The alternatives to victory and defeat are forms of survival of the competitors. The entire health of each competing civilization matters. It is obvious enough to Americans that we must remain prosperous, free, constitutional, democratic. It goes without saying that we must, as far as our individual fortunes permit us, retain our belief in God and derive from religious beliefs those spiritual strengths not available to the Communists. What is not often raised is the equally important factor of the conquest of probability.
Wars are much more often won by people who are sure they are going to win than by people who know that they would like to win, but who think at the same time that they will probably be defeated. The over-confidence of a Cortez or a Mao Tse-tung may seem insane to many of us. With the passion for security so prevalent in individual and national lives, both the Western powers and the individuals comprising them grotesquely exaggerate the margin of safety which they need in which to survive.
Part of this springs from the fact that much of our civilization is not forward-looking, that neither young Americans nor old Americans have a clear-cut or hopeful picture of what the world should be, will be, and must be, by A.D. 2055. On the Communist side it is frequent, but not universal, to discover that the best Communist cadres are made up of men who are dead sure that Communism will win, who are equally sure that Communism does not have to be right in order to win, and who are sure that "objectively and scientifically" (whatever that may mean), the Communist system is almost certainly destined to succeed. If Communism cannot get out of succeeding, the responsibility of the individual Communist becomes bearable; he is still seriously and tragically responsible for the expediting or the delaying of the inevitable, but he does not take the mantle of God or Karl Marx and state that this is the world as he wishes it to be and that the world of his desires will come into existence if, and only if, he fulfills his personal responsibilities to the utmost.
In Asia, perhaps more than in Europe, there are many persons who are turning toward Communism, not because they think it is good or just, or even because it is powerful, but simply because it is likely. Every individual in his own life has known that he cannot undo the passage of time, the aging of his body, the death of his loved ones, the loss of opportunities which might have been seized, or even his own death; in their individual lives men of all nations perform the feat, characteristic of the human being and apparently shared by no other species of life, of living from day to day in a constant reconciliation of the past and present with their own estimate of the probable future. At times in history, that which should happen seems to be unleashed like spiritual lightning and men rally in frenzy around causes which for the year or the decade seem inspiring, terrifyingly beautiful, and within human reach; through most of history, that which is apt to occur provides a more sober guide to the future and men prepare to live in accordance with its standards.
In the battle of the probabilities the PsyWar of the Western powers has been weak, high-pitched, and uncertain, while the insistence of the Communist themes has been as monotonous and hypnotic as a jungle drum. For better or for worse, the Communists have broken a path through to what they think to be the future; we of other nations have not.
The chief element of anti-Communist victory—practical, sober expectation of a certain and final downfall of the Soviet system—has thus far been lacking on the anti-Communist side.
The Communists, on the contrary, have unreasonably, provocatively, and untruthfully raved, screamed, shrieked, and lied to bring about that better world which, curiously enough, their most effective cadres considered to be an inevitable world. Thus the UN prisoners held by the Communists during the Korean war were subjected to a constant bombardment of Communist propaganda concerning their personal responsibilities before history and the opportunities which they would have to serve peace and mankind, as these noble concepts are set forth on the Red side.
It does no good for an American propaganda radio to pledge battle to the death while the U.S. press services amiably discuss an accommodation with the Communists. Comparably, an official propaganda plan to make the people of France feel that the Americans love and admire them is not very realistic if, in terms of column-inches of French press material, unofficial American utterances are related to France to the effect that the French are washed up, their cause in Indochina hopeless, their economy unviable, and their political goals foolish. The years 1950-54, during which the Korea struggle took place and in which NATO and the European Defense Community (EDC) came to prominence, often showed a proclivity on the part of U.S. official propagandists to go far beyond that which their home public would support. Need it be said that the effects on foreign public opinion were possibly deflationary?
An imaginable end to the Cold War may lie in neither victory nor defeat, in neither accommodation nor reconciliation, but in the development of more, newer, and different quarrels. Hostility of Protestant and Catholic faded out in Europe when the hostility of French, Germans, Spaniards, and other nationalities came to be more important. It is a problem for the psychiatrist and sociologist to answer if they can. Is it possible that semantics of war-causing quarrels can be superseded by anything other than different quarrels? A tension-free civilization is imaginable; given the characteristics of most present-day cultures it is scarcely more than merely imaginable.48
If within the limits of practical possibility one were to list the hypothetical requirements for an end of the Cold War, the following might stand forth:
It would be a brave and foolish man who would say which of these the world should expect, but it would be a stupid staff officer who did not anticipate at least one of them and who did not as a military officer or government official do his best to bring about "victory" in a form which his side could define, recognize, welcome, and achieve.49
The most important of these wars were the five in Korea, Indochina, the Philippines, Malaya, and Indonesia. The Israeli struggle appears pretty well settled as a fighting war and the India-Pakistan issue appears not to be one which will lead to general war between those two countries. The predominant group of wars shows variations of the same components in different quantities.
