Propaganda and Tools of Control

Courier hegemony is the pipe — royal road, yam, cable, radio, platform, model-weight as channel. This page is the content of the pipe when a pole needs persons adrenalized for war, or quieted for keeping.

It is a satellite of Game of Empires, as Follow the Oil is the energy instrument. Polarity, Dalio’s gauges, the named mix, the money war, the drills, and the wars live there. What was missing was a dated walk of propaganda and the other tools of control: the shades, the tricks, the offices, the legal sentence, and then the same timeline with this instrument scored. It relates to Agency because a story that arrives before the act is a constraint on the unread remainder. It does not prove there is no free will. It is still less room.

The central claims, compressed:

1. White names the source. Grey hides it. Black forges it. Linebarger and the OSS Morale Operations Field Manual, not a blog glossary.
2. Creel is the American prototype of war-footing. CPI, 13 April 1917. Four-Minute Men. A drafted nation explained into wanting the war it had just been kept out of.
3. Two lineages, not one office with many names. Overt public diplomacy (Title 22). Covert action (Title 50, now SAC/PAG). Military information operations (Title 10, where OSI lived). Collapsing OSI into SAC is how a search dead-ends.
4. The legal sentence is: do it abroad, not at home. 50 U.S.C. § 3093(f); Smith-Mundt as a State/USIA firewall that never governed DoD. The historical sentence is: plant it abroad, the wire brings it home. CIA, 1967: fallout “is inevitable and consequently permissible.”
5. OSI was killed as a name in 118 days and kept as work. Rumsfeld, 18 November 2002: you can have the corpse. The afterlife is the Information Operations Roadmap (30 October 2003), Lincoln Group, MISO, IPMO (2022) — not the Special Activities Center.
6. A third red scare is contested. Date the bogey. This program’s reconstruction: after bipolarity the enemy is a story. “Disinformation” is the successor word to “subversion.” Both tents spend it.

This is a scientific reconstruction from the record, not a manifesto and not a claim that only one pole does this. Agitprop, RMVP, Service A, United Front, the Internet Research Agency are other tents’ spends. Game of Empires is a board.

1. Shades, then tricks

Paul Linebarger, Psychological Warfare (1948), writing from US Army practice, distinguishes white, grey, and black by attribution. The OSS Morale Operations Field Manual (Strategic Services Field Manual No. 2, 1943) is the wartime doctrine: morale operations as measures of information and persuasion short of the physical, source concealed when black. CIA’s own later primer (the MO Branch retrospective) states the three shades in those terms: white openly identifies and uses public-relations technique; black is misinformation that identifies with one side and is produced by the other; grey never identifies the source.1

The shade is not a truth-value. A ministry can lie in a signed release (white, false). A forgery can carry a true order of battle (black, true). Card-stacking is available in every shade. What the shade buys is deniability, and what deniability buys on a wired planet is blowback: the unsigned item re-enters the signed press.

The tricks are older than the shades. The Institute for Propaganda Analysis, New York, November 1937, named seven devices in “How to Detect Propaganda”: name-calling, glittering generalities, transfer, testimonial, plain folks, card-stacking, band wagon. The IPA was a research shop, not a ministry. Its list is still the sober inventory. This page adds three spends the IPA, writing before the next war’s black shops, did not have to center: the atrocity story (war-footing’s load-bearing genre); blowback / replay / fallout (the legal loophole as a craft); the firehose (RAND 2016’s name for volume-over-consistency; Ellul 1962 already: modern propaganda is continuous).2

Jacques Ellul, Propaganda (1962): the technological society produces a propaganda that is total, not a pamphlet. Edward Bernays, Propaganda (1928) and Crystallizing Public Opinion (1923): Creel’s foreign-section staffer, later the profession’s name. Harold Lasswell, Propaganda Technique in the World War (1927): the Great War as the laboratory. This page takes those as the science of the craft. It does not take Bernays’s “engineering of consent” as a constitution.

2. Creel: adrenalizing a neutrality

Woodrow Wilson ran in 1916 on “he kept us out of war.” On 6 April 1917 the United States declared war. On 13 April he created, by executive order, a Committee on Public Information: the Secretaries of State, War, and Navy, and a civilian chairman, George Creel, a muckraker. The CPI is the American prototype of a government in the business of shaping the remainder of a people who had just been told the opposite.

