3 Covert Crusade

The conclusion of the Second World War left the United States with a massive global infrastructure for waging psychological warfare, both in its occupying forces and in its numerous Office of War Information (OWI) outposts. However, competition and conflict both within and between the Departments of State and the Army produced what Army historian Alfred Paddock (1973) has called ‘crosscurrents of uncertainty and caution’ over if, where, and how the United States should continue to wage psychological war in the future. Though the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and the OWI were officially dissolved in September 1945, key personnel from these organisations continued to advocate for psychological war until the establishment of their respective successor agencies: the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in 1947 and the United States Information Agency (USIA) in 1953. In the interim, struggles over psychological warfare between the Departments of State and the Army revolved around the related questions of whether or not the United States should wage psychological war in times of peace, and whether psychological war should be a civilian or military responsibility.

In this chapter, I show how these ‘crosscurrents of uncertainty and caution’ led to the assumption of responsibility for psychological warfare by the CIA in the years before the establishment of the USIA. I focus on the so-called Crusade for Freedom, in which the CIA covertly organised and funded an ostensibly private group of American citizens called the National Committee for a Free Europe (NCFE), which in turn waged a proxy psychological war against the Soviet Union through the establishment of Radio Free Europe, a radio station based in West Germany broadcasting to the Soviet satellite states. I draw particular attention to the way that Radio Free Europe’s psychological war was predicated upon the Crusade for Freedom’s appearance as an independent, citizen-run body. Central to the ruse was constructing the public perception that the Crusade was financed by and through the efforts of private, ordinary American citizens devoted to ‘fighting for freedom’ abroad. In examining the CIA’s covert Crusade for Freedom within the United States, I argue that the geopolitical imaginary of psychological warfare that began in the summer of 1940 was increasingly tied to the personal responsibility of American individuals to wage it.

Central to the post-1945 psychological war landscape was the Allied occupation of Germany, Austria, Japan, and Korea. In charge of consolidation propaganda in occupied Germany was Major General Robert McClure, the ‘forgotten father’ of Army special and psychological warfare. Appointed by Dwight Eisenhower as head of the Psychological Warfare Division of the Supreme Headquarters of the Allied Expeditionary Forces (PWD/SHAEF) in Europe in 1944, McClure’s Psychological Warfare Division became the Information Control Division (ICD) in 1945 and was responsible for the ‘de-nazification’ of Germany by assuming total control over media production and distribution.

In what had become ‘the biggest newspaper enterprise in the world’, McClure described the scale of the ICD’s control over Germany’s communication systems in a 1946 letter to his friend and former psychological war deputy C. D. Jackson:

We now control 37 newspapers, 6 radio stations, 314 theatres, 642 movies, 101 magazines, 237 book publishers, 7,384 book dealers and printers, and conduct about 15 public opinion surveys a month, as well as publish one newspaper with 1,500,000 circulation, 3 magazines, run the Associated Press of Germany (DANA), and operate 20 library centers … The job is tremendous. (Cited in Paddock 2018, n.p.)

The system of control was similar to that employed in Italy, beginning with a complete halt to domestic media production, the re-establishment of circulation under military control, and the gradual return of media production and circulation to German citizens under a strict and restrictive licensing system subsequent to extensive political and psychiatric vetting of editors (Levy 1947). As Daugherty and Janowitz (1958, 363) note, the ‘re-establishment of a democratic press’ in Germany involved a contradictory state of political exception: ‘in a basic sense’, they write, ‘it was a paradoxical objective since arbitrary and authoritarian means had to be employed in pursuit of democratic objectives’.

A working agreement between Elmer Davis at the OWI and McClure at the PWD/SHAEF, now the Information Control Division, ensured that policy for the German press was coordinated across the occupying authority. As Albert Norman (1951, 20) recounts, the ICD proceeded through three phases of curtailing, restoring, and managing the circulation of news in Germany:

The first phase [of the reorientation policy] called for the total prohibition of German public education and cultural media; the second for the employment of official (‘overt’, as it was then called) American educational services and the simultaneous searching out of anti-Nazi Germans who could be trusted to re-establish indigenous media under Military Government supervision; and the third phase, for the gradual transition to complete control of the cultural media by the Germans themselves, under the supervision of the Military Government authorities.

The final stage’s ‘supervision’ entailed not only a discerning selection of editors, but also the creation of a punitive monitoring system which exerted control over the breadth of allowable debate. One measure of overt censorship involved a ban on criticism of the occupying authorities: ‘such attacks were indeed contrary to directives, which stipulated that no attacks on settled military government policy would be printed’. In one case, an offending newspaper was ordered to reduce its issues from six to four pages for a month’s time, while in another case editors were reprimanded and directed to stay within official guidelines. Despite the lack of a free press, Norman (1951, 41) happily concluded that ‘all in all the German press could fairly be said to be moving toward becoming a free democratic organ’.

Editors selected by American occupying forces underwent thorough vetting, often more rigorous than that required for other fields of public life, indicating the esteem in which the power of the press was held. In order to qualify for a publishing licence, editors were required to undergo exhaustive field investigation, often with weeks-long psychiatric interviews to establish the candidates’ political orientation and loyalty. Particular emphasis was placed upon prospective editors’ willingness to comply with American requirements that a reconstructed German press follow the strictures of a ‘non-political press’. Unlike the British and Soviet occupied zones, editors selected in the American zone curtailed the establishment of the party presses that had dominated the German news landscape before the war. While some critics saw the denial of the right of political parties to publish newspapers as a denial of the democratic process, Norman flatly asserted that ‘most Germans approved of the non-party press and credited their newspapers with having remained impartial in discussing political problems’ (Norman 1951, 40). Suggesting a bridging continuity with the OWI’s ostensible ‘strategy of truth’, the emphasis on factual news was explicitly conceived in contrast to editorial, partisan, or advocacy-centred approaches to news production. As Norman (1951, 32) explained,

the type of newspaper the American military government authorities wished to see the Germans introduce was one that emphasized straightforward news reporting, with emphasis on international rather than on provincial news. This would mean less editorializing and more factual news reporting of events. In pre-Hitler days it was the political editorial, not the current news, which received the major emphasis in German newspapers.

It was under these conditions that the press re-emerged in Germany. The first German-language newspaper published in the US zone of occupation was the Frankfurter Rundschau, appearing on 31 July 1945 with an initial circulation of 500,000. More newspapers were soon established in Heidelberg, Marburg, Stuttgart, Bremen, Wiesbaden, Munich, Garmisch-Partenkirchen, and Nuremburg, as well as in Hof, Augsburg, Darmstadt, and Regensburg. By late 1946, thirty-eight newspapers were licensed in the American zone, with a circulation of roughly four million. In June 1945, a German News Service (Deutsche Allgemeine Nachrichten Agentur: DANA) was established on the model of the American Associated Press. Like the newspapers themselves, DANA was first operated under complete military control and gradually handed over to publishers licensed by the American occupying force. By 1946, ‘the news service was completely in German hands, free to conduct its own affairs, subject only to the few restrictions then applied to the indigenous press as a whole’ (Norman 1951, 43).

The appraisal of the German press under the ICD as free, democratic, and non-political brings into stark relief the police function of the press under occupation. Having curtailed all media circulation in the American zone, the ICD went about re-establishing circulation contingent upon a restrictive and punitive licensing system to encourage the production of a self-censoring German press system. It was a miniature of what Neocleous (2000) has identified as the transformation of the disciplinary logic of police to the disciplinary logic of the market, here in the form of a highly contingent liberal ‘free press’. It resembled what served in another context as a model for American power through the establishment and financing of a liberal press which ‘may rightfully be regarded as autonomous; but in the exercise of its autonomy will naturally have due regard for the source of its funds’ (‘Understanding’ 1949).¹ What resulted was a system not of free competition, but one in which a nominally liberal press acquired the appearance of editorial independence from party rule as such, while authority was exercised through the gradual transition to path-dependent presses set up by editors loyal to American occupying officials.

As head of the United States’ vast psychological war apparatus, McClure attempted to solidify the status of psychological warfare in domestic debates over its nature and place in times of peace. Alongside General Eisenhower, McClure advocated for keeping psychological warfare under military control. McClure and Eisenhower had become friends during the 1942 Darlan affair in North Africa, where along with Time–Life–Fortune Vice President C. D. Jackson the three worked on damage control over Eisenhower’s decision to work with Vichy France (Cook 1984, 46). As debates over the future of psychological warfare developed between 1946 and 1947 in State–War–Navy Coordinating Committees, Eisenhower reached out to his former psychological war chief to insist that they must ‘keep psywar alive’ within the Army (Paddock 1973, 74).

Despite the support for psychological war from major figures such as Eisenhower and McClure, many Army officers believed that the military should not be ‘selling democracy’ in times of peace. As a correspondence between US Army Generals Willard Wyman and General Lauris Norstad reveals, many in the Army were apprehensive about psychological war during peacetime. As was often the case, however, apprehension attached primarily to concerns over the public’s hostility towards psychological war. In a letter to Norstad, Wyman wrote that there was ‘a great need for a synonym which could be used in peacetime that would not shock the sensibilities of a citizen of democracy’. In another letter to Major General Eddy, Norstad warned of ‘huge opposition’ from the public and press if plans to continue psychological warfare were not presented ‘very carefully’. Though it was perhaps an underestimation of the willingness of the press to cooperate in a Cold War context, General Eddy agreed, suggesting that psychological warfare should continue ‘under the aegis of an agency not directly connected with the armed forces’ (cited in Paddock 1973, 77–8).