Each was a reaction to the fall of Japan's short-lived East Asia military empire. Each involved partial or complete resistance to economic affiliation with the capitalist world. Each had an ingredient, though these differed in stress and direction, of local Asian nationalism. Except for Indonesia, each eventually became a part of the world-wide front between Communism and anti-Communism. These wars deserve consideration one at a time for their PsyWar content.
For instance, one of the major factors in the defeat of the Nationalists consisted of the withdrawal of the Japanese managers and technicians from China as well as of those Japanese troops who had been maintaining a degree of law and order in Manchuria and North China. This withdrawal was not only sought by such "progressives" in the State Department as John Stewart Service and Alger Hiss; it was also enthusiastically endorsed by conservatives such as General Wedemeyer, who shipped the Japanese out and General MacArthur, who received them. No American, right-wing or left-wing, seriously proposed replacing the Japanese with United States or United Nations personnel until the Nationalists had enough trainees to manage a modern, capitalist China. By withdrawing the Japanese the Nationalists and the Allies destroyed the political and economic system under which the Nationalists proposed to operate and were then astonished when the Nationalists met defeat.
In the China policy situation the contribution of Communist covert propaganda within the United States in preventing aid to Chiang in the crucial years of 1947, 1948 and 1949 should not be overlooked; neither should it be overestimated nor considered the sole determinant of events which took place within China.50
Dutch military and strategic propaganda in their war with the Indonesians suffered from uncertainty on the Dutch side as to the goals of the war, the suspicion that a Netherlands victory would be nothing more than a triumph of colonial capitalism, and the insistent interference of United Nations and United States observers. The Dutch were never able to put across the point that Indonesia derived its nationhood from Imperial Japanese sponsorship and the Netherlands withdrawal was dictated as much by the practical necessity of reconciling world opinion and balancing the home budget as by the militarily untenable nature of the Dutch enterprise.
In this situation Ramón Magsaysay, as Secretary of Defense, developed some of the most provocative and audacious anti-guerrilla operations of the postwar period. To meet the Communist claim that the struggle was one of the landless against the rich, he offered all surrendered Huks resettlement in a new land project; he visited the project himself frequently enough to make sure it remained a valuable demonstration area. To allow the common people to help the Government, without their suffering from Communist reprisals against themselves or their families, he disseminated secret methods whereby the people could communicate with the Government forces. He established a psychological warfare office under Major José Crisol. This office was doing as good a job of tactical PsyWar with leaflets, mimeographs, loudspeakers, light planes, and other field and headquarters equipment as any army installation which the author has seen. Most of the doctrine and procedures for the operation of the office were American, but the content of the materials was Filipino. Catholicism, Filipino patriotism, Malayan nativism and peasant common sense were some of the factors used to underscore the Philippine Army's appeals. In the following three years the Huks shrank seriously although the danger could not be said to have been eliminated altogether.
It ill becomes an American to criticize the French for their policy in Indochina since it was by virtue of a U.S. strategic decision and a U.S. logistical action that Indochina was turned first from Japanese hands into the hands of the British in the south and the Chinese Nationalists in the north. The British did not care much about the local situation. The particular Chinese Nationalists in northern Indochina were mildly sympathetic with local nationalism, but chiefly preoccupied with stealing everything that could be put on a truck. After this ill-fated liberation the Americans then assisted the French in transporting forces back to Indochina. This was after much of the U.S. press and many U.S. leaders had indicated their disapproval of French colonialism and had given indirect but powerful encouragement to Viet Minh's rebellion against the French. Having helped foul up the situation for the French hopelessly, the United States then observed their return (a return which was definitely, though indirectly, made possible only by U.S. aid to France) with uncertainty and disquiet. It took the Americans four years to decide that they were on the French side and even then they were not very much on the French side.
Neither were the French.
