Covert Crusade

Abstract

Abstract This chapter details the Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) stewardship of American psychological warfare between 1948 and the formation of the United States Information Agency in 1953. It narrates these events through the so-called ‘Crusade for Freedom,’ a long-running covert CIA campaign fronted by the ostensibly private citizens of the National Committee for a Free Europe (NCFE). While the CIA’s ruse against American citizens was spectacular, this chapter goes beyond revelation to analyse the ways in which the Crusade for Freedom encouraged regular Americans to imagine themselves as engaged in a personalised ‘spiritual war’ against the Soviet Union. This chapter considers the pastoral nature of American psychological warfare both at home and aboard, detailing its use of Christian ‘technologies of the self,’ notably confession and catechism. It concludes that the early years of the Cold War were deeply formative of the enduring perceptions and mythologies that continue to surround psychological war.