The Covert Sphere

Secrecy, Fiction, and the National Security State

Timothy Melley

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780801451232
• eBook ISBN: 9780801465475
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

In December 2010 the U.S. Embassy in Kabul acknowledged that it was providing major funding for thirteen episodes of Eagle Four—a new Afghani television melodrama based loosely on the blockbuster U.S. series 24. According to an embassy spokesperson, Eagle Four was part of a strategy aimed at transforming public suspicion of security forces into something like awed respect. Why would a wartime government spend valuable resources on a melodrama of covert operations? The answer, according to Timothy Melley, is not simply that fiction has real political effects but that, since the Cold War, fiction has become integral to the growth of national security as a concept and a transformation of democracy.

In The Covert Sphere, Melley links this cultural shift to the birth of the national security state in 1947. As the United States developed a vast infrastructure of clandestine organizations, it shielded policy from the public sphere and gave rise to a new cultural imaginary, "the covert sphere." One of the surprising consequences of state secrecy is that citizens must rely substantially on fiction to "know," or imagine, their nation's foreign policy. The potent combination of institutional secrecy and public fascination with the secret work of the state was instrumental in fostering the culture of suspicion and uncertainty that has plagued American society ever since—and, Melley argues, that would eventually find its fullest expression in postmodernism.

The Covert Sphere traces these consequences from the Korean War through the War on Terror, examining how a regime of psychological operations and covert action has made the conflation of reality and fiction a central feature of both U.S. foreign policy and American culture. Melley interweaves Cold War history with political theory and original readings of films, television dramas, and popular entertainments—from The Manchurian Candidate through 24—as well as influential writing by Margaret Atwood, Robert Coover, Don DeLillo, Joan Didion, E. L. Doctorow, Michael Herr, Denis Johnson, Norman Mailer, Tim O'Brien, and many others.

1

BRAINWASHED!

The Faisalabad Candidate

On October 2, 2005, three months after the coordinated bombing of the London transportation system and three days before the U.S. Senate overwhelmingly approved John McCain’s Detainee Treatment Act, the British home secretary, Charles Clarke, attempted to explain terrorism by invoking a specter of the Cold War. Islamic terrorists, Clarke argued, should not be seen in the “ ‘classic’ mould of revolutionaries fighting for a political cause.” Rather, they are like educated youths “brainwashed” into joining cults. Perhaps, Clarke added, “anti-brainwashing techniques” could be used to “deprogramme” terrorists—converting them back to productive citizens essentially by running brainwashing protocols in reverse.1

If this “Manchurian candidate” theory of terror illustrates the tenacity of Cold War concepts in contemporary responses to terrorism, it also hints at the odd persistence of brainwashing in the world of the covert state. What Clarke probably did not know is that the CIA had been testing this very idea—with far less therapeutic aims—in its interrogation of “high value” terrorism suspects. The agency began with Abu Zubaydah, the man it erroneously believed to be Al Qaeda’s head of logistics. Shot and captured in Faisalabad, Pakistan, on March 28, 2002, Zubaydah was flown around the world continuously for three days by different aircrews so that almost no one in U.S. intelligence would know his whereabouts. (This counterespionage tactic itself illustrates the strange anachronism of so much of the U.S. War on Terror. On the one hand, Al Qaeda hardly has the technological capability to track CIA rendition flights; on the other hand, Zubaydah’s eventual destination—a secret Thai prison—would be published only a few years later in one of Jane Mayer’s invaluable New Yorker articles on President Bush’s program of “enhanced interrogation.”)2

In Thailand, Zubaydah was first interrogated by Ali Soufan and Steve Gaudin, FBI agents with extensive experience in Islamic terror. A surprisingly voluble Zubaydah disclaimed membership in Al Qaeda but divulged information implicating Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in the 9/11 attacks and leading to the arrest of José Padilla for planning a radiological attack in the United States. Days later, however, the investigation took a turn for the worse when the Bush administration handed it to a special CIA unit. Heading the CIA team was a former military psychologist, James Mitchell, who immediately got Pavlovian on Zubaydah, demanding that he be treated “like a dog in a cage.”3 Mitchell meant this literally. Zubaydah was stripped naked and placed inside what he came to call his “tiny coffin.” Deeply disturbed, the FBI agents protested, and the FBI director, Robert Mueller, soon barred bureau personnel from participating in what he saw as an illegal and counterproductive interrogation. Meanwhile, an increasingly uncooperative Zubaydah was shuttled from coffin to frigid cell, deprived of sleep for up to ninety-six hours straight, placed in agonizing “stress positions,” blasted with loud music, and eventually waterboarded eighty-three times, as often as three times a day. Weeks of this “Clockwork Orange kind of approach,” as one CIA officer called it, produced exactly the response Mitchell and his staff had hoped for. Zubaydah confessed to membership in Al Qaeda and to a horrifying array of terror plots—including plans to blow up “American banks, supermarkets, malls, the Statue of Liberty, the Golden Gate Bridge, the Brooklyn Bridge, and nuclear power plants.” On investigation, however, all of these confessions proved fictitious. Zubaydah, it turned out, was not even a member of Al Qaeda.4

