OSS Psychologicaland Communications Studies Research, by Paul Wolf

The CIA and the Founding Fathers of Communication Studies

By Christopher Simpson, 1994

Turning to a consideration of CIA-sponsored psychological warfare studies, one finds a wealth of evidence showing that projects secretly funded by the CIA played a prominent role in U.S. mass communication studies during the middle and late 1950s. The secrecy that surrounds any CIA operation makes complete documentation impossible, but the fragmentary information that is now available permits identification of several important examples.
The first is the work of Albert Hadley Cantril (better known as Hadley Cantril), a noted "founding father" of modem mass communication studies. Cantril was associate director of the famous Princeton Radio Project from 1937 to 1939, a founder and longtime director of Princeton's Office of Public Opinion Research, and a founder of the Princeton Listening Center, which eventually evolved into the CIA-financed Foreign Broadcast Information Service. Cantril's work at Princeton is widely recognized as "the first time that academic social science took survey research seriously, and it was the first attempt to collect and collate systematically survey findings." 70 Cantril's The Psychology of Radio, written with Gordon Allport, is often cited as a seminal study in mass communication theory and research, and his surveys of public opinion in European and Third World countries defined the subfield of international public opinion studies for more than two decades.
Cantril's work during the first decade after World War II focused on elaborating Lippmann's concept of the stereotypethe "pictures in our heads," as Lippmann put it, through which people are said to deal with the world outside their immediate experience. Cantril specialized in international surveys intended to determine how factors such as class, nationalism, and ethnicity affected the stereotypes present in a given population, and how those stereotypes in turn affected national behavior in various countries, particularly toward the United States. 71 Cantril's work, while often revealing the "human face" of disaffected groups, began with the premise that the United States' goals and actions abroad were fundamentally good for the world at large. If U.S. acts were not viewed in that light by foreign audiences, the problem was that they had misunderstood our good intentions, not that Western behavior might be fundamentally flawed.
Cantril's career had been closely bound up with U.S. intelligence and clandestine psychological operations since at least the late 1930s. The Office of Public Opinion Research, for example, enjoyed confidential contracts from the Roosevelt administration for research into U.S. public opinion on the eve of World War 11. Cantril went on to serve as the senior public opinion specialist of the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs (an early U.S. intelligence agency led by Nelson Rockefeller and focusing on Latin America), of the World War II Office of War Information, and, in a later period, as an adviser to President Eisenhower on the psychological aspects of foreign policy. During the Kennedy administration, Cantril helped reorganize the U.S. Information Agency. 72
According to the New York Times, the CIA provided Cantril and his colleague Lloyd Free with $1 million in 1956 to gather intelligence on popular attitudes in countries of interest to the agency. 73 The Rockefeller Foundation appears to have laundered the money for Cantril, because Cantril repeatedly claimed in print that the monies had come from that source. 74 However, the Times and Cantril's longtime partner, Lloyd Free, confirmed after Cantril's death that the true source of the funds had been the CIA. 75
Cantril's first target was a study of the political potential of "protest" voters in France and Italy, who were regarded as hostile to U.S. foreign Policy. 76 That was followed by a 1958 tour of the Soviet Union under private, academic cover, to gather information on the social psychology of the Soviet population and on "mass" relationships with the Soviet elite. Cantril's report on this topic went directly to then president Eisenhower; its thrust was that treating the Soviets firmly, but with greater respect -- rather than openly ridiculing them, as had been Secretary of State John Foster Dulles' practice -- could help improve East-West relations. 77 Later Cantril missions included studies of Castro's supporters in Cuba and reports on the social psychology of a series of countries that could serve as a checklist of CIA interventions of the period Brazil, the Dominican Republic, Egypt, India, Nigeria, Philippines, Poland, and others. 78
An important focus of Cantril's work under the CIA's contract were surveys of U.S. domestic public opinion on foreign policy and domestic political issues -- a use of government funds many observers would argue was illegal. 79 There, Cantril introduced an important methodological innovation by breaking out political opinions by respondents' demographic characteristics and their place on a U.S. ideological spectrum he had devised -- a forerunner of the political opinion analysis techniques that would revolutionize U.S. election campaigns during the 1980s. 80
A second-and perhaps more important -- example of the CIA's role in U.S. mass communication studies during the 1950s was the work of the Center for International Studies (CENIS) at MIT. The CIA became the principal funder of this institution throughout the 1950s, although neither the CENIS nor the CIA is known to have publicly provided details on their relationship. It has been widely reported, however, that the CIA financed the initial establishment of the CENIS; that the agency underwrote publication of certain CENIS studies in both classified and nonclassified editions; that CENIS served as a conduit for CIA funds for researchers at other institutions, particularly the Center for Russian Research at Harvard; that the director of CENIS, Max Millikan, had served as assistant director of the CIA immediately prior to his assumption of the CENIS post; and that Millikan served as a "consultant to the Central Intelligence Agency," as State Department records put it, during his tenure as director of CENIS. 81 In 1966, CENIS scholar Ithiel de Sola Pool acknowledged that CENIS "has in the past had contracts with the CIA," though he insisted the CIA severed its links with CENIS following a bitter scandal in the early 1960s. 82
