CHAPTER 14
The "Cold War" and Seven Small Wars

The period after 1945 has turned out to be considerably more turbulent than most Americans expected. Though the victory over Fascism and Japanese militarism has proved to be psychologically and historically complete, the struggles between the victors have developed such mistrust and bitterness as to create a present-day equivalent of the Thirty Years' War, rather than a period of peace as it was understood by educated men of the nineteenth century.

Along with many other military and political phenomena, psychological warfare has been thrust into a period of "no war and no peace" which has proved to be extraordinarily difficult for Western men to deal with either emotionally or intellectually.45 Such phrases as Churchill's term, "the Iron Curtain," and Walter Lippmann's coinage, "the Cold War," have become a part of civilized speech throughout the world. They have obscured almost as much as they have explained. It is entirely conceivable that an adequate description of the present historical period will only be written after the forces now operating have ceased to be significant; at that future time it may be possible for serious and reflective men to determine what happened in the middle of the twentieth century.

An event such as the liberation of Indochina from Japanese military occupation in 1945, met competently and reasonably by the standards of an anticipated "world of 1946," which unfortunately never materialized, led to the frustrations, bloodshed, deceit, and warfare of the late 1940s, and by 1954 became partially intelligible as a facet of the free world's struggle against Communism.

What such polemics overlook is the terrifying probability that events may happen so rapidly that no one on either the Communist or anti-Communist side is capable of assimilating a new datum, such as the development of the hydrogen bomb, the death of Stalin, or the appearance of Israel among the nations, until well after the event has occurred. The occurrence of public events in all past civilizations has involved a considerable number of public agreements on the major hypotheses concerned; as pointed out earlier in this book, the antagonists in older wars usually, though not always, knew what the war was about. Today the spiritual, psychological, logical, and scientific inconsistencies and paradoxes within each system are so deep as to make the definition of long-range goals almost impossible. Any one goal, such as the establishment of peace, the appreciation of an international system of alliances against aggression, the maintenance of national sovereignty, the protection of a free-enterprise economy, the assurance of self-determination to non-self-governing peoples, or the like, may, if emphasized, contradict the concomitant goals which support it.

In the next chapter, concerning strategic information operations of the United States Government in the foreign field, there will be further discussion of the psychological strengths of the free world; we will say at this point that in the light of the strategic and military contexts of the postwar period the free world has had the advantages of modesty, relaxation, and elasticity. Among Americans, even among intelligent Americans, it is frequent to find the assumption being made that the chief strength of the free world consists of its legal rights and its democratic political processes, rather than in its actual (not merely formal) toleration of many points of view and its actual relaxation of the populations under its control.

Since the free world is not committed to victory as much as is the Communist world, it can afford more defeats without a corresponding loss of morale. Since the free world has not promised a Utopian future, it can go from the reality of the 1950s to whatever realities the 1960s or the 1970s may bring without a sharp letdown in morale or widespread heartbreak among its most gifted advocates. In Cold War terms the free world is committed to fighting, but not to victory, while the Communists are committed to the actual though remote promise of triumph for their system throughout the world. The citizens of the United States can therefore contemplate the survival of the USSR or its annihilation and replacement by a democratic Russia with equanimity; their Soviet opposite numbers, group for group and class for class, cannot be as detached from the struggle.

Over all of us there hangs the entirely uncertain future raised by possible use of atomic bombs, hydrogen bombs, and other novel weapons—a future about which former Governor Adlai Stevenson felt so gloomy that he said another war would end civilization. (The rejoinder can, of course, be made that if another war would end civilization anyhow, win, lose, or draw, the United States might as well disband its defense forces now and enjoy life for the few short years that remain.)

It can even be argued that Yalta, and everything for which Yalta stands, was a tragic mistake and yet a blessed one. If the Western powers had not attempted to deal amicably with the Soviet Union at Yalta the Western peoples, already hypersensitized in matters of conscience, might have attributed to themselves and to their posterity an unbearable burden of guilt. We and our children might have gone down fighting while wondering in our innermost hearts, "Why didn't we make a real try to avoid war with Soviet Russia?"

Though the Teheran and Yalta agreements have been violated by the USSR almost from the moment they were concluded, it can be argued that the Western world was wise in experimenting with appeasement because it liberated our consciences for future struggle. No one can possibly argue that we did not try to get along with the Communist system, that we failed to offer the Communists a reasonable share in the world of power politics, or that we threatened the Communists with aggression during the course of our anti-fascist struggle. For better or for worse, we did try to get along with them. We have failed.

Why have we failed?

The failure seems to be much more on the side of the Communists than on the side of the free nations. Though it is possible for Left-liberals or hypercritical intellectuals to find fault with the U.S. and British position in this respect or that, short of extreme nit-picking it must be argued that the Communists jumped the gun on the Western powers in almost every case. Tito, while still in agreement with Moscow, proved implacable toward the constitutional Yugoslav government and the Church as they had existed before 1941. While Roosevelt was still living the Lublin Poles prepared a savage double-cross of the London Poles. Whether Communist action arose from a lamentable fear of our own aggressiveness, or a Machiavellian plan to conquer the world does not, at any time, matter very much; what matters is the almost indisputable fact that in many parts of the world the Communists undertook the initiative against the anti-Communists.

(The first edition of this book, Psychological Warfare, was written in 1946 and published in 1948; the second edition is being completed eight years later, in 1954. Any reader who contrasts the two editions will see at a glance that the author, although suspicious of Communism, had no real anticipation of the fury or seriousness of the Communist attack upon the non-Communist world, nor of the strategic arguments and responsibilities which the free world would therewith be forced to accept.)

A curious division of responsibilities not anticipated by the Creel Committee of World War I or the OWI of World War II arose in the Washington of the Cold War period. While the military establishments were given jurisdiction over propaganda activities connected with actual combat, other propaganda activities were kept largely in civilian hands, though simultaneously the direction of civilian policy at its very highest level became para-military through the influence of the National Security Council.

In other words, most of the national foreign-policy decisions at the highest level have been dictated in recent years by strategic considerations. They have been National Security Council decisions, not Cabinet-type decisions of the kind which might have been made in the years of William McKinley or Warren G. Harding. Yet, even though the decisions have been strategic in type, the propaganda implementation of these decisions has fallen for the greater part on the State Department and on the economic aid program facilities, not on the military. The military have been pretty strictly confined to those aspects of propaganda which directly pertain to combat areas. By 1953 U.S. leaders had begun to understand the situation with which they had been dealing since 1947 and in light of that necessarily belated but correct appreciation of their own position, the William Jackson Committee began to recommend that propaganda policy be written not as something self-contained, but be considered an integral part of every other U.S. Government decision possessing world situation or news impact.

If it is true that the United States is engaged in a major struggle, if it is further true that this struggle has no visible end, if this struggle threatens all of us and our children as well with lifetimes of tension and violent deaths under ultra-destructive weapons, one may quite reasonably ask the question, Which is the better reaction for the bulk of the American population: normality, emotional health, mild irresponsibility, and the stockpiling of nervous and physical strength for a time of trial which may lie far ahead; or, alternatively, tension now, worry now, responsibility now, fatigue now, all the way through from the uncertain present across the bitter and perilous future to the months of near-Armageddon which may lie fifteen, twenty, or thirty years ahead?

Sadly and seriously, with no attempt at cleverness or mockery, a staff officer could argue today that the American people should leave their worries to their leaders so as to be strong when the time of trouble comes. In the field of civil defense, for instance, it is grotesque to spend billions on offense and little on the saving of American lives. On second glance, this may not be so grotesque after all. The technological advance of fissionable and thermonuclear weapons is so rapid, the development of guided missiles and other carrying instruments so swift and so unpredictable, that a 1955 model civil-defense system might become a fool's paradise by 1960. If this be true, it is better to live as well as we can to maintain the profession of arms at an adequate level, to hope (quite irrationally) for the best, and to let the dead of the future bury their dead as best they may.47

The alternatives to victory and defeat are forms of survival of the competitors. The entire health of each competing civilization matters. It is obvious enough to Americans that we must remain prosperous, free, constitutional, democratic. It goes without saying that we must, as far as our individual fortunes permit us, retain our belief in God and derive from religious beliefs those spiritual strengths not available to the Communists. What is not often raised is the equally important factor of the conquest of probability.

Wars are much more often won by people who are sure they are going to win than by people who know that they would like to win, but who think at the same time that they will probably be defeated. The over-confidence of a Cortez or a Mao Tse-tung may seem insane to many of us. With the passion for security so prevalent in individual and national lives, both the Western powers and the individuals comprising them grotesquely exaggerate the margin of safety which they need in which to survive.