In a meeting in November 1947, the secretaries of the Army, Navy, Air Force, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff determined that as matters of state policy both overt and covert propaganda operations should belong to the Department of State, and on 24 November 1947 President Harry Truman assigned psychological warfare coordination to Secretary of State George Marshall. Indicative again of the ‘uncertainty and caution’ surrounding psychological warfare, the decision was reversed after only three weeks, with Marshall objecting to the State Department’s involvement in covert operations that could, if revealed, embarrass the Department and harm diplomatic relations. Like General Wyman, however, Marshall’s opposition was not to psychological warfare as such but to State Department culpability. Marshall’s recommendation was that psychological warfare be waged with guidance from the Department of State, but at a plausibly deniable remove. The result was that in both military and diplomatic circles enthusiasm for psychological warfare was tempered by an aversion to culpability should covert programmes be exposed. The situation was ripe, therefore, for the passage of a National Security Council directive (NSC-4A) on 14 December 1947 that placed responsibility for psychological warfare within the newly established CIA in only its third month of existence (National Security Council 1947).

In response to NSC-4A, those in the Department of the Army who wished for psychological warfare to remain an Army responsibility argued that, as a kind of ‘war’, psychological warfare belonged within a military structure. A study initiated by the Army in January 1948 discussed ‘insidious and destructive’ communist propaganda that it claimed ‘directly threatened’ American national security. The Army argued that ‘inasmuch as the use of propaganda as a weapon of either war or peace is of fundamental concern to the Department of the Army, it is believed imperative that Army efforts in this field be coordinated and directed’ (cited in Paddock 1973, 83). On the question of ‘public sensitivity’ concerning psychological warfare, the Army study concluded that

the fact that the American people and Congress do not like and/or are afraid of domestic propaganda, is no excuse for us to sidestep our responsibility. The responsibility of accepting the consequence of doing nothing is far greater. The American people have proved [sic] too many times that they can ‘take it’ if they are told why. (Cited in Paddock 1973, 83)

The study had been produced by the Army’s Department of Planning and Operations in close collaboration with McClure and other Army partisans. However, opinions differed within the armed forces on the question of psychological war. Omar Bradley, the first chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, saw psychological warfare as appropriate in times of war, but not in peacetime. As McClure countered, however, given the scale of the Army’s psychological warfare operations in occupied Germany, Japan, and Korea, the Department of the Army was already ‘the foremost US propaganda agency of our government’. The State Department, McClure continued, had not ‘taken over its responsibilities in this field for a number of reasons’, but foremost among them was that, relative to the new Department of Defense, it lacked the appropriations to do so (Paddock 1973, 89).

The issue of appropriations came up again later, but in the interim McClure illustrated his point in a letter to Army General Albert Wedemeyer reproducing the litany of extant US Army psychological warfare operations. Concluding what historian Alfred Paddock has called ‘one of the most comprehensive communications on the subject of psywar written by an Army officer during the interwar years’, McClure urged recognition of psychological warfare as an Army responsibility. He called for the establishment of an organisation within the National Defenses to carry out operations, planning, and research, and for the recruitment of ‘willing, experienced civilians’ such as his wartime deputy C. D. Jackson. In Wedemeyer’s response to McClure, he explained that the decision to implement a psychological warfare capability was essentially out of the Army’s hands and in those of the National Security Council. However, Wedemeyer relayed to McClure the interest of a young Frank Wisner, head of the CIA’s new Office of Special Projects. In recognition of McClure’s status as ‘the most knowledgeable and experienced officer in the game’, Wisner was keen to recruit McClure to the CIA.

McClure declined, and many in the Army had justifiable concerns that Wisner would become ‘another [William] Donovan’ who would ‘run away with the ball’ (Corson 1977, 304). The beginning of the Korean War in 1950 brought back to the fore the question of the Army’s capacity to wage psychological war, leading to struggles between McClure and Wisner over control of guerrilla and covert operations in the field. Having declined Wisner’s offer, McClure became on 15 January 1951 head of the Army’s Office of the Chief of Psychological Warfare, which sought to combine psychological warfare with the ‘unconventional warfare activities’ of subterfuge, sabotage, and guerrilla activities behind enemy lines. With the support of Secretary of the Army Frank Pace, a man with an ‘intense personal interest’ in psychological warfare, the Korean War became a new testing ground for psychological war in theatre combat. Indeed, US forces in Korea produced a mixture of tactical and strategic leaflets that combined amounted to thirteen million per week. Tactical leaflets included claims of good treatment for prisoners of war and appeals for defection, as well as the perennial theme of American ‘material superiority’ and the subsequent ‘body count’ figures it produced.²

Just as advocates in the Army made their bid for Army control over psychological warfare, so too did advocates from the Department of State. After NSC-4A assigned covert psychological warfare operations to the CIA, George Kennan lamented that ‘we [in the State Department] are ill-equipped to engage in political and psychological conflict with the Soviet world’ (cited in Lucas 1996, 284). Kennan’s advocacy in 1948 was decisive in pushing the State Department to take an aggressive stance towards the Soviet Union, with his policy planning staff training and employing refugees from the Soviet bloc in psychological warfare. Like the Army, the Department of State wished to be involved in the planning of psychological warfare activities, yet also removed from culpability for it. In this Kennan was again aided by the CIA’s Frank Wisner, whose Office of Special Projects could provide both the desired coordination with, and distance from, psychological war.

It was in the context of these cross-currents of reticence and enthusiasm at the Departments of the Army and State that responsibility for psychological warfare ultimately landed with the CIA. Having been established precisely for the conduct of such covert operations, the creation of the CIA allowed for the reproduction of the wartime division between the ‘black’ operations of the OSS, which used deceit, subterfuge, and misattribution, and the ‘white’ operations of the OWI, whose ‘strategy of truth’ advertised objective and factual war reporting. As William Donovan noted during the Second World War, though the OWI and OSS often clashed over jurisdiction, both black and white operations in fact worked in tandem: to maintain the façade of a ‘strategy of truth’, covert operations needed to be externalised from overt ones. Through participation in coordinating committees such as Wisner’s Office of Special Projects (later renamed the Office of Policy Coordination) and President Truman’s Psychological Strategy Board, the State Department could shield itself from diplomatic exposure, while the Army could avoid apparent encroachment on matters of policymaking.

One of the first major psychological warfare operations organised by the CIA was the establishment of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty in Eastern Europe (Cummings 2010a; Johnson 2010; Mickelson 1983). While the purpose of the Radios was to broadcast pro-capitalist, anti-communist propaganda behind the Iron Curtain, like the construction of psychological warfare between 1940 and 1941, the establishment of the Radios involved a massive publicity campaign within the United States, this time to create the illusion that the Radios were fully funded through voluntary donations by ordinary US citizens. Once again, the establishment of a large-scale psychological warfare operation abroad was intimately tied to the construction of a domestic geopolitical imaginary of psychological warfare and the role of the ordinary American citizen within it. However, while the 1940–1 campaign revolved around the theme of ‘psychological defense’ against a German ‘strategy of terror’, a new campaign beginning in 1950 constructed a geopolitical imaginary in which the United States would take the offensive in a new international war of ideas.

In its own public retrospective, the CIA (2007) called Radio Free Europe ‘one of the longest running and successful covert action campaigns ever mounted by the United States’, having maintained successful cover until the late 1960s behind a domestic front group called the National Committee for a Free Europe (later renamed the Free Europe Committee). The Committee enjoyed a line-up of OSS veterans surrounded by prominent American businessmen and politicians. Notable members included William Donovan, Allen Dulles, Dwight Eisenhower, Lucius Clay, Henry Luce, and Dewitt Wallace, owner of Reader’s Digest magazine (see Sharp 2001).³ Though it is unclear whether all its membership was aware of the group’s CIA origin, it is likely that the agency’s role remained an open secret, especially for those, like Donovan, directly connected to the intelligence community. For its part, the Committee sustained the CIA’s cover by creating the illusion that it was an organic civil society organisation spontaneously formed by concerned citizens to ‘fight communism in the war of ideas’.

The origins of the programme can be traced to a 30 April 1948 planning paper written by Kennan for the National Security Council in which he discusses the creation of such a private committee working undercover, but in close relation to the US government, to sponsor the activities of political exiles from Soviet-aligned countries. Whereas the post-war Fulbright programme sought to expand global US influence through the coordination of exchange programmes, Kennan’s envisioned programme would foster political exiles in the United States to leverage their voices against the Soviet Union both domestically and abroad. Its guiding philosophy would be that psychological warfare featuring ‘indigenous’ voices would be received in their native countries as more authentic, an early illustration of what Katz et al. (1955) famously called the ‘two-step’ propaganda technique.

While much of the uncertainty surrounding psychological warfare in the post-war years revolved around the question of its use in times of peace, Kennan firmly believed that the necessity of waging psychological war erased the distinction between war and peace altogether. In the opening line of the planning paper in which he outlines what later became the Committee for a Free Europe, Kennan (1948) presaged Foucault’s observation thirty years later that ‘political warfare is the logical application of Clausewitz’s doctrine in time of peace’. While the logic of ‘total war’ had done much to effect a breakdown between military and civilian life, for Kennan it had not gone far enough, and the United States remained ‘handicapped by a popular attachment to the concept of a basic difference between peace and war’.