The "French side" was an indefinable amalgam of old-fashioned French colonialism, the membership of three small Asian states in a French Union, and anti-Communism. The French made the mistake which the Americans repeated when they invited the Chinese Communist general, Wang Hsiu-ch'üan, to New York to defame the United States through the courtesy of the United States Government, or when they tried dealing with the Chinese Communists, fighting them, dealing with them, and fighting with them again. When the French finally decided to seek an all-out military victory against the Communists they set up local governments which they themselves promptly dishonored, giving them neither prestige nor authority enough to combat the Communist menace in local Asian terms.
That the French should have held the Asian anti-Communist front under these strange political circumstances is a credit to France. The Indochinese war has been dirty, discouraging. It has often verged upon the hopeless. The French have been criticized by the Americans in the early period of the reoccupation of Indochina for not turning the country over to Communist "nationalists" lock, stock and barrel; later the Americans criticized the French because the French did not annihilate the same "Communist nationalists" whom the Americans had previously lauded. In the end, Dien Bien Phu and Geneva were the inevitable concomitants of Panmunjom. Once we made "peace," the French had to make an equally bad "peace" too.
The United States was adroit enough to obtain the immense psychological leverage of getting the Korean war recognized as a UN war. The Indochinese war was not made a UN war even though it was the same enemy who was being fought—Asian Communists underwritten by Peking and guaranteed by Moscow—in each case.
Amazing though it may seem, practical psychological warfare was almost completely neglected by the French until the Americans supplied the French with printing facilities for French Annamite leaflets in 1950. By 1952 the French had assigned staff officers to carry out psychological warfare responsibilities and were making a serious effort to link up with the other anti-Communist forces in East Asia for the purpose of obtaining psychological warfare know-how. A considerable improvement in tactical psychological warfare was made between 1950 and 1952. The strategic psychological warfare position of the French in the area must be referred back to the "battle of the probabilities," mentioned earlier in this chapter. So long as French, Americans, and Annamites all feel that a French defeat is quite probable and say so both publicly and privately, it will be difficult for the French to make the Indochinese believe that Viet Nam, Cambodia, and Laos are here to stay as French-protected and anti-Communist nations.51
What are "life, purpose, and honor" in basic human terms?
They are the rights to belong to something, to be a part of history, to make one's own world move, to be a human being superior to other human beings, to be vain, to be proud, to be self-sacrificing.
After years of war against the Chinese Communist guerrillas who have small components of Malayans and Indians with them, the British have not yet found a single British brigadier or major general of the Chinese race. The world at large on the anti-Communist side has yet to hear of a Chinese-Malayan hero who served mankind by falling martyr to the Communist terror or by emerging as victor in valiant heroic combat.
The Chinese in Malaya, as the author has observed at first hand, are probably more prosperous than any other Chinese have ever been anywhere in the world. Under capitalism today the Chinese communities in Malaya have achieved a degree of wealth, health, and education which Communist China will be remarkable to have achieved if it survives and succeeds for the next hundred years.
Does this not give the lie to the great Communist myth concerning Asia—the myth accepted by many Western politicians, intellectuals, and newspaper men—that the struggle between Communism and anti-Communism is a struggle for living standards? that the issue is an issue of "who will provide the best livelihood"?
On the pro-Communist side in Malaya, Chinese who are not religious and who are known for their practicality and secularism, struggle for the chance to go forth and suffer, to serve in an army with bad medical service and no pensions, to face an almost certain death in the jungle, to lose life and property (which they could keep on the British side) in order to gain that other kind of life—life with honor and purpose, on the Communist side.
The British meanwhile progress, no doubt. In many respects the British administrations in Singapore and Malaya are more enlightened than some of the local governments in the United States. But whatever the reason, they do not seem to belong to the Chinese who live there or even to the Malays. They are governments for the people, and not (so far as the local people seem to judge) governments of the people.
Is it reasonable to ask in the mid-1950s that decent British officers and civil servants convert themselves into apocalyptic fanatics of a weird composite Asian nationalism? Can the British make revolution in Malaya when they are rather fatigued with their own Labor revolution at home? Can we Americans, who have made nothing, absolutely nothing, out of the heroism and romance and tradition that might have been reconstituted as the ancient kingdom of Ryukyu (Okinawa), be in a position to chide the British for not doing that which we ourselves do not undertake?
