The first comprehensive plan was for Germany, completed and sent to the PSB in the summer of 1952. Plans for other psychological operations aimed at reducing Communist Party electoral power in France and Italy, at influencing negotiations for a Korean cease-fire, at creating a pro-American disposition among Japanese, at carrying out “Doctrinal (Ideological) Warfare Against the USSR.” Some PSB planners felt the CIA did not know enough about political differences among Soviet leaders for a sound psywar plan. They considered requesting a special national intelligence estimate on the subject. The PSB wanted a psychological warfare plan to be implemented upon the death of Stalin. That turned into a huge fight, and the plan would never be completed. Instead, when Joseph Stalin died in March 1953 the American response had to be cobbled together on the fly.

  All the high-level interest, the encouragement of President Truman, and the advice of psychological warfare experts like Paul Linebarger never moved psywar technique beyond a relatively crude level. Linebarger, something of a guru in the field, had written a standard text on the subject and been the top consultant to OPC’s Far East Division. He ran an orientation course to introduce new staff to this arcana, which the board ordered officials to attend and which the CIA hosted through at least six iterations. The agency’s support for this endeavor constituted service it could trade on when the Psychological Strategy Board tried to clamp down.

  Not that any of the training mattered. A plan for a “psychological offensive” against Russia, for example, is studded with moralistic rhetoric that sounds like a collection of homilies and themes. The three objectives in this plan were: to emphasize to Soviet rulers and peoples the reckless nature of their policy, to establish goodwill between the peoples of the two nations, and to widen the schism thought to exist between the Soviet people and their rulers. The propaganda themes suggested to reach these objectives included the following:

  The attempts of all tyrants to conquer the world have always failed. . . . Truth, mercy, pity, charity, love of family, hospitality, are some of the basic values which have always been dear to the Soviet peoples and . . . are held in common with the people of the free world, but in contempt by the Soviet rulers. . . . The U.S. is peace loving and honors the sovereignty and integrity of peoples and nations [while, by contrast, Soviet] statements of possibility of peaceful co existence have been made only for the purpose of deceiving Soviet and other peoples. . . . [In Russia] first freedom of speech was lost, now freedom of silence.

  There would be lots of other plans as well as advice from officials, spies, academics, advisory panels, and more. In Truman’s era alone the Psychological Strategy Board accumulated more than 33,000 pages of records, much of them the minutiae of these plans, and most of that of about the same sophistication, or lack thereof. Henry A. Kissinger, an early PSB consultant, compiled an advisory report on Germany used in developing the psywar plan for that country. From Trieste to Thailand, from Sweden to Southeast Asia, from the “Potential Role of Wealthy Individuals in Foreign Countries” to “Moral Rearmament Events Around the World” to “Forest Problems in Africa, Near East and Southwest Asia,” the PSB tried to build global influence. Plan “Torrential” concerned psychological operations during nuclear war, as if they would matter. Plan “Takeoff” tried to predetermine the spin to put on any possible collapse of truce talks to end the Korean War. Another stuffed file concerned “Doctrinal Warfare (Ideological).” Project “Engross” specified a program for “educating” escapees from behind the Iron Curtain while at the same time PSB crafted a plan to discredit Russian brainwashing.

  The plans were usually written by ad hoc committees brought together for the purpose. For example, the contingency paper for spinning the Korean truce negotiations involved a group of seven: three persons from State, one from CIA, and one from each of the armed services. Several of these people had temporary duty assignments to PSB, the others simply went to the meetings. Perhaps it is not surprising that more than a year after State originally asked for this study it had yet to be completed. Through mid-1953 the Psychological Strategy Board set up thirty-six of these panels to draft forty-four different plans.

