Bad Men Do What Good Men Dream: A Forensic Psychiatrist Illuminates the Darker Side of Human Behavior

by Robert I. Simon

  “Man is born unto trouble as the sparks fly upward,” Job laments, yet, remarkably, there are very many “good” people in this world, able to rise above the destructive impulses that we all possess.

  It is the human condition to have dark demons and to struggle against them. When we acknowledge the dark side of our humanity, when we locate the possibility of evil within ourselves, when we attempt to tame our demons by channeling them into fantasies, dreams, and creative achievements, we are doing what humanity as a whole has done in taming fire—even though, inevitably, sparks will still fly and will be infinitely dangerous. By striving to harness our demons, we express the undaunted aspect of the human spirit, the urge to pursue and fulfill our destiny as individual human beings.

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  Psychopaths

  The Predators Among Us

  They are absolutely the world’s best manipulators, liars, and fabricators of truth. They do so convincingly because they believe their own lies. After all, their life is nothing but a lie, a sham, how can we possibly assume they know anything different.

  —Hervey Cleckley, M.D.

  When FBI supervisor Robert Philip Hanssen was arrested in February 2001 and charged with selling government secrets to the U.S.S.R. and then to Russia over a 15-year period, for $1.4 million in cash and diamonds, his espionage was termed “possibly the worst intelligence disaster in U.S. history.” The son of a Chicago police officer, Hanssen was reported to have been emotionally abused in childhood. He has said that he decided to betray his country at age 14. He studied dentistry and Russian and received an M.B.A. degree, but then went to work in the Chicago police department as an internal affairs investigator. Joining the FBI at the age of 35, he rose quickly to supervisor in the counterintelligence bureau in Washington, D.C. He began spying for the Soviets in the mid-1980s, compromising U.S. agents and double agents. His espionage was attributed, in part, to his belief that his FB I colleagues did not appreciate his brilliance and refused to accept him as a peer and friend. Hanssen refused to be considered for a higher position in the FBI because he would have been required to

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  take a lie detector test, which he suspected he would fail. A convert to Catholicism, he attended mass almost daily, was a member of the secretive Opus Dei sect, and seemed devoted to his wife and six children. At one point, his wife confronted him and demanded he confess his crime to a priest; the priest directed him to hand over to charity, as penance, some of the money he had received for his espionage.

  Insight into Hanssen’s complex psychological makeup and his reasons for the espionage has been limited by his imprisonment and a gag order forbidding him to speak to the public. However, the personalities and early lives of a previous group of very damaging spies, the Walker family, are better known.

  For 17 years, John Anthony Walker, Jr., used his position and knowledge as a career Navy Chief Warrant Officer to gain access to top-secret naval communications involving U.S. nuclear submarines. He sold these critical military secrets to the Soviet Union. To assist him, he recruited his son, his brother, and his best friend, Jerry Whitworth, all of whom were also in the Navy. He also tried to enlist his daughter’s help when she was in the Army, but she refused. It has been alleged that he strapped a money belt on his unsuspecting mother to bring spy payments back from Europe. The Walker spy ring jeopardized the lives of all Americans and, possibly, everyone in the free world. It inflicted enormous damage to the military security of the United States, with economic costs estimated in the high millions, if not billions of dollars. John A. Walker received about $1 million from the Soviet Union for his treachery. Of that amount, he paid his son only $1,000.

  In my opinion, John A. Walker, Jr., displayed many of the antisocial behaviors typically found among psychopaths. Because I have not examined Walker personally, I cannot make a diagnosis of antisocial personality disorder. But there is plenty of detailed information about Walker’s childhood and family in Pete Earley’s book Family of Spies, from which the following account is drawn.1 John Anthony Walker, Jr., was born on July 28, 1937, the second of three sons. “Jack” became his mother’s favorite. A special bond between them grew stronger over the years. His father was severely alcoholic, a man who held and lost a succession of jobs. The family was often impoverished. The parents fought constantly. During the father’s drunken states, he often beat the mother and sometimes abused the Walker children.

