Audra Wolfe, writer and science historian/The Atlantic
By working for the CIA, a crack team of researchers honed the United States’ first formal peacetime campaign of propaganda and manipulation.
The phrase Cold War didn’t always refer to a time period. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, the very years that the battle lines between the United States and the Soviet Union were being drawn, U.S. foreign-policy strategists used the phrase to invoke a specific kind of conflict, one carried out by “means short of war.” If, as NSC-68, a key document of U.S. strategy, asserted in 1950, the United States and the Soviet Union were locked in an ideological clash of civilizations, a battle between “slavery” and “freedom,” a victory by force would be hollow. If the United States wanted to defeat communism, it needed to do so “by the strategy of cold war,” combining political, economic, and psychological techniques. “The cold war,” NSC-68 warned, “is in fact a real war in which the survival of the free world is at stake.”
This was a new kind of conflict requiring new kinds of weapons: psychological weapons. The question of psychological warfare preoccupied a small but influential group of foreign-policy officials during President Harry S. Truman’s second term. By the time that Truman left office in January 1953, the United States had laid the legal and institutional foundations for overt propaganda campaigns as well as covert action. During that period of experimentation leading up to the Eisenhower presidency, almost anything U.S. strategists could dream up, short of overthrowing foreign governments (that would come later), was up for discussion. Among other things, the Marshall Plan allotted $13 billion to rebuild Western Europe, Voice of America transmitted jazz and news to listeners in 46 languages in more than a hundred countries, and the CIA sent tens of thousands of balloons filled with anti-Communist pamphlets into China.Even as State Department, CIA, and Army officials spent countless hours working through the administrative challenges of launching a psychological-warfare program more or less from scratch, they spent remarkably little time discussing what kinds of messages might best promote the cause of “freedom.” Ideas about science rarely, if ever, explicitly appeared on lists of psychological-warfare objectives. Science entered U.S. psychological-warfare programs as a stowaway, tucked into the pockets of some of the private individuals to whom the State Department and the CIA turned to wage the United States’ battle against communism. More subtext than text, ideas about science subtly undergirded policy makers’ emerging plans for waging and winning this new kind of war.
Prior to the Cold War, the United States had never formally mounted psychological-warfare campaigns during peacetime. The country had, of course, engaged in practices that we might consider psychological warfare, using world’s fairs, missionaries, economic policies, and educational exchanges to promote U.S. values. But what changed in the years immediately following World War II was a sense that the United States was engaged in a prolonged battle of civilizations that could not be won through force alone. And, as was so typical throughout the Cold War, U.S. policy makers blamed the Soviet Union for forcing their hand.
On March 12, 1947, President Truman appeared before a joint session of Congress to request $400 million in economic and military aid to Turkey and Greece. In what came to be known as the Truman Doctrine, the president pledged to give such assistance as needed to help “free and independent nations to maintain their freedom” in the face of Communist threats. Three months later, the Marshall Plan was announced. Leaders in the United States didn’t consider the Marshall Plan an act of psychological warfare per se, but the Soviet Union’s leaders did and barred its satellite countries from participating.
This turned out to be the opening salvo in a high-stakes game of propaganda. In fall 1947, Communist Party officials revived the party’s prewar international propaganda network under a new name, the Communist Information Bureau, or Cominform. In mid-1948, the Soviet Union launched a campaign against the United States, targeted at audiences both within its own territories and in the world at large. In Moscow, the authorities celebrated writers, musicians, and scientists who promoted seemingly “Russian” values; abroad, the Cominform’s agents attacked U.S. aggression and promoted the Communist commitment to peace. Soviet authorities meanwhile cracked down on Soviet citizens’ ability to communicate with foreigners and foreign institutions. A dispatch from the U.S. ambassador to Moscow in January 1949 warned of the “near-impregnable barrier between Soviet citizens and foreigners in the U.S.S.R.” and specifically noted that the new restrictions eliminated exceptions for “scientific and educational institutions.”
Over the next year, the United States intensified its commitment to psychological warfare and, increasingly, did so publicly. On April 20, 1950, President Truman kicked off a national “Campaign of Truth” with an address before the American Society of Newspaper Editors. In a lunchtime address at the Statler Hotel in Washington, D.C., Truman implored the country’s leading editors to join the government in meeting “false propaganda with truth all around the globe.” “Everywhere that the propaganda of Communist totalitarianism is spread,” the president warned, “we must meet it and overcome it with honest information about freedom and democracy.”
Truman’s public speech coincided with a new statement of U.S. strategy issued behind closed doors. NSC-68, a top-secret document drafted by a committee chaired by Paul Nitze, the new head of the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff, confirmed the U.S. view of the conflict with the Soviet Union as total and ideological. It is not hyperbole to refer to the 66-page document as “apocalyptic,” as historians so frequently do, because the document responded directly to a potentially world-ending threat: the Soviet Union’s explosion of an atomic weapon in August 1949.
This new, explicit focus on psychological warfare, combined with the outbreak of the Korean War in June, had an immediate effect on both overt and covert propaganda programs. Truman requested nearly $90 million from Congress to step up the State Department’s information campaigns; Congress agreed to two-thirds of this, $63.9 million, in September 1950. On the covert side, the CIA’s Office of Policy Coordination (OPC), the agency’s covert-operations wing, immediately submitted budget estimates to dramatically expand the OPC’s operations through 1957. The CIA also asked for something more difficult to supply than money: expertise. As matters currently stood, the OPC lacked “a significant body of knowledge, personnel reserves, techniques, and philosophy of operations” regarding psychological warfare. For this, the architects of U.S. psychological-warfare strategy turned to the
scientific community.