The Urgency of the Lie

By Marcus Boone · August 6, 2026

A 1947 memo reveals the CIA's early push to move 'psychological warfare' from a wartime tool to a permanent feature of American statecraft

October 22, 1947. The Second World War had been over for two years. The smoke had cleared from the ruins of Berlin and Tokyo, and the American public was, for the most part, looking toward a return to normalcy, the expansion of the middle class, and the promises of the post-war era. But inside the burgeoning architecture of the new National Security State, the peace was an inconvenient fiction.

In a memorandum addressed to the State–Army–Navy–Air Force Coordinating Committee (SWNCC), Rear Admiral Roscoe Hillenkoetter, the first Director of Central Intelligence, was not interested in normalcy. He was interested in the machinery of influence. The document, recently surfaced in the Foreign Relations of the United States archives, records a pivotal moment where the United States decided that the tools of war—specifically the manipulation of the human mind—were too useful to leave in the barracks.

The Pivot to Permanent War

Until this moment, the framework for a "Psychological Warfare Agency" was predicated on a specific condition: it was to be established only "in time of war or threat of war as determined by the President." This was a standard safeguard, a recognition that the weaponization of information and perception is a drastic measure, reserved for existential crises.

Hillenkoetter found this restriction unacceptable. In the memo, he writes bluntly: "I am of the opinion that conditions now indicate that psychological warfare measures be instituted now as a matter of urgency."

There is a cold precision in that phrasing. Hillenkoetter did not suggest a gradual transition or a cautious study of the geopolitical landscape. He demanded "urgency." He was arguing that the state of "threat" was no longer a temporary condition to be declared by the President, but a permanent environment in which the United States must operate. By pushing for these measures to be "instituted now," Hillenkoetter was helping to bake the Cold War into the very DNA of the American government.

Accountability in the Fog

Perhaps more alarming than the push for psychological warfare is the admission of how little oversight actually existed for it. The memo reveals a government in a state of organizational chaos, a vacuum of authority that is the natural breeding ground for covert excess.

Hillenkoetter notes that the functioning of the National Security Council (NSC) was "still undetermined" and that the SWNCC was in the process of being "reconstituted." Because the adults in the room hadn't yet decided who was in charge, Hillenkoetter recommended that the decision of who the Psychological Warfare Agency would be accountable to be "deferred at this time."

When the oversight of a psychological warfare apparatus is "deferred," the apparatus does not stop growing; it simply grows in the dark. Hillenkoetter’s eventual suggestion—that accountability be assigned to the Joint Chiefs of Staff—is telling. He wasn't looking for civilian oversight or diplomatic checks; he was looking for military alignment. He wanted the people who understand how to win a war to manage the process of manipulating the public, whether that public was foreign, domestic, or both.

The Pursuit of National Objectives

The memorandum concludes with a recommendation that an Ad Hoc Subcommittee study whether the U.S. should "at the present utilize psychological warfare measures in furtherance of the attainment of its National objectives."

"National objectives" is the ultimate government euphemism. It is a phrase designed to be wide enough to cover any action and vague enough to avoid any specific scrutiny. In 1947, these objectives were being defined by a small circle of men in Washington, far removed from the families who would eventually pay the price for these "measures" in the decades to come.

We are seeing here the birth of the covert consensus. The logic is simple: the world is dangerous, the threat is urgent, and because the threat is so great, we cannot afford the luxury of clear accountability or the restriction of wartime triggers. Once you decide that psychological warfare is a tool for "National objectives" rather than a last resort for survival, you have ceased to be a republic and have become an empire.

Hillenkoetter’s memo is short, but its legacy is long. It marks the moment the U.S. government decided that the truth was a secondary concern to the "attainment" of its goals. The "urgency" he felt in October 1947 created a precedent of secrecy and manipulation that the intelligence community has never truly abandoned. The document doesn't tell us exactly what those first psychological measures were—that remains in the gaps and the redactions of history—but it tells us exactly why they were started: because the people in power decided that the public's perception was a battlefield to be conquered.