  American democracy represented the best thing the United States had to offer the world, including its enemies in the Cold War. Not only that, Harry Truman and his successors believed in democracy, professed democratic ideals, enunciated the tenets of their faith, and were ready, when approached by such groups as the Balts, to issue ringing declarations of support. Yet somehow the psywar specialists failed in translating America’s sincere credo into a compelling message. And the United States cheapened the coin of its appeal by covert actions that, to foreign populations, did not represent American policies democratically arrived at. At home the stagnant civil rights of minorities, the loyalty investigations and McCarthyism of the 1950s, like the red-baiting of the left in later decades, offered America’s adversaries ready targets for their own propaganda. Presidents employing the CIA as a Cold War agency, sending the spooks out to make the world safe for democracy, were, to use a baseball analogy, putting a batter in the box who already had one strike against him.

  As for the State Department, Paul H. Nitze, now chief of the Policy Planning Staff, told Gordon Gray, “Look, you just forget about policy, that’s not your business; we’ll make the policy and then you can put it on your damn radio.”

  Others had hoped to have an easier time of it, namely the military experts on unconventional warfare, for whom Gordon Gray had toiled while still at the Pentagon. In the early postwar years there was little support for these methods in the armed forces. Army Ranger units and Merrill’s Marauders of Burma fame were disbanded, as were the air force’s air commandos. Psychological warfare capabilities existed only residually within the intelligence staffs of the various services. General Eisenhower, as army chief of staff until 1948, remembered his successes with psychological warfare in North Africa and Italy during the war, and the deception and unconventional warfare that had helped the D-Day invasion, and tried to preserve these capabilities. Maj. Gen. Robert A. McClure, who had been Ike’s psywar expert, did his best to crusade for this capability. Even Eisenhower’s orders proved insufficient to galvanize action. Some senior officers believed that covert psywar operations would not be accepted by the American people. McClure demurred.

  The advocates of military psywar were helped by the appearance of NSC-4/A, which demonstrated presidential interest in the area of psychological warfare. The army began a staff study in January 1948 that led to the adoption that fall of a plan for establishing standardized psywar units plus staffs at all echelons of command.

  Army proponents also tried to carve out larger roles for themselves. Gen. Albert C. Wedemeyer, chief of the army’s Plans and Operations Division, thought the assignment of all “black” propaganda to the CIA was basically unsound. General McClure argued the army possessed a greater capability, in the form of outlets and audience, than even the State Department. A couple of years earlier, with the occupation forces in Germany, McClure had reported that his staffs controlled a full array of media: several dozen newspapers, six radio stations, more than a hundred magazines, every theater and movie screen (almost a thousand), and literally every one of the thousands of book, magazine, and newspaper kiosks in the country. Such a degree of penetration offered U.S. psychological warriors dominance as great as anything enjoyed by America’s ideological enemies. Instead the occupation gradually lifted controls on the German media, and the U.S. military steadily dismantled its psywar units. Soon the subject was scarcely being taught in service schools. In 1950 there were only seven officers in the U.S. Army who specialized in psychological warfare.

  As assistant secretary of the army, Gordon Gray encouraged the development of a psywar capability and made good use of studies by consultant Paul Linebarger that argued for better articulated capabilities in this area. Appeals for help from Frank Wisner at the CIA also had their uses within the army hierarchy. Gray went further, knocking heads together, demanding progress reports from the army chief of staff, Gen. J. Lawton Collins. All this predated Gray’s duty at the Psychological Strategy Board.

  There was also the issue of unconventional warfare capabilities or, as they are known today, special operations forces. At first paramilitary operations were considered part of the psywar function, the province of the army’s intelligence (G-2) staff. The paramilitary side had been viewed with distaste by Gray’s predecessor, Army secretary Kenneth Royall, who told a June 1948 meeting that he wanted his service to know nothing about covert operations. Prodded by Gray and others, Royall soon allowed participation in overt and even covert propaganda. By March 1949 Gray could tell his boss that “we are actually participating in Europe.” Royall then designated Gray as the official to whom all covert matters would be taken.

