The Info Web

#PsychologicalWarfare

27 entries

People (9)

  • Colston Westbrook CIA operative and psychological warfare specialist who ran the Black Cultural Association at Vacaville prison while working for CIA proprietary Pacific Architects and Engineers, where he recruited SLA leader Donald DeFreeze before the group placed him on its death list.
  • Commander Narut US Navy clinical psychologist in Naples who told a 1975 NATO conference in Oslo that the Navy trained 'combat psychopaths' as assassins, then retracted the most specific claims under institutional pressure.
  • Emmett O'Brien A US Army colonel in military intelligence who produced a 1971 study at the US Army War College on the five-phase defection process, drawing on cases from the Philippines, Malayan, and Vietnam wars and peacetime defections to the US, arguing that the use of already-defected guerrillas as testimonial voices was the most effective technique for inducing further defection.
  • Goodwin Watson Social psychologist at Teachers College, Columbia University, who headed the Analysis Division of the Foreign Broadcast Intelligence Service until 1943, when Section 304 barred him from federal pay.
  • Hans Speier German-American sociologist who analyzed Nazi radio at the New School, ran German analysis at the Foreign Broadcast Intelligence Service, and from 1948 to 1960 directed the Social Science Division of the RAND Corporation.
  • Konrad Kellen Rand Corporation analyst and former World War II psychological warfare professional who, working from the same Viet Cong interview transcripts as Leon Gouré, reached the opposite conclusions: that VC morale was high, organizational cohesion was strong, and the war was unwinnable; his findings were formally published but ignored by policymakers.
  • Leon Goure Rand Corporation social scientist who led Phase II of the Viet Cong Motivation and Morale Study from 1965, whose optimistic morale briefings reached Walt Rostow and Robert McNamara while the war escalated.
  • Michael Aquino U.S. Army Lt. Col. in Military Intelligence and psychological operations who founded the Temple of Set, co-authored the MindWar doctrine, and was investigated during the 1986-87 Presidio child abuse scandal.
  • Walter Langer Cambridge psychoanalyst who produced the first psychoanalytic profile of Adolf Hitler for the OSS in 1943, predicting his suicide and identifying exploitable psychological vulnerabilities.

Organizations (12)

  • 4th Psychological Operations Group A US Army psychological operations unit that developed specialized psyops technology including the Mitralux image projector and the hurricane hustler leaflet delivery device during the Vietnam War.
  • 7th Psychological Operations Group A US Army psychological operations unit headquartered in Okinawa that produced weekly classified propaganda analysis documents during the Vietnam War, including Communist Propaganda Highlights and Trends Analysis reports.
  • Black Cultural Association Prison outreach program at Vacaville run by CIA operative Colston Westbrook that connected white radical students from Berkeley with Black inmates, serving as a recruitment mechanism for the SLA and a conduit for behavioral modification experimentation.
  • CIAA Roosevelt's wartime Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs, headed by Nelson Rockefeller, the first official US government propaganda operation, which built economic, media and political infrastructure in Latin America.
  • CRESS Army-funded counterinsurgency and psychological-warfare research center at American University, founded in 1956 as the Special Operations Research Office (SORO), which ran Project Camelot and was renamed CRESS in 1966.
  • Foreign Broadcast Intelligence Service The Foreign Broadcast Intelligence Service was the United States government's radio monitoring and analysis service, created inside the Federal Communications Commission in 1941 and whose expertise was carried into the Open Source Center in 2005.
  • Human Resources Research Institute A US Air Force-affiliated behavioral science research organization at Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama, that conducted classified psychological vulnerability studies of Communist China beginning in 1951, producing analyses of Chinese newspaper letter columns and family revolution dynamics intended to support propaganda targeting.
  • Institute of World Affairs A research unit of the New School for Social Research from 1943 to 1953 that produced government-commissioned postwar studies, funded in part through Doris Duke's Independent Aid.
  • National Security Council Presidential council created in 1947 that issued the written covert-action directives NSC 4-A, NSC 10/2 and NSC 5412, and whose staff ran the operations later exposed in the Iran-Contra affair.
  • Office of War Information The Office of War Information was the federal propaganda and information agency created by Executive Order 9182 in June 1942 and abolished in December 1945, its foreign functions passing to the State Department.
  • Psychological Strategy Board The Psychological Strategy Board, created by Truman's directive of April 4, 1951, coordinated national psychological operations until Executive Order 10483 abolished it on September 2, 1953.
  • Rand Corporation The Rand Corporation is the Air Force's principal Cold War nonprofit think tank in Santa Monica, founded as Project RAND in 1946, whose Vietnam-era Viet Cong Motivation and Morale Study produced suppressed critical findings.

Programs (6)

  • Chieu Hoi A South Vietnamese government defection program running throughout the Vietnam War that offered amnesty to Viet Cong and North Vietnamese soldiers who surrendered, and became the primary distribution channel for US psychological operations leaflets and loudspeaker broadcasts.
  • Operation Tintinnabulation A US Army psychological operations campaign conducted in Vietnam using aircraft-mounted loudspeakers and noisemakers at night to erode Viet Cong morale and induce surrenders under the Chieu Hoi program, which reportedly doubled monthly defections.
  • Project Exploit USSR A 1962 five-volume classified typescript that analyzed psychological vulnerabilities in the Soviet Union for use in psychological operations, comprising an orientation and summary volume, a component social systems analysis, and a synthesis and overview.
  • Project Troy Project Troy was a 1950-51 MIT study of Soviet jamming and political warfare, reporting to the Secretary of State, whose February 1951 report proposed radio, balloon and elite-directed campaigns behind the Iron Curtain.
  • Quantico Vulnerabilities Panel Eleven consultants convened by Nelson Rockefeller met at Quantico in June 1955 to recommend ways of exploiting Communist bloc vulnerabilities, and their aerial inspection proposal became Eisenhower's Open Skies offer at Geneva.
  • Wandering Souls A US psychological operations tactic used in Vietnam by the 1st Infantry Division in which helicopters overflew villages between midnight and 6 a.m. broadcasting eerie recordings representing the souls of unburied dead Viet Cong soldiers, designed to exploit Vietnamese superstitions about the fate of those killed in battle far from home.