Like George Marshall before him, Kennan believed that the State Department should coordinate both overt and covert psychological warfare while maintaining optical distance and deniability. Kennan had been ‘deeply impressed by the results achieved in Italy’ in 1948, where the CIA had funded Christian democrats against communists. Kennan’s intention was to expand on the tactics used in Italy to ‘create a mechanism for direct intervention in the electoral processes of foreign governments’ (Mickelson 1983, 14). Kennan specifically advised the creation of ‘liberation committees’ for the purpose of producing ‘liberation movements’ in the Soviet world. He argued that the work of these committees should appear overt, led by ‘trusted private American citizens’, but in reality ‘receive covert guidance and possibly assistance from the Government’. Again, plausible deniability was paramount: ‘while covert political warfare must be controlled by the [State] Department, the direction should not be physically in the Department of State’, more so since the funds necessary to arrange such an operation could not be concealed within the State Department’s budget. Recalling McClure’s point that the State Department would have trouble funding psychological warfare that the Army would not, Kennan (1948) wrote that ‘the NSC Secretariat would seem to provide the best possible cover for such a directorate’.

A year later, on 19 April 1949, plans for what would become the NCFE were ready to be implemented. Two OSS veterans – the CIA’s Frank Wisner and the NCFE’s first president DeWitt Poole – met with FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover in his Washington, DC, office to discuss plans for the operation and to secure the latter’s blessing concerning the use of foreign émigrés in the programme. Hoover was enthusiastic, believing that ‘communism could be withstood only by education’, and insisted that the pair recruit a ‘quality’ executive membership for the proposed committee. He suggested furthermore that Wisner’s office should consult the FBI’s files when vetting émigré agents and informants for use in the programme. The suggestion was happily received with the caveat that the Committee be allowed to liaise with the FBI’s New York office, since it was ‘desirable for this committee to keep out of Washington as much as possible’ (‘Office of Policy Coordination’ 1949).

It was an extraordinary meeting. While Hoover’s importance in waging the Cold War is well understood, Wisner and Poole remain more obscure figures; at that time, the first was approaching the pinnacle of his power and influence, while the latter was coming to the end of a long and distinguished career. Before the Second World War, Frank Wisner was, like his friend William Donovan, a Wall Street lawyer, who had in fact been recruited by Donovan for service in the OSS. At the OSS, Wisner took on various assignments: first in Cairo, then in Istanbul, before eventually being driven from Budapest in 1944 by the advancing Red Army (Dorchester 2015; Jeffreys-Jones 2000). After the war Wisner returned to Wall Street, becoming a senior partner at the law firm Carter Ledyard before being recruited by the State Department in 1947. There he worked quickly to become director of its Office of Special Projects, soon renamed to the secretive Office of Policy Coordination. In 1951 Wisner succeeded Allen Dulles as the CIA’s second Deputy Director of Plans, controlling major portions of the CIA’s budget and personnel. As Deputy Director, Wisner oversaw major covert operations, including the overthrow of Iran’s Mossadegh in 1953 and Guatemala’s Jacobo Arbenz in 1954 (Cullather 1994).

Wisner was also involved in other significant intelligence operations, from the stay-behind networks in post-war Europe (Wala 2016) to supporting the failed Hungarian uprising of 1956. However, it was during this decisive period in the late 1940s and early 1950s that Wisner set up his most infamous operation, Project Mockingbird. Though details remain unclear, Mockingbird was carried out under Wisner’s Office of Policy Coordination and is generally agreed to have involved recruiting foreign and domestic journalists to gather intelligence and manipulate media coverage of the Cold War (Flynn 2015, 432). Public knowledge of Mockingbird was partially revealed by the Church Committee of 1975, but as Carl Bernstein (1977) reported, information on the CIA’s journalist programme remained guarded as more sensational revelations grabbed headlines.⁴

It remains the case that ‘questions abound’ (Maret 2018) concerning Operation Mockingbird and Frank Wisner’s role in developing contacts in the American news media; however, some estimates suggest that by the mid-1950s almost 600 journalists globally – including prominent journalists at CBS, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and Newsweek – were involved in the programme (Bernstein 1977; Davis 1979; Flynn 2015; Loory 1974). As described by Loory (1974, 12) in the Columbia Journalism Review,

Wisner built an organization that he laughingly but lovingly called ‘my mighty Wurlitzer’. It was a wondrous machine that used many instruments – charitable foundations, labor unions, book publishers, the student movement – to play variations on a theme: the discrediting of communism, the shaming of the Soviet Union, the promotion of the Christian Democratic movement in Western Europe and the building of a positive image for the United States abroad.

The other man in the room with Hoover and Wisner was DeWitt Poole, another OSS veteran who, unlike Wisner, was at the end of a long career that began with Foreign Service posts in Paris and Berlin before the First World War. After assignment to Russia during the 1917 revolution, he became chief of the State Department’s Russian division in 1919. He later resigned from this position, protesting that the United States had not been critical enough of the ‘complete immorality of the Bolshevik leaders’ and what he understood as Lenin’s ‘world policy’ of communist expansion (Lees 2000, 90). In 1930, Poole became the head of Princeton’s School of Public and International Affairs, where he ‘developed his views on the vital role to be played in democracy by the active citizen’ (Scott-Smith 2014, 96). In 1937, he co-founded Public Opinion Quarterly, which after the Second World War became the academic clearinghouse for psychological warfare research and debate (see Simpson 1994).

In a 1940 Princeton address, Poole had insisted that the role of government was to create in its citizens a ‘belligerent loyalty’ towards the United States and the ‘liberal-democratic’ way of life. A year later he joined William Donovan on the ground floor of the Office of the Coordinator of Information (CoI) and then at the OSS, heading the Foreign Nationalities Branches (FNB) of both. At the FNB, Poole coordinated the exploitation of recent immigrants, political exiles, and refugees as both sources of intelligence and psychological warfare assets, particularly as concerned their home countries and respective diasporas within the United States. The selection of Poole as president of the Committee for a Free Europe was thus a natural choice, given its reproduction of the tactics and themes of his FNB at the CoI and OSS.

During his time as head of the FNB, Poole employed themes of ‘spiritual’ and psychological warfare to foreshadow the crusade against communism he envisioned after the end of the Second World War. In a speech on 3 July 1942, he insisted that

[d]‌emocracy must turn militant again … To reconquer the key positions of the world, democracy must not only put forth armies of the sword but send after them, as rapidly as the fighting lets up, equally equipped armies of the spirit – convinced and trained missionaries, propagandists. Without this sequel the present war becomes only a gesture of defense offering at best but negative and short-term gains. The surest, perhaps the only, insurance against another world-wide civil cataclysm soon again is to win a preponderance of the strong peoples of the world to some single general faith and purpose … My proposal is that two systems of scholarships be at once set up with a view to training a good number of carefully selected young women and men citizens, chiefly those of recent foreign extraction, to become working missionaries of democracy in the post-armistice world. (Cited in Scott-Smith 2014, 96)

Mirroring his conviction that the Soviet Union meant to embark upon a mission of world revolution, Poole saw the expansion of American liberal capitalism as an article of missionary faith for the post-war world. After the war, Poole was heavily involved in European affairs, serving as chief of the State Department’s interrogation programme in Germany, which collected intelligence and vetted Germans for leadership roles for the task of rebuilding the German state. It was as president of the NCFE, however, that Poole most forcefully pursued his vision of liberal-capitalist evangelism at the forefront of the anti-communist state–private networks of the Cold War.

With Hoover’s blessing to recruit a ‘quality’ executive, Wisner and Poole set about finding suitable membership for the NCFE. Its first chairman, Joseph Grew, a career diplomat, played the role of the concerned private citizen in his recruitment of other influential and connected Americans. In a 27 May 1949 recruitment letter to Charles P. Taft, son of the former president, Grew (1949) insisted that the NCFE would ‘fit the American habit that private citizens should take the initiative’ to ‘combat the mounting threat of communism’. It was an ironic claim given the extent to which the NCFE was conceived and executed at the highest levels of government. Nevertheless, Grew recruited members on the principle that it could fight communism in the ‘sector of ideas’, as a complement to the military and economic strategies of NATO and the Marshall Plan.

Much like Poole’s FNB at the OSS, the FCNE proposed to groom and leverage political refugees from the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe for use in psychological war, particularly in radio appeals to their respective home countries. As Grew put it, Radio Free Europe would ‘put the voices of refugee political leaders on the air so that they will be heard by their own peoples in Europe, in their own languages, in the old familiar tones’. However, like Poole’s FNB, which took plays ‘out of the Creel book’ as well as its own ‘store of stratagems and tricks’, leveraging foreign political exiles was also an opportunity to intervene in US political life (Lees 2000, 85). To this end, foreign recruits who were ‘qualified by personality and mastery of English’ were put at the disposal of ‘trade unions, farm organizations, colleges and universities, churches, civic organizations, women’s clubs and other organizations’ to educate their various memberships on the purported evils of communism (Grew 1949).

In the summer of 1949, an official press release heralding the establishment of the NCFE cited an apparent American commitment to ‘opposing despotism’ (NCFE 1949) as its raison d’être. The committee did not parse words in insisting that ‘Communist oppressors have replaced Nazi oppressors’. Calling the Soviet Union a ‘slave society’, the NCFE’s motto, which appeared on all its promotional material, paraphrased Abraham Lincoln’s anti-slavery Gettysburg Address, replacing its national imaginary for a global one: ‘this world, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom’ (NCFE 1951b, emphasis in original).⁵ In this geopolitical imagination, US liberal-capitalism’s fight against communism was clothed not only in the mantle of slavery abolition, but also as a holy and righteous crusade. Reviving the religious undertones of spiritual self-defence surrounding psychological warfare, the NCFE cast the Cold War as a ‘struggle for the souls of men’.