Part of this springs from the fact that much of our civilization is not forward-looking, that neither young Americans nor old Americans have a clear-cut or hopeful picture of what the world should be, will be, and must be, by A.D. 2055. On the Communist side it is frequent, but not universal, to discover that the best Communist cadres are made up of men who are dead sure that Communism will win, who are equally sure that Communism does not have to be right in order to win, and who are sure that "objectively and scientifically" (whatever that may mean), the Communist system is almost certainly destined to succeed. If Communism cannot get out of succeeding, the responsibility of the individual Communist becomes bearable; he is still seriously and tragically responsible for the expediting or the delaying of the inevitable, but he does not take the mantle of God or Karl Marx and state that this is the world as he wishes it to be and that the world of his desires will come into existence if, and only if, he fulfills his personal responsibilities to the utmost.

In Asia, perhaps more than in Europe, there are many persons who are turning toward Communism, not because they think it is good or just, or even because it is powerful, but simply because it is likely. Every individual in his own life has known that he cannot undo the passage of time, the aging of his body, the death of his loved ones, the loss of opportunities which might have been seized, or even his own death; in their individual lives men of all nations perform the feat, characteristic of the human being and apparently shared by no other species of life, of living from day to day in a constant reconciliation of the past and present with their own estimate of the probable future. At times in history, that which should happen seems to be unleashed like spiritual lightning and men rally in frenzy around causes which for the year or the decade seem inspiring, terrifyingly beautiful, and within human reach; through most of history, that which is apt to occur provides a more sober guide to the future and men prepare to live in accordance with its standards.

In the battle of the probabilities the PsyWar of the Western powers has been weak, high-pitched, and uncertain, while the insistence of the Communist themes has been as monotonous and hypnotic as a jungle drum. For better or for worse, the Communists have broken a path through to what they think to be the future; we of other nations have not.

The chief element of anti-Communist victory—practical, sober expectation of a certain and final downfall of the Soviet system—has thus far been lacking on the anti-Communist side.

The Communists, on the contrary, have unreasonably, provocatively, and untruthfully raved, screamed, shrieked, and lied to bring about that better world which, curiously enough, their most effective cadres considered to be an inevitable world. Thus the UN prisoners held by the Communists during the Korean war were subjected to a constant bombardment of Communist propaganda concerning their personal responsibilities before history and the opportunities which they would have to serve peace and mankind, as these noble concepts are set forth on the Red side.

It does no good for an American propaganda radio to pledge battle to the death while the U.S. press services amiably discuss an accommodation with the Communists. Comparably, an official propaganda plan to make the people of France feel that the Americans love and admire them is not very realistic if, in terms of column-inches of French press material, unofficial American utterances are related to France to the effect that the French are washed up, their cause in Indochina hopeless, their economy unviable, and their political goals foolish. The years 1950-54, during which the Korea struggle took place and in which NATO and the European Defense Community (EDC) came to prominence, often showed a proclivity on the part of U.S. official propagandists to go far beyond that which their home public would support. Need it be said that the effects on foreign public opinion were possibly deflationary?

An imaginable end to the Cold War may lie in neither victory nor defeat, in neither accommodation nor reconciliation, but in the development of more, newer, and different quarrels. Hostility of Protestant and Catholic faded out in Europe when the hostility of French, Germans, Spaniards, and other nationalities came to be more important. It is a problem for the psychiatrist and sociologist to answer if they can. Is it possible that semantics of war-causing quarrels can be superseded by anything other than different quarrels? A tension-free civilization is imaginable; given the characteristics of most present-day cultures it is scarcely more than merely imaginable.48

If within the limits of practical possibility one were to list the hypothetical requirements for an end of the Cold War, the following might stand forth:

• (1) General war leading to destruction of either the Communist or non-Communist systems; or
• (2) Prolongation of the present Cold War atmosphere until new and more interesting quarrels arise which make the present ones obsolete; or
• (3) Reconciliation of the Communist and anti-Communist systems, by some process not now imaginable, along the general lines of Franklin D. Roosevelt's "Grand Design;" or
• (4) Collapse of all major civilizations under impact of fissionable and thermonuclear weapons; or
• (5) Gradual erosion of the anti-Communist world and an eventual Communist victory by sustained Communist successes short of war—or the alternative of gradual erosion of the Communist world and the creation of a constitutionalist and libertarian probability of victory, also without the outbreak of general war.

It would be a brave and foolish man who would say which of these the world should expect, but it would be a stupid staff officer who did not anticipate at least one of them and who did not as a military officer or government official do his best to bring about "victory" in a form which his side could define, recognize, welcome, and achieve.49

The most important of these wars were the five in Korea, Indochina, the Philippines, Malaya, and Indonesia. The Israeli struggle appears pretty well settled as a fighting war and the India-Pakistan issue appears not to be one which will lead to general war between those two countries. The predominant group of wars shows variations of the same components in different quantities.

Each was a reaction to the fall of Japan's short-lived East Asia military empire. Each involved partial or complete resistance to economic affiliation with the capitalist world. Each had an ingredient, though these differed in stress and direction, of local Asian nationalism. Except for Indonesia, each eventually became a part of the world-wide front between Communism and anti-Communism. These wars deserve consideration one at a time for their PsyWar content.

For instance, one of the major factors in the defeat of the Nationalists consisted of the withdrawal of the Japanese managers and technicians from China as well as of those Japanese troops who had been maintaining a degree of law and order in Manchuria and North China. This withdrawal was not only sought by such "progressives" in the State Department as John Stewart Service and Alger Hiss; it was also enthusiastically endorsed by conservatives such as General Wedemeyer, who shipped the Japanese out and General MacArthur, who received them. No American, right-wing or left-wing, seriously proposed replacing the Japanese with United States or United Nations personnel until the Nationalists had enough trainees to manage a modern, capitalist China. By withdrawing the Japanese the Nationalists and the Allies destroyed the political and economic system under which the Nationalists proposed to operate and were then astonished when the Nationalists met defeat.

In the China policy situation the contribution of Communist covert propaganda within the United States in preventing aid to Chiang in the crucial years of 1947, 1948 and 1949 should not be overlooked; neither should it be overestimated nor considered the sole determinant of events which took place within China.50

In this situation RamÓn Magsaysay, as Secretary of Defense, developed some of the most provocative and audacious anti-guerrilla operations of the postwar period. To meet the Communist claim that the struggle was one of the landless against the rich, he offered all surrendered Huks resettlement in a new land project; he visited the project himself frequently enough to make sure it remained a valuable demonstration area. To allow the common people to help the Government, without their suffering from Communist reprisals against themselves or their families, he disseminated secret methods whereby the people could communicate with the Government forces. He established a psychological warfare office under Major JosÉ Crisol. This office was doing as good a job of tactical PsyWar with leaflets, mimeographs, loudspeakers, light planes, and other field and headquarters equipment as any army installation which the author has seen. Most of the doctrine and procedures for the operation of the office were American, but the content of the materials was Filipino. Catholicism, Filipino patriotism, Malayan nativism and peasant common sense were some of the factors used to underscore the Philippine Army's appeals. In the following three years the Huks shrank seriously although the danger could not be said to have been eliminated altogether.

It ill becomes an American to criticize the French for their policy in Indochina since it was by virtue of a U.S. strategic decision and a U.S. logistical action that Indochina was turned first from Japanese hands into the hands of the British in the south and the Chinese Nationalists in the north. The British did not care much about the local situation. The particular Chinese Nationalists in northern Indochina were mildly sympathetic with local nationalism, but chiefly preoccupied with stealing everything that could be put on a truck. After this ill-fated liberation the Americans then assisted the French in transporting forces back to Indochina. This was after much of the U.S. press and many U.S. leaders had indicated their disapproval of French colonialism and had given indirect but powerful encouragement to Viet Minh's rebellion against the French. Having helped foul up the situation for the French hopelessly, the United States then observed their return (a return which was definitely, though indirectly, made possible only by U.S. aid to France) with uncertainty and disquiet. It took the Americans four years to decide that they were on the French side and even then they were not very much on the French side.

Neither were the French.

The "French side" was an indefinable amalgam of old-fashioned French colonialism, the membership of three small Asian states in a French Union, and anti-Communism. The French made the mistake which the Americans repeated when they invited the Chinese Communist general, Wang Hsiu-ch'Üan, to New York to defame the United States through the courtesy of the United States Government, or when they tried dealing with the Chinese Communists, fighting them, dealing with them, and fighting with them again. When the French finally decided to seek an all-out military victory against the Communists they set up local governments which they themselves promptly dishonored, giving them neither prestige nor authority enough to combat the Communist menace in local Asian terms.

That the French should have held the Asian anti-Communist front under these strange political circumstances is a credit to France. The Indochinese war has been dirty, discouraging. It has often verged upon the hopeless. The French have been criticized by the Americans in the early period of the reoccupation of Indochina for not turning the country over to Communist "nationalists" lock, stock and barrel; later the Americans criticized the French because the French did not annihilate the same "Communist nationalists" whom the Americans had previously lauded. In the end, Dien Bien Phu and Geneva were the inevitable concomitants of Panmunjom. Once we made "peace," the French had to make an equally bad "peace" too.

