OWI and the Secret Ledger of German Social Decay
The blueprint for wartime propaganda stayed hidden in a series of reports on Germany, though the actual operations derived from them remain blacked out.
By Marcus Boone ·
Psychological Warfare
11 Tests and the Psychological Filtering of the American Airman
The US government spent years quantifying the mental thresholds of its recruits, keeping the "Study of Combat Experiences" hidden while engineering the ideal combatant.
By Eleanor Voss ·
"These are the French" and the OSS Audit of a Nation's Soul
Maintained by the Office of the Chief, the records of the ETO Field Office show how the OSS reduced the French population to a set of sociological variables to be managed after the invasion.
By Desmond Okafor ·
Forged Sheet Music and the OSS War to Break Axis Morale
Axis soldiers were broken by forged toilet paper and fake radio broadcasts, a campaign of lies documented in curated exhibition panels and kept from public view for decades.
By Theo Marchetti ·
Japanese Civilians and the FMAD Morale Ledger
Kept hidden in integrated series, the psychological mapping of a population's breaking point provided the data used to engineer a total surrender.
By Constance Bell ·
A Latin America Exception and the OWI's 1943 Propaganda Order
For decades, the record of the Office of War Information presented a clean face of recruitment posters while masking a clandestine channel for influence in Latin America.
By Theo Marchetti ·
Canton's Black Radion Report and the OSS Scripts for Submission
Scripts designed to bend the will of audiences in China and Japan remained tucked away in sample files, masking the true reach of the agency's psychological warfare.
By Constance Bell ·
SRI International and the Top Secret Risk of Mental Suffering
Subjects risked death and cognitive instability in a remote viewing program hidden behind a shifting contract number and a facade of Army research.
By June Hargrove ·
650 Patients and the CIA's Index of Human Suggestibility
For decades, a curated list of psychological breakthroughs in West Germany and Italy remained hidden, tracing the precise mechanisms by which the human mind accepts a falsehood as a cure
By Miriam Adler ·
Thirteen Issues of *Victory* and the War for Neutral Minds
For three years, the United States deployed a "slick" magazine to hijack the perceptions of foreigners, a program whose bureaucratic DNA survived the war to build the CIA's psychological war machine.
By Theo Marchetti ·
Donald Downes and the Sanitized View of Australia
The record of wartime intelligence on Australia was stripped of its operational teeth, leaving a paper trail of booklets and pamphlets that hid the actual work of the Secret Intelligence Branch.
By Theo Marchetti ·
Simon Peter Alexandrov and the 1946 Atomic Bluff at Bikini
Kept secret for decades, a 1946 report exposes the psychological terror of Polish observers and the calculated lies of a Soviet agent attempting to rattle the American atomic monopoly.
By Eleanor Voss ·
Eleven Scrapbooks and the OSS Blueprint for Global Deception
The OSS kept 11 books of leaflets and songs used to manipulate populations from Italy to Indo-China, leaving the actual delivery networks and psychological tolls hidden from the record.
By Constance Bell ·
153,000 Coins and the Police Sensitives of Western Germany
A curated bibliography kept secret for decades maps the boundary between psychiatric theory and the operational use of 'sensitives' to solve crimes and gauge population susceptibility.
By Miriam Adler ·
AIR and the $14 Million Project to Map Human Capability
Kept in a CIA dossier, a 1990s blueprint for an electronic database of human skills shows how the intelligence community viewed the American workforce as a targetable resource.
By Marcus Boone ·
Pacification Manuals and the Erasure of the Vietnamese Peasant
For decades, the machinery of rural surveillance in Vietnam remained buried in a curated archive of 'theses' and 'talking papers' that masked the raw violence of defoliation.
By Theo Marchetti ·