CENIS emerged as one of me most important centers of communication studies midway through the 1950s, and it maintained that role for the remainder of the decade. According to CENIS's official account, the funding for its communications research was provided by a four- year, $850,000 grant from the Ford Foundation, which was distributed under the guidance of an appointed planning committee made up of Hans Speier (chair), Jerome Bruner, Wallace Carroll, Harold Lasswell, Paul Lazarsfeld, Edward Shils, and Ithiel de Sola Pool (secretary). 83 It is not known whether Ford's funds were in fact CIA monies. The Ford Foundation's archives make clear, however, that the foundation was at that time underwriting the costs of the CIA's principal propaganda project aimed at intellectuals, the Congress for Cultural Freedom, with a grant of $500,000 made at CIA request, and that the Ford Foundation's director, John McCloy (who will be remembered here for his World War II psychological warfare work), had established a regular liaison with the CIA for the specific purpose of managing Ford Foundation cover for CIA projects. 84 Of the men on CENIS's communication studies planning committee, Edward Shils was simultaneously a leading spokesman for the CIA-backed Congress for Cultural Freedom Project; Hans Speier was the RAND Corporation's director of social science research; and Wallace Carroll was a journalist specializing in national security issues who had produced a series of classified reports on clandestine warfare against the Soviet Union for U.S. military intelligence agencies. 85 In short, CENIS communication studies were from their inception closely bound up with both overt and covert aspects of U.S. national security strategy of the day.
The CENIS program generated the large majority of articles on psychological warfare published by leading academic journals during the second half of the 1950s. CENIS's dominance in psychological warfare studies during this period was perhaps best illustrated by two special issues of POQ published in the spring of 1956 and the fall of 1958. Each was edited by CENIS scholars-by Ithiel de Sola Pool and Frank Bonilla and by Daniel Lerner, respectively -- and each was responsible for the preponderance of POQ articles concerning psychological warfare published that year. The collective titles for the special issues were "Studies in Political Communications" and "Attitude Research in Modernizing Areas." 86
CENIS scholars and members of the CENIS planning committee such as Harold Ina", Y. B. Damle, Claire Zimmerman, Raymond Bauer, and Suzanne Keller 87 and each of the special issue editors" provided most of the content. They drew other articles from studies that CENIS had contracted out to outside academics, such as a content analysis of U.S. and Soviet propaganda publications by Ivor Wayne of BSSR and a study of nationalism among the Egyptian elite by Patricia Kendall of BASR that was based on data gathered during the earlier Voice of America studies in the Mideast. 89
The purported dangers to the United States of "modernization" or economic development in the Third World emerged as the most important theme of CENIS studies in international communication as the decade of the 1950s drew to a close. Practically without exception, CENIS studies coincided with those issues and geographic areas regarded as problems by U.S. intelligence agencies "agitators" in Indonesia, student radicals in Chile, "change-prone" individuals in Puerto Rico, and the social impact of economic development in the Middle East. 90 CENIS also studied desegregation of schools in Little Rock, Arkansas, as an example of "modernization." 91
In these reports, CENIS authors viewed social change in developing countries principally as a management problem for the United States. Daniel Lerner contended that "urbanization, industrialization, secularization [and] communications" were elements of a typology of modernization that could be measured and shaped in order to secure a desirable outcome from the point of view of the U.S. government. "How can these modernizing societies-in-a-hurry maintain stability?" Lerner asked. "Whence will come the compulsions toward responsible formation and expression of opinion on which a free participant society depends?" 92
In The Passing of Traditional Society and other texts, Lerner contended that public "'participation' [in power] through opinion is spreading before genuine political and economic participation" in societies in developing countries 93 -- a clear echo of Lippmann's earlier thesis. This created a substantial mass of people who were relatively informed through the mass media, yet who were socially and economically disenfranchised, and thus easily swayed by the appeals of radical nationalists, Communists, and other "extremists." As in Lippmann's analysis, mass communication played an important role in the creation of this explosive situation, as Lerner saw it, and in elite management of it. He proposed a strategy modeled in large part on the campaign in the Philippines that combined "white" and "black" propaganda, economic development aid, and U.S.-trained and financed counterinsurgency operations to manage these problems in a manner that was "responsible" from the point of view of the industrialized world.