The United States was adroit enough to obtain the immense psychological leverage of getting the Korean war recognized as a UN war. The Indochinese war was not made a UN war even though it was the same enemy who was being fought—Asian Communists underwritten by Peking and guaranteed by Moscow—in each case.

Amazing though it may seem, practical psychological warfare was almost completely neglected by the French until the Americans supplied the French with printing facilities for French Annamite leaflets in 1950. By 1952 the French had assigned staff officers to carry out psychological warfare responsibilities and were making a serious effort to link up with the other anti-Communist forces in East Asia for the purpose of obtaining psychological warfare know-how. A considerable improvement in tactical psychological warfare was made between 1950 and 1952. The strategic psychological warfare position of the French in the area must be referred back to the "battle of the probabilities," mentioned earlier in this chapter. So long as French, Americans, and Annamites all feel that a French defeat is quite probable and say so both publicly and privately, it will be difficult for the French to make the Indochinese believe that Viet Nam, Cambodia, and Laos are here to stay as French-protected and anti-Communist nations.51

What are "life, purpose, and honor" in basic human terms?

They are the rights to belong to something, to be a part of history, to make one's own world move, to be a human being superior to other human beings, to be vain, to be proud, to be self-sacrificing.

After years of war against the Chinese Communist guerrillas who have small components of Malayans and Indians with them, the British have not yet found a single British brigadier or major general of the Chinese race. The world at large on the anti-Communist side has yet to hear of a Chinese-Malayan hero who served mankind by falling martyr to the Communist terror or by emerging as victor in valiant heroic combat.

The Chinese in Malaya, as the author has observed at first hand, are probably more prosperous than any other Chinese have ever been anywhere in the world. Under capitalism today the Chinese communities in Malaya have achieved a degree of wealth, health, and education which Communist China will be remarkable to have achieved if it survives and succeeds for the next hundred years.

Does this not give the lie to the great Communist myth concerning Asia—the myth accepted by many Western politicians, intellectuals, and newspaper men—that the struggle between Communism and anti-Communism is a struggle for living standards? that the issue is an issue of "who will provide the best livelihood"?

On the pro-Communist side in Malaya, Chinese who are not religious and who are known for their practicality and secularism, struggle for the chance to go forth and suffer, to serve in an army with bad medical service and no pensions, to face an almost certain death in the jungle, to lose life and property (which they could keep on the British side) in order to gain that other kind of life—life with honor and purpose, on the Communist side.

The British meanwhile progress, no doubt. In many respects the British administrations in Singapore and Malaya are more enlightened than some of the local governments in the United States. But whatever the reason, they do not seem to belong to the Chinese who live there or even to the Malays. They are governments for the people, and not (so far as the local people seem to judge) governments of the people.

Is it reasonable to ask in the mid-1950s that decent British officers and civil servants convert themselves into apocalyptic fanatics of a weird composite Asian nationalism? Can the British make revolution in Malaya when they are rather fatigued with their own Labor revolution at home? Can we Americans, who have made nothing, absolutely nothing, out of the heroism and romance and tradition that might have been reconstituted as the ancient kingdom of Ryukyu (Okinawa), be in a position to chide the British for not doing that which we ourselves do not undertake?

The Communist magic is strong, bad magic. In North Korea it created officers in an unreasonably short time, developed fanatics while we were trying to develop gentlemen, and came close to defeating us in the perilous weeks of the Pusan perimeter. In China soldiers of whom many Americans despaired when they fought on the Nationalist side became desperate assault infantry under Communist training. The timid and quarrelsome Annamites who had given the French so little trouble before Communism organized them, fought like leopards once they read Marx, Lenin, Mao Tse-tung and Ho Chi-minh.

Was this why the Communists were able to continue in Malaya? No one has ever accused the British Army of a lack of ingenuity. The forces who developed desert raiders, coastal commandos, air-dropped banditti, and a plethora of amusing, shocking, and audacious innovations cannot be accused of a lack of imagination.

The British did use psychological warfare in Malaya strategically, tactically, in the field, in the cities, by radio, and by print. When Carleton Greene was directing the British PsyWar effort from the headquarters of that redoubtable gentleman, Malcolm MacDonald, British Commissioner General for South East Asia, he even resorted to the device of writing individual letters to known Communists and leaving these letters scattered through the jungle. The British used white propaganda, black propaganda, grey propaganda; if there had been a purple propaganda they certainly would have tried it. Alex Josey came close to it when he shocked the planters in Malaya by delivering socialist speeches over the Malay radio in an attempt to pull the Left wing off the Communist bird.

Sir Henry Gurney, the High Commissioner of the Federation who was murdered in 1952, was a veteran of irregular warfare. He had faced the Zionist terrorists in Jerusalem and was a man without fear. His approach to the problem of confronting Communism was hopelessly sane. The Communists were offering young Chinese the intoxication of craziness, of a mad and heroic righteousness to justify the misspending of their lives. Sir Henry's answer was decency, goodness, security, prosperity, authority, liberty under law. He offered everything except glamor, terror, inspiration, and romance—

Everything except the chance to join the British side.

What kind of British side?

A British side which, like the Communist side, would welcome the makers of the future, the builders of the next civilization, the arbiters of history.

The Communists have presented a high bid against the U.S. and Britain as well as the other Western powers. We have not yet overbid them. The high bid is the opportunity to join, to belong, really to be equal, not just legally equal, and, above everything, to share, to struggle, and to work under conditions of heroism for a common goal.

The top levels of this problem are, of course, political. They must be solved in the light of a U.S. home public which eschews crusades and dreads adventures. At a lower level the problem becomes one for the military staffs of the future. How can the United States, the United Nations, or other anti-Communist forces recruit native leaders and native followers under circumstances of dignity and honor? How can we either learn to love the allies we have or to find allies whom we can love? Until then much of the spiritual and organizational advantage in Asia will fall to the Communists. We may have the better ideals, but if people who are determined to illuminate their own lives with the splendor of risky, heroic, or self-sacrificing action (and who insist on doing something desperate somewhere somehow, so as to relieve the ignominy, poverty, and monotony of their existences) cannot learn how to join us, they will perforce join the other side.

A slight or even a substantial increase in economic welfare in the Asian states seems to the author to favor a sharp increase in Communist strength. When people are desperately poor or sick they cannot worry about causes. When they become moderately well off—well enough off to know that they are despised, poor by our standards, ignorant by our standards—then the point of psychological frenzy comes in.

The strategic PsyWar self-limitations imposed by the United States on the United States in the Korean war were also crippling. The United States did not desire anything which a professional soldier would recognize as victory. U.S. opinion was divided as to whether all of Korea should be liberated by UN forces. At the policy-making level—certainly among our allies—there was pretty general agreement to remain at peace with the supply dumps and high command of the Chinese Communist forces in Manchuria and China while fighting the forward echelons of those forces in Korea. The United States would not accept defeat nor would it seek a decisive victory because victory might have involved the risk of war.

Under these conditions it must be pointed out that General MacArthur had the first and only PsyWar establishment ready to operate the moment the Korean war began. Col. J. Woodall Greene ably managed the Tokyo headquarters for most of the period of the Korean war. The Department of the Army showed great good judgment in bringing back Brig. Gen. Robert McClure, who had been Eisenhower's PsyWar chief in Europe, to the new Department of the Army's PsyWar establishment which was created on 15 January 1951 in the Pentagon as a part of Special Staff, United States Army, with the title of Office of the Chief of Psychological Warfare (OCPW). When General McClure departed for Teheran, he was succeeded at OCPW by Brig. Gen. William Bullock. The last period of the Korean war found Korean local PsyWar at the headquarters of Eighth U.S. Army in Korea (EUSAK) under the command of Col. Donald Hall, who had probably seen more continuous PsyWar service than any other officer in the U.S. Army.

CHAPTER 15
Strategic International Information Operations

From 1776 to 1945 the U.S. system of government managed to survive in a world comprising many types of government without setting up its own propaganda and agitational forces. Propaganda through most of the twentieth century was pretty clearly limited by the U.S. conception of propaganda as a weapon auxiliary to war. "Psychological warfare" became proper, in conventional American terms, only when there was a war to be won. With the coming of peace in 1945 there was considerable uncertainty as to whether the United States should have a propaganda establishment at all.

Even at the time of writing (1954) there is still some doubt as to whether the United States needs propaganda facilities. The William Jackson report of July 1953 indicated that the terms propaganda and psychological warfare were unsatisfactory. Of course they were. They still are. The world itself is unsatisfactory—in terms of the traditional, humane, rational U.S. point of view.

The story of U.S. "peacetime" propaganda since the end of World War II is a very complicated one. Quantity, direction, purpose, and quality have shifted with the various turns of the international situation. The subject has become much more difficult to write about since the time the first edition of this book was written in 1946.