Why, then, had the most critical early investigation of the War on Terror been placed in Mitchell’s hands? Mitchell had no knowledge of Islam or the Middle East, no counterterrorism experience, and no Arabic language skills. He had never conducted an interrogation. In fact, he had never witnessed a real interrogation. His particular skill lay in the simulation of torture. Before contracting privately with the CIA, Mitchell was a military psychologist involved in the Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape (SERE) program. Never intended for use on foreign detainees, SERE was developed at the end of the Korean War to protect U.S. troops from enemy “brainwashing.” The theory was that a program of simulated capture and coercive interrogation could inoculate U.S. troops against Communist mind control in the event of their real capture.5 In its interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, then, the CIA had essentially subjected him to its own notion of midcentury Chinese “brainwashing.”

But how could brainwashing have come to be the model on which the United States built a crucial part of its twenty-first-century antiterror program? And how, for that matter, could commentators and politicians like Clarke have come to see brainwashing as both a cause of terrorism and a potential solution to it? Brainwashing would seem at most a strange footnote in the history of the Cold War—a marginal anxiety at the lunatic fringe of the Korean War era.

Yet brainwashing turns out to be among the quintessential fantasies of the postwar period. The subject of scores of novels and films, congressional hearings, and government research projects, brainwashing has for sixty years been a persistent vehicle through which citizens and government officials have imagined global ideological conflict. Insofar as “cold” warfare implies a conflict of ideas and persuasion fought not on the battlefield but through propaganda, psychological warfare, and other ideological weapons, brainwashing is the essence of cold warfare. It is no accident that U.S. military leaders explicitly embraced the notion as both a metaphor for psychological warfare and a literal weapon in the U.S. arsenal. In popular discourse, the notion of brainwashing provoked crucial questions about the nature of U.S. democracy in the age of the National Security State. Was the postwar public sphere a “marketplace of ideas” or a field in which new social institutions—including covert government agencies—controlled human thought and action?

Brainwashing became a meaningful cultural fantasy because it adjudicated such questions through the thematics of secret agency and ideological conversion at the heart of cold warfare. In the following pages, I suggest that its cultural history powerfully illustrates the role of fiction in the covert sphere. Brainwashing was widely understood to produce a bizarre amalgam of reality and fiction. It thus conjured up perhaps the first full-blown postmodern subject, a person utterly constructed and controlled from without. This nightmare of masculinity undone was among the first major ways in which the Cold War public came to conceive its own relation to the Cold War. It was also a major influence on U.S. security policy, whose architects (like the public) turn out to be trapped in the epistemology of the covert sphere. Because the history of brainwashing divides along the fault line between the covert and public spheres, I must offer two different renditions of its history, beginning first with the popular, or public, version—which, of course, is not the whole story.

Brain Warfare

Brainwashing has always been associated with the Korean War, even though fears of a more vague form of Communist “thought control” became a U.S. obsession as early as the Eastern bloc show trials of the late 1940s. As Stephen Whitfield notes, the United States Chamber of Commerce so worried about “thought-control” that its Committee on Socialism and Communism “proposed in 1946 and 1948 to remove liberals, socialists, and Communists from opinion-forming agencies,” including libraries, schools, newspapers, and “the entertainment industries.”6 Among the most memorable moments of Ellen Schrecker’s outstanding history of McCarthyism is her anecdote about Judge Harold Medina, who presided in the 1949 case that effectively outlawed the Communist Party as a criminal conspiracy to overthrow the government (Dennis v. U.S.). At a dinner party one evening, Schrecker reports, Medina explained “that whenever he looked at the spectators during the trial, he consciously forced himself to keep his eyes moving so that he wouldn’t let himself be placed in a trance by the hypnotists that the party might have placed in the courtroom.”7 Clearly, fears of mind control were in the air long before the outbreak of war in Korea.

But the more specific concept of brainwashing was first popularized by the journalist Edward Hunter three months after the start of the Korean War. In September 1950, the Miami News published Hunter’s article “ ‘Brain-Washing’ Tactics Force Chinese into Ranks of Communist Party.” Hunter would go on to publish two books on the subject: Brain-Washing in Red China: The Calculated Destruction of Men’s Minds (1951) and Brainwashing: The Story of Men Who Defied It (1956).8 Hunter initially conceived of brainwashing to explain the mass “reeducation” of civilians in Maoist China. Largely on the basis of interviews with Chi Sze-chen, a recent graduate of North China People’s Revolutionary University, Hunter claimed to unearth a complex system of ideological indoctrination. The system was notable not so much for its scathing anti-American ethos as for its coercive methodology, which combined mind-numbing repetition with rewards and punishments in order to force a wholesale shift in worldview. This approach, Hunter explained, was “psychological warfare on a scale incalculably more immense than any militarist of the past has ever envisaged.” Still, at this early juncture in its history, brainwashing had not yet come to seem the nightmare of total mental control into which it would soon be transformed. It was rather a mix of familiar techniques for coercion on the one hand and pedagogy on the other—a tool “for political indoctrination” in which the “medium for this learning is propaganda, and propaganda is applied to everyone…. Even the word [learning], used this way, is a propaganda term.”9 If this system was innovative, it was so only because of its scale and the ruthlessness of its proponents, who aimed to install a new worldview in an entire population.

