Psychoanalytical intelligence -- the mother lode for today's spies

During World War II, Allied and neutral intelligence services compiled extensive psychological dossiers of Hitler, Mussolini, and Japanese Prime Minister Hideki Tojo and Emperor Hirohito I. Psychoanalysts and political psychologists were employed by such intelligence services as Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), America’s Office of Strategic Services (OSS), and France’s Deuxième Bureau (until 1940), the Free French Bureau Central de Renseignements et d’Action (BCRA) (from 1940 to 1944), and Service de Documentation Extérieure et de Contre-Espionage (SDECE). These agencies sought to understand fascist leadership, mass obedience, and authoritarian personality structures. These same analytical disciplines are now being employed by intelligence agencies around the world to predict and respond to the increasingly erratic and unhinged Trump.

During World War II, the OSS, relying on the works of Otto Fenichel, Georg Simmel, and Rudolph Loewenstein, analyzed fascist leaders as embodiments of projection, paranoia, scapegoating, and ego-regression. The OSS also produced famous wartime psychological profiles of Hitler and Mussolini.

Britain’s MI6 built upon the research of British scholars and analysts to produce reports on fascist leaders as examples of nationalized instincts and mass psychological contagion. One academic work that was used by Allied intelligence was Etienne de Greet’s and Earl Langwell’s examination of how Mussolini and Hitler appealed to inferior minds, triggering sudden loyalty and group identity shifts (Psychology of the Totalitarian Movement, 1939).

French psychoanalysts in exile contributed to “political Freudian” literature, analyzing fascist aggression, antisemitism, and authoritarian fantasy structures.

Dutch and Belgian scholars (e.g., de Greet) analyzed Mussolini and Hitler as archetypal authoritarian personalities, explaining how totalitarian movements exploited instinctual drives.

Swiss psychoanalysts (influenced by Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung) examined fascism as a collective neurosis focusing on mass psychology rather than individual diagnoses. Swedish academics published sociological analyses of fascist mass movements, though they tended to avoid identifying Mussolini and Hitler by name.

Japanese leaders like Tojo and Hirohito were psychoanalyzed mostly through cultural anthropology.

Eighty-seven years later, former U.S. allies like Britain and France and wartime foes, including Germany, Italy, and Japan, are conducting psychoanalytical analyses on America’s president. What would have been unthinkable in 1939 is now reality.

PSYINT collectors today are not limited to crude codebreaking and human intelligence to gather psychological and related medical intelligence, known as MEDINT, on targeted political leaders. Trump’s reported use of one or more unsecured commercial smart phones very likely provide to friendly and hostile intelligence services a wealth of PSYINT on his psychological state and his numerous manic episodes.

Thanks to state-of-the-art surveillance technology developed by the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) and Israel’s Mossad and Unit 8200, Trump’s psychiatric profile, medications, treatment, and other details are a mere few keystrokes away from the world’s intelligence agencies. NSA’s XKeyscore and systems like it can ascertain the mental states of Trump and his mercurial and unhinged officials, ranging from White House aides Stephen Miller and Karoline Leavitt to Secretary of Defense/War Pete Hegseth, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, and Secretary of State/National Security Adviser Marco Rubio.

XKeyscore and related systems can be used by U.S.-allied intelligence agencies to query previously-collected global signals intelligence (SIGINT) data, while Israel’s PEGASUS, marketed by NSO Group and sold to scores of foreign intelligence and law enforcement agencies, can be used to cull data from smart phones. XKeyscore and similar systems search vast SIGINT datasets for such selectors as email, phone numbers, cookies, VPN (virtual private network) identifiers, digital fingerprints, IP addresses, and browsing habits. In addition to Trump. this search capability can be extended to his doctors, specialists, family members, and closest advisers.

For the world’s intelligence agencies, Trump has met and exceeded the trip wire of what is termed the “Dark Tetrad” of what constitutes a dangerous psychopath on the level of Hitler, Idi Amin, Pol Pot, and Kim Jong Un. Dark Tetrad traits are narcissism, paranoia, Machiavellianism, and sadism and Trump. These traits have always been demonstrated by Trump, but with age and the onset of dementia they have become dangerously more acute. It is now guaranteed that a majority of world leaders are receiving daily classified briefings from their intelligence agencies on how Trump is making decisions based on his stress, humiliation, or external threats.

In addition to SIGINT, foreign intelligence agencies closely monitor Trump’s gait changes, speech patterns, medication use, hospital visits, fatigue indicators, and cognitive slips in public appearances.