In the first place, governmental secrecy has been very sharply restored. Even very routine State Department operations for putting across the U.S. point of view have been shrouded in masses of classified documents. For reasons not always evident to the outside observer, the assumption has become prevalent that the normal operations of the United States Government should be kept confidential, secret, or even top secret. Often it would seem that the attempt to maintain secrecy in non-sensitive functions is not worth the security effort at all or, contrariwise, may even reassure the antagonists of the United States by not letting them realize how serious and how unfriendly our plans or policies with respect to them may be. (This is not the time or place to discuss the problem of secrecy as a protection against domestic criticism—which secrecy, of course, has often become, to the detriment of both the government and the citizens of the United States.)

In the second place, not only have information activities become more hush-hush: they have also become more complicated. It is difficult to do justice to an intricate moving panorama of activities, some of which may not be mentioned or described under existing law.

In other words, there were eight years in which the Department of State had primary responsibility for the conduct of peacetime propaganda of the United States. This was the first and only time that the United States Government had in a period of relative peace undertaken a sustained propaganda effort.

The effort had ups and downs because neither the citizenry nor the officials knew whether the country was in a condition of peace or at war and, if at war, at war with whom. To some the enemy was Communism, the ideology; to others, Communism the movement; to still others, the USSR; to others, the Korean Communists, but not the Chinese Communists; to others, the Chinese Communists in Korea, but not the Chinese Communists in China; and so on, ad infinitum.

The general history of these eight years was, by and large, a first phase in which the United States demobilized or destroyed propaganda facilities which had been built up with great skill and at great cost during World War II, and a second phase in which those facilities were partially rebuilt and the skills rediscovered. The low point in this development was probably the winter of 1947-48.

For a while, the rumor went around Washington that the Secretary of Defense, Louis Johnson, would not tolerate the utterance of the words propaganda or psychological warfare, and that the Secretary of the Army, Kenneth C. Royall, refused to have the topic mentioned to him. That may be the exaggeration characteristic of newspapermen, but it epitomized the spirit of that time.

While "psychological warfare" almost disappeared from the Department of Defense and the three services during this low point, the State Department never quite demobilized. For one thing, the State Department had inherited the OWI facilities and the Army facilities in the occupied countries—Austria, Germany, Korea, and Japan. As the heir to substantial informational facilities the State Department kept a certain minimum activity going. Facilities such as American Broadcasting Station in Europe (ABSIE), Radio in the American Sector—of Berlin—(RIAS), the Information Control Commands in the American Sector of Germany, Information and Education (I&E) Section of the General Headquarters of the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (SCAP) in Japan—these (though sometimes renamed) represented going propaganda concerns which required a Washington command post.

Meanwhile, it became standing operating procedure in the U.S. diplomatic establishment to attach some kind of an informational facility to every diplomatic establishment and to most of the major consulates.

Since there were always advocates of complete propaganda dismantlement, as well as enthusiasts for the maintenance of information programs, the issue of remaining in the propaganda business or getting out was always more or less in doubt. The economy and the demobilization phases of 1947 and 1948 were stimulated by evidence of Soviet bad faith in Europe during 1949 and brought into sharp focus by the outbreak of the Korean semi-war in 1950.

It is not possible to do justice to all these different systems in a single phrase. Even as late as the present, it is sometimes difficult to determine why the U.S. need have an information program operating in such entirely friendly countries as Cuba, Haiti, Ireland, or Australia. There is some point to the argument set forth by ultraconservatives that what was good enough for Theodore Roosevelt ought to be good enough today; that, in other words, the United States should be known for what it is and not by what a few hired promoters can say about it.

As in so many other fields of activities, however, the past is irrecoverable. The United States can no more return to the pre-atomic age in propaganda matters than it can in defense matters. The world we have built is with us and the only alternative to survival seems death. With respect to the specific field of propaganda, this leads to occasional curious political alliances. Sometimes the conservatives in U.S. politics are so conservative they want no propaganda at all; at other times these same conservatives are so anti-Communist that they want more propaganda. On occasions the Left within the USA has viewed U.S. propaganda with alarm and at other times has demanded that there be more of it and that more of the content be Left.

Later, as will be described, the Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs was supplemented by a Psychological Strategy Board outside of the Department of State and still later by a White House assistant in charge of informational policies at the highest level.

What can be said of this first U.S. peacetime performance in the propaganda field?

The Assistant Secretaries themselves have been men of varied capacities and interests. Mr. Barrett was an OWI veteran and a journalist of high standing. George Allen was a tough-minded career diplomat. Howland Sargeant was a distinguished government official. William Benton was the founder of the most successful "canned" music system for restaurants and the most vigorous promoter which the EncyclopÆdia Britannica ever had; later he became a Senator. Men such as these can scarcely be called tight-lipped fanatics emerging from the hidden recesses of a U.S. "Politburo." They and their colleagues did a surprisingly good job.

American travelers overseas were often amazed to find that the U.S. propaganda effort was far more polished and purposeful than an observer within the United States could expect it to be. The activities of the Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs consisted of supervising the domestic origination of broadcasts directed to the Soviet Union, the satellite countries, neutrals, and friends. The radio system was generally known as the Voice of America. To this degree he had charge of a propaganda system operated within the United States by Americans, but speaking to foreigners, sometimes by transmitters located within the USA and more often with relay transmitters which picked up programs originating in the continental United States and rebroadcast overseas.

One echelon removed, there were installations attached to the diplomatic and consular establishments of the United States which were usually known as USIS although in some particular cases quasi-private facilities were sponsored instead. In each foreign country there was at the embassy or legation level a Public Affairs Officer (PAO) who was the information specialist for the diplomatic mission and—in theory at least—in charge of all U.S. propaganda or informational activities, whichever one preferred to call them, in the country to which he was accredited.

A complex hierarchy of officials routed, relayed, screened, and coordinated programs from headquarters to the PAOs in the field and proposals or requests from the PAOs back to headquarters.

After all, what is one to do? Is it valid to "propagandize" our innocently cherubic service personnel abroad whom so many domestic purity leagues and local pressure groups are anxious to defend? After all, these service people possess fearful weapons. Each has a Congressman to whom he might write. But if service personnel in a foreign country are to be given nonpropaganda materials, how can the same area be given propaganda materials for the benefit of the indigenous personnel? The propaganda from the United States Government must not be too much at variance with the "nonpropaganda" of the United States Government. If the two extremes of communication were too far apart, the United States Government might look like an ass. That would be most unhappy.

Over and above the contradictions and difficulties involved in the operation of at least two governmental systems and many private systems of U.S. news communication and dissemination systems in foreign areas, there is the further problem of additional U.S. facilities. Sources such as The Washington Post, Joseph Alsop, James Reston, and other well-informed Washington journalists often hinted gloomily and darkly that U.S. cloak-and-dagger operations are still going on; Dorothy Thompson was often troubled by what she regarded as the feckless successors of the wartime OSS. Many times Americans resident in local areas concerned seemed never to have heard of the hush-hush operations in their own overseas homes, operations which were denounced with purple prose in Washington; we can say that covert operations, when they have been really uncovered, as in the case of the Time story about overzealous U.S. support of a German nationalist resistance group, turn out to be much more pale than the lurid columnists or inside stories from Washington would lead one to believe.

More serious have been the duplication, and triplication, and occasional quadruplication of official informational activities. The overseas economic and military aid program, known successively as Economic Cooperation Administration (ECA), Mutual Security Administration (MSA) and Foreign Operations Administration (FOA) has not only supplemented the existing leaflet, broadcast, and other informational activities of the State Department and the armed forces with a third set of information programs; it has itself had a fourth rival in the Point Four administration, the Technical Cooperation Administration (TCA), which was both a part of State and not a part of State, depending upon the particular situation overseas.

The advantage of the RFE and RFA type of operation is that by giving voice to independent nongovernmental resistance to Communism it has often been possible to go far beyond the limits which intergovernmental protocol would impose upon U.S. official broadcasts. That is, the United States can scarcely describe a deputy minister in the Rumanian Government as a scoundrel, thief, pervert, or renegade; Rumanian exiles allowed access to Radio Free Europe stations need have no such limitations. On the other hand, there is the difficulty that Radio Free Europe, because of its U.S.-based finance and management might lend an unnecessary U.S. sponsorship to genuinely independent anti-Communist undertakings. Here again, as in the case of the reconciliation of the State Department and Defense broadcasts, it is impossible to draw a doctrinal rule which would prescribe on one hand that all propaganda broadcasts should be unofficial or that they should all be official. One cannot even say that they should all be coordinated.

The report, released in July 1953, pointed out the Psychological Strategy Board had erred in trying to plan informational activities in its own light instead of considering the informational aspects of every single U.S. Government activity possessing international significance. The report recommended the replacement of the Psychological Strategy Board by a more realistic policy-coordinating organization which would coordinate not merely propaganda policies, but all policies and, having coordinated all policies, would then resolve upon maximum psychological exploitation of the policies which had been decided.

