Gordon Gray Masked Atomic Terror and Soviet Farms as Office Supplies

By Marcus Boone · August 9, 2026

Soviet farms and the psychological effects of atomic energy were watched for years under labels for office furniture to hide the manipulation of global perception.

The US National Archives contains a series titled "Supplies, Services and Equipment Files from Class 400 of the Decimal Files." To a casual researcher, the name suggests a mundane ledger of office furniture, stationery, or perhaps the procurement of typewriters. The file's catalogue entry records a different reality. This series consists of correspondence, reports, and newspaper clippings covering a range of topics that bear no obvious relation to office supplies: Soviet agriculture, narcotics, oil cartels, and "the psychological effects of atomic energy."

Class 400

The juxtaposition is jarring. In the sterile logic of the decimal filing system, the terror of the nuclear age and the global trade of narcotics are categorized alongside "supplies and equipment." This is the administrative shorthand of the Psychological Strategy Board (PSB), a body created on April 4, 1951, during the Truman administration. According to the public record, the PSB was designed to coordinate and plan psychological operations, acting as a bridge between the Under Secretary of State, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, and the Director of Central Intelligence.

When the government labels the "psychological effects of atomic energy" as a matter of equipment and services, it reveals the clinical distance with which it viewed the mental landscape of the Cold War. The PSB did not merely observe these effects; it was tasked with the planning of operations. The inclusion of newspaper clippings in the Class 400 files indicates a preoccupation with how these topics were being framed in the public square, and how that framing could be manipulated to serve national security interests.

Gordon Gray and the 1951 Mandate

The board's first director was Gordon Gray, a man who would later serve as National Security Advisor under Eisenhower. The public record establishes that the PSB was born out of a need to manage the growth of covert activities conducted by the Office of Policy Coordination during the Korean War. Gray’s mandate was coordination, but the scope of that coordination was vast.

The Class 400 files suggest that the PSB’s definition of "psychological strategy" extended to the very basics of human survival and greed. By tracking Soviet agriculture and oil cartels, the board was identifying the pressure points of the enemy’s economy. By monitoring narcotics, they were identifying vulnerabilities in the social fabric of target populations. These were not merely intelligence reports; they were the raw materials for psychological warfare.

Palestine and the Subject Files

The scale of the PSB’s appetite is further evidenced by related series within the National Archives. The "Subject Files" contain memoranda and reports on a dizzying array of foreign policy issues, including the Air Intelligence Division, the Central Intelligence Agency, and Palestine. This suggests a global reach where the PSB sought to align the narrative of American interests across disparate geographies, from the Middle East to the nuclear laboratories of the West.

Other related series provide the logistical scaffolding for these operations. The "Personnel Files from Class 200" contain the applications and clippings concerning the people hired to execute these strategies. Meanwhile, the "Finance and Accounting Files from Class 100" record the budget estimates for fiscal year 1954 and detail intelligence operations specifically linked to the State Department. The government was not just thinking about psychological operations; it was budgeting for them, hiring for them, and filing them under labels designed to disappear into the background of a bureaucracy.

The Gaps in the Catalogue

What we have here is the map, not the territory. The archival scope-and-content descriptions tell us that these files exist, but they do not provide the pages themselves. We know the PSB was interested in the "psychological effects of atomic energy," but the catalogue entry does not say whether they viewed these effects as a deterrent to be amplified or a trauma to be managed. We know they tracked oil cartels and Soviet farms, but the specific reports and the resulting "psychological strategies" remain outside this summary.

There are related files held elsewhere—referenced in the FRUS (State Department) records, including a memorandum from the Acting Director of the PSB to the Under Secretary of State—but the specific contents of the Class 400 "Supplies, Services and Equipment" files remain a matter of archival record rather than public knowledge. The documents remain in the National Archives, categorized by a decimal system that sought to render the manipulation of global perception as routine as ordering a new shipment of paper.