Soon after the NCFE’s official debut, its evangelical undertones were made overt via the announcement of a ‘Crusade for Freedom’ on Labor Day 1950. Led by General Lucius Clay, the charismatic figure at the centre of the previous year’s ‘Berlin air lift’, the Crusade was launched in a national radio address by presidential hopeful Dwight Eisenhower, then-president of Columbia University. The context of Labor Day was significant, as Eisenhower again stressed that under Communism ‘one third of the human race works in virtual bondage’ (New York Times, 5 September 1950a). On its surface, the Crusade for Freedom’s debut therefore appeared as a campaign to publicise the NCFE and its effort to fund and operate Radio Free Europe in Eastern Europe.

Within the framework of funding Radio Free Europe, however, the NCFE advanced a geopolitical imaginary in which ordinary Americans could participate in a kind of ‘spiritual warfare’ against the Soviet Union, what the New York Times supportively called a ‘world-wide battle for men’s minds’ (New York Times, 4 July 1950). The Times barely altered NCFE press releases in framing the Crusade as filling ‘the need for a large-scale democratic truth offensive … in the most important battle of all, the battle of ideas’ (New York Times, 28 July 1950). This so-called battle of ideas revived the spectre of fifth columns in the United States and Western Europe. The people of Western Europe were, the NCFE claimed, struggling to ‘guard their freedom against a fifth column attack which is without precedent for its lack of principle, its intensity and its range of action’ (NCFE 1949).

While pre-war fifth column alarmism in the United States primarily concerned convincing Americans that they were under siege by German subversives, the Crusade for Freedom repurposed the narrative to construct an image of US psychological warfare in which the United States could similarly wage war at a distance against an enemy ideology. Playing again on the stage set by the OWI’s ‘strategy of truth’ and its biblical refrain that ‘the truth shall set you free’, the Crusade advanced a kind of Christian-liberal revolutionary idealism. As Eisenhower argued in his Labor Day speech, ‘the communist leaders believe that, unless they destroy our system, their own subjects, gradually gaining an understanding of the blessings and opportunities of liberty, will repudiate communism and tear its dictators from their positions of power’ (New York Times, 5 September 1950a).

The Crusade exhaustively advanced a geopolitical imagination in which individual citizens qua individuals could wage psychological war. While Edmond Taylor’s ‘nerve privates’ took primarily defensive positions against an ostensible barrage of German psychological war, the Crusade promised to give the American citizen the psychological initiative by transforming them into a kind of private liberator-warrior (Figure 3.1). Against the ‘devilish libel’ of Soviet propaganda, Eisenhower promised ‘every American the chance to participate directly to counter this propaganda assault’ (New York Times, 5 September 1950b, emphasis mine). The theme of participation was significant; however, like Dewitt Poole’s emphasis on the importance of the ‘active citizen’ in securing democratic morale, participation in psychological war against communism took strange, often risible forms.⁶ While the liberal rhetoric of participation and political activity were presented as ciphers for the freedom of the individual in a liberal-capitalist society, closer analysis suggests that the Crusade for Freedom can be understood not as the exercise of autonomous or collective political agency, but as an archetypal exercise in governmental power.

The operation of governmental power can especially be discerned in the Crusade’s efforts to harness the agency of American citizens for two major domestic psychological war efforts: the solicitation of ‘truth dollars’ to fund Radio Free Europe, and  the signing of ‘freedom scrolls’, both of which were a means for Americans to pledge themselves in ‘the fight against communism’. Like the 1940–1 effort to construct a popular geopolitical imagination of psychological warfare, these efforts had the ouroboric effect of doing propaganda for propaganda. They can be understood in terms of avowal and investment, which a 1951 Crusade pamphlet (NCFE 1951b) describes as

The following sections investigate the significance of the Crusade for Freedom’s psychological warfare within the United States. They suggest that the Crusade’s domestic propaganda operated by constructing a liberal geopolitical imaginary of psychological warfare based on the participation of citizens through acts of avowal (signing of the ‘freedom scroll’) and investment (donating ‘truth dollars’). In examining these acts of avowal and investment, I argue that psychological warfare in the United States was underwritten not only by acts of deception, but also through the productive employment of ordinary citizens.

Though the operating costs of Radio Free Europe and its parent Committee for a Free Europe were fully paid for by the CIA, the illusion that both were organic, grassroots initiatives was imperative to their operation. This illusion was sustained by the Crusade’s solicitation of so-called truth dollars, small donations from American citizens that allowed Radio Free Europe to appear as a fully private and independent organisation funded by ordinary Americans. Calls for ‘truth dollar’ donations appeared in magazines, radio advertisements, workplace pledge drives, and sometimes even fell from the sky in the form of airdropped leaflets. Donors were encouraged to give as much as they could, but the suggested donation of a single truth dollar reflected the CNFE’s interest in drawing the widest possible constituency into its fold. Paid return postage and envelopes for donations were often provided by the Crusade, ironically costing the NCFE more in administrative costs than the dollar received therein. Even though the average truth dollar donation represented a financial loss for the Committee, CIA funding meant the Crusade could spend lavishly to advertise the truth dollar drive and maintain the appearance of a grassroots movement to ‘fight against communism’.

Central to the Crusade for Freedom’s vision was the belief that, as a private organisation, Radio Free Europe could act in ways that the United States government could not. In his 1950 Labor Day speech, Eisenhower lauded Voice of America but stressed the United States’ need for ‘powerful radio stations abroad, without Government restrictions’. As the New York Times suggested, diplomatic considerations prevented the State Department and Voice of America from ‘speaking too bluntly’ to foreign peoples and governments (New York Times, 5 September 1950b). As an ostensibly private, citizen-led organisation, however, it was believed that Radio Free Europe could achieve what Voice of America could not. Indeed, the idea that Radio Free Europe could act as a ‘free enterprise’ cutting through government bureaucracy and inefficiency was a central feature of its rhetorical appeal. The ostensible voluntarism of the Crusade also satisfied the ideological conceits of the Cold War United States. When Crusade spokesman General Lucius Clay addressed a room of business and civic leaders at the Yale Club shortly after the Crusade’s launch, he therefore insisted that ‘it’s not our way of life to depend on government’; rather, ‘it’s up to every citizen to augment the Voice of America’ (New York Times, 20 September 1950). Clay’s words echoed former Undersecretary of State Joseph Grew’s recruitment letters which claimed that the Committee ‘fit the American habit that private citizens should take the initiative’. It therefore remained an enduring and fundamental irony that Radio Free Europe would have been totally impossible without massive covert funding from the US security state.

Beyond creating cover for CIA funding, solicitation of truth dollars dovetailed with the emergent geo-economic ideology of the ‘free flow of information’. As Herbert Schiller (1969, 1975) has demonstrated, rhetoric surrounding the ‘free flow of information’ was central to post-war American imperialism in the arena of communication. Couched in cosmopolitan language of ‘free and open’ exchange of culture and information, the free flow doctrine disguised the economic geography of the Cold War struggle over the political economy of communication in the developing world. As Schiller (1986, 57) argues,  

‘free flow’ cannot exist, according to media owners and editors, without a ‘free press’. And a ‘free press,’ still according to the wisdom of this group, depends on the financial support of advertising. ‘We acknowledge,’ the Talloires Declaration states, ‘the importance of advertising as a consumer service and in providing financial support for a strong and self-sustaining press. Without financial independence, the press cannot be independent.’

Though in the early 1950s American economic hegemony was far from that reflected in the 1981 Talloires Declaration, the logic equating the freedom of information with its privatisation and commodification had already materialised in the new international reach of US media industries. Celebration of US-led media privatisation as the standard-bearer for press freedom was correspondingly central to the Crusade’s rhetoric and promotional activities. As Roscoe Drummond, director of information for the Economic Cooperation Administration in Europe, noted on the occasion of the Crusade’s launch of 1,000 balloons from the Empire State Building in October 1950, ‘the communists are afraid to allow a free exchange of information … The time to spread the propaganda of truth and freedom is now’ (New York Times, 11 October 1950).⁸ The balloons for their part carried envelopes and promotional leaflets soliciting truth dollars from the citizens below, a stark illustration of the Crusade’s roots in psychological warfare techniques honed during the Second World War. In the geo-economic imagination, barriers to American capital and investment in the fields of news, media, and cultural production became de facto curbs on the ‘freedom of ideas’ and ‘freedom of speech’ as such. The truth dollar therefore functioned as a kind of rhetorical sleight of hand, conflating the freedom of US capital with freedom of speech writ large.

Despite the fact that Radio Free Europe’s operations were totally disconnected from its fundraising efforts, the Crusade nevertheless contrived to suggest a price equivalence for ‘truth behind the iron curtain’, claiming that ‘every dollar buys 100 words of truth’ (Figure 3.2). Not only did the Crusade advance the premise that private individuals could participate in psychological warfare in a private capacity, it also did so in a way that was fundamentally tied to the expression of personal and political agency through the market. If Foucault (2008, 31) notes that neoliberal ideology understands the market as a ‘site of veridiction’ where truth is expressed through the price mechanism, the Crusade went further to frame the market as a site where individuals could assert truth in ways that exceeded what was possible by the state.

Like the rhetorical sleight of hand through which it conflated freedom of capital with freedom of speech, the contrivance of a price mechanism through which American citizens could participate in psychological warfare reimagined individual political agency as an act of market exchange. In the geo-economic imaginary of the Crusade for Freedom, not only was Radio Free Europe a medium for broadcasting ‘truth’ behind the Iron Curtain, it also represented the deeper truth of market veridiction reflected in the Crusade’s appearance as a spontaneous, demand-driven, and self-organised market for political agency. In reality, the CIA’s organisation and funding of the Crusade contradicted every claim it advanced: it lost money on every truth dollar it collected, and the ostensible spontaneity of its private actors was in fact orchestrated by a large and centralised state bureaucracy. However, the fantasy of a spontaneous organisation of private actors achieving what government could not exemplified the idea that the market could act as a site of veridictive truth. While Radio Free Europe attempted to ‘fight communism’ in Eastern Europe, the Crusade for Freedom advanced a domestic political imaginary in which the American dollar became both a medium of personal political agency, and a guarantor of truth and freedom.