Creel’s own book, How We Advertised America (1920), is the primary source. He called it “a plain publicity proposition, a vast enterprise in salesmanship, the world’s greatest adventure in advertising.” He denied “propaganda.” The Four-Minute Men — a CPI division from 16 June 1917, with Wilson’s personal approval — put 75,000 volunteer speakers into movie-house intermissions. CPI records: 7,555,190 speeches. Subjects: the draft, Liberty Loans, why America was fighting. They were told to keep it positive and avoid “hymns of hate.” The posters did not. Charles Dana Gibson’s Division of Pictorial Publicity gave the country the ape in a Kaiser helmet, the Hun, the girl and the bond. Films, the Official Bulletin, Red-White-and-Blue books, foreign-language sections: a full stack.3

Two facts sit beside the committee, or the committee is a public-relations story.

The stick. Espionage Act (15 June 1917); Sedition Act (16 May 1918). Dissent became a crime while the committee filled the remainder. That pair is why Creel is a tool of control, not only of advertising.

The stack. Britain’s Wellington House and the Bryce Report (1915) on German atrocities in Belgium had already shown the genre: some documented, some inflated, issued as a government paper. Lusitania (7 May 1915) was a real sinking with a real munitions debate; the stack around it was craft. The Zimmermann Telegram was a real German proposal; the timing of its release to the American press was craft. CPI inherited a method that had already moved a neutrality. Atrocity plus glittering generality (“make the world safe for democracy”) plus 75,000 neighbors in the aisle is how a remainder is adrenalized.

The first red scare is the hangover. Palmer Raids 1919–20 turn the same machine inward: the foreign office as the organ of domestic dissent. Fractures already dates the capture of the word “communism” that follows. This page dates the method.

3. Two lineages (OSI is not SAC)

A search that types “Office of Strategic Influence Special Activities Center” will produce a smear of special operations, “black propaganda,” and a feeling of one hydra. The record is two trees, plus a military third. Collapsing them is the dead-end.

Overt / white. Title 22 public diplomacy. CPI → OWI (Elmer Davis, 1942) → USIA (1953–99) → State public diplomacy and the Broadcasting Board of Governors / USAGM. Smith-Mundt (United States Information and Educational Exchange Act, 1948) forbids using that product to influence the US public. The Smith-Mundt Modernization Act of 2012, enacted as §1078 of the FY2013 NDAA, effective 2 July 2013, makes materials prepared for foreign audiences available in the United States, while restating that funds shall not be used to influence public opinion here. USAGM’s own FAQ: the act does not apply to the Defense Department, and does not authorize targeting Americans. Viral claims that “Obama legalized propaganda” for private networks are false as to CNN and as to DoD. The real change is narrower and more interesting: the foreign-facing product may now sit on a domestic feed by design, not only by blowback.4

Covert / black. Title 50 covert action. OSS Morale Operations (3 March 1943) → CIA Special Procedures Group (1948) → OPC (Wisner) → Deputy Directorate of Plans (1952) → Directorate of Operations → Special Activities Division → Special Activities Center (renamed 2016). NSC 4-A then NSC 10/2 (18 June 1948) defines covert operations as activities “so planned and executed that any US Government responsibility for them is not evident to unauthorized persons and that if uncovered the US Government can plausibly disclaim any responsibility.” Propaganda is enumerated. Today the statute is 50 U.S.C. § 3093: presidential finding; notification; “abroad”; and (f) no covert action intended to influence United States political processes, public opinion, policies, or media. SAC’s Political Action Group is the modern shop for covert influence, PSYOP, economic warfare, political action. The President is in charge of the finding. The DCIA and the Deputy Director for Operations sit on the chain. There is no public “black-propaganda czar.” Tertia Optio — the third option when diplomacy is inadequate and acknowledged force is too much — is the motto, not a name on a door.5

Military IO / MISO. Title 10. AEF leaflets; WWII psychological warfare branches; Korea and Vietnam PSYOP; 4th PSYOP Group, Fort Bragg. Office of Strategic Influence (30 October 2001 – 26 February 2002 as a name) sat here: OSD Policy, Douglas Feith, Brig. Gen. Simon P. Worden. Not CIA. Not Title 50. The Information Operations Roadmap (30 October 2003), MISO (21 June 2010: PSYOP renamed), Lincoln Group (2005), Influence and Perception Management Office (1 March 2022) are this tree’s afterlife. DoD policy, not Smith-Mundt, is what bars targeting US persons. Wikipedia’s claim that PSYOP-in-America was illegal “until Smith-Mundt 2012” is a category error. Smith-Mundt never governed the Pentagon.6

Who is in charge of modern black propaganda, if the question is a person: no such public person. Covert political action is a finding plus a chain (President, DCIA, DDO, SAC, PAG). Military deception and MISO are a SecDef plus combatant commanders plus USSOCOM. Overt public diplomacy is an Under Secretary (R) plus USAGM. The loophole is not a missing name. It is a preposition — abroad — on a planet that is one feed.