  Meanwhile the army staff acquired a “special warfare” section within its psywar area. Manned by veterans of Merrill’s Marauders, OSS, and guerrilla commanders in the Philippines, the special warfare section laid down contingency plans for paramilitary actions, including, in the event of war in Europe, one to obstruct movement of Soviet reinforcements by activating a partisan force in Eastern Europe. A Joint Chiefs paper in August 1948 recommended the United States support guerrilla warfare under the policy direction of the NSC, envisioning the army acquiring means to carry out the plan. As already noted, Truman policy provided that the CIA have primary responsibility for covert operations during peacetime and the military in war.

  Carrying out covert operations naturally meant real units and troops. The Joint Chiefs recommended against any sort of special warfare corps, instead favoring individual training within the services. Specialists would be on call to lead native guerrillas. But the army consulted with former OSS commander Col. Ray Peers on the formation of a Ranger Group, planned in early 1949 to include about 115 officers and 135 enlisted men. These “airborne reconnaissance agents” would be sent to theaters, army groups, and armies for specified missions. This was a step toward a special warfare corps, not away from it.

  As elsewhere, the Korean War provided huge impetus. Troops in the field tried to run psywar leaflet campaigns against the North Koreans and then the Communist Chinese. Army commanders soon found inadequate the air force’s use of occasional transport planes diverted from other work when available. After some Washington infighting, the air force moved ahead with the first actual special warfare units. Called Air Resupply and Communications (ARC) wings, three of these units were formed beginning in February 1951, stationed at bases in Great Britain, Libya, Okinawa, and Clark in the Philippines. A base in Alaska was planned but never activated. The ARC wings operated a wide variety of transport aircraft in exactly the same fashion as the wartime air commandos or the proprietary airline the CIA bought known as Civil Air Transport. They engaged in disaster relief, conventional transport operations, and training flights in an attempt to disguise their real covert purpose. For example, when the U.S. Air Force began flying a regular passenger/cargo route from Clark Air Force Base in the Philippines to French Indochina in 1952, some of the missions went to the 581st Air Resupply and Communications Wing. Similarly, planes of the 580th Wing flying from Wheelus air base in Libya in the mid-1950s helped ferry critical fuel and chemical supplies to Turkey for the CIA’s U-2 missions there.

  The 581st Wing provides an excellent example of the relationship between the ARC wings and the Central Intelligence Agency. Activated in July 1951 after eleven months of training in Idaho, about a thousand airmen then moved to Clark Field. Commanded by Col. John K. Arnold, Jr., the 581st flew six different types of aircraft and helicopters, including black-painted B-29 bombers in a model configured for long-range air drops. Not long after reaching the Philippines, Colonel Arnold found himself summoned to Far East Air Force headquarters in Tokyo. Officers briefed Arnold on his unit’s role in psychological warfare, dropping leaflets over the borderlands of North Korea and China. Two CIA men added authenticity to the scene.

  “You’re a marked man now,” one of the CIA officers observed as they walked into the building.

  The CIA contributed to the costs of running the ARC wing. James Darby, director of operations for the 581st, accompanied a CIA officer who made regular cash deliveries to the unit’s finance section. According to reports, some airmen were actually CIA contacts or officers under cover, revealing themselves to comrades only many years later. Colonel Arnold knew there were CIA people in his unit but deliberately made no effort to find out more, reasoning that if captured he’d have no secrets to give away.

  Arnold’s choice turned out to be prescient. On January 12, 1953, the wing commander and a crew of thirteen flew one of their B-29s (tail number 44-62217) up to Yokota, where they picked up leaflets to drop over North Korea. This would be the 581st’s first psywar mission in the war. “Stardust Four-Zero” became the radio call sign; the mission, to distribute the leaflets over six targets, should have taken less than half an hour. The B-29 would return to Yokota and reach Clark the following morning, where Arnold planned to relax with his wife May.