This "development theory," which combined propaganda, counter- insurgency warfare, and selective economic development of targeted regions, was rapidly integrated into U.S. psychological warfare practice worldwide as the decade drew to a close. Classified U.S. programs employing "Green Beret" Special Forces troops trained in what was termed "nation building" and counterinsurgency began in the mountainous areas of Cambodia and Laos. 94 Similar projects intended to win the hearts and minds of Vietnam's peasant population through propaganda, creation of "strategic hamlets," and similar forms of controlled social development under the umbrella of U.S. Special Forces troops can also be traced in part to Lerner's work, which was in time elaborated by Wilbur Schramm, Lucian Pye, Ithiel de Sola Pool, and others. 95 Lerner himself became a fixture at Pentagon-sponsored conferences on U.S. psychological warfare in the Third World during the 1960s and 1970s, lecturing widely on the usefulness of social science data for the design of what has since come to be called U.S. -sponsored low-intensity warfare abroad. 96
The Special Operations Research Office's 1962 volume The U.S. Army's Limited-War Mission and Social Science Research and the well-publicized controversy surrounding Project Camelot 97 show that the brutal U.S. counterinsurgency wars of the period grew out of earlier psychological warfare projects, and that their tactics were shaped in important part by the rising school of development theory. 98 Further, the promises integral to that theory -- namely, that U. S. efforts to control development in the Third World, if skillfully handled, could benefit the targets of that intervention while simultaneously advancing U.S. interests -- were often publicized by the USIA, by the Army's mass media, at various academic conferences, and in other propaganda outlets. In other words, as the government tested in the field the tactics advocated by Lerner, Pool, and others, the rationalizations offered by these same scholars became propaganda themes the government promoted to counter opposition to U.S. intervention abroad. 99
The important point with regard to CENIS is the continuing, inbred relationship among a handful of leading mass communication scholars and the U.S. military and intelligence community. Substantially the same group of theoreticians who articulated the early cold war version of psychological warfare in the 1950s reappeared in the 1960s to articulate the Vietnam era adaptation of the same concepts. More than a half-dozen noted academics followed this track Daniel Lerner, Harold Lasswell, Wilbur Schramm, John W. Riley, W. Phillips Davison, Leonard. Cottrell, and Ithiel de Sola Pool, among others. 100

Excerpt from The Science of Coercion Communication Research and Psychological Warfare 1945-1960, by Christopher Simpson, pp. 79-85. (Oxford University Press, 1994)

Footnotes:

70. Information on Cantril in this paragraph is from "Cantril, [Albert] Hadley," National Cyclopedia of American Biography, Vol. 55, pp. 211-12.
71. See, for example, William Buchanan and Hadley Cantril, How Nations See Each Other (Westport, CT Greenwood, 1972), pp. 91-101; or Hadley Cantril, The Politics of Despair (New York Basic Books, 1958).
72. "Cantril, [Albert] Hadley. See also collection of Psychological Strategy Board correspondence with Cantril, including Cantril's oblique reference to what appears to be clandestine CIA sponsorship and editing of his pamphlet The Goals of the Individual and the Hopes of Humanity (1951; published by Institute for Associated Research, Hanover, NH) in Cantril note of October 22, 195 1; in Hadley Cantril correspondence, Psychological Strategy Board, Truman Library, Independence, MO.
73. John M. Crewdson and Joseph Treaster, "Worldwide Propaganda Network Built by the CIA" New York Times, December 26, 1977.
74. Hadley Cantril, The Human Dimension Experiences in Policy Research (New Brunswick, NJ Rutgers University Press, 1967), pp. 131-32, 145.
75. Crewdson and Treaster, "Worldwide Propaganda Network."
76. Hadley Cantril and David Rodnick, Understanding the French Left (Princeton Institute for International Social Research, 1956).
77. Cantril, The Human Dimension, pp. 134-43.
78. Cantril, The Politics of Despair; Cantril, The Human Dimension, pp. 1-5, 144.
79. Lloyd Free and Hadley Cantril, The Political Beliefs of Americans (New Brunswick, NJ Rutgers University Press, 1967). On the question of legality, note that the CIA's charter bars the agency from "police, subpoena, lawenforcement powers or internal security functions," a phrase that most observers contend prohibits the CIA from collecting intelligence on U.S. citizens inside the United States. On this point, see Thomas Powers, The Man Who Kept the Secrets Richard Helms and the CIA (New York Pocket Books, 1979), pp. 315-17, 367-70, concerning the CIA's Operation Chaos.
