#PsychologicalWarfare
18 entries tagged PsychologicalWarfare.
People (7)
- 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 stationed in Naples who disclosed at a 1975 NATO conference in Oslo that the Navy had trained 'combat psychopaths' as assassins through a three-phase audio-visual desensitization program, triggering a brief international scandal before retracting the most specific of his 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.
- 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, redirected its findings to support an air power thesis through systematic selection and suppression of contrary data, forged colleagues' signatures on a policy memorandum, and supplied the optimistic briefings on VC morale that Walt Rostow and Robert McNamara consumed 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 (7)
- 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, which served as the first official US government propaganda operation and built the economic, media, and political infrastructure for postwar American hegemony in Latin America.
- CRESS An Army-funded social science research organization at American University that ran from 1956 through the 1960s under the name SORO before being reorganized as CRESS following the Project Camelot scandal, maintaining two analytical divisions focused on counterinsurgency intelligence and area handbooks.
- 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.
- Rand Corporation The Rand Corporation is the US Air Force's principal Cold War nonprofit think tank in Santa Monica, founded as Project RAND in 1946 and incorporated in 1948, whose Vietnam-era Viet Cong Motivation and Morale Study produced critical findings that were suppressed at the time and later vindicated by Rand's own official history.
Programs (4)
- 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.
- 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.