Psychological Strategy Board

The Psychological Strategy Board (PSB) was a United States interagency body created by a presidential directive of Harry S. Truman on April 4, 1951 to plan and coordinate psychological warfare across the Departments of State and Defense and the Central Intelligence Agency, reporting to the National Security Council under its first director, Gordon Gray. Dwight D. Eisenhower's Executive Order 10483 of September 2, 1953 replaced it with the Operations Coordinating Board (OCB). In 1952 the CIA's scientific-intelligence staff and its director, Walter Bedell Smith, put the flying saucer reports before the board as a possible psychological-warfare problem and instrument; the researcher Michael Salla holds that the board and its successor managed the UFO issue, the author Jim Marrs relays a source who says Gray directed a psychological-strategy study of UFOs, and the author Mark Pilkington treats the board's habits of mind as the key to what the CIA did when it turned to the saucer problem. The All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office's 2024 historical-record report covers the 1953 Robertson Panel but does not discuss the board, and the researcher Kevin Randle reports that the Eisenhower Library archivist found no sign that Philip Corso, the officer most often named in connection with the board, belonged to the successor board.

The CIA's 1952 memoranda about the board are documented; what they imply is not agreed. Pilkington reads the board's media machinery and the 1953 panel's debunking programme as one perception-management effort wrapped around the saucer question; Salla reads the board and the OCB as the standing UFO-management channel and Corso's service as proof of access, which requires Randle's archivist to be wrong or to have consulted the wrong record; Marrs's study rests on one unnamed source, so if that source is mistaken the study is an inference from the board's mandate rather than a document. On the narrowest reading, nothing beyond the 1952 correspondence and the panel is shown to have passed through the board.

Establishment and mandate

Truman's directive of April 4, 1951 was addressed to the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Defense and the Director of Central Intelligence; the board itself consisted of the Under Secretary of State, the Deputy Secretary of Defense and the Director of Central Intelligence, and the State Department had opposed its creation and then argued that one of its own officials should chair it. The White House released an abbreviated version of the directive on June 20, 1951. Gray was its first director. According to Pilkington, the board was charged with ensuring "that America and Americans looked, sounded and thought right," and even the contents of its first strategy paper are still classified, though traces of it are referenced in other documents. The Truman Library holds the board's files.

Operations and personnel

In May 1952 the board took over Packet, the CIA's psychological-warfare programme aimed at persuading foreign leaders of the superiority of the American way. C. D. Jackson was, according to Pilkington, a key strategist of the board, and Pilkington records a 1952 Jackson note that a magazine article by the Atomic Energy Commission's chairman was progressing well toward "remov[ing] the guilt complex from America on the use of the A-bomb." Jesse Michels describes Jackson as Eisenhower's special assistant and a liaison between the CIA and the Pentagon, and Marrs writes that Jackson helped create the Bilderberg Group and served under Eisenhower as "special consultant for psychological warfare." Henry Kissinger consulted for the board in 1951, 1952 and 1955, and, according to Michels, for Gray directly. Salla places Gray among the twelve members listed in the Eisenhower Briefing Document, a Majestic 12 paper whose authenticity is itself disputed.

Corso's postings are the point where the accounts diverge. Salla writes that Corso's military records show him assigned to both the board and the OCB from 1953 to 1956 and holds that this gave him access to UFO information; Randle reports that Herbert Pankratz, an archivist at the Eisenhower Library, wrote in 1998 that Corso was not a member of the National Security Council or of its ancillary Operations Coordinating Board, and treats the claimed postings as résumé inflation.

The flying saucer question, 1952

The radar and visual sightings of the July 1952 Washington overflights prompted, in Pilkington's words, "exactly the sort of confusion that the CIA had warned the Psychological Strategy Board about." In a 1952 memorandum H. Marshall Chadwell of the CIA's Office of Scientific Intelligence concluded that a study should determine what use United States psychological-warfare planners might make of the phenomena and what defenses should be prepared against Soviet use of them, and recommended that public perception be managed "to minimize the risk of panic." A CIA memorandum stamped October 2, 1952 asks that the Director of Central Intelligence discuss the subject with the board and attaches, for his signature, a memorandum to the board's director. The text Pilkington prints is a note from Smith to the board's director, Raymond Allen, which says the proposal he was sending the National Security Council concluded that the problems of unidentified flying objects "appear to have implications for psychological warfare as well as for intelligence and operations," and proposes that the board discuss "the possible offensive and defensive utilization of these phenomena for psychological warfare purposes."

Michels adds a document from Smith to the board's director reporting that over 1,500 UFO reports had been logged, 20 percent unexplained, and asking whether the phenomena could be controlled, predicted or used. Pilkington places Smith's note in the surge of public interest and witness reports of late 1951, when the Air Force replaced its Project Grudge team with Project Blue Book; Salla holds that the board's tools of propaganda, mass media and disinformation "would prove to be the very tools used to deny or ridicule the UFO phenomenon."

The panel the CIA convened in January 1953 under Howard P. Robertson recommended, in Pilkington's summary, a public "debunking" programme to reduce interest in the subject, using film and television and the advice of psychologists and an advertising expert, together with monitoring of civilian groups such as the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization. The national security agencies were to "strip the Unidentified Flying Objects of the special status they have been given and the aura of mystery they have unfortunately acquired." The AARO report lists the same recommendations to debunk reports and monitor domestic enthusiast organizations. Pilkington cites Curtis Peebles for the reading that the report "was not really about flying saucers, it was about Pearl Harbor," and adds that how far the CIA and the Air Force carried out the recommendations "is not always clear." Pilkington relays the chemist Leon Davidson's question whether the April 1952 LIFE article endorsing interplanetary saucers followed Air Force strategy or, given Henry Luce's relationship to the CIA and the board, "somebody else's game plan," a suggestion Davidson took further to a staged demonstration over Washington.

Succession

The board was ended by executive order in September 1953 and its functions passed to the OCB, which Pilkington calls a rebranding of the same machinery as the "more oblique-sounding" OCB and Michels calls its successor. Salla writes that there has been speculation that the OCB "played a critical role in managing the UFO phenomenon" and "secretly continues to play this role though with another name." Pilkington dates the machinery's effective end to Senator Frank Church's 1973 investigation of the CIA.

Open questions

References

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