In a sense this is rather like saying that the United States should have a President, since the powerful chief executive of this government has, since 1789, been the final arbiter of executive matters, both foreign and domestic. In another sense it can be interpreted to mean that the responsibilities of the Presidency are so great that no one man could perform in his head all the staff work necessary to see through the opinion-reactions which might develop abroad to U.S. executive decisions made here at home. If the latter supposition is true, it means that the United States is saddled with one more intricate governmental process made necessary by the closeness, dangerousness, and importance of international affairs in the lives of Americans and their government.

In so far as this development represented an attempt to coordinate the framing of U.S. Government policy in such a manner as to achieve maximum impact on the rest of the world, it represented a major step forward. The de-emphasis of "psychological warfare" or "psychological strategy" as operations which could somehow or other be efficacious without a context of material support through the real-life behavior of the Government issuing the propaganda was a healthy sign indeed.

Psychological warfare is at best a cumbersome and pretentious label for an important modern political and military weapon, the use of mass communication. The definition of empirical "psychological warfare" given in Chapter 3, and reproduced as it was originally written in 1946, makes it perfectly plain that the term acquires specificity which is made plain by the particular individualities involved undertaking the operation at any given time: psychological warfare is not an ancient term which is so well defined by the usage of centuries that modern men would be ill advised to redefine it or to sweep it aside.52

Indeed, the basic weakness of the term psychological warfare is its pretentiousness within American civilization of the 1900s. No one now knows whether the United States of the 1960s will turn out to be dynamic, forward-looking, insistent upon its own view of the world. It is difficult in the 1950s to see how the next decade or so could bring forth anything as explosive or violent in the social and political field as the atomic bomb has been in the field of fission. The United States certainly does not seem to be on the threshold of a new Islam. For better or for worse, the U.S. strengths are the strengths of sobriety, calmness, health. They are the strengths of living as opposed to the strengths of revolution. Revolution may be strong; it may even be pleasurable to some persons involved, but as Denis W. Brogan has pointed out in his The Price of Revolution (Boston, 1952), revolution has a cost factor which must be weighed against the results expected from it.

In the context of mid-twentieth century affairs it is almost pitiable and endearing to see us Americans of this time, who are so little given to the drama of fanaticism or the salvation of the world through cruelty, attempting to dramatize our own modest and reasonable operations by giving them melodramatic and pretentious labels. If the Communists torment us long enough they may make us into alert brutes; this seems doubtful now. It seems probable that we will continue to be brave without becoming fiendish in combat, strong without becoming ferocious in peace.

Varying definitions of PsyWar are adopted by official agencies from time to time. The current (1953) Joint Chiefs of Staff definition runs as follows:

"Psychological warfare comprises the planned use of propaganda and related informational measures designed to influence the opinions, emotions, attitudes, and behavior of enemy or other foreign groups in such a way as to support the accomplishment of national policies and aims, or a military mission."

This definition differs from the one given in Chapter 3 in the following important respects: it stresses the planned character of PsyWar; it restricts the pertinent measures to those of an informational character; and it makes clear the operational goals. It is not clear why it is necessary to stress the element of planning of PsyWar as distinguished from other sorts of war, unless it is a homily to the PsyWar operator to keep his functions in line with those of other national activities. The question of restriction to informational character is more serious; it excludes the interpretation that in essence, psychological warfare depends upon warfare psychologically waged. Thus, substantive operations of a noninformational character, adopted and executed primarily for their psychological effect, could properly be called PsyWar. Finally, the specification of goals is chiefly important for the control of the function, and can largely be taken for granted. Therefore, to preserve an inclusive view of the function which will comprise the range of variation in official definitions—including those of one's enemies—the author stands by the definition stated in 1946.

A republic cannot impose a purpose upon mankind.

A democracy cannot enounce a policy and then stick to it for years and decades.

Americans are not Messiahs. The limitations of American civilization over and above our specific political institutions are such as to make it impossible for Americans to lead a fanatical counter-crusade against Communism, or to guarantee to the human race at large that Americans of 1955 promise that Americans of 1975 will perform this or that specific action.54

American propaganda is always limited precisely because it is American. Even in an age of atomic weapons, to be American means, to some degree at least, to be free. The people of this country, or at the very least an awful lot of them, do have something to do with operating the government. A new election and a hostile House of Representatives can cut off the funds for any project no matter what its merits may be in the eyes of the top-secret planners. The outside world knows this even if Washington politicians and bureaucrats sometimes forget. One can even contradict the title of Archibald MacLeish's famous poem, America Was Promises, and state categorically that in the propaganda field, America certainly is not promises. The promise of a tsar or a dictator is usually good for his lifetime, whereas the promise of the United States is good only within the letter of the law—a specific treaty, a definite commercial agreement, a very sharp and very narrow commitment.

There is an American strength in international affairs. This strength does not lie in a propaganda capacity to promise, to threaten, or to commit the United States Government to future courses of action. It lies, rather, in the immense probabilities of American life, in the virtual certainty that the American people will react in such and such a fashion to a new aggression, that the American people will (if attacked) in all probability destroy their attackers, whoever those attackers may be, and that the American people, despite their occasional shortcomings in matters of racial tolerance, political freedom, and economic injustice, will in the long run be solidly ranged behind whatever policies seem to promise equality, prosperity, and freedom for all mankind.

The limitations of the United States as a source of propaganda are sharp. There is no U.S. party line; it is virtually impossible to imagine that within our civilization as we now know it there could be one. There might be an official U.S. line, unanimous and binding upon all federal departments, but the federal government itself is, after all, only one among the forty-nine separate governments operating within the continental USA. The state governments, the cities within them, and the people at large are free to contradict what the federal government may say at any given point.

American strength cannot be sought in unanimity. U.S. propaganda is incapable of pulling the Sudeten rabbit out of a Munich hat. Short of an intimate and extreme danger of war itself, the U.S. Government cannot threaten a foreign government very successfully; too many U.S. citizens would immediately shout at one another, at their own government, and to the foreigners concerned: "Those Washington officials don't really mean it! We don't want war. We're not going to go through with it." If the USA moved against Spain, there are friends of Franco in Washington who would tell him to sit tight; if the USA moved too rapidly against the Communist world, there are plenty of Americans, both in and out of government, who would say privately, through the press, or by letters that the Indian Government or some other should assure Moscow and Peip'ing that the U.S. would not dare carry through.

Exploitation of U.S. propaganda strength must therefore always be developed from the probable or apparent "center" of American opinion at that moment. It is impossible to find a U.S. policy which can be made compulsory and unanimous upon all Americans both public and private. It is not impossible through an adroit combination of the skills of leadership, foresight, and a keen awareness of intra-U.S. politics to devise foreign-policy programs which will command the decisive assent of the American people.

Once war breaks out, the American people have in the past shown a very good capacity to unite in winning and finishing the war. There is no reason to suppose that the situation will be different in the future. What is perplexing, and for the present insoluble, is this: how can the American people, short of getting involved in war, become so purposeful, so decisive, so nearly unanimous, as to take actions which will prevent a war? The situation in the early 1950s is on the Communist side a major crusade against what the Reds regarded, or pretended to regard, as "aggressive" U.S. capitalist power.

In other words, the Communists of the world had a crusade against the USA. The USA had a crusade against no one. A prominent Washington official long displayed the sign in his office: I Ain't Mad at Nobody. In a very real sense this epitomized one of the very real moods of the American people. How do we defend ourselves against a crusade, especially if we have no desire to have part in a counter-crusade?

U.S. propagandists sometimes forget that they are not speaking for a mere nation, but are the representatives of something which is far bigger than any single nationality—they are the spokesmen, whether they like it or not, for a way of life which is new in the world, for a kind of freedom which, though coarse, is real. Characteristic American strengths have been, are, and will be the strengths of patience, endurance, versatility, and curiosity. It is foolish to ask Americans to be strong in bitterness, strong in hatred, strong in a cruel or proud self-righteousness. We are not Japanese, or Prussians, or Russians; we are not Irish, or English, or French; we are mostly European and yet un-European. Our propaganda will be effective only if it springs from the simplest and strongest aspects of our life at home. Our material prosperity is beyond doubt; what is not so evident to the outside world is the frugality, the kindliness, and the humble foresight which drove so much of that prosperity into being.

This is, of course, not true.

The Swedes were very good friends of the Norwegians. Nevertheless, the Swedes saved their Swedish skins by sitting back when the Nazis overran Norway.

Did Lithuania have an enemy? Did Latvia have an enemy? Did Estonia have an enemy? These countries were the good friends of all the Western powers. These countries have disappeared.

The United States was a friend of China, a friendship boastfully and sentimentally proclaimed for more than a hundred years, from the days of Daniel Webster to the finale of George C. Marshall. What use was it to the Chinese to have the United States as a friend? When they fell upon trouble, a U.S. Secretary of State denounced their government as corrupt and told the Chinese how good the United States was.

Friendship does not usually lead to war or peace. War and peace depend upon survival. Any veteran will remember men whom he disliked intensely in his own wartime outfits: he never day-dreamed of turning them over to the enemy just because he was personally antagonistic to them. A common danger from something—more complicatedly, a common interest in something—is a far more potent assurance of future strength and strategic action than is friendship.