80. For an example of a similar, later technique, see "Redefining the American Electorate," Washington Post, October 1, 1987, p. At 2, with data provided by the Times Mirror-Gallup Organization.
81. On CIA funding of CENIS, see Victor Marchetti and John Marks, The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence (New York Dell, 1974), p. 181; and David Wise and Thomas Ross, The Invisible Government (New York Vintage, 1974), p. 244. On CIA funding of studies, see Marchetti and Marks, The CIA, p. 18 1. For an example of a major study reported to have been underwritten by the CIA, see W. W. Rostow and Alfred Levin, The Dynamics of Soviet Society (New York Norton, 1952). On CENIS as a conduit of CIA funds, see Wise and Ross, The Invisible Government, p. 244. On Millikan's role, see U.S. Department of State, Foreign Service Institute, "Problems of Development and Internal Defense" (Country Team Seminar, June 11, 1962).
82. Ithiel de Sola Pool, "The Necessity for Social Scientists Doing Research for Governments," Background 10, no. 2 (August 1966) 114-15.
83. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Center for International Studies, A Plan for Research in International Communications World Politics, 6, no. 3 (April 1954) 358-77; MIT, CENIS, The Center for International Studies A Description (Cambridge MIT, July 1955).
84. Don Price Oral History, pp. 61-70, and Don Price memo, May 21, 1954 (appendix to oral history), Ford Foundation Archives, New York. The archival evidence concerning this aspect of the Ford Foundation's relationship with the CIA was first brought to light by Kai Bird.
85. On Shils, see Peter Coleman, The Liberal Conspiracy (New York Free Press, 1989), pp. 98-209 passim. On Speier, see, Hans Speier, "Psychological Warfare Reconsidered," RAND paper no. 196, February 5, 1951; Hans Speier, "International Political Communication Elite and Mass," World Politics (April 1952 [RAND paper no. P-270], Hans Speier and W. Phillips Davison, "Psychological Aspects of Foreign Policy," RAND paper no. P-615, December 15, 1954. Speier's other contemporary work that has since come to light includes several studies of Soviet response to West German rearmament, Soviet political tactics involving nuclear threats, a report on the American Soldier series, and a commentary on political applications of game theory. Speier died February 17, 1990, in Sarasota, Florida; see "Hans Speier, Sociologist," Washington Post, March 2, 1990. On Carroll, see Wallace Carroll, The Army's Role in Current Psychological Warfare (top secret, declassified following author's mandatory review request), February 24, 1949, box 10, tab 61, entry 154, RG 319, U.S. National Archives, Washington, DC; Wallace Carroll, "It Takes a Russian to Beat a Russian," Life, December 19, 1949, pp. 80-86; "CIA Trained Tibetans in Colorado, New Book Says," New York Times, April 19, 1973.
86. Ithiel de Sola Pool and Frank Bonilla (eds.), "A Special Issue on Studies in Political Communication," 20, no. I (Spring 1956); Daniel Lerner (ed.), "Special Issue Attitude Research in Modernizing Areas," 22, no. 3 (Fall 1958).
87. In 20, no. I (Spring 1956) Harold Isaacs, "Scratches on Our Minds," p. 197; Y. B. Damle, "Communication of Modem Ideas and Knowledge in [East] Indian Villages," p. 257; Claire Zimmerman and Raymond Bauer, "The Effect of an Audience upon What Is Remembered," p. 238; Suzanne Keller, "Diplomacy and Communication," p. 176; and Harold Isaacs, "World Affairs and U.S. Race Relations A Note on Little Rock," 22, no. 3 (Fall 1958) 364.
88. Ithiel de Sola Pool, Suzanne Keller, and Raymond Bauer, "The Influence of Foreign Travel on Political Attitudes of U.S. Businessmen," p. 161; Frank Bonilla, "When Is Petition 'Pressure'?" p. 39; Daniel Lerner, "French Business Leaders Look at EDC," p. 212 -- all in 20, no. 1 (Spring 1956); and Daniel Lerner, "Editors Introduction," p. 217; Ithiel de Sola Pool and Kali Prasad, "Indian Student Images of Foreign People," p. 292; Frank Bonilla, "Elites and Public Opinion in Areas of High Social Stratification," p. 349; all in 22, no. 3 (Fall 1958).