The Communist magic is strong, bad magic. In North Korea it created officers in an unreasonably short time, developed fanatics while we were trying to develop gentlemen, and came close to defeating us in the perilous weeks of the Pusan perimeter. In China soldiers of whom many Americans despaired when they fought on the Nationalist side became desperate assault infantry under Communist training. The timid and quarrelsome Annamites who had given the French so little trouble before Communism organized them, fought like leopards once they read Marx, Lenin, Mao Tse-tung and Ho Chi-minh.
Was this why the Communists were able to continue in Malaya? No one has ever accused the British Army of a lack of ingenuity. The forces who developed desert raiders, coastal commandos, air-dropped banditti, and a plethora of amusing, shocking, and audacious innovations cannot be accused of a lack of imagination.
The British did use psychological warfare in Malaya strategically, tactically, in the field, in the cities, by radio, and by print. When Carleton Greene was directing the British PsyWar effort from the headquarters of that redoubtable gentleman, Malcolm MacDonald, British Commissioner General for South East Asia, he even resorted to the device of writing individual letters to known Communists and leaving these letters scattered through the jungle. The British used white propaganda, black propaganda, grey propaganda; if there had been a purple propaganda they certainly would have tried it. Alex Josey came close to it when he shocked the planters in Malaya by delivering socialist speeches over the Malay radio in an attempt to pull the Left wing off the Communist bird.
Sir Henry Gurney, the High Commissioner of the Federation who was murdered in 1952, was a veteran of irregular warfare. He had faced the Zionist terrorists in Jerusalem and was a man without fear. His approach to the problem of confronting Communism was hopelessly sane. The Communists were offering young Chinese the intoxication of craziness, of a mad and heroic righteousness to justify the misspending of their lives. Sir Henry's answer was decency, goodness, security, prosperity, authority, liberty under law. He offered everything except glamor, terror, inspiration, and romance—
Everything except the chance to join the British side.
What kind of British side?
A British side which, like the Communist side, would welcome the makers of the future, the builders of the next civilization, the arbiters of history.
The Communists have presented a high bid against the U.S. and Britain as well as the other Western powers. We have not yet overbid them. The high bid is the opportunity to join, to belong, really to be equal, not just legally equal, and, above everything, to share, to struggle, and to work under conditions of heroism for a common goal.
The top levels of this problem are, of course, political. They must be solved in the light of a U.S. home public which eschews crusades and dreads adventures. At a lower level the problem becomes one for the military staffs of the future. How can the United States, the United Nations, or other anti-Communist forces recruit native leaders and native followers under circumstances of dignity and honor? How can we either learn to love the allies we have or to find allies whom we can love? Until then much of the spiritual and organizational advantage in Asia will fall to the Communists. We may have the better ideals, but if people who are determined to illuminate their own lives with the splendor of risky, heroic, or self-sacrificing action (and who insist on doing something desperate somewhere somehow, so as to relieve the ignominy, poverty, and monotony of their existences) cannot learn how to join us, they will perforce join the other side.
A slight or even a substantial increase in economic welfare in the Asian states seems to the author to favor a sharp increase in Communist strength. When people are desperately poor or sick they cannot worry about causes. When they become moderately well off—well enough off to know that they are despised, poor by our standards, ignorant by our standards—then the point of psychological frenzy comes in.
The strategic PsyWar self-limitations imposed by the United States on the United States in the Korean war were also crippling. The United States did not desire anything which a professional soldier would recognize as victory. U.S. opinion was divided as to whether all of Korea should be liberated by UN forces. At the policy-making level—certainly among our allies—there was pretty general agreement to remain at peace with the supply dumps and high command of the Chinese Communist forces in Manchuria and China while fighting the forward echelons of those forces in Korea. The United States would not accept defeat nor would it seek a decisive victory because victory might have involved the risk of war.
Under these conditions it must be pointed out that General MacArthur had the first and only PsyWar establishment ready to operate the moment the Korean war began. Col. J. Woodall Greene ably managed the Tokyo headquarters for most of the period of the Korean war. The Department of the Army showed great good judgment in bringing back Brig. Gen. Robert McClure, who had been Eisenhower's PsyWar chief in Europe, to the new Department of the Army's PsyWar establishment which was created on 15 January 1951 in the Pentagon as a part of Special Staff, United States Army, with the title of Office of the Chief of Psychological Warfare (OCPW). When General McClure departed for Teheran, he was succeeded at OCPW by Brig. Gen. William Bullock. The last period of the Korean war found Korean local PsyWar at the headquarters of Eighth U.S. Army in Korea (EUSAK) under the command of Col. Donald Hall, who had probably seen more continuous PsyWar service than any other officer in the U.S. Army.