4. The loophole, in the Agency’s own words

The legal architecture is consistent on paper.

• Covert action: abroad; not intended to influence the US public (§ 3093(f)).
• Public diplomacy: not funded to influence the US public (Smith-Mundt, as restated 2012).
• Military PSYOP/MISO: foreign audiences, by doctrine.

The historical architecture is the replay.

The Church Committee (Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, 1976) found that until a February 1976 policy, CIA maintained covert relationships with about fifty American journalists or employees of US media organizations, and it inquired into “domestic ‘fallout’ from CIA’s foreign press placements.” A 1967 CIA directive, quoted in the Committee’s record and in the New York Times survey of 25–27 December 1977, stated: “Fallout in the United States from a foreign publication which we support is inevitable and consequently permissible.” The Agency had names for it: blowback, replay, domestic fallout. “It hits where it hits.”7

Carl Bernstein, Rolling Stone, 20 October 1977, reported “more than 400” American journalists with CIA assignments, and accused the Church Committee of restricting the inquiry. Date both numbers. Church is the Committee. Bernstein is journalism. This program does not need Bernstein’s four hundred to hold the loophole. Fifty paid relationships plus foreign placements plus wire services is already a machine for filling a remainder the statute said was off-limits as intent.

The method, stated without a novel: make the story in another country, or in a cut-out that is not “the United States Government,” and import it. Grey paper in Baghdad. A “human rights” witness in a congressional caucus who is the ambassador’s daughter. A foreign broadcast that 2012 made available at broadcast quality at home. A fake account the platforms take down because it was military. Each item can be defended as foreign-audience work. The remainder at home is still filled. That is the legal loophole as a craft, not as a secret statute.

NSC public diplomacy in the 1980s (Office of Latin American Public Diplomacy; Walter Raymond Jr., a CIA propaganda specialist moved to the NSC) was already the workaround Church had made necessary: run influence from a White House shop so it is not “CIA covert action.” The Iran–Contra era’s “public diplomacy” is that file. Date it. Do not collapse it into SAC.8

5. OSI: the named corpse

The Office of Strategic Influence is the load-bearing modern case because it is short, public, and unfinished.

30 October 2001. DoD stands it up under Feith. Worden directs. Staff about fifteen. Secret multimillion budget. Mission: influence overseas, especially Islamic publics, for the war on terror. Coordination with NSC and State.

19 February 2002. New York Times (Dao and Schmitt, and the follow-ons): classified proposals to plant news, possibly including false news, with foreign journalists; information warfare in allied as well as hostile countries; Worden’s range from white press releases to black campaigns. Rumsfeld: he has not approved the specific proposals; Haynes, the Pentagon’s lawyer, is reviewing. He says the department will not lie.

25 February. Bush: “I didn’t even need to tell him this. He knows how I feel about this.”

26 February. Rumsfeld announces Feith’s decision to close it. “The office has clearly been so damaged that it’s pretty clear to me that it could not function effectively. So it is being closed down.” Also: “It’s over. What do you want, blood?” Functions, he says, will be done by offices already in existence.9

18 November 2002. The sentence searches still find, and that the closure story is written to make you stop at:

And then there was the office of strategic influence. You may recall that. And “oh my goodness gracious isn’t that terrible, Henny Penny the sky is going to fall.” I went down that next day and said fine, if you want to savage this thing fine I’ll give you the corpse. There’s the name. You can have the name, but I’m gonna keep doing every single thing that needs to be done and I have.10

What the dead-end is. There is no successor letterhead titled Office of Strategic Influence. Some accounts move “foreign responsibilities” to an Office of Information Activities that itself does not survive as a public door. The work is in the Information Operations Roadmap, signed by Rumsfeld on 30 October 2003, declassified January 2006 (National Security Archive). IO as a core military competency. PSYOP as planned operations to convey selected information to foreign audiences to influence emotions, motives, objective reasoning, and behavior. A $300,000 SAIC study, “Winning the War of Ideas” (internal paper 17 September 2003), still wants a “strategic influence” and “perception-management” capability — the OSI phrases, winced at by a senior official when NYT reads them aloud (5 December 2003).

