental health of the CIA isn't just about doing what’s right for the people who work there.

And it isn’t a sign of weakness or being soft. It’s quite the opposite.

Ultimately it will make the United States safer.

Janaki Kates: You need to have a workforce that reflects the people that we're representing, and we need to have diverse perspectives, and we need a strong workforce of sound mind that can provide analysis to our nation's policymakers. We are dealing with misinformation, divergent information, all the time, and we need people who trust their own instincts to be able to make some of these calls. I think it's a hundred percent an issue of national security.

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If you want to know more about the issues we covered in this episode, we recommend The Recruiter, by Douglas London. It’s available on Audible.

CREDITS:

IN THE ROOM WITH PETER BERGEN is an Audible Original.

Produced by Audible Studios and FRESH PRODUCE MEDIA

This episode was produced by Alexandra Salomon with help from Luke Cregan.

Special thanks to Cate Cahan.

Our executive producer is Alison Craiglow.

Katie McMurran is our technical director.

Our staff also includes Erik German, Laura Tillman, Holly DeMuth, Sandy Melara, and JP Swenson.

Our theme music is by Joel Pickard