From 1776 to 1945 the U.S. system of government managed to survive in a world comprising many types of government without setting up its own propaganda and agitational forces. Propaganda through most of the twentieth century was pretty clearly limited by the U.S. conception of propaganda as a weapon auxiliary to war. "Psychological warfare" became proper, in conventional American terms, only when there was a war to be won. With the coming of peace in 1945 there was considerable uncertainty as to whether the United States should have a propaganda establishment at all.
Even at the time of writing (1954) there is still some doubt as to whether the United States needs propaganda facilities. The William Jackson report of July 1953 indicated that the terms propaganda and psychological warfare were unsatisfactory. Of course they were. They still are. The world itself is unsatisfactory—in terms of the traditional, humane, rational U.S. point of view.
The story of U.S. "peacetime" propaganda since the end of World War II is a very complicated one. Quantity, direction, purpose, and quality have shifted with the various turns of the international situation. The subject has become much more difficult to write about since the time the first edition of this book was written in 1946.
In the first place, governmental secrecy has been very sharply restored. Even very routine State Department operations for putting across the U.S. point of view have been shrouded in masses of classified documents. For reasons not always evident to the outside observer, the assumption has become prevalent that the normal operations of the United States Government should be kept confidential, secret, or even top secret. Often it would seem that the attempt to maintain secrecy in non-sensitive functions is not worth the security effort at all or, contrariwise, may even reassure the antagonists of the United States by not letting them realize how serious and how unfriendly our plans or policies with respect to them may be. (This is not the time or place to discuss the problem of secrecy as a protection against domestic criticism—which secrecy, of course, has often become, to the detriment of both the government and the citizens of the United States.)
In the second place, not only have information activities become more hush-hush: they have also become more complicated. It is difficult to do justice to an intricate moving panorama of activities, some of which may not be mentioned or described under existing law.
In other words, there were eight years in which the Department of State had primary responsibility for the conduct of peacetime propaganda of the United States. This was the first and only time that the United States Government had in a period of relative peace undertaken a sustained propaganda effort.
The effort had ups and downs because neither the citizenry nor the officials knew whether the country was in a condition of peace or at war and, if at war, at war with whom. To some the enemy was Communism, the ideology; to others, Communism the movement; to still others, the USSR; to others, the Korean Communists, but not the Chinese Communists; to others, the Chinese Communists in Korea, but not the Chinese Communists in China; and so on, ad infinitum.
The general history of these eight years was, by and large, a first phase in which the United States demobilized or destroyed propaganda facilities which had been built up with great skill and at great cost during World War II, and a second phase in which those facilities were partially rebuilt and the skills rediscovered. The low point in this development was probably the winter of 1947-48.
For a while, the rumor went around Washington that the Secretary of Defense, Louis Johnson, would not tolerate the utterance of the words propaganda or psychological warfare, and that the Secretary of the Army, Kenneth C. Royall, refused to have the topic mentioned to him. That may be the exaggeration characteristic of newspapermen, but it epitomized the spirit of that time.
While "psychological warfare" almost disappeared from the Department of Defense and the three services during this low point, the State Department never quite demobilized. For one thing, the State Department had inherited the OWI facilities and the Army facilities in the occupied countries—Austria, Germany, Korea, and Japan. As the heir to substantial informational facilities the State Department kept a certain minimum activity going. Facilities such as American Broadcasting Station in Europe (ABSIE), Radio in the American Sector—of Berlin—(RIAS), the Information Control Commands in the American Sector of Germany, Information and Education (I&E) Section of the General Headquarters of the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (SCAP) in Japan—these (though sometimes renamed) represented going propaganda concerns which required a Washington command post.
Meanwhile, it became standing operating procedure in the U.S. diplomatic establishment to attach some kind of an informational facility to every diplomatic establishment and to most of the major consulates.
Since there were always advocates of complete propaganda dismantlement, as well as enthusiasts for the maintenance of information programs, the issue of remaining in the propaganda business or getting out was always more or less in doubt. The economy and the demobilization phases of 1947 and 1948 were stimulated by evidence of Soviet bad faith in Europe during 1949 and brought into sharp focus by the outbreak of the Korean semi-war in 1950.
It is not possible to do justice to all these different systems in a single phrase. Even as late as the present, it is sometimes difficult to determine why the U.S. need have an information program operating in such entirely friendly countries as Cuba, Haiti, Ireland, or Australia. There is some point to the argument set forth by ultraconservatives that what was good enough for Theodore Roosevelt ought to be good enough today; that, in other words, the United States should be known for what it is and not by what a few hired promoters can say about it.