  Everything went fine over the first targets, but at the last, near Korea’s border with China, jet fighters intercepted them and damaged the plane so badly the crew had to bail out. At 11:16 P.M. Stardust Four-Zero radioed Mayday. The nearby city of Andung on the Yalu was the location of the Sixty-fourth Air Defense Corps, the main Russian unit participating in the war, which for several months had assigned some of its fighters to night duty. The Chinese are not known to have had night fighters at this time, but it is impossible to discover who shot down Arnold’s B-29. The Russians regarded their participation in the war as secret, just as secret as CIA’s relationship with the ARC wing, and never claimed credit for this success.

  The incident provided a windfall for Communist propaganda. The shoot-down enabled Beijing to claim that U.S. forces were intruding into China. Interrogation of prisoners promised plentiful information. At least eleven of the crew were captured by Chinese troops and brought to Andung. Although three of Colonel Arnold’s men remain unaccounted for (comrades believed they saw one in Chinese prisons), the airmen could detail the operation of the highly classified ARC wings. Colonel Arnold might know more, as might Maj. William H. Baumer, operations officer for the Ninety-first Strategic Reconnaissance Squadron, who had hitched a ride aboard Stardust Four-Zero to see for himself the difficulties of flights along the Yalu River zone. Baumer had definitely picked the wrong night to fly. After the Cold War, historians researching in previously secret Soviet records found messages sent in Russian intelligence channels, asking and granting Russian intelligence help on interrogations of the U.S. airmen, later reporting that Moscow had gotten transcripts of Arnold’s interrogations and other items.

  The American airmen were moved by train to Shenyang and kept there two weeks, then taken to Beijing, where the real inquisition began. Chinese security kept the whole affair under wraps until November 1954, when Beijing decided to score a propaganda coup, holding a show trial of Arnold’s crew and other CIA agents captured earlier. In his statement, no doubt made under duress, Colonel Arnold admitted what had been put in the indictment for the Chinese court: the 581st Wing’s task, “besides psychological-warfare missions, is the introduction, supply, resupply, evacuation, or recovery of underground personnel.”

  Colonel Arnold was sentenced to ten years in prison, Major Baumer to eight, the other airmen to shorter periods. In fact, however, China released the Americans in the summer of 1955, when they were taken to a railway station near Hong Kong and handed over to a U.S. team headed by air force intelligence officer Delk Simpson. CIA officers were right behind him, and CIA people were principals in the debriefings of the returned airmen in Japan. Colonel Arnold was later sent to CIA headquarters to repeat his story. John Gittinger, a CIA psychologist, observed the interviews in Japan, determining how these Americans had borne up under captivity. Meanwhile John Arnold’s mission had outlasted his unit, for the air force had deactivated his ARC wing soon after the truce that ended the fighting in Korea.

  Korea brought about not only a massive expansion in CIA activity—its budget doubled from 1951 to 1952—but wrought an increased separation between paramilitary operations and psychological warfare. Indeed for a time the latter predominated, soaking up three-quarters of the agency’s budget at the height of the war. But as the name “Wurlitzer” implied, Frank Wisner retained his deep commitment to psywar. Wisner’s foot-dragging where the Psychological Strategy Board was concerned aimed specifically at protecting his own activities. Secret or “black” propaganda, as well as the partially attributable “grey” projects, were the particular province of OPC by order of the president under the NSC-4/A directive. This became one more area where the sparks that flew off Wisner’s table ignited important CIA initiatives.

  The same support Wisner had lent the Committee for a Free Europe, the balloon leaflet efforts, and other projects now extended to Asia. The Committee for a Free Asia originated in 1951. An Asian analogue to Radio Free Europe was set up on Taiwan to beam programs onto the mainland. Radio Free Asia went on the air in May 1951 using leased facilities for shortwave broadcasts in several Chinese dialects and in English. Unfortunately the agency soon discovered through surveys that, for the most part, only Mao Zedong’s party officials had radios; the CIA began aiming more at overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia. There is evidence of CIA subsidizing publications, labor movements, and youth and public interest groups, including the Committee of One Million Against the Admission of Communist China to the United Nations. The propaganda effort was nothing if not global.