State Department Officials Masked Cold War Warfare as a 'Psychological Effort'

By Marcus Boone · August 9, 2026

Foreign populations were targeted by state manipulation while the government used sanitized language to hide that psychological warfare was being waged during a time of peace.

The memorandum is undated, but its contents map a frantic effort to build a machine for the mind. Written by W.K. Scott, the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Administration, to Under Secretary Webb, the document serves as a ledger of the internal scaffolding used to institutionalize "psychological warfare" during the opening act of the Cold War.

By 1950, the United States was operating under the shadow of NSC 68, a policy paper the public record describes as a blueprint for the militarization of the Cold War. While NSC 68 provided the strategic justification for a massive military expansion, Scott’s memorandum details the specific, grinding bureaucratic arguments over who would actually control the psychological front. The struggle was not over whether to manipulate foreign perceptions, but over which office would hold the leash.

"Avoid the controversy"

The document traces a lineage of directives—NSC-10/2, NSC-4, and NSC-43—that gradually shifted the responsibility for "foreign information measures" and "covert operations" into a structured government apparatus. By March 1950, NSC-59 had officially charged the Secretary of State with formulating the "National Psychological Warfare policy in time of national emergency and the initial stages of war."

However, the transition from wartime necessity to peacetime application created a branding problem. The memorandum reveals a calculated effort to sanitize the language of state manipulation. To bypass the political risk of admitting that the U.S. was waging war on the psyche of foreign populations during a time of peace, the State Department adopted a new phrase: the "National Psychological Effort."

Scott explicitly writes that this term was chosen "in order to avoid the controversy about whether 'psychological warfare' is conducted in time of peace." This was not a mere semantic preference; it was a strategic pivot. By rebranding warfare as an "effort," the administration could maintain the machinery of psychological operations without triggering the domestic or international alarms that the word "warfare" would inevitably provoke.

August 17, 1950

As the hostilities in Korea intensified, the theoretical plans of the late 1940s became urgent operational requirements. On August 17, 1950, the Department of State announced the creation of a national psychological strategy board. According to the memo, this board was "in fact nothing more than" the Director and Consultants already established under NSC-59, but the public announcement gave it a veneer of new, decisive action.

This coincided with the development of NSC-74, a report that had been prepared on the "tacit assumption" that any future war would be general and would strike "without warning." The plan envisioned a tiered response: an "initial stage" of psychological warfare to be triggered on "D-day" (or earlier, at the President's discretion), followed by "subsequent stages" of a more permanent organization.

Under this framework, the Secretary of State was to "formulate national psychological warfare policy and issue psychological warfare policy directives to appropriate departments and agencies of the U.S. Government." In the heat of the Korean conflict, the Interdepartmental Foreign Information Organization was to be "augmented" into an Interim Psychological Warfare Board. The goal was total coordination, ensuring that the "psychological measures" were in lockstep with military movements in the field.

Admiral Souers

Despite the agreed-upon goals, the government could not agree on the hierarchy. The memorandum details a rift between the State Department and the Executive Office of the President. On September 13, 1950, Secretary Johnson argued that the current plans were "inadequate" and proposed the creation of an "independent psychological planning board" located directly within the Executive Office of the President. This board would have been staffed by full-time appointees rather than department representatives, effectively stripping the State Department of its autonomy over the "effort."

This sparked a formal "memorandum of disagreement." The core question was simple: should the authority to issue policy guidance to all government agencies executing psychological operations reside with the Secretary of State, or with an official independent of any department and responsible directly to the President?

To break the deadlock, President Truman referred the dispute to the Bureau of the Budget and Admiral Souers. By January 18, Souers had proposed a compromise: a board "under the NSC" with a chairman appointed by the President. This move effectively shifted the center of gravity away from traditional diplomacy and toward the National Security Council's inner circle.

The memorandum ends with a mention of a meeting at the Bureau of the Budget involving Admiral Souers and several officials, including Lawton and Staats. During this meeting, a revised draft of the Souers directive was circulated and discussed, but the record notes that "no copies were given out."