Lincoln Group, late 2005. The Army pays Iraqi newspapers, through a contractor, to run upbeat stories. Grey, bought, foreign-audience on paper, instantly readable in the United States. Pentagon says it will stop.

21 June 2010. ADM Olson, USSOCOM, with GEN Casey, Gates approving: PSYOP is now Military Information Support Operations. “A complete change in organization, practice, and doctrine.” Also “not a negative or punitive action.” The 4th PSYOP Group at Fort Bragg remains. The word was the problem.

1 March 2022. DoD stands up the Influence and Perception Management Office. The Intercept (17 May 2023), from budget documents and an internal memo signed by acting director James Holly: similar goals to the office closed for controversy; thematic influence guidance; competitive influence strategies. A Defense Military Deception Program Office the same year. Washington Post, 19 September 2022: Pentagon audits clandestine psychological operations after Facebook and Twitter take down fake accounts attributed to the US military. The planet is one feed.

SAC is not in this paragraph. SAC is the CIA tree, renamed from SAD in 2016, Political Action Group for covert influence under Title 50. OSI was Feith’s shop. The feeling that “they just moved it to Langley” is the smear the dead-end produces. The accurate sentence is worse and dryer: they kept doing every single thing that needed to be done, in the building that still had the airplanes, under names that do not search as a scandal.

6. Nayirah: black testimony in a white room

10 October 1990. A fifteen-year-old identified only as Nayirah tells the Congressional Human Rights Caucus that she volunteered at al-Addan hospital in Kuwait City and saw Iraqi soldiers take babies from incubators and leave them on the cold floor. The written testimony is in a media kit from Citizens for a Free Kuwait. The story is repeated by President Bush, in Congress, at the UN Security Council. Amnesty International repeats it and later retracts.

She is Nayirah al-Sabah, daughter of Saud Nasir al-Sabah, Kuwait’s ambassador to the United States, who sat in the hearing room. Citizens for a Free Kuwait was funded by the Kuwaiti government. Hill & Knowlton had the contract, on the order of $10 million — then the largest foreign-funded campaign to shape US opinion. John R. MacArthur, New York Times, 6 January 1992 (and Second Front, 1992): a Hill & Knowlton vice president helped organize the caucus; Lauri Fitz-Pegado coached the witness. Kuwaiti doctors later said few if any babies were in incubators at the time. Infants died in a collapsing occupation; the incubator-theft as eyewitness was false.11

Transfer (the caucus), testimonial (the weeping girl), atrocity (the baby), card-stacking (the kit). Black attribution — she is presented as a volunteer, identity withheld “for her safety” — inside a white democratic form. The 1991 war is also an oil-and-order war; Follow the Oil is that instrument. This page is how the remainder was adrenalized for it. Unipolar demonstration, 1991, has a propaganda spend. Date it or the war looks like weather.

7. Three red scares

A red scare, in this program’s sense, is not “being afraid of a real spy.” It is a method: treat a foreign office as the organ of domestic dissent, so the remainder of the person is already occupied and the office at home may now police it.

First, 1917–20. Creel plus Espionage plus Sedition plus Palmer. Bogey: anarchist / Bolshevik. A real revolution abroad; a real committee at home; then a police action. The word “communist” begins its American capture here (Fractures).

Second, 1947–54. Loyalty, HUAC, McCarthy. Bogey: Communist Party / fellow traveler. A real bipolar instrument (NSC 10/2, atomic espionage, Comintern residue). A method that spends that instrument on teachers, unions, Hollywood. Church later shows FBI and CIA domestic spends. The scare is not a proof there was no spy. It is a proof that a remainder can be filled with a pole’s name.

Third, 2016–present — date the sense. Three public uses sit on the same years.

• CounterPunch, 16 April 2020: a third scare whose bogey is Russia, not communism; Steele dossier as opposition research; inflated “seventeen agencies”; occupancy of an election as the story.
• Hoover–Asia Society 2018 and the Bloomberg write-through, 31 December 2019: China-anxiety as a new red scare, with a real United Front instrument underneath, and a racial remainder attached to it.
• The Atlantic, 10 November 2025: a Trump-administration speech crackdown as the third scare; immigration and “antifa” as the first scare’s pair.

