9. Profiling the Operational Codes of
Political Leaders
Stephen G. Walker, Mark Schafer,
and Michael D. YoungOperational code analysis emerged as a leadership assessment tool
after World War II in response to the puzzle of Soviet negotiating
behavior and the escalation of U.S.-Soviet relations into a cold war.
The prototypical studies by Leites (1951, 1953) at the RAND Cor-
poration identified the operational code of the Soviet Politburo as the
beliefs about the exercise of political power in the Bolshevik ideol-
ogy, which reflected motivational biases in Lenin's character and
Russian political culture. He argued that these beliefs accounted for
Soviet negotiating strategy and tactics in dealing with the West at
the end of World War II over such issues as German reunification;
economic recovery in Europe; and a general peace settlement with
Germany, Italy, and Japan.
This chapter contains systematic procedures developed since the
RAND project for identifying a leader's operational code and infer-
ring likely patterns of leadership behavior. To employ operational
code analysis as a method of assessing leadership behavior, it is desir-
able to know something about its evolution and previous applica-
tions. It is also important to be aware of how the techniques for iden-
tifying beliefs and drawing inferences about behavior have
developed. These topics are discussed briefly before turning to the
task of forecasting behavior from operational code beliefs. First, there
is a summary of the evolution of operational code analysis and the
development of the Verbs in Context System (VICS) of content
analysis for retrieving and analyzing a leader's operational code
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