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Win with Red Teaming: A Case Study in Strategic Empathy from Inside the CIA, with Amaryllis Fox, Former CIA Clandestine Operative
Red Teaming is really interesting because it’s exercising compassion and empathy for pragmatic, strategic gain. And those are two ideas that sometimes seem like an either/or. I can either be a compassionate, empathetic, kind person, or I can go after the pragmatic win. But I don’t get to do both. And the truth is that you are actually far better equipped to go after the pragmatic, strategic win when you know how to exercise empathy and climb into the perspective of another person–particularly your adversary.
Offer unorthodox analysis
In the context of national security and the agency, Red Teaming really grew out of the Cold War and the idea that in such an entrenched ideological conflict, it’s very difficult to set aside the conventional wisdom of everyone who’s around you–of your nation state, of your group–and ask yourself what you would be feeling, and therefore what your next move would be, if you were the adversary. And it is very difficult to actually make strategic predictions if you don’t understand the spirit and the emotions and the experience as a human being that your adversary is going through. So the Red Team was set up during the Cold War to channel the Soviet leadership, and we’re really talking about almost method acting. I mean this is the sort of Daniel Day-Lewis approach to national security. And in this scenario officers would fully channel the Soviet leadership – Soviet stationary, Soviet-style decorations in the bunker, and truly get inside the mind. And yes, they were looking for what the leadership would be planning to do the following week. They were also sharing reports everyday about how they were feeling, how their ego was feeling. Was President Reagan’s speech today a challenge to their pride as a man? Were they feeling irritable? Were they feeling impatient? Were they feeling proud? Hopeful? And those journal entries that came out of the Red Cell helped President Reagan know when to push on the Berlin Wall, when to propose certain changes to nuclear treaties that were being proposed. And so given its success, when we were a decade later faced with another existential threat in the post-9/11 ramp up in the War on Terrorism, the Red Cell was again looked to by Director George Tenet of the CIA. He reactivated the Red Cell and challenged this team to get inside the minds of our adversaries and to offer very unorthodox analysis to the US policy-making community based on how they thought the terrorist target–these individual human beings–were actually feeling and experiencing the war from their perspective, holed up in Peshawar or Tora Bora or wherever each of these targets was experiencing the War on Terror in a very different way from most of the policymakers in Washington, DC.
Abandon who you are
When you start out on a Red Cell, the most important instruction to remember, and the hardest, is to let go of any personal association you feel to your point of view. We as humans, an almost infinite number of times a day, attach our own sense of self-worth to a particular opinion or point of view or perspective that we express – out loud, sometimes even in our own head. Just to have had the thought on some level attaches our own validity to the validity of that thought. And the problem with that is that we experience new data points all day long, and certainly when channeling the experience of someone else you’re faced with a completely new perspective on a problem. And it’s very difficult to internalize that and take that data on board and see how your opinion changes as a result of it, if in changing your opinion you’re actually invalidating yourself or your self-worth in some subconscious way. And I think this is one of the great challenges of life as a human being, is this idea that it’s impossible for us to have every piece of information about even one thing, let alone all of the different opinions that we’re asked to express over the course of a day or a lifetime.
And so when you sit down day one in a Red Cell, you are asking of yourself the ability to set aside everything you hold dear in terms of your upbringing, your life experiences, the stories your parents told you when you were a kid. All of the fears and hopes that are built into us in such visceral ways during our childhood and the course of our life. To leave those things behind is, in a sense, to abandon who you are, or at least the life experiences that have brought you to this moment. And that’s really what you need to do, is to kind of fully climb out of all of those clothes and be able to climb into the experience of another person. And that takes humility, and it takes curiosity, and it’s infinitely rewarding.