89. Ivor Wayne, "American and Soviet Themes and Values A Content Analysis of Themes in Popular Picture Magazines," p. 314; Patricia Kendall, "The Ambivalent Character of Nationalism among Egyptian Professionals," p. 277 -- all in 20, no. I (Spring 1956).
90. Guy Pauker, "Indonesian Images of Their National Self," p. 305; Lucian Pye, "Administrators, Agitators and Brokers," p. 342; Alain Girard, "The First Opinion Research in Uruguay and Chile," p. 251; Kurt Back, "The ChangeProne Person in Puerto Rico," p. 330; Robert Carlson, "To Talk with Kings," p. 224; Herbert Hyman et al., "The Values of Turkish College Youth," p. 275; Raymond Gastil, "Middle Class Impediments to Iranian Modernization," p. 325; Gorden Hirabayashi and M. Fathalla El Kbatib, "Communication and Political Awareness in the Villages of Egypt," p. 357; A. J. Meyer, "Entrepreneurship and Economic Development in the Middle East," p. 391; Richard Robinson, "Turkey's Agrarian Revolution and the Problem of Urbanization," p. 397; Lincoln Armstrong and Rashid Bashshur, "Ecological Patterns and Value Orientations in Lebanon," p. 406 -- all in 22, no. 3 (Fall 1958).
91. Isaacs, "World Affairs and U.S. Race Relations," p. 364.
92. Lerner, "Editor's Introduction," pp. 218, 219, 221.
93. Lerner and Pevsner, The Passing of Traditional Society, p. 396. Emphasis added.
94. Special Operations Research Office, The U.S. Army's Limited-War Mission, pp. 59-63, 69-77; Blum, The CIA, pp. 133-62.
95. On communications theorists' contributions to counterinsurgency, see Special Operations Research Office, The U.S. Army's Limited-War Mission, pp. 159-69 (Pye) and 199ff (Pool). See also Ithiel de Sola Pool (ed.), Social Science Research and National Security (Washington, DC Smithsonian Institution [Office of Naval Research Project], 1963), pp. 1-25 (Pool), 46-74 (Schramm), 148-66 (Pye).
96. Special Operations Research Office, The U.S. Army's Limited-War Mission, pp. 282ff; see also U.S. Department of the Army, Art and Science of Psychological Operations, pp. xvii, 47-53.
97. The Camelot Affair precipitated the first genuinely public discussion of the collision between the professed humanitarian values of modem social science and the actual ends to which it had been put in the world political arena. In 1964, the U.S. Army hired private U.S. social scientists to conduct a series of long-term inquiries into the social structures, political and economic resources, ethnic rivalries, communication infrastructures, and similar basic data concerning developing countries considered likely to see strong revolutionary movements during the 1960s. The project exploded when nationalist and left-wing forces in Chile and other targeted countries protested, labeling Camelot a de facto espionage operation. Camelot contractors, notably sociologist Jesse Bernard of American University, replied that the criticism was "laughable" because Camelot's had been "designed as a scientific research project" in which me countries selected for study made "no difference." The argument escalated from there. See House Committee on Foreign Affairs, Behavioral Sciences and the National Security, Report No. 4, 89th Cong. 1st sess. (Washington, DC GPO, 1965); Jesse Bernard, "Conflict as Research and Research as Conflict," in Irving Louis Horowitz, The Rise and Fall of Project Camelot, rev. ed. (Cambridge, MA MIT Press, 1974), p. 129n.
98. Special Operations Research Office, The U.S. Army's Limited-War Mission, pp. 282ff; see also U.S. Department of the Army, Art and Science of Psychological Operations, pp. xvii, 47-53.
99. For example, Executive Office of the President, "NSAM No. 308 A Program to Promote Publicly U.S. Policies in Vietnam" (June 22, 1964); McGeorge Bundy, "NSAM No. 328 Military Actions in Vietnam" (April 6, 1965); "NSAM No. 329 Establishment of a Task Force on Southeast Asian Economic and Social Development" (April 9, 1965); and "NSAM No. 330 Expanded Psychological Operations in Vietnam" (April 9, 1965); each was obtained via the Freedom of Information Act from the U.S. Office of the Comptroller General.
100. On Lerner, Riley, Davison, Cottrell, and Pool, see Special Operations Research Office, The U.S. Army's LimitedWar Mission, pp. xvi, 151-59, 199-202, 282-86. On Pool, Davison, and Schramm, see Pool, Social Science Research and National Security, pp. 1-74. On Lasswell, see Harold Lasswell, World Revolutionary Elites Studies in Coercive Ideological Movements (Cambridge MIT Press, 1966).