Friendship operates between individuals, not between the overgrown corporate fictions which are called nations.

If you were a West German, and if you were absolutely positive that all Americans were lovely people, you would be wise to join the Soviet side. That way, if the Russians win, you will have appeased the enigmatic and implacable Muscovites. On the other hand, if the Americans win and you are sure they are lovely people as well as good friends of yours, they will not really mind your having joined the other side as a matter of temporary factual necessity. If a man is your best friend he may jump into the river to rescue you, should you fall in; unfortunately, he might prefer to telephone a rescue squad. But if he is handcuffed to you, you are reasonably sure that if you fall in he will be with you.

Call it propaganda, call it information, call it international communication—under any name the major point remains: Americans can find trustworthy future allies through commitment to common interest or common danger. Friendship is pleasant, but not of the essence. In some cases it might be desirable for leaders or key groups in important foreign areas to realize that the United States could be a worse enemy than the Soviet Union, rather than to realize that the U.S. is a friend. If the French were sure of this—that is, that a Soviet-occupied France would get sixty-five hydrogen bombs dropped on it while a U.S.-occupied France would get only three—they might prefer the Americans whether they liked them or not.

Is this kind of communication consistent with American ideals? Perhaps not. Yet honesty has always been one of the American ideals and perhaps honesty may take us in the future to a stronger and a wiser position than friendliness has taken us in the past.

CHAPTER 16
Research, Development, and the Future

Psychological warfare is part of civilization. Civilization, no matter how one defines it, is not a static thing. It is an immense fermenting, active, often turbulent composite of the whys and hows of the way men and women think and behave. The short-run factors in a civilization are often as important as the long-run ones. Though the United States from 1860 to 1960 has been a steady part of the west European, predominantly Christian civilization, the United States has undergone immense changes of fashion, belief, appetite, preference, and behavior. With any changing, developing civilization, "war" may seem like a very static term, so that the Civil War and the war of the Western powers against Germany of 1939-45 may to some degree seem comparable phenomena. They are comparable, but only within sharp limits.

War is coming to mean the effectuation or prevention of revolution, not the half-savage, half-courteous armed conflict of sovereign nations. War is getting to be chronic again.55 War between entirely comparable states such as the United States and Canada, Mexico and Cuba, Indonesia and India, Iraq and Saudi Arabia, or any similar combination, is getting to be more and more unthinkable. War between ideologically dissimilar states, such as North Korea and South Korea, Communist China and Nationalist China, Viet Minh and Viet Nam, USSR and USA, is getting to be virtual normality.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the discussion of tensions as a cause of war. Tension certainly contributed very much to the outbreak of war in 1914. It is possible that the tensions and hostilities of Europe in the 1930s which allowed Fascism and Communism to become threatening and powerful also contributed in the end to the outbreak of war in 1939. It is difficult, however, to suppose that the coming of war in September 1939 was itself the result of tension except as a very remote and indirect cause. This author believes that tension leads to a perpetuation of a kind of civilization in which wars are possible, but cannot persuade himself that an additional factor of tension within civilization as we know it can be an immediate cause of war.57

Research into tensions has been carried fairly far. It may be that the wartime role of tension can be ascertained by scientific methods, so that the psychological warfare of Power A can cause so much more tension than Power B, either among the Élite or among the general population, that Power B cannot further continue the war. Alternatively, it is imaginable that Power A may be able to relax tension so sharply among the Élite or broad population of Power B that Power B's potentiality for war, or decision to wage war, can be postponed.

For purposes of research it seems worthwhile to suggest that tension appears to be highly prevalent in the two most powerful military civilizations on earth today: the USSR and its satellites, on the one hand, and the cluster of Western powers, on the other. Tension appears to be caused by the complexity of every-day life, the demands made upon the psychophysiological organization of each individual human being, by the technological facilities available, and through the relief offered within each civilization by the opportunity to discharge hatred against members of the other civilization instead of recognizing self-hatred for the very real problem which it is.

In other terms, it is tough to be modern; the difficulty of being modern makes it easy for individuals to be restless and anxious; restlessness and anxiety lead to fear; fear converts freely into hate; hate very easily takes on political form; political hate assists in the creation of real threats such as the atomic bomb and guided missiles, which are not imaginary threats at all; the reality of the threats seems to confirm the reality of the hate which led to it, thus perpetuating a cycle of insecurity, fear, hate, armament, insecurity, fear, and on around the circle again and again.

It would be unwise of U.S. military and political leaders to overlook developing strengths within American every-day talk and thinking, whether academic or popular. Too specific a concentration on the problem of winning a war may cause a leader or his expert consultants to concentrate on solutions derived from past experience, therewith leading him to miss new and different solutions which might be offered by his own time. Changes need not always be thought of as weaknesses, which they are if past criteria are retained as absolute standards. Men born in the period 1910-20 may have endowments which are not commonly found among men born in the period 1930-40, yet it is entirely possible that the generation born during 1930-40 may have capacities and resistances which the older generation does not altogether appreciate.

Apply this concept to Communism. Communism loses strength every day that it exists: each day deprives it of novelty, each day makes it a littler more familiar, each day makes its leaders one day older. If Americans can learn how to be flexible and imaginative and to understand themselves as they really are, they might find that the real American appeal to the youth of the world would be much greater than the Communist appeal. It was unfortunately characteristic of the United States in the early 1950s of the Cold War that U.S. propaganda was based on ideals and standards older than the ideals and standards competitively presented by the Communists, and that therefore in many parts of the world the struggle between Americans and Communists appeared to be a struggle on our side of the old against the young. Nothing could be farther from the truth. The United States army in Korea in 1950-53 was one of the most revolutionary armies in history, an army dedicated to non-victory, pledging allegiance to a shadowy world government of the United Nations behind the practical reality of the government of the United States. Perhaps never before in many centuries have men fought so matter-of-factly, so calmly, so reasonably. They fought well and did not need to be jazzed up with the hashish of "making the world safe for Democracy" or "establishing the Four Freedoms."

The temper of the U.S. forces in Korea in 1951 was demonstrated by a Reserve sergeant who scarcely knew he was in the Reserves until he was on a boat bound for Pusan. He was a practical man, anxious to get home, but willing to do his share in this war as long as he had to. He was given the assignment of testing the voice plane of U.S. headquarters at Taegu. The loudspeaker was not working quite right, and he was instructed to test the plane at 500, 1,000 and 1,500 feet. The plane flew low over U.S. headquarters. The roar of the engines almost deafened everyone within the building, yet even above the roar of the engines there could be heard the bone-chilling hum of the silent loudspeaker—an immense magnification of the noise one hears from a radio set which is turned on without being tuned to a station. Everyone expected the sergeant to say, "This is the EUSAK voice plane testing; one-ah, two-ah, three-ah!" Instead the immense voice came through clearly, through brick, and plaster, and wood, through air and trees. It must have reached four miles. The gigantic voice of the sergeant seemed to roar over half of South Korea as he said, "Why—don't—you—imperialist—sons o' bitches—go—back—to—Wall-Street—where—you—belong?" It was said that fifty colonels grabbed for their phones simultaneously, but the purely American gimmick to the whole story lay in the fact that the sergeant was not punished. No damage was done. The Americans thought their enemies were funny or silly. We had shown that we were not afraid of Communist ideas. Several South Koreans told the author that they regarded the Americans as inscrutable people indeed.

The development of modern civilization is certain to have developments in war both as to the purpose of war and as to the modes of war. It seems likely that in the face of the supreme danger of atomic and thermonuclear weapons nations will resort more and more to small wars and semi-war operations which will offer the opportunity of strategic advantage without the cataclysmic danger of a world-wide showdown. In a very hush-hush way the U.S. Army is looking into the possibilities of small and irregular kinds of war; security regulations prohibit the author from discussing some of the interesting new developments in this field.

Within the general research field, two basic approaches have been recognized by the U.S. Army as being distinct from one another: developmental research and operations research. Developmental research consists of that research which creates new weapons, new methods of war, new devices or procedures, doing so by digging through modern science, investigating its applicability to military problems, and then advancing the frontier of science, when necessary, in the military interest. The goals of operations research are more modest and, in some respect, more provocative. Operations research takes operations as they exist and reexamines them from beginning to end to discover how much of each operation is scientifically pertinent to its stated goal, what economies, modifications, or changes might be introduced, and how the operation might be improved.

Developmental research had a great deal to offer, but the gap between initial scientific advance and practical military application appeared to be too broad to warrant the assumption that the research had transformed the U.S. PsyWar program.

Among other things, Army officers in the PsyWar field showed, early in the Korean war, that land forces possessed tactical opportunities which combat propaganda could exploit very effectually. Various experiments were tried, none of them so decisive as to affect the outcome of the war, but some of them of real tactical value and others of great importance in obtaining Chinese prisoners.