Overall intelligence assessments from spy agencies around the world conclude that Trump’s mental state is so dire that any military, economic, or political decision, no matter how extreme, should be anticipated from Washington. On the table for consideration are a U.S. military invasion of Greenland, Canada, Cuba, Panama, or other countries; deployment of U.S. troops in support of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine; sabotage of the International Court of Justice in The Hague; unilateral U.S. withdrawal from the United Nations and expulsion of its headquarters from New York; and withdrawal from NATO.

PSYINT has also provided other governments with an insight into the interpersonal dynamics at play within the White House. Trump’s frequent temper tantrums with his Cabinet and advisers are known to be on the scale of Hitler’s tirades in his Chancellery bunker as the Third Reich neared collapse in April 1945.

MI6’s dossier on Trump’s mental state details his frontotemporal dementia that casts serious doubts on Trump’s fitness to rule. The Canadian Security and Intelligence Service (CSIS) is well-aware that Trump’s insistence that he has repeatedly “aced” the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA) on dementia (Trump wrongly believes that MoCA is an IQ test) is far worse than the mild cognitive impairment that can be determined by the test created in 1996 in Montreal. Trump’s lack of mental fitness is the message CSIS has delivered to Prime Minister Mark Carney. The Indian Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) has also determined that Trump’s cognitive abilities have sharply declined, a development that has been exploited by the nationalist regime of Prime Minister Narendra Modi to fill a vacuum left by the United States in the Indian Ocean region. Modi felt that he has a green light to extend India’s geopolitical influence in the region, particularly after Trump referred to the “Islamic Republic of Japan” and called Zelensky “Putin” at the NATO summit in Ankara.

Middle Eastern intelligence agencies consistently report on Trump’s cognitive decline and erratic behavior in dealing with Iran, the Strait of Hormuz, Oman, Iraq, and Lebanon. Mossad is delighted with Trump’s dementia since it allows the Netanyahu regime to act undeterred by Washington throughout the Middle East and beyond.

Russian and Chinese have weaponized Trump’s mental decline. The topic is deployed when useful, dropped when Trump serves their interests.

Trump’s unwavering trust of Vladimir Putin, along with intelligence collected over decades from SIGINT and HUMINT sources, has many intelligence agencies convinced that Russia and the USSR before it carried out an intelligence coup in not only curating a high-level intelligence asset in Trump but by inserting him into Republican presidential politics followed by two terms as president. This was not only documented in the Steele Dossier compiled by former MI6 Soviet and Russia expert Christopher Steele -- and instantly reviled by Trump and his circle – but by other Western intelligence agencies. They concluded that Moscow cultivated Trump as a useful asset over decades. West German (and later German), Czech, Polish, French, Italian, Dutch, Canadian, Ukrainian, Portuguese, Vatican, Finnish, Swiss, European Union, and other intelligence agencies produced classified intelligence summaries about kompromat-seeking and targeted cultivation that framed Trump as unusually susceptible to Russian influence.

The German Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND) has determined that Trump has “difficulty maintaining a coherent line of thought.” Chancellor Friedrich Merz is afraid that Trump could trigger a world war. Spain’s Centro Superior de Información de la Defensa (CESID) believes that Trump is plagued by logorrhea, a psychiatric condition marked by excessive, rapid, and often incoherent speech. The condition also features phonemic paraphasias and a profound loss of narrative coherence. The French Direction générale de la Sécurité extérieure (DGSE) is in general agreement with the CESID conclusion.

Many countries have decided that their insight into Trump’s diminished and dangerous mental state requires a coordinated resistance that includes everything from a military response to a U.S. invasion of Greenland to punishing economic and diplomatic sanctions in the event of a U.S. withdrawal from the UN, G7, or NATO. The Trump administration’s recognition of Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara and the Spanish exclaves of Ceuta, Melilla, and small Spanish islands off the Moroccan coast has signaled to the EU that given Trump’s previous threats against Greenland, Denmark, and Spain, as well as high tariffs against the EU and a global recession caused by the U.S.-Israeli military attack on Iran, the United States is a strategic enemy of Europe that is led by a certifiable madman with access to civilization-ending nuclear weapons.

As far as foreign intelligence agencies using their influence to push for invocation of the 25^th Amendment, all of them – allied, neutral, and adversary – have determined that subject should remain confined to U.S. domestic discourse. Spy shops around the world have adopted a wait and see stance.