I believe in the sacredness and dignity of the individual.

I believe that all men derive the right of freedom equally from God.

I pledge to resist aggression and tyranny wherever they appear on earth.

I am proud to enlist in the Crusade for Freedom.

I am proud to help make the Freedom Bell possible, to be a signer of this Declaration of Freedom, to have my name included as a permanent part of the Freedom Shrine in Berlin, and to join with the millions of men and women throughout the world who hold the cause of freedom sacred.

Crusade for Freedom ‘Freedom Scroll’

Foucault’s identification of the market as a site of veridiction for neoliberal ideology came at a crossroads in his intellectual trajectory. Developed in the Birth of Biopolitics lecture series, his critique of neoliberalism was among his few substantive investigations of the 20th century, appearing after his Security, Territory, Population lectures, which focused mostly on the emergence of 17th- and 18th-century governmentality, and before his sudden and subsequent turn to the origins of Christianity. It was, however, the theme of ‘veridiction’ – of investigating procedures of the manifestation of truth through speech – that carried his interest both forward to an investigation of its significance to the history of the liberal present, and backwards to its Christian origins in practices of confession and avowal of self. While Foucault (2014a, 19, 17, 2014b, 80) only hinted at the political significance of avowal of self in the 20th century, the Crusade for Freedom is an extraordinary study of the way that avowal – ‘a verbal act through which the subject affirms who he is, and binds himself to this truth’ – created an ‘obligation for individuals to become essential actors in the procedures of manifestation of the truth’.

In addition to the solicitation of truth dollars, a central feature of the Crusade for Freedom involved the recruitment of Americans to sign so-called freedom scrolls pledging their commitment to the Crusade and its fight against communism. The scrolls mimicked in appearance the American Declaration of Independence while also invoking the ancient and biblical connotations of the scroll (Figure 3.3).⁹ Framed quite literally as a Christian crusade against communism, the scrolls reflected the Committee’s tendency to saturate its products in Christian imagery and to portray the Cold War as a Manichaean battle between Christianity and atheism. Eisenhower’s Labor Day speech announcing the launch of the Crusade, for example, condemned the Soviet Union’s ‘devilish libel’, its ‘evil broadcasts’, its ‘political wickedness’, and the serpentine features of its ‘hissing tirades’ and ‘communist venom’. While these rhetorical devices sought to leverage Christian majorities both in the United States and abroad – Italy in 1948 being the archetype – the Crusade can also be understood to have exploited Christian techniques of asserting pastoral forms of power over the American public.

Since the posthumous publication of Foucault’s later work on confession and avowal, scholars such as Stephen Legg (2016, 19) have considered ‘how procedures of truth have existed and developed alongside other genealogies and institutions of liberal power’. On this account the Crusade for Freedom’s drive to collect signatures on freedom scrolls can be understood precisely as a form of avowal – not only as an individual obligation to manifest truth abroad through the investment of truth dollars in Radio Free Europe, but also as an obligation to manifest truth about oneself. As the New York Times’ coverage of Eisenhower’s first Crusade speech suggests, the Crusade was ‘a call upon all Americans to re-dedicate themselves to the cause of freedom’, a reflexive act to ‘affirm the signer’s belief in world freedom’ (New York Times, 5 September 1950a, emphasis mine). As Eisenhower himself put it:

In this Battle for Truth, you and I have a definite part to play. During the Crusade, each of us will have the opportunity to sign the Freedom Scroll. It bears a declaration of our faith in freedom, and of our belief in the dignity of the individual, who derives the right of freedom from God. Each of us, by signing the Scroll, pledges to resist aggression and tyranny wherever they appear on Earth. Its words express what is in all our hearts. Your signature on it will be a blow for liberty. (Cited in New York Times, 5 September 1950b)

However, not everyone at NCFE supported the freedom scroll campaign. In a letter to Abbott Washburn dated 17 August 1950, Pete Carroll, Eisenhower’s friend and speechwriter, criticised the effort. ‘What good will signing a scroll do’, he asked. ‘Don’t they want some money? Why not say so? … Aren’t we aping the commies with this scroll business?’ (cited in Medhurst 1997, 653). As Washburn later recalled of its planning stages, ‘if we can get something that will raise money too, that [would be] great’. However, Washburn rejoined that ‘it was clear that [the Committee’s] first desire was involvement by the public to make this a volunteer thing’. While solicitation of funds for Radio Free Europe was central to the Committee’s cover as a private venture, the campaign’s real value was understood as its ability to involve US citizens in symbolic and moral acts of waging ‘spiritual war’ against communism. The collection of truth dollars and freedom scroll signatures was therefore primarily about the investment of individuals in the ideological project of anti-communism, what Foucault called the question of ‘this strange truth that the individual must produce about himself’ (Foucault 2014a, 19). By encouraging US citizens to actively produce discourses of anti-communism tied to avowals of self, the Crusade campaign sought to ‘tie the individual to his truth, by his truth, and by his own enunciation of his own truth’.

More than a theoretical abstraction, the strategy of avowal was overt in the Crusade’s public-facing communications. In a 6 September 1950 speech, Crusade leader General Lucius Clay insisted that ‘those who contribute are doing more than to help the cause because in signing the pledge they are rededicating themselves to the principles of freedom in which we believe’ (NCFE 1951a, emphasis mine). A 1951 Committee for a Free Europe pamphlet described the Crusade’s mission as one to ‘rededicate Americans to their heritage of freedom’ (NCFE 1951c). Similarly, in concluding his 1950 Labor Day speech, Dwight Eisenhower emphasised the obligation of individuals to examine and govern their conscience, insisting that ‘each must make it his responsibility to see that we remain strong morally, intellectually, materially … Ladies and Gentlemen, we must get tough – tough with ourselves’ (New York Times, 5 September 1950a).

The theme of freedom was so central to the Crusade rhetoric that it presented itself as a kind of global abolitionist movement against the ‘slavery’ of the Soviet system. However, the Crusade also suggested the contradictory theme that some freedom would necessarily have to be surrendered for the war to be won. As Eisenhower put it during his Labor Day speech, ‘success in such national crises always requires some temporary and partial surrender of individual freedom. But the surrender must be by our specific decision, and it must only be partial and only temporary.’ The claim recalled Donovan and Mowrer’s (1940) insistence that in the arena of psychological warfare, democracy was a uniquely vulnerable form of government since its constituents were nominally free to control the levers of government and national security. If it was a strange call for the voluntary surrender of freedom, it further illustrated Foucault’s (2007) premise that liberal forms of government have been built upon ‘the paradox of pastoral power’ and voluntary obedience to the pastor as one who guides the examination of conscience. While the figure of the individual pastor recedes in the complexity of the modern world, the Crusade for Freedom illustrates what Foucault (2014a, 18) identifies as

[the tendency] to tie the individual more and more to his truth (I mean, to the obligation to tell the truth about oneself), to make this truth-telling function in one’s relationships to others, and to commit oneself through this truth which is told. I do not mean that the modern individual ceases to be bound to the will of the other who commands him; but more and more, this connection overlaps and is tied to a discourse of truth that the subject is led to maintain about himself.

One can see in the Crusade for Freedom precisely this effort to – as Legg (2016, 12) explains – ‘obligate individuals to become essential actors in the manifestation of truth … both [as] operator, spectator and the object of truth acts’. In insisting that individuals could wage their own private spiritual war against communism, American psychological warfare adopted not only the symbolism of the Christian crusade, but also the logic of pastoral power. If the pastoral obligation to ‘the will of the other who commands’ became dispersed in the imagined community of the nation, it was precisely as a citizen of the United States that the Crusade obligated individuals to formulate truths about themselves. In the Crusade, the obligation of the American citizen to manifest truth abroad in psychological warfare against the Soviet Union became inextricably tied to the obligation to manifest a binding truth about oneself – what Deborah Cowen (2004) has identified as the paradoxical domestic intimacy of ‘scaling the nation’. If the responsibility to examine and manifest truths about oneself represents a foundational practice of Christianity, in the Crusade for Freedom the obligation became central to the American geopolitical imagination of psychological warfare as a kind of internal and spiritual battle against a foreign Other.

A remarkable advertisement in the New York Times two weeks after Eisenhower’s speech illustrated the stark pastoral logic of the Crusade (Figure 3.4). In an ‘open letter’ to Eisenhower, the president of a US furniture-making company authored a litany of self-avowals constructed around an examination and confession of conscience. ‘I KNOW’, the advertisement read, ‘the Kremlin hates us for fear that the ideals of our FREEDOM might penetrate the minds of those they have oppressed.’ ‘I KNOW’, it continued, ‘I shall give my effort and all I can afford for this cause’ (New York Times, 17 September 1950). Quite literally a catechism for Cold War, the advertisement can be understood as a kind of first-person ‘discourse of truth on the self, formed through the examination of conscience’. In this pastoral imaginary, Eisenhower assumed the role of pastor, as one who binds the individual to the person who directs their conscience (Foucault 2007, 183).

