Moseley Warns US Lacks Experts to Wage Psychological Warfare

By Marcus Boone · August 9, 2026

Foreign populations were slated for manipulation by a centralized engine of influence designed after Washington admitted it had no funds or experts to conduct such operations.

On October 15, 1947, a memorandum moved across a desk in Washington. It came from Moseley, the Secretary of the State–Army–Navy–Air Force Coordinating Committee (SANACC), and was addressed to Under Secretary of State Robert Lovett. The subject was stark: "Proposal for a National Psychological Warfare Organization."

This document, preserved in the Foreign Relations of the United States (State Dept) archive, captures a moment of institutional panic. The United States had just emerged from a global war and was stepping into a Cold War for which it had no established psychological playbook. Moseley was bringing to Lovett’s attention a report from the SANACC Subcommittee on Special Studies and Evaluations—a group comprising representatives from the State Department, the Central Intelligence Group (CIG), and the Armed Services. The subcommittee was led by Ralph Block of the Office of Intelligence Research (OIE), and their mandate was to design a system for the "conduct of psychological warfare in time of war or threat of war."

October 15, 1947

The proposal was not for a mere advisory board, but for a centralized engine of influence. The memo suggests the creation of a National Psychological Warfare Organization that would sit under either the National Security Council or a reconstituted SANACC. This body would be granted the power to provide "unified direction and authoritative coordination of the national psychological warfare effort and activities."

At the top of this structure would be a director appointed by the President. This director would also chair a policy planning board that would pull in the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS), the CIG, and the Armed Services. The goal was clear: the government wanted a single point of failure and a single point of control for how it manipulated the perceptions of foreign populations. The memo explicitly notes that this organization would require its own specific "allocations of manpower, funds, facilities, etc."

A Training School and Rosters

What the document reveals is a staggering gap between the government's ambitions and its actual capabilities in 1947. For all the talk of "unified direction," the United States was starting from zero.

Moseley lists a series of failures in the memo. He admits that the Department of State and the "Military Establishment" had no funds appropriated for psychological warfare. More damningly, he notes that "no psychological warfare specialist reserves exist within the Military Establishment or the Department of State."\ The U.S. government wanted to wage a psychological war but realized it had no one who actually knew how to do it.

To bridge this void, the subcommittee proposed the immediate creation of a "psychological warfare specialist category." They argued that the Army, Navy, and Air Force needed to institute training now. They called for the creation of a training school and the implementation of new recruitment policies. While the organization itself would be a wartime entity, the recruitment was to begin immediately. The State Department and the CIG were tasked with compiling rosters of available people capable of this work.

No Peacetime Authorization

There is a careful, almost legalistic boundary drawn in the text. Moseley points out that the SANACC Subcommittee is the only peacetime organization charged with preparing these policies, and he emphasizes that the committee is "not authorized to conduct psychological warfare in peacetime."\ He insists that the plans relate only to a "wartime agency," with the sole exception of the training and the rosters.

This distinction is a convenient fiction. By 1947, the Truman Doctrine had already shifted American foreign policy toward the containment of communism through any means necessary. The public record defines psychological warfare (PSYWAR) as any action practiced mainly by psychological methods to evoke a "planned psychological reaction in other people." While Moseley may have felt the need to reassure Lovett that they weren't breaking any peacetime rules, the urgent demand for "specialists" and "rosters" suggests a government preparing the soil for a war that would never actually stop.

Other records in the US National Archives, such as those listed under "Psychological Warfare Area Estimates" (NAID 601164) and "Psychological Warfare Files" (NAID 6828665), point to the broadening of these efforts. But this October memo is where the plumbing was first designed.

It leaves the question of where those first rosters were drawn from, and who was deemed a "specialist" in the art of psychological manipulation in the autumn of 1947.