  1 From Pete Earley, Family of Spies. Copyright ©1988 by Pete Earley. Used by permission of Bantam Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc.

  By approximately age 10, Jack had conceived an intense hatred toward his father and determined to kill him. His plan was to thrust a cast-iron rollaway bed down the stairs as his drunken father was staggering up them. If the resulting fall did not kill his father, Jack planned to finish him off with a baseball bat. The plan went awry when the father returned to the house as expected, but passed out before he could get up the stairs. Jack fell asleep while waiting for him to continue his climb. The antisocial side of Walker’s personality became more evident as he moved through adolescence. A childhood best friend recalled that “what you see on the surface with Jack is not what you get. Trust me. I knew him like a brother, better than anyone else. Jack is cunning, intelligent, clever, personable, and intrinsically evil.”

  As an adolescent, Jack and his friends stole eggs and used them to pelt streetcars. They rolled used tires down hills at cars that passed below. They threw rocks through the windows of the local Catholic church. They stole coins from church sanctuaries where parishioners left contributions in small receptacles for the poor. At school functions, they stole money from coats and purses. Jack crafted a pair of brass knuckles and precipitated a fistfight to try them out. He and his friends set fires. The boys borrowed a rifle one evening to shoot at cans and beer bottles. Jack became bored with these targets and sat on a ledge to shoot at the headlights of cars on a highway below. After Walker and his friends were arrested for a series of burglaries, Walker, as a teenage high school dropout, joined the Navy to escape punishment. In the service, he rose rapidly through the ranks because he was intelligent and easily able to pass the various promotion exams.

  During his 21-year naval career, Jack Walker had many sexual experiences with prostitutes. He seemed to be drawn to “bleak harbor hotels, lurid bars, and crude hookers.” One of Walker’s Navy bosses told Earley: “The problems with John Walker involved moral turpitude. The guy just didn’t have any moral standards, as far as I was concerned. He constantly bragged about women, and if a woman looked at him twice, why, he’d be unzipping his britches.” A business colleague of Walker described him, years later, as a person who enjoyed involving himself in intrigues.

  Walker married, but the marriage was troubled. His wife, Barbara, discovered that he was having many affairs. She described him as moody, continually oscillating from pleasantness to anger and violence. She alleged that Walker intimidated her physically and abused her. When he fell into debt because of failed business ventures, he tried to force her into prostitution to earn money.

  Barbara Walker began to suspect her husband’s espionage activities in 1967. She found incriminating evidence that he had recklessly left in a tin box in a desk drawer, a box that contained the couple’s bonds and other personal items. She found maps, photographs of “dead drops” (locations for secret exchange of information), and even a letter from his KGB contact. Although she warned him that she would report his spying, he did nothing to stop her. Barbara Walker remained silent about it for some time. She later explained that she had always protected her husband to safeguard her children. At some point, all of his children, and a son-in-law, supposedly knew about the espionage as well. He allegedly tried to persuade his daughter to have an abortion when her pregnancy threatened to interfere with his spying. During a custody suit that erupted between his daughter and son-in-law, the son-in-law allegedly threatened to expose the espionage if he lost custody of
the child. One of Jack’s childhood friends tried to articulate the power Jack had over family and friends: “It was almost hypnotic…I can’t explain it, but he was my Svengali. There was just something intriguing about him that drew me to him. He had a certain manipulative power.”

  Walker loved the fast life; in bars and ports around the world, he enjoyed calling out, “Bartender! I’ll have a shot of the scotch that’s named after me—Johnny Walker.” He was flamboyant. He portrayed himself as a fervent patriot, expressed conservative views, and kept a color photo of then President Ronald Reagan on his wall. He made extravagant boasts about his high-ranking military connections, claiming once that he had keys to the War Room.