Mirroring this confessional discourse, a staple of the Crusade for Freedom was the organisation of ‘statement contests’ in which winners were promised trips to Radio Free Europe headquarters in Munich to read their personal message to ‘the millions of people trapped behind the Iron Curtain’. Though begun in the early days of the Crusade, statement contests reached their height in the late 1950s, appearing in numerous advertisements, notably in Reader’s Digest, whose owner Dewitt Wallace was an executive member of the Committee for a Free Europe. In an advertisement for the Crusade’s 1959 statement contest, the US Advertising Council distributed press kits including a three-panel cartoon strip which was recommended for use in conjunction with advertising or editorial features in the contest (Cummings 2010b). Typical contest prompts included ‘as an American, I support Radio Free Europe because …’; ‘Why I want to participate in the Crusade for Freedom …’; or, as a Reader’s Digest advertisement read (Figure 3.5), ‘I believe the most important thing people behind the Iron Curtain should know is … .’ The targets of such ads were often schoolchildren, who were encouraged to examine their conscience and ‘speak with [their] hearts and heads’. Above all, the Crusade’s myriad confessional techniques sought to obligate American citizens to produce and bind themselves to avowals of self that pitted them against communism in a spiritual struggle to defend the liberal-capitalist way of life.

‘Quite a thrill to proceed under police escort! … Dignitaries [in Chicago] rang me … Had to break up [a]‌ contest between Windy City policeman trying to prove who could ring me loudest and hardest … [In Phoenix], a series of rallies all day with [a] giant climaxing parade at night. Rang so much they wore me out!’

‘If a Bell Could Speak’, Story of the World Freedom Bell

While truth dollars and freedom scrolls served to introduce the US public to the Crusade for Freedom, perhaps its most recognisable and enduring symbol was the so-called Freedom Bell that adorned nearly all its promotional material. Like the scrolls and dollars, the Freedom Bell combined elements of US history with Christian imagery, in this case blending the Philadelphia Liberty Bell with the evangelising symbolism of the tolling church bell. The first Crusade for Freedom in 1950, originally envisioned as a one-year campaign, was designed around a national tour showcasing the Freedom Bell in the United States, before its transatlantic voyage and installation in the bell tower of Berlin’s City Hall. In a series    of highly orchestrated and publicised events, the Freedom Bell was originally produced at a foundry in Croydon, England, then shipped across the Atlantic, arriving in New York City on 6 September 1950 to a ticker-tape parade two days after Eisenhower’s Labor Day radio speech announced the Crusade to the US public (Figure 3.6). Measuring over twelve feet high, and weighing over ten tons, the bell depicted five men holding outstretched hands, representing the apparent ‘five major races of man’ (New York Times, 7 September 1950). The bell’s brim carried a globally reimagined adaptation of Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, which stood as the Crusade’s motto: ‘that this world, under God, shall have a new birth of Freedom’.

As the major attraction of the first Crusade for Freedom, a rapid publicity tour across the United States followed its New York landing, with stops in twenty-six major cities (Figure 3.7). A motorcade truck was fitted to haul and display the bell, and stops on the tour became events for the promotion of the Crusade and the solicitation of truth dollars and scroll signatures. The signed scrolls were subsequently collected, made the journey across the country, and ultimately were enshrined in the base of the bell at its final destination in Berlin, where it remains today. At the conclusion of the first Crusade, the Freedom Bell in Berlin was fitted with recording equipment that could ‘carry its peal over the world’ (New York Times, 7 September 1950). More specifically, the sound of the bell’s ringing was used to announce segments on Radio Free Europe, a symbolic herald for the United States’ Crusade over the airwaves in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.

Often described in terms of its ‘penetrating’ tones, the symbolism of penetration was consonant with the Crusade’s broader emphasis on ‘penetrating’ the Iron Curtain with the potency of American ‘truth’. If Carol Cohn’s (1987) study of nuclear defence scientists has revealed the sexual imaginaries underwriting the everyday practices of defence contractors, a similar sexual politics underwrote the Crusade for Freedom’s geopolitical imagination. In this imagination, the Crusade reflected not only a passive commitment to freedom, but also an aggressive imposition of the United States’ will upon its geopolitical rival. In Radio Free Europe, the Crusade for Freedom therefore linked geopolitical imaginaries of psychological warfare with a kind of muscular Christianity underwritten by themes of sexual domination. If themes of muscular Christianity had previously served to construct geopolitical imaginations of psychological warfare as a kind of inner struggle and spiritual battle against the forces of an insidious and foreign enemy – an approximation of the baptismal battle with Satan – the Freedom Bell tied the Crusade’s Christian themes to the symbol of Radio Free Europe as the unilateral imposition of a ‘penetrating truth’. It condensed all the major themes of psychological warfare’s moral economy: it was manly, it was true, it imposed order, and more than saving lives it offered salvation.

In the years following the second Crusade in 1951, Henry Ford II replaced General Clay as chairman of the Crusade amid concerns that the Crusade had become ‘big business’ and had strayed from its original purpose. In place of the Freedom Bell’s tour of the United States during the first Crusade of 1950, the Ford Motor Company donated a fleet of flatbed trucks for use in a tour of the continental United States. Each truck’s flatbed depicted an identical pageant scene dramatising the Freedom Bell’s ‘penetration’ of the Iron Curtain with ‘truth’ carried over the airwaves of a Radio Free Europe transmitter (Figure 3.8). What became known as the ‘Crusade for Freedom Motorcade’ presented a pantomime of psychological warfare and a geopolitical imaginary of ‘truth as a weapon’ in contested and enemy territories. The motorcade provided, moreover, an ‘excellent backdrop for newspaper publicity photos for the Crusade campaign and local citizens’ (Friedman n.d.a).

Radio Free Europe was not, however, the only method the Crusade had contrived to ‘penetrate’ the Iron Curtain. Since Soviet transmitters regularly jammed the broadcasts of Voice of America and Radio Free Europe, a plan to float balloons carrying printed material into Eastern Europe was hatched by the Crusade in 1951. The balloons were made by General Mills, sponsors of the Crusade, connected most directly to it through OSS veteran Abbott Washburn. One estimate suggests that over half a million balloons were floated to Eastern Europe and beyond between 1951 and 1956, carrying over 300 million leaflets and other printed materials (Cummings 2010c). At the campaign’s beginning in 1951, Czechoslovakia was a primary target for the Crusade’s psychological war, having become a Communist country three years prior in 1948.

Present for the launch of the first balloons into Czechoslovakia was C. D. Jackson, who in an 8 October 1951 Time magazine article (‘Winds’ 1951) lionised the efforts of the Crusade. In an ongoing deception of the US public, Jackson portrayed the Crusade as a ‘private international organization’ that was ‘tearing a hole in the iron curtain’. The article described Jackson on location at the balloon launch with Harold Stassen, a perennial failed presidential nominee for the Republican Party, and Drew Pearson, whose syndicated column ‘Washington Merry-go-Round’ was one the best known of the day. Time wrote that the men, personally releasing the first balloons, ‘looking like three Statues of Liberty, held high above their heads big rubber balloons’. The balloons carried the standard second-person addresses of psychological war, hailing their Czech targets directly as political subjects:

A new wind is blowing. New hope is stirring. Friends of freedom in other lands have found a new way to reach you. They know that you also want freedom. Millions of free men and women have joined together and are sending you this message of friendship over the winds of freedom … There is no dungeon deep enough to hide truth, no wall high enough to keep out the message of freedom. Tyranny cannot control the winds, cannot enslave your hearts. Freedom will rise again. (Friedman n.d.a)

Frequencies and schedules for Radio Free Europe were listed on the backs of the leaflets. RFE broadcasts in turn alerted listeners to the balloon drops and encouraged Czechoslovakians to collect and share the leaflets attached to them. ‘What might the balloon barrage accomplish?’, a Time magazine article asked (‘Winds’ 1951). ‘So far’, it responded, ‘the Crusade for Freedom is not suggesting revolt … for revolt can be premature and disastrous. Instead, the balloons are an imaginative experiment in contact, bearing a message of hope until the time might be ripe for other words.’ Though the article suggested that ‘so far’ the intent of the balloon launches was not to foment revolt, it intimated that a kind of ‘people’s uprising’ directed by the Crusade was a matter not of if but when. The idea of a people-led grassroots capitalist revolution furthermore dovetailed with the broader US propaganda theme of a ‘people’s capitalism’ and a corresponding if contradictory ‘classless society’ that would accompany it (Castillo 2010; Hixson 1998; Roholl 2012). C. D. Jackson himself was bullish on encouraging Eastern Europeans to revolt against the Soviet Union, as evinced in a 16 November 1953 letter to Allen Dulles in which he urged the United States to exploit projected food shortages in Czechoslovakia and Poland to encourage strikes and protests in what he called a ‘winter of discontent’ (‘Fomenting Unrest’ 1953).

After the launches, Stassen made the incredible claim that ‘if the free world can send enough messages by radio and balloon, Soviet Russia will have to give up its present world policy, and the prospects for avoiding World War III will be considerably brighter’ (‘Freedom Crusade’ 1951). Though hardly credible, the claim illustrates the extent to which psychological warriors wished for American audiences to believe in the ‘power of truth’ qua psychological warfare. Pearson was more taciturn, though he still argued in his nationally syndicated column on 17 August 1951 that the balloon campaign was a symbol of the ‘free-enterprise system’, illustrating the double function of the Crusade as propaganda both for itself and for a muscular capitalist system able to achieve what government bureaucracy could not. As Pearson wrote,

the current experiment in penetrating the iron curtain by balloons may be a great success or it may fail. It is too early yet to say. But the important thing is that it’s an attempt by private individuals under the free-enterprise system to try out certain methods of psychological propaganda – or call it psychological warfare if you will – which governments will not – and perhaps cannot tackle. (Cited in Cummings 2010c)

The targeting of Americans as a secondary audience of the ‘Winds of Freedom’ campaign was not limited to coverage of the Eastern European launches. As Pinkerton et al. (2011) note in their study of Project Revere, a collaborative research project between the University of Washington and the US Air Force, efforts to use American citizens as test subjects for researching the dissemination of psychological warfare leaflets often carried with them their own implicit psychological warfare messages. In the case of Project Revere, use of American citizens in research on leaflet dispersal doubled as illustrations for those citizens of their own vulnerability to aerial attack, compounding the Cold War climate of fear (Figure 3.9).