One of the points examined was surrender as a process. Surrendering does not depend upon the disposition of the individual enemy soldier to say yes or no to the war as a whole. He could say no a thousand times and still be on the other side shooting at us.

The actual physical process of surrender is an elaborate one consisting of the psychological processes of getting ready to give up on the other side, the physical capacity to surrender when the opportunity for getting captured presents itself, and the alternative, more difficult process of deliberately leaving the other side and getting to our side alive. In 1951 and 1952 there were considerable developments along this line. Americans learned much about how to teach enemy soldiers to surrender. Late in 1952 and early in 1953 the front had become so static that it took extraordinary heroism for soldiers—outside of a tiny minority engaged in reconnaissance patrols—to get away from their own side and surrender to the enemy without being killed by their friends as deserters or by the enemy as sneak attackers.

The U.S. public did not realize that throughout the Korean war the Communists—Russian, North Korean, and Chinese—enjoyed a distinct radio advantage over the UN side both as to funds available for programs and as to number of station-hours on the air. The language gap between the Americans and Chinese was so extreme that it was hard for Americans to realize that the Chinese broadcasts covered wider audiences and covered them better than did our own. American restraint in this field may have been dictated in part by the fact that the war was a limited war consisting of combat only with those armed Chinese Communists on North Korean territory, but not with armed Chinese Communists elsewhere in the Far East.

Philosophy offers an opportunity for the reexamination of cultural values. The indoctrination of those professors who will teach the teachers of the generation after next will influence the capacity of future Americans to have a world-view which will give them the utmost opportunities for action in the military field while retaining as far as possible the blessings of U.S. civilian civilization. That U.S. civilization is still civilian and not military is, of course, beyond cavil.

The William Jackson committee was a voice crying in the wilderness when it asked for new terms and new ideas against which to set U.S. propaganda operations in the world of modern strategy. Philosophers may have had the capacity for finding some of the answers, but philosophers, of all people, do not like to be jostled or hurried. The author has never heard of a philosopher employed on a confidential basis by the United States Government to think through the historical and cultural rationale of a U.S. military victory for the future. Writers such as F. S. C. Northrop and Erich Fromm—to name only two sharply contrasting personalities—have written books which possess high significance for the international propaganda field. The connection appears, however, to be tangential.

Though literary men have converted their writing to propaganda purposes, few of them have gone on to define the characteristics of a specific conversionary literature or to compile canons of literary style applicable to the propaganda field. The contributions may lie in the future.

A good argument can be presented to the effect that the skills brought from the social-science into the propaganda field are more valuable once they are employed full time in that field than an attempt to apply political science, or sociology, or economics, each as an individual compartment, to the field of propaganda. There is still no book available with the title The Politics of Knowledge,60 even though the reception, control, prohibition, and dissemination of knowledge is a major factor in all modern governmental processes both in and out of the propaganda field.

One of the most conspicuous developments since World War II has been the application by psychologists, sociologists, and persons in related field of quantifying techniques. The introduction of rigorous scientific requirements of number into the attempted reportage of propaganda behavior or propaganda results is having a significant effect. Quantification may not obtain everything which its devotees claim for it. There is a wide area of human behavior which is significant to the ordinary person, or even to the expert in descriptive terms, and which loses much of its significance if the descriptive and allusive terms are replaced by measurements, tables, and graphs. There is, however, no danger that quantification will replace description as the sole tool of research in the propaganda field.

What quantification does do is develop a common area of discussion between propagandists and nonpropagandists. In many instances quantification can demonstrate results where allegations of failure or of success would have nothing more than personal authority to support them. Within our own particular kind of civilization quantification has a special appeal because of the American trust in engineering and in numbers. The conclusions of the Kinsey reports on men and on women seem much more authoritative to the ordinary man because they are presented with an ample garniture of numbers, even though Havelock Ellis's pioneer works in the psychology and behavior patterns of Western sex life may have been much more tangible and much more revolutionary in their time.

Another aspect of projection is left unexplored because of its immense difficulty and its dangerously unscientific character. Consider the problem this way: the United States one day before the outbreak of war with a hypothetical enemy, such as the Soviet Union, will possess a certain group of characteristics. Representative individual lives within this country can be determined to possess certain habits concerning mass communication, trust in mass communication, and response to symbols which may come through press, radio, or other mass devices.

One day after the outbreak of war the United States will change because the war has broken out.

One month after the outbreak of war the United States will no longer be the USA₁ which existed on war-day. It may well have become USA₂₅ because of the rapidity and variety of change. Three Soviet hydrogen bombs and twelve Soviet atomic bombs might change many of our national, economic, political, and psychological characteristics, and no one, not even an American, could predict this change in advance. The best he could do would be to get ready to study the change as it occurred, to understand the rate and direction of the change, and to assess the meaning of the change in light of the conduct of war.

The same would be true of the USSR; that country, like any other major country, would change under the impact of war. Who could have predicted the renascence of Russian patriotism and traditionalism resulting from the Nazi invasion of 1941? Even if we know where the Russians are as of the outbreak of war, we won't know where they will head or how fast they will head there, once war has broken out.

The scientific problem presented by attempted serious study of a U.S.-Soviet war is therefore very difficult indeed. It is really a problem involving three clusters of moving bodies. The first cluster will be the American people, their behavior, and their institutions; the second cluster, the Russians and allied peoples, their behavior and their institutions; the third cluster, the changing methods of communication existing between them.

It can be said even now, simply by referring to the character of the American people and their past history, that if the Communist leaders of the USSR start a general war, the end of that war is sure (under sets of words and ideas which have yet to be developed in the future) to involve the reconciliation of the inhabitants of the USA with the Russian people. In other words, USA_v and USSR_v can and must have certain relationships with each other, preeminent among which are attempts at undoing war damage, at political and cultural reconciliation, and the undertaking of the rebuilding of a world which both these great peoples can support with enthusiasm and hope.61

USA_v and USSR_v are imaginable. USA₁ and USSR₁ for the day preceding the outbreak of war, or, alternatively, the day on which the war occurs, will be known elements. American science in many fields can help U.S. mass communications and therewith help our armed forces if we learn how to ascertain how the Soviet leadership changes, how Soviet Élite groups change, and how the Soviet population changes during the course of the war. We must not only be able to guess what is happening to them physically, but must try to appreciate and to understand what is happening to them psychologically and semantically. This is an immense task. It is by no means certain that our research and development facilities can give us an adequate research program to handle the problem.

This much can be said: if the Americans understand the Russians before the war and during the war, it will be the first time that a nation has kept its enemy in wide-awake sight.

The usual process in the past has been the acceptance of a few exaggerated stereotypes of the national characteristics of the potential enemy, the ascription of every possible kind of infamy and inhuman characteristic to the enemy during the war, and the redefinition of the enemy as a friend after the war. It would be strange and wonderful if the U.S. Government and the U.S. propagandists (or conceivably as much as a large minority of the U.S. population) could learn how to fight the USSR in order to help the Russians escape from a tyranny which has already hurt them much more than it has hurt us.

The Germans suffered a tragic, overwhelming, and perhaps decisive psychological defeat in the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic and in the Ukraine, when they carried with their field forces such naÏve and tragic Nazi misconceptions of Russian and Ukrainian character as to defeat every opportunity they may have had for a serious anti-Communist alliance of Germany with the Russian and Ukrainian peoples. They destroyed themselves not through ignorance, but through what they thought they knew. If they had been more calm, less assured, more willing to learn from immediate experience, and less indoctrinated with their own preposterous misconceptions of Russian and Ukrainian character, they might have found Russian and Ukrainian allies who would have joined them in the final extermination of the Soviet system.

The world Communist movement has already suffered very serious setbacks because of its failure to project U.S. behavior successfully from the summer of 1950 onward. If the Russian and Chinese Communists had understood Americans well and had made a correct evaluation of the American response to the invasion of South Korea, they would not have driven the United States from lethargy to alertness, from weakness to military strength, from vulnerability toward Communist and crypto-Communist propaganda to sharp and angry recognition of Communist manipulation of symbols such as "progressives," "people's governments," and "liberation."

Sociologically it would seem that the Russian Communists attempted definite improvements of the techniques of Communist revolution and that these improvements have in large part failed in the European satellites. The governments of Rumania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and East Germany have turned out to be poor governments—despite the fact that from the Soviet point of view it was a sharp innovation to leave them in pseudo-parliamentary form instead of creating outright Soviet facsimilies.

At the Chinese end of the Moscow-Peking axis the sociology of revolutionary propaganda and organization appears to have worked out much more successfully than at the Russian end. The Chinese Communists, perhaps because they were Chinese, perhaps because they were tougher and more experienced Communists than the Russians, got their country under rigid control and then undertook social and political experiments on a very audacious scale. They have managed not to be un-Chinese while creating in China the kind of pervasive dictatorship which Communist control appears to require.