  In June of 1976, after 19 years of marriage, Barbara Walker divorced her husband and moved to Maine to be as far away from him as possible. Shortly thereafter, Walker retired from the Navy. During his service career he had received two Navy commendation medals, a good conduct medal, the Vietnam Service medal, and the National Defense Service medal.

  After retiring, Walker became a private detective and carried such weapons as a cane with a knife concealed within it. Walker was able to purchase office space for his three private detective agencies as well as a houseboat, a camper, two cars, and a single-engine plane that he loved to fly. In a safe deposit box, Walker kept ten 100-ounce silver bars. He told one of his detective employees that the key to his method of operation was to tempt people by playing on their greed. The employee reported that Walker himself “felt basically greedy” and believed that you could get to anyone “through their greed.” When his KGB case officer informed Walker that he had been awarded the rank of admiral in the Soviet Navy for his outstanding contributions to world peace through espionage, Walker replied, “Tell them thanks a lot.” His reason for spying was to obtain money and what it could buy.

  Walker seemed not to be worried that family members knew about the spying. He felt impervious to discovery. In fact, the spy ring itself was a clumsy and bumbling operation, yet it escaped detection for almost two decades. Barbara Walker had warned her husband that she would expose him, but she hoped that he would heed her warning and flee the country. He did not. She finally turned him in during the fall of 1984 when she told the FBI about his espionage. On May 19, 1985, he was tailed by the FB I to a lonely road in a Maryland suburb of Washington. There, Walker made a drop of secret documents intended for his KGB handler and was finally arrested.

  After his arrest, Walker seemed unconcerned for his future, stating with open bravado, “I’m a celebrity.” He knew what he had to sell, even though the coin this time was different. He agreed to tell the government everything about his espionage activities and to testify against his best friend, Jerry Whitworth, in exchange for a plea bargain for himself and his son. The fourth ring member, his brother Arthur, had already pleaded guilty, been fined $250,000, and been sentenced to three life terms. Whitworth was fined $410,000 and sentenced to 365 years in prison. In exchange for his cooperation, Jack Walker received one life term, as did his son. Michael Walker was released on parole in 2000 at age 37. Jack Walker’s expected release date is 2015, when he will be 77 years old.

  Psychopaths who commit espionage often betray their country for money, sex, and the thrill of illicit behavior such as conning others, even an entire nation. They are in stark contrast to persons who commit espionage for strongly held beliefs and principles—in other words, those who are ideologues.

  People who commit antisocial acts are not necessarily psychopaths. The widely held public notion that the psychopaths among us are crazed killers is also wrong. Psychopaths are people who have severe antisocial impulses. They act on them without regard for the inevitable and devastating consequences these actions may bring to themselves and others. Many psychopaths are not criminals, but they are the predators among us, chronic parasites and exploiters of the people around them. Psychopaths use psychological cues and push emotional buttons to manipulate the vulnerable for their own purposes. They are unable to put themselves in other people’s shoes, any more than a snake can feel empathy for its prey.

  By Their Acts Ye Shall Know Them

  Everyone has antisocial impulses. The vast majority of individuals who take personality tests that measure one’s degree of psychopathy do not score zero. Psychiatrically healthy people score within a certain numerical range well above zero but do not rise to the level of a psychopathic personality. In other words, normally functioning people possess some antisocial traits.

  Who has not had the wish to take something that belongs to another, or to take harmful advantage of someone for one’s own benefit? Good men and women have such impulses but curb them. Bad men and women act them out. The mayhem and personal suffering that psychopaths inflict on society is enormous. Then too, over the course of their lives, psychopaths demand a disproportionate amount of time and financial expenditure, particularly from health care professionals. When they are children, psychopaths are usually delinquent and difficult to manage. As they get older, their predatory behavior usually costs individuals and society both suffering and money. If they become criminal, the costs of incarcerating them are high. So, too, are the costs to society for caring for their deserted and traumatized families.