The use of balloons to spread domestic propaganda for the Crusade dates back to its earliest days, when a thousand balloons were launched from the Empire State Building to coincide with the Freedom Bell’s departure from New York to Berlin in October 1950 (New York Times, 11 October 1950). Those balloons carried freedom scrolls and freedom dollar envelopes, but later balloons (such as the ones launched by General Mills from Sioux Falls, South Dakota) (Figure 3.10) carried information about the Winds of Freedom campaign and instructed readers to fill out a short questionnaire on the location, time, and nature of their discovery of the leaflets. Like Project Revere, Crusade balloons transformed American citizens into participant subjects of Cold War research on balloon propaganda dissemination, with the double function of acclimating the American public to a geopolitical imaginary of a global psychological war in which they played an active part. The leaflets again stressed participation: ‘to millions in Soviet captivity, leaflets like this mean hope and encouragement … to make this test a success, your cooperation is vital’.

In one of its promotional hardcover ‘blue books’, the Crusade for Freedom claimed that ‘the best evidence of the Freedom Bell’s effectiveness as a psychological weapon were the angry denunciations and lies evoked from Moscow’, which had called the Crusade’s signature drive ‘a parody of a public movement’ (NCFE 1951a). Since comprehensive public opinion polling in enemy territories was often impossible to conduct, psychological warriors regularly contented themselves with pointing to denunciations of their efforts by enemy leaders as proof of their efficacy. While the Crusade booklet relished what it presented as Soviet outrage over the ‘ludicrous masquerade’ of the Crusade and the ‘false peals’ of the Freedom Bell, what the Crusade did not reveal about Soviet denunciations was that they correctly identified Radio Free Europe as a front for the CIA (Panfilov 1981).

By contrast, the fact that the Committee for a Free Europe was organised and funded by the CIA was not revealed to the American public until 1967, after the small San Francisco-based left-wing publication Ramparts published a story on CIA infiltration of the National Students Association. The surprising revelation from the fringe publication prompted larger papers to pursue the story, and the New York Times eventually published reporting linking Radio Free Europe to the CIA (Cone 1998, 152), a full seventeen years after the Committee for a Free Europe was formed. Ironically, the listening audiences of Radio Free Europe in the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc would have known, or at least would have been told, that the broadcasts were the work of the CIA, meaning the constituency most deceived about the Radio’s true origins were American citizens, many of whom donated money to the cause of ‘telling the truth’ to the ‘enslaved peoples’ of Eastern Europe.

As Cone (1998, 148) notes, ‘the unmasking of RFE and RL [Radio Liberty] is significant partly because it took so long, but more so because the press and broadcast media were, in many cases, well aware of the connection between the CIA and the stations, and simply chose not to report the link’. As recounted by Sig Mickelson (1983, 125), former president of CBS and subsequently of Radio Free Europe itself, many American journalists and editors were aware that RFE and the Committee for a Free Europe were covers for the CIA but ‘kept their lips and typewriters sealed’. When it came to supporting the Crusade, however, the American media were effusive. Cone’s (1998, 149) study suggests that the value of advertising and public service announcement space donated to the Crusade by the American press was between nine and seventeen million dollars. In 1955 a Crusade newsletter boasted that more than 450 newspapers carried 700 Crusade ads, and that 75 per cent of major American newspapers ran supportive articles or editorials during the 1955 campaign.

Additionally, many journalists and media executives sat on boards and worked in the newsrooms of Radio Free Europe (Cone 1998), including future USIA director Edward R. Murrow, television personality Ed Sullivan, and prominent journalist Walter Cronkite.¹⁰ Leland Stowe, the fifth column alarmist reporter who helped fabricate the Ewald Banse controversies of 1933 and 1941, was the head of Radio Free Europe’s News and Information department during the 1950s and actively recruited journalists to the station. Working his niche warning Americans of clandestine foreign plots conspiring to victimise them, Stowe published several books after the Second World War, employing the second-person trope for his Target: You (1949) as well as Conquest by Terror: The Story of Satellite Europe (1952).

It was, however, Henry Luce’s media empire that was most influential in advertising the Crusade and valorising the geopolitical imaginary of waging global psychological war. This was perhaps unsurprising given Time–Life–Fortune Vice President C. D. Jackson’s central role in the Crusade, in Radio Free Europe, and later in the Eisenhower administration. In a seminal report to President Eisenhower in 1953, Jackson stressed that the value of keeping Radio Free Europe’s CIA connection secret lay in its ability to ‘take positions for which the United States would not desire to accept responsibility’ (‘President’s Committee’ 1953). Again, the virtue of Radio Free Europe was its ability to leverage government resources to subvert overt government norms, channels, and regulations. Though other Time–Life–Fortune executives were involved with Radio Free Europe, Jackson was by far the most influential and active. His departures from the company to work with government and the CIA were so frequent that a playfully named ‘Fun and Games Committee of the C. D. Jackson Hello & Goodbye Society’ was established to celebrate the occasions (Cook 1984, 43) (Figure 3.11).

Among Jackson’s other forays into government work was his role on President Truman’s Psychological Strategy Board (PSB), a short-lived agency coordinating psychological war policy and planning across government agencies. In May 1952, Jackson organised members of the board to convene at Princeton University, inviting representatives from the CIA, the State Department, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Princeton University. Also present for the articulation of what became the ‘Princeton Agenda’ were Allen Dulles and Walter Rostow, who were joined in consensus that the United States should engage in a more aggressive programme of psychological warfare against the Soviet Union (‘Princeton Statement’ 1952). Though at the end of his presidency Truman did not take up the Princeton Agenda, in 1952 Jackson briefed candidate Eisenhower on the meeting. Both Jackson and Eisenhower had a ‘shared belief that psychological warfare was essential to military strategy’ (Stern 2012, 12) which dated back to the winter of 1942, when Jackson was flown to North Africa to manage the public relations disaster of Eisenhower’s collaboration with Vichy General Darlan. The Darlan affair began a ‘long and close association’ between the two men, which continued in their collaboration on the Crusade for Freedom and solidified early in Eisenhower’s presidency.

Building upon his advocacy for the Crusade, presidential candidate Eisenhower invoked the moral economy of psychological warfare, posing it as an alternative to armed conflict. In an 8 October 1952 campaign speech, he spoke on the importance of the ‘struggle for the minds and wills of men’:

We must adapt our foreign policy to a ‘cold war’ strategy that is unified and coherent … In spirit and resolve, we should see in this ‘cold war’ a chance to gain a victory without casualties, to win a contest that can quite literally save the peace. (New York Times, 9 October 1952)

A week after his election as president in November 1952, Eisenhower gave his third Crusade for Freedom radio speech in an event hosted by new Crusade chairman Henry Ford II. In the same broadcast, his defeated opponent Adlai Stevenson made clear that support for the Crusade was a bipartisan affair, warning Democrats not to ‘sit back and lose the war of ideas by default’. Hewing close to Crusade talking points, Stevenson praised Radio Free Europe for going beyond the restrictions of what a government agency could do. ‘Imagine yourself’, he said, ‘behind the Iron Curtain. Bombarded constantly and from all sides by official propaganda, how could you fail to be more impressed by the one voice in the chorus that is voluntary?’ (New York Times, 12 November 1952). Reproducing the Crusade logic that contrasted private voluntarism to the ‘tyranny of government’, Stevenson joined Eisenhower in praising the Crusade for ‘penetrating the Iron Curtain’.

Early in his presidency, Eisenhower convened a Committee on International Information Activities to review and plan the United States’ psychological warfare policy. Colloquially known as the Jackson Committee for its chair William Harding Jackson, a New York attorney and Deputy Director of the CIA, the Committee was also attended by C. D. Jackson, arguably the more influential of the two Jacksons, serving as Eisenhower’s new Special Assistant to the President on psychological warfare. The Jackson Committee’s classified report to the president on 30 June 1953 urged the maintenance of the CIA’s cover as Radio Free Europe’s benefactor. Perhaps most lastingly, the Committee recommended the consolidation of American psychological warfare efforts, leading to the establishment of the United States Information Agency the next month. Despite the massive expansion of American psychological warfare represented by the establishment of the USIA, the Jackson Committee recommended the wholesale abandonment of the term ‘psychological warfare’. A White House press release on the report called it an ‘unfortunate term’ that did ‘not describe the efforts of our nation to build a world of peace and freedom’. The term, the release continued, should be discarded ‘in favor of others that describe our true goal’ (New York Times, 9 July 1953). As C. D. Jackson complained years later to William Harding Jackson,

over and over again thousands of characters – mostly military characters – have got to have explained to them that psychological warfare is not an occult science practiced on a couch, but just one of many clubs in the bag of the Foreign Minister or the military commander … We sure have been ruined by that word ‘psychological’. (Cited in Granville 2005, 811)

Through the committee, C. D. Jackson dismantled the PSB on which he had served under Truman and attempted to banish use of the term which he had done so much to build in the years before American entry into the Second World War. While the report is said to have ‘dropped like a bombshell’ (Perusse 1958, 25) on the characters – the mostly military characters – who had begun to institutionalise psychological warfare at places such as Johns Hopkins University’s Operations Research Office, the Jackson report in fact called for the massive expansion of psychological warfare and an acknowledgement of its intractability from all policy formation. As the Jackson report suggested,

the directive which created the Psychological Strategy Board assumes that in addition to national objectives formulated by the National Security Council, there are such things as ‘over-all national psychological objectives’ … The PSB directive also speaks of ‘psychological policies’ and the Board has been working to develop ‘a strategic concept for psychological operations’. We believe these phrases indicate a basic misconception, for we find that the ‘psychological’ aspect of policy is not separable from policy, but is inherent in every diplomatic, economic or military action. (‘President’s Committee’ 1953)

The term ‘psychological warfare’ sat uneasily with the American public, perhaps unsurprisingly given the lengths to which figures such as C. D. Jackson and William Donovan had gone to portray German psychological warfare in the 1940s as a kind of ‘witch doctor’ mind control. In consolidating the OWI’s infrastructure of information outposts around the world, the new USIA would abandon the bogey of psychological warfare and instead take up the mantle of its predecessor’s ‘strategy of truth’, a rhetorical strategy already heavily evidenced by the CIA’s Crusade for Freedom. As with the OWI, the USIA’s strategy of truth was premised on the dissimulation of propaganda in the tones and format of objective and factual news reporting. In an attempt to avoid the dissemination of outright fabrications, the USIA’s strategy of truth would seek to assert governmental power through the control of circulation through the ‘particular selection and treatment of news designed to present a full exposition of US actions and policies, especially as they affect the particular country addressed’ (‘President’s Committee’ 1953).