In the manipulation of satellites and in particularization of propaganda, the North Korean Communist army, the Viet Minh army in Indochina, and the Malayan Races Liberation Army on the Malay peninsula, appear to have near-optimum localism and particularism without suffering serious deviation from the main Communist world-wide pattern. In North Korea, of course, Chinese intervention and Soviet support have sharply modified the position of the North Korean People's Army, but the Annamite and Malay Communist forces appear to be fighting with high morale and considerable success, despite the duality of control from Peking and Moscow, and despite the difficulties of reconciling Asian nationalism with Marxian-world doctrine.

Another Communist technique is now known through Edward Hunter's provocative pioneer book62 by its correct name of "brain-washing." This involves the transformation of a human personality. The author has himself interrogated victims of brain-washing and can attest to the terrifying depth to which this process is carried. The victim of brain-washing is subject to very slight persuasion at the rational level. He is not even given much propaganda as U.S. propagandists of recent years might recognize the product. Instead, the process of brain-washing consists of a frontal attack on all levels of the personality, from the most conscious to the most hidden. The Communists seek through fatigue and sustained interrogation to create a condition similar to what is called "nervous breakdown" in popular parlance. Then they rebuild the personality, healing their victim into Communist normality.

One victim to whom the author talked had been so subject to Communist brain-changing that he thought himself a real Communist even though he had been reared a Catholic. He was completely convinced of the Communist cause and of his own life and place in that cause after the brain-washing had been completed. Unfortunately for Communism, the man got into serious sexual difficulties, difficulties of a kind which any American psychiatrist would recognize as potentially devastating.

As a result of his sexual frustrations he suffered a mild equivalent of the medically recognized phenomenon of the schizophrenic break—that terrible moment of false enlightenment in which the psychotic personality cuts loose with a truth of his own and shuts off most or all communication with normal people—with the consequence that he was walking along Nanking Road in Shanghai, a normal Communist in one instant of time and (as he put it to the author) in a millionth of a second he suddenly realized he was a Catholic, an anti-Communist, the enemy of every man, woman and child in sight—and at war with his entire environment. As this writer understood it, the poor man, though adjusted to the Communist environment after brain-washing, happened to go crazy—crazy enough to come back to our side.

Who can say which is sane, which insane? When two social and cultural systems are completely at odds with one another it may be impossible to be "normal" in both of them.

Scientifically the Chinese process of personality transformation lacked some of the pharmaceutical features apparent in the Western Communist conversions for purposes of confession. It appears to be a combination of audacious practical experimentation with well-known procedures from textbooks of Pavlovian psychology. It is, of course, an interesting scientific question to ask one's self: could Communist psychological researchers do enough psychological research to understand their own difficulties and to de-Communize themselves in the very act of seeking better psychological weapons for Communism? If the people in charge of Communist psychological techniques were scientists, as American psychologists generally are, there might be a real point of discussion. Unfortunately, most of them appear to be artists, believers, and fanatics. The history of the fanatical religions which have inflamed and ripped so much of mankind across the centuries is not such as to suggest that Communism will de-Communize itself by becoming more Communistic or more scientific.

Logically considered, the United States remains the largest extant revolutionary experiment in the world—the first immense human community which survives without profound dogma or profound hatred and which attempts to make short-range, practical, and warm-hearted (though ideologically superficial) concurrence the foundation for a political and industrial civilization. If the United States wins a few more wars it may be that the rest of mankind will be persuaded that our kind of practicality is not only humanly preferable, but scientifically more defensible than the philosophies of competing civilizations. It seems unlikely that Communist research can outstrip us in the propaganda field so far as the race is run in purely scientific terms; artistically and gadget-wise the Communists are just as inventive as we are and often more enthusiastic.

On the other side of the coin, it is very hopeful to note that the many and dangerous techniques developed by OSS for covert propaganda, some of which were applied with considerable success in Europe, have not been introduced into domestic U.S. politics, commercial competition, or other forms of private life. After each war there is often a danger that the coarsening of a culture by the war will lead to the application of wartime skills to peacetime situations. This was emphatically not the case in the Presidential campaigns of 1948 and 1952, even though persons of rich PsyWar experience in World War II were on the staffs of both Stevenson and Eisenhower.

It is often forgotten that some of the deadliest and most effective revolutionary enterprises in the nineteenth century were undertaken without the consent or assistance of the existing governments. Karl Marx was certainly not an invention of Lord Palmerston. Bakunin did not operate out of the French Foreign Office.

In the postwar discussion of USA-Communist rivalry, recommendations were often made on the U.S. side that we should counter Soviet covert operations with our own covert operations against the USSR. What has been forgotten in this context is the fact that such operations have been made illegal and dangerous under United States law. Under Federal law as it exists today no Underground Railway could be developed to assist Soviet escapers in the way that Negro slaves were relayed across the Free States to Canada in the years before Emancipation. One of the chief blocks to U.S. covert operations is the immense growth in all directions of the power, authority, and responsibility of the Federal Government; this growth makes it almost impossible to wage revolutionary or conspiratorial operations from U.S. territory without the prior approval of U.S. authorities—which the authorities, under traditional international law, cannot give and cannot afford to give.

It would seem desirable, if the Cold War situation persists over a long period of time, for Americans to reexamine the restraints which they have placed upon their own citizens and to attempt a revision of the laws which would permit pro-American secret activities to be launched without permitting anti-American activities of the same kind to be carried on. One immediately comes to the conundrum:63

How can the Government say yes to the one and no to the other without being cognizant of what happens?

The answer would appear to lie in the older body of our law in that a withdrawal of governmental authority from some fields would leave the individual responsible and subject to indictment and trial if his enterprises should prove deleterious to the United States Government, but not subject to punishment if his enterprises hurt the known antagonists of the USA.

Phrased in another way, this means that the USA might, in a long-range Cold War situation, be required to make some domestic recognition of the fact that the Communist states are the antagonists but not the military enemies of the U.S. system of government and that as antagonists of this system of government such states, their representatives, their property, and their organizations, should not be afforded any more protection under our laws than is given to the National City Bank of New York in the laws applicable to the city of Moscow, or the American Telephone & Telegraph Company in the laws which apply in Budapest. For a long time the Communist states have treated even the most innocent business enterprise and social club on our side as though they were attainted with an inherent factor of criminal and subversive intent. The withdrawal of U.S. legal protection from all things Communist might allow the American people—or those among them who so chose—to develop proclivities for adventure and trouble-making against the Communists. These proclivities are now sternly repressed by Federal statute.

This is not the end of the story.

One of the paradoxical but deeply true factors in the study and conduct of propaganda is this: the more people know about propaganda, the better they can resist it.

Propaganda was a tremendous bogey in the 1920s. It probably seems very ugly and frightening to most people born before 1920. It does not seem too frightening, so far as the author can judge, to Americans born after 1930. Those born in the period 1920-30 appear to be divided in their emotional reactions to mass persuasion situations.

PsyWar is not magic. It is a valuable auxiliary to modern warfare and a useful concomitant to modern strategy. If a particular strategic policy is sanely and effectively devised as a feasible deterrent to war, the PsyWar procedures supporting that strategy will contribute to the prevention of war. Psychological warfare represents a recognition and acceptance in the military and strategic field of skills which grow about us every day.

In so far as ultra-destructive weapons may have increased the tenseness and bad temper of people who must live under the perpetual but remote threat of atomic bombing, one can say that physicists have upset the nerves of mankind and that it is now up to the propagandists to reassure and to reconcile the peoples.

Whatever PsyWar does, it certainly does not and should not increase the bitterness of war. Fighting itself is the supreme bitterness. Radio broadcasts and leaflets even in wartime only rarely should promote hatred. The situation which the world faces is dangerous because of technological development, not because of psychological knowledge. PsyWar ranks as a weapon, but it is almost certainly the most humane of all weapons.

Apart from PsyWar, what military weapon destroys the enemy soldier's capacity to fight by saving his life? PsyWar tries to bring him over alive and tries to send him home as our friend. No rival weapon can do this.

PsyWar, no matter what it may be called in the future, cannot be omitted from the arsenal of modern war. Neither can it outlast war. Its improvement is a cheap, valuable, and humane way of increasing the military potential of any country whether we think that country to be politically right or politically wrong.

Since 1945 we Americans have written more, studied more, and talked more about PsyWar than have any of the other free peoples. This is a hopeful sign. It can be read as an indication that the American love of the gadget, the American quest for a novelty, can be turned to the arena of the soul. The Communists are better liars, better schemers, better murderers than we shall ever be; they start off by being better fanatics. Is it not in the American spirit that we should out-trick them, out-talk them, and out-maneuver them? We have a very creative and resourceful civilization at our backs. We have no FÜhrer to guide us and no party line to comfort us; we don't even want such things. Hard though it may be, we can live with our own consciences and not seek for keepers.

The Communists have started a fight with us. That fight may go on a long time. If they want to stop fighting we shall certainly try to find peace with them. But if they push the fight to its bitter end—

We shall not fail.