  Not all criminals are psychopaths; in fact, many are not. And not all psychopaths are criminals; in fact, again, many are not. Psychopaths exist at all levels of society, in all walks of life. No profession, however noble, is spared its cadre of them. We know them, if we know them at all, by their acts.

  Originally, the term psychopath was used in psychiatry to refer to all personality disorders. Later, as we came to understand the spectrum of personality disorders, the definition narrowed. In 1941, in his classic book The Mask of Sanity, Dr. Hervey Cleckley gave the psychopathic personality a clinical definition. He described the psychopath as having the traits of guiltlessness, superficial charm, egocentricity (extreme self-centeredness), incapacity for love, an absence of shame or remorse, a lack of psychological insight, and an inability to learn from past experience. Antisocial personality disorder, the current official term for psychopathy, was the first personality disorder to be officially recognized within psychiatry and to be included in the earliest version of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, known to all mental health practitioners as DSM.

  DSM-II, published in 1968, changed the term psychopath to sociopath, and more clearly refined it:

  This term is reserved for individuals who are basically unsocialized and whose behavior pattern brings them repeatedly into conflict with society. They are incapable of significant loyalty to individuals, groups or social values. They are grossly selfish, callous, irresponsible, impulsive and unable to feel guilt or to learn from experience and punishment. Frustration tolerance is low. They tend to blame others or offer plausible rationalizations for their behavior. A mere history of repeated legal or social offenses is not sufficient to justify this diagnosis.

  The current version, published in 1994 with text revisions in 2000 (DSM-IV-TR), emphasizes antisocial behavior, more than personality traits and their motivation, in the definition of antisocial personality disorder. The diagnostic criteria for the antisocial personality rely heavily on the research of Dr. Eli Robbins, work that has demonstrated that this disorder is stable and continuous, lasting from childhood through adulthood. This latest version of DSM stresses predisposing childhood factors, such as attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder and conduct disorder. It also emphasizes criminal behavior over the essential narcissistic features of the disorder. Although the latest DSM also lumps together all delinquents, it does give consideration to the social, economic, and cultural determinants of their delinquency.

  Laypersons and some professionals use the term psychopath to pejoratively label people who engage in antisocial activities, or simply people that they plainly dislike. Dr. Cleckley’s original research demonstrated long ago that the antisocial behavior of common crim
inals and the antisocial behavior of psychopaths are different. Criminals often have standards that they will not go beyond, or families to whom they will never be disloyal. Although it may seem contradictory, some nonpsychopathic criminals have principles and a conscience. An example of this distinction can be made in the case of a career criminal who is surprised in the middle of a robbery and kills two officers to escape capture and imprisonment; he views killing or being killed, which he regrets, as an unavoidable occupational hazard both for himself and the police. The criminal psychopath who kills does so casually, or even for no apparent reason. He feels absolutely no remorse, nor does he give the killing a second thought beyond maneuvering to avoid the consequences.

  Psychopaths can be passive or aggressive. Passive psychopaths tend to be parasitic and exploitative of others, whereas aggressive psychopaths commit major crimes. Passive psychopaths (referred to as passive-parasitic, exploitative, or predatory) have frequent scrapes with the law but usually manage to squirm out of serious trouble and punishment. Passive psychopaths commit mostly white-collar crimes. The more aggressive ones, particularly the sexually sadistic, may commit serial sexual murders. Their need for constant stimulation through sexual arousal appears to be a motivating factor in their crimes.

  For the most part, however, the average, everyday psychopath among us (and within us) appears to the outside world as a model of normality. As Cleckley wrote,

  There is nothing odd or queer about him, and in every respect he tends to embody the concept of a well-adjusted, happy person…. He looks like the real thing…. More than the average person, he is likely to seem free from minor distortions, peculiarities, and awkwardness so common even among the successful…. Everything about him is likely to suggest desirable and superior human qualities, a robust mental health.