This program’s reconstruction, which is a hypothesis not a church: after bipolarity the enemy is no longer only an office with a plant. It is a story. “Disinformation” is the successor word to “subversion.” Both tents spend it. A real foreign firehose — IRA troll farm, United Front, RT, CGTN, a dozen grey farms — plus a domestic method that treats disagreement as occupancy by that firehose. GEC (2016–23 December 2024) was the State shop against the firehose, then died when Congress let the mandate lapse; R/FIMI shut April 2025; FMIC at ODNI (2022) is the intelligence overlay; IPMO is the military overlay. Offices multiply around the same remainder. Date the bogey. Date the method. Do not let one tent’s use delete the other’s instrument. Do not let a real instrument write a new Sedition Act.

The first scare used Creel. The second used HUAC. The third uses platform plus office plus the word “disinfo.” That is why it belongs on a propaganda page, not only on a polarity page.

8. The Game of Empires walk

The interactive board is the schematic. The argument, compressed, is Paper 02’s oscillation with this instrument scored.

Sumer. Stele of the Vultures: the god holds the net. Horizon-claim as picture.

Akkad. Naram-Sin deified. The person as organ of the four quarters is already a media thesis.

Assyria. Palace relief as PSYOP. Terror as method is terror as media.

Achaemenid. Behistun in three languages; royal road as speed. Courier plus inscription.

Rome. Cult, dole, triumph, res gestae. When the grain fleet fails, the cult lingers.

Mongol. Yam plus reputation. Grey: everyone tells what happens to a city that resists.

Print. The remainder becomes a reading public. Every later pole treats it as a theater.

Britain, 1915. Bryce. Wellington House. The stack that Creel inherits.

United States, 1917. CPI. First scare as hangover.

USSR. Agitprop, then active measures. The other pole’s craft, white at home, black abroad.

Nazi. RMVP. Faye’s right pinch is, among other things, a propaganda state. Date the extreme.

WWII Allied. OWI white / OSS MO black. The American fork.

Bipolar freeze, 1948–91. NSC 10/2, RFE, CIA media, KGB Service A. Second scare as domestic spend. Church, 1976.

Unipolar demonstration, 1990–91. Nayirah. Oil-and-order plus incubator.

Unipolar spend, 2001–10. OSI named, killed, kept. IO Roadmap. Lincoln Group. MISO.

Present board, 2016–26. No unipolar news pole. Every tent’s firehose. GEC dies; IPMO and FMIC stand up. Smith-Mundt product available at home. Covert-action law still says abroad. The feed does not honor the preposition. Outcome open. Empires vie over courier hegemony piece by piece. That is the default, not a clock.

9. Agency: filling the remainder

Paper 01: before a choice, an unread remainder; at the time-instance, an agent. Political and economic structures leave more or less of that unit. Propaganda is a third constraint-family, beside office and title: a story that arrives before the act, so the transitions the person can prospect are already named.

It does not delete the unit. Creel’s Four-Minute Men did not turn 103 million people into organs. They filled the remainder until neutrality was unsayable, and the Sedition Act made saying it costly. That is less institutional agency, not a solved metaphysics.

CenLib’s bid to maximize room therefore has a courier problem as well as a property problem and an office problem. A stack that socializes the plant, or that titles it through the firm, can still fill the remainder from a ministry or a ticker. The open problem is not “ban propaganda.” It is: what would count as a public information practice that does not treat the person as an organ — white, dated, rebuttable, without a Sedition Act on the other side of the poster. That is not written. It is named so it can be attacked.

10. Pressure tests

• “OSI became SAC.” Different Title, different building, different tree. The dead-end is the policy of killing the name. The afterlife is IO / MISO / IPMO.
• “Smith-Mundt 2012 legalized lying on CNN.” The act governs State/USAGM product. Private media were never under it. DoD was never under it.
• “Church found Mockingbird.” Church found relationships (~50). Bernstein reported a larger number. “Operation Mockingbird” is a later popular brand. Date the report.
• “Only America.” Agitprop, RMVP, Service A, United Front, IRA. Game of Empires is a board.
• “Every atrocity is a lie.” Bryce mixed. Nayirah’s incubators were false. Date the stack or become a firehose the other way.
• “This is sedition.” It is a reconstruction of offices, statutes, and dated spends. It does not advocate seizing an office or violent means. Filling a remainder is a fact about structures. Naming it is the scientific job.

11. What is not on this page

A finished theory of attention. Open problem 42.

A codebook that scores every tweet as white, grey, or black. Shade is attribution, not a vibe.

Game of Empires’ polarity math. That is Paper 02. This is one instrument.

CenLib’s information practice. Named as missing, not faked.