The production and selection of news for the ‘particular country addressed’ was a significant recommendation of the Jackson report. While the Jackson Committee purported to dismantle American psychological warfare, it in fact signalled not only its massive expansion, but also a concurrent refinement and specification of its targets. In place of expensive American staffers producing general news stories about the United States, the USIA would now employ local producers in its various countries of operation to ‘adapt all broadcasting and information activities to the needs of each target country’. In place of generic broadcasts by the Voice of America, the new USIA represented a revolution in erstwhile American psychological warfare that would tailor efforts to the individual country addressed, mirroring the larger Cold War movement towards more localised and applied area studies (Barnes & Farish 2006).

In another watershed recommendation, the Jackson Committee suggested a new policy of non-attribution: ‘as a general rule, information and propaganda should only be attributed to the United States when such attribution is an asset. A much greater percentage of the information program should be unattributed’ (‘President’s Committee’ 1953). Though some argued that unattributed materials, so long as they remained ‘true’, could be considered ‘white’ propaganda operations, misattribution was generally understood as a ‘black’ propaganda tactic, by convention the province of covert agencies such as the OSS and the CIA. Despite its advertisement of a ‘strategy of truth’, the USIA was from its conception envisioned as a quasi-covert agency. It was perhaps appropriate that C. D. Jackson chose 1 April 1954 as the day he resigned as advisor to the President on psychological warfare, having played an instrumental role in crystallising the global expansion of unattributed American propaganda under the banner of ‘dismantling American psychological warfare’.

With the creation of the United States Information Agency, erstwhile supporters of psychological warfare sought to reassure the American public that the worst excesses of psychological war had been put to rest. As former Secretary of the Department of the Air Force Thomas K. Finletter (1954, 126) put it:

Psychological Warfare is a bad term because the word ‘warfare’ implies that deceit is justifiable if it serves our purpose. Deceit is standard practice in the tactics of war. It is not correct practice in peacetime, whether it be directed toward our own people, to our friends, to those who have not taken sides, or to the people enslaved by Russia and China. It is neither consistent with our principles nor is it good business. Psychological warfare had its extravagances a while but they have been put to rest by the definitive report of a committee headed by William H. Jackson which recommended that the US give up psychological warfare.

However, the reports of psychological warfare’s death were greatly exaggerated. As Finletter continued, ‘this is not to say that psychological warfare should not continue as a military tactic nor that the US should stop explaining its policies to its Allies, to the neutrals, and to the enslaved peoples, providing the explanations are meticulously truthful’ (p. 16). Finletter’s Janus-faced comments reflected the tension between an inward-facing consensus that psychological warfare was a necessary component of foreign policy, and the outward-facing need to appear to rein in psychological warfare during peacetime. As ever, the invocation of the ‘strategy of truth’ served to suspend this contradiction and legitimate the massive expansion of psychological warfare through the USIA.

A strikingly candid assessment of this squaring of the circle was written in 1954 by Roland Perusse (1958, 32), an officer at the newly established USIA. In his estimation, ‘the principal lesson to be derived from the reappraisal of psychological warfare … is that the term itself had best be avoided in any characterization of either our informational output or our foreign relations generally’. Noting the weariness of the US public on the issue of psychological war, Perusse wrote that

we have not always had the opportunity to explain that by ‘warfare’ we have meant ‘peacefare’ and we have necessarily assumed a ridiculous posture (something akin to the Communist corruption of word meanings) every time that we have made the attempt. In brief, those in the business of explaining US policies abroad through a judicious choice of word symbols had failed to choose an appropriate word symbol [‘psychological warfare’] to characterize their operations.

One early candidate to replace psychological warfare at the terminological level was offered by the social psychologist Leonard Cottrell (1958, 20), for whom the term ‘political communication’ reflected a flattened sense of neutrality and objectivity. For Cottrell, ‘political communication’ emphasised the intractability of persuasion from all information, a principle that dovetailed with the emergent ideology that a market-based ‘free flow of ideas’ should govern the United States’ approach to erstwhile psychological war. As Cottrell argued,

a large proportion of what we label psychological warfare falls well within what democratic cultures guarantee as an inalienable right – namely to convince other people that you are right and that they are wrong. Indeed, we are committed to the technique of the free-for-all competition of ideas as a way of crystallizing our opinions on public issues. The kind of reciprocity implied in this concept might well make the Politburo nervous.

While no one term came to denote the former practice of psychological warfare until the mid-1960s, when ‘public diplomacy’ offered what Cull (2006, n.p.) calls an ‘alternative to the anodyne term information [and the] malignant term propaganda’, consensus within the family of psychological warriors held that psychological war by any other name would remain an integral part of US foreign policy.

Propaganda theorists such as Harold Lasswell (1951) now claimed that ‘peacefare and warfare [were] the two patterns which are assumed in the instruments of total policy at all times’. If some reached merely for euphemisms to soften the bellicosity of the term ‘psychological war’, others sought to retain and rehabilitate the concept as such. As Roland Perusse (1958, 33) put it, ‘abandonment of the term should by no means result in the abandonment of any of the processes involved in what has been known professionally as ‘psychological warfare’. Insisting that there would always be a need for ‘psychological intelligence’ provided by anthropologists, sociologists, and area specialists, Perusse (1958, 34) recommended a purely partisan solution to the terminological problem:

It is better to let the term [propaganda] ride as a proper definition for totalitarian efforts and to characterize the activities of democratic societies as ‘information’. From a strictly academic point of view, the distinction is not valid; but from a practical and public relations point of view, the entire task of dealing with foreign peoples will be made easier if we go along with the tide of public opinion … From a strictly professional viewpoint, [the USIA] is ‘psychological warfare’, pure and simple, as everyone who has engaged in any aspect of such activity will recognize, but for the better chances of its success, it would appear wise not to call it that, but rather, as recommended by the President’s Committee, to concentrate on finding other terms that describe our true goals.

This chapter has considered the arc of psychological warfare’s evolution from the immediate post-war context of Allied occupation, to the ‘caution and uncertainty’ of the post-war years, to its eventual adoption by the CIA. Like the original construction of psychological warfare a decade earlier by actors surrounding William Donovan’s OSS, the construction of psychological war in the early 1950s was an ouroboric project – propaganda about propaganda. The façade of private American investment and participation in psychological warfare had the effect of hailing Soviet and Eastern European individuals as recipients of communications not from the United States government, but from concerned American citizens. However, it had the double function of compelling the same American citizens to reflect upon and posit themselves as actors in the arena of psychological warfare.

In tracing the contours of the Crusade for Freedom’s various efforts to mobilise the American public, this chapter has shown that American psychological warfare attempted to employ a confessional strategy to ‘make speak’ and to obligate Americans to articulate and conform to truths about themselves. I argue that these avowals of American selfhood were understood by the Crusade’s architects as crucial hinges between waging psychological warfare abroad and mobilising Americans for a ‘spiritual war’ against communism in which Americans again found themselves to be both objects and subjects. Central to these ‘technologies of the self’ were injunctions for Americans to conceive and posit their political agency in the symbolic terms of economic exchange and speech, namely the truth dollar and the freedom scroll. Here again, psychological warfare sought to obscure domestic monopolies of knowledge through recourse to a liberal political imaginary, with the dollar and the scroll becoming new ciphers for freedom of industry and speech. These were accompanied by muscular Christian themes in which communication media such as Radio Free Europe became ‘weapons’ for the ‘penetration’ of the minds and borders of communist Eastern Europe.

While the creation of the USIA in 1953 represented a massive expansion of its predecessor’s global psychological warfare apparatus, its establishment coincided, ironically, with a disavowal of the increasingly unpopular term ‘psychological warfare’ to describe American propaganda activities abroad. Mirroring the way that the language of psychological warfare replaced the unpopular language of propaganda, I have shown how the abandonment of terminology surrounding psychological warfare nonetheless involved an entrenchment of both its practice and the geopolitical imaginations cultivating it. I have emphasised throughout the continued role of Time–Life–Fortune Vice President C. D. Jackson and other OSS veterans in subsuming psychological cold war within a superseding geopolitical imagination of a proselytising ‘strategy of truth’. In the next chapter I trace the re-emergence of psychological warfare at the USIA within the context of President John Kennedy’s articulation of the United States’ global counterinsurgency strategy and its prosecution in Vietnam through the offices of the Joint United States Public Affairs Office.