James Webb - Project Troy

[EndtheMadnessNow]

I remain star struck by the fact that the telescope producing all the beautiful imagery floating around our screens these past couple days is literally named after a pioneer in psychological warfare who helped establish deep ties between the State Department, CIA, MIT, and Harvard.

James Webb, former NASA head & namesake of the new space telescope, also established...

The phrase Cold War didn’t always refer to a time period. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, the very years that the battle lines between the United States and the Soviet Union were being drawn, U.S. foreign-policy strategists used the phrase to invoke a specific kind of conflict, one carried out by “means short of war.” If, as NSC-68, a key document of U.S. strategy, asserted in 1950, the United States and the Soviet Union were locked in an ideological clash of civilizations, a battle between “slavery” and “freedom,” a victory by force would be hollow. If the United States wanted to defeat communism, it needed to do so “by the strategy of cold war,” combining political, economic, and psychological techniques. “The cold war,” NSC-68 warned, “is in fact a real war in which the survival of the free world is at stake.”
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The CIA also asked for something more difficult to supply than money: expertise. As matters currently stood, the OPC lacked “a significant body of knowledge, personnel reserves, techniques, and philosophy of operations” regarding psychological warfare. For this, the architects of U.S. psychological-warfare strategy turned to the scientific community. Undersecretary of State James Webb asked the noted physicist and veteran adviser Lloyd Berkner’s help in assembling a crack team of scientists to tackle the problem of psychological warfare. The resulting Project Troy brought together a group of social scientists and physical scientists from MIT and Harvard that either already had or would soon play leading roles in the Cold War. In addition to Berkner himself, the group included the electrical engineer (and future adviser to President Kennedy) Jerome Wiesner, the physicist and future Nobel laureate Edward Purcell, and the economist Max Millikan, all at MIT; the anthropologist Clyde Kluckhohn and the psychologist Jerome Bruner, both Office of War Information veterans now at Harvard; and a select few others from outside the universities, including RAND’s Hans Speier and Bell Labs’ John Pierce.
....

Project Troy’s biggest impact ultimately turned out to be long-lasting relationships between government officials at the State Department and the CIA and social scientists at MIT and Harvard. In the more immediate future, however, Project Troy’s endorsement of some sort of central agency to coordinate the various overt and covert psychological-warfare programs already in place sent ripples through the foreign-policy establishment.
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All this suggests that scientific programming had a place, if not necessarily a prominent one, in both overt and covert psychological-warfare programs in the early 1950s. Over time, the CIA and the State Department would find ways to incorporate messages about scientific progress more directly into their work. They did so particularly with programming aimed at a particular class of elite technocrats in developing nations—the very people that NSC-68 proposed to win over in the first place.

The Atlantic

Reading "NSC 68" in the first paragraph and my paranoia meter is peaked.

Project Troy was a research study of psychological warfare undertaken for the Department of State by a group of scholars including physicists, historians and psychologists from Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and RAND Corporation in the fall of 1950.[1] The Project Troy Report to the Secretary of State, presented to Secretary Dean Acheson on 1 February 1951, made various proposals for political warfare, including possible methods of minimizing the effects of Soviet jamming on the Voice of America broadcasts.

On 26 March 1951 Robert J. Hooker delivered a memorandum on the Troy Report to the Director of the Policy Planning Staff Paul Nitze, asserting that the report "deserves the most serious consideration. It lays down principles and techniques for the conduct of political warfare which, with few exceptions, seem worthy of adoption."

Don't worry, INTO is on the case.





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Sidenote: My grandfather was the secret message traffic (the Typist) secretary for General Douglas MacArthur during WWII.