As in so many other fields of activities, however, the past is irrecoverable. The United States can no more return to the pre-atomic age in propaganda matters than it can in defense matters. The world we have built is with us and the only alternative to survival seems death. With respect to the specific field of propaganda, this leads to occasional curious political alliances. Sometimes the conservatives in U.S. politics are so conservative they want no propaganda at all; at other times these same conservatives are so anti-Communist that they want more propaganda. On occasions the Left within the USA has viewed U.S. propaganda with alarm and at other times has demanded that there be more of it and that more of the content be Left.
Later, as will be described, the Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs was supplemented by a Psychological Strategy Board outside of the Department of State and still later by a White House assistant in charge of informational policies at the highest level.
What can be said of this first U.S. peacetime performance in the propaganda field?
The Assistant Secretaries themselves have been men of varied capacities and interests. Mr. Barrett was an OWI veteran and a journalist of high standing. George Allen was a tough-minded career diplomat. Howland Sargeant was a distinguished government official. William Benton was the founder of the most successful "canned" music system for restaurants and the most vigorous promoter which the Encyclopædia Britannica ever had; later he became a Senator. Men such as these can scarcely be called tight-lipped fanatics emerging from the hidden recesses of a U.S. "Politburo." They and their colleagues did a surprisingly good job.
American travelers overseas were often amazed to find that the U.S. propaganda effort was far more polished and purposeful than an observer within the United States could expect it to be. The activities of the Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs consisted of supervising the domestic origination of broadcasts directed to the Soviet Union, the satellite countries, neutrals, and friends. The radio system was generally known as the Voice of America. To this degree he had charge of a propaganda system operated within the United States by Americans, but speaking to foreigners, sometimes by transmitters located within the USA and more often with relay transmitters which picked up programs originating in the continental United States and rebroadcast overseas.
One echelon removed, there were installations attached to the diplomatic and consular establishments of the United States which were usually known as USIS although in some particular cases quasi-private facilities were sponsored instead. In each foreign country there was at the embassy or legation level a Public Affairs Officer (PAO) who was the information specialist for the diplomatic mission and—in theory at least—in charge of all U.S. propaganda or informational activities, whichever one preferred to call them, in the country to which he was accredited.
A complex hierarchy of officials routed, relayed, screened, and coordinated programs from headquarters to the PAOs in the field and proposals or requests from the PAOs back to headquarters.
After all, what is one to do? Is it valid to "propagandize" our innocently cherubic service personnel abroad whom so many domestic purity leagues and local pressure groups are anxious to defend? After all, these service people possess fearful weapons. Each has a Congressman to whom he might write. But if service personnel in a foreign country are to be given nonpropaganda materials, how can the same area be given propaganda materials for the benefit of the indigenous personnel? The propaganda from the United States Government must not be too much at variance with the "nonpropaganda" of the United States Government. If the two extremes of communication were too far apart, the United States Government might look like an ass. That would be most unhappy.
Over and above the contradictions and difficulties involved in the operation of at least two governmental systems and many private systems of U.S. news communication and dissemination systems in foreign areas, there is the further problem of additional U.S. facilities. Sources such as The Washington Post, Joseph Alsop, James Reston, and other well-informed Washington journalists often hinted gloomily and darkly that U.S. cloak-and-dagger operations are still going on; Dorothy Thompson was often troubled by what she regarded as the feckless successors of the wartime OSS. Many times Americans resident in local areas concerned seemed never to have heard of the hush-hush operations in their own overseas homes, operations which were denounced with purple prose in Washington; we can say that covert operations, when they have been really uncovered, as in the case of the Time story about overzealous U.S. support of a German nationalist resistance group, turn out to be much more pale than the lurid columnists or inside stories from Washington would lead one to believe.
More serious have been the duplication, and triplication, and occasional quadruplication of official informational activities. The overseas economic and military aid program, known successively as Economic Cooperation Administration (ECA), Mutual Security Administration (MSA) and Foreign Operations Administration (FOA) has not only supplemented the existing leaflet, broadcast, and other informational activities of the State Department and the armed forces with a third set of information programs; it has itself had a fourth rival in the Point Four administration, the Technical Cooperation Administration (TCA), which was both a part of State and not a part of State, depending upon the particular situation overseas.