The transformation of brainwashing from a system of coercive interrogation and propaganda to a supposed program for human enslavement reflects the cultural demands placed on the idea by the Korean War. In 1952, a group of U.S. Air Force pilots—most famously, Colonel Frank Schwable—confessed to dropping anthrax, typhus, cholera, and plague on North Korea. Thirty-five other captured pilots substantiated these confessions in great detail. By 1953, to the embarrassment of many in the United States, almost 5,000 of 7,200 U.S. POWs had signed confessions or petitions calling for an end to the war. Evidence emerged that U.S. troops engaged in criminal behavior detrimental to their compatriots. While most veterans recanted their confessions on repatriation, some did not. Most disturbing of all, twenty-one POWs refused repatriation entirely—actions a disgusted Eisenhower attributed to a U.S. “propaganda disadvantage” with the East. “A basic truth,” noted Eisenhower, is that “the minds of all men are susceptible to outside influences.” In keeping with this theory, Eisenhower dramatically enhanced U.S. military capacities in once-scorned avenues such as public relations, propaganda, and psychological warfare. The United States, he told a San Francisco crowd in October 1952, was locked in a “struggle for men’s minds,” and what was needed was a “psychological effort put forth on a national scale.”10

But most of this campaign would not be conducted in front of the nation. Eisenhower asked specifically for “subversion and propaganda weapons” with “no govt [sic] connection.”11 Ike’s theory of “outside influence” could not be a plank of his public policy. The notion that individuals were the products of social influence flew in the face of Cold War domestic ideology, which saw American individualism as a bulwark against Communist conformity. An open campaign of influence, moreover, would discredit the ideology of American exceptionalism. The resulting division between public and covert policy is among the reasons Americans came to see brainwashing less as a tool in a propaganda war than as a deadly threat to the rugged individualism that would win the Cold War. This view was held not only by the public but also by military and intelligence officials, who took seriously the idea that Communist states had developed a terrifying form of mind control. In 1953, for instance, the CIA Psychological Strategy Board recommended that U.S. politicians be monitored for “signs of a changed personality” so that they could be quarantined and tested for Soviet drugging.12 After the British launched their version of SERE training, the United States soon followed suit.

Yet the end of the Korean War did not calm the brainwashing scare. Five years after Hunter’s initial article, in fact, the notion had grown into something far more bizarre and terrifying than it originally seemed. In Hunter’s 1956 volume—this one published not by Vanguard but by the large New York house of Farrar, Straus, and Cudahy—brainwashing had become the stuff of science fiction, “some form of mass hypnosis” capable of fostering “unthinking discipline and robotlike enslavement.” A mysterious mix of oriental mystery and Soviet rationality, the technique now seemed “like witchcraft, with its incantations, trances, poisons, and potions, with a strange flair of science about it all, like a devil dancer in a tuxedo carrying his magic brew in a test tube.”13 The “flair of science” in this increasingly occult practice came from the Russian behavioral psychologist Ivan Pavlov, whose discoveries had supposedly made it possible to supplant an individual’s consciousness with fabricated beliefs, memories, and even traits. “Conditioned reflexes,” Hunter explained, “could conceivably be produced to make [a man] react like [a] dog that rolled over at its trainer’s signal…. The Kremlin could use words as signals—any words would do—imperialism, learning, running dog of the imperialists, people, friend of the people, big brother, without any relationship to their actual meaning. The Kremlin’s plan was to make these reflexes instinctive, like the reactions of… animals,” until subjects were “no longer capable of using free will.” According to this account, brainwashing could “change a mind radically so that its owner becomes a living puppet—a human robot—without the atrocity being visible from the outside. The aim is to create a mechanism in flesh and blood, with new beliefs and new thought processes inserted into a captive body. What that amounts to is the search for a slave race that, unlike the slaves of olden times, can be trusted never to revolt, always amenable to orders, like an insect to its instincts.”14 If U.S. POWs proved weak, it was because they had been subjected to a mind-control weapon of extraordinary power.

Such notions proved hugely attractive to conservative anti-Communists, who came to see brainwashing as both a cause of communism’s perplexing appeal in the Far East and a potential threat at home. Hunter’s sense that “brainwashing would inevitably cause a national neurosis” in any country “afflicted” with it echoed the claim of national psychopathology in George Kennan’s 1946 “Long Telegram”—arguably the most important document of the Cold War—which painted Soviet leadership as “neurotic,” “insecure,” “fanat...

Table of contents

• Preface
• Introduction
• 1. Brainwashed!
• 2. Spectacles of Secrecy
• 3. False Documents
• 4. The Work of Art in the Age of Plausible Deniability
• 5. Postmodern Amnesia
• 6. The Geopolitical Melodrama
• Notes
• Works Cited