Similarly, in psychological warfare, planning can be made realistic if it starts with the individual operation for the control of which the planning is done. Define the operator as anyone having a task in the actual preparation, production or transmission of propaganda materials, whether through electric communications or by print. The operator is not usually a person with a high security classification, yet he plays his indispensable part in fulfilling the highest and most secret strategy of the war. How can a plan be written that will be useful in carrying out the actual (and highly secret) strategy of the war while meeting the needs of an inexpert individual way down at the bottom of the control system? The answer is, of course, that no such plan can be prepared. Different plans are needed for successive phases.
The operator needs simple but basic materials. If he is a producer of some kind—such as a creative writer, an artist, a singer, a program arranger, a newscaster who does his own scripts and so on—he is likely to be a person with ideas of his own. Individual creativeness cannot usually be turned on and off like a faucet. Low-ranking and disciplined though the hired writer may be, he is still subject to the inward frailties of authors if he is any good. (This particular author sympathized deeply with some poor American Japanese who were given unbelievably dull outlines and told, "Turn this into exciting Japanese material! Give it pep! Make it rock them off their tatami! But don't get away from that outline one damn inch!" The nisei rolled their eyes; they did a poor job, as they knew that they would.)
The person who has to be told day in and day out how to operate is no operator at all. Psychological warfare is no place for unsuccessful short-story writers or would-be radio commentators. It demands professional standards, and it has more than professional difficulties. Therefore what the operator needs is not technical instruction but general guidance.
He must be told what he can say, what he cannot say. He should whenever possible be given some reason for perplexing or cryptic instructions. He should be helped to become familiar with what we are trying to tell the enemy. There is nothing classified about that, since the enemy is to be told it as soon as possible. The guidance given the operator should be:
- (1) Plain.
- (2) Feasible. (This sounds superfluous, but was not so during World War II when operators were sometimes told to attack such-and-such an enemy institution without referring to it directly or indirectly.)
- (3) Organized. (The material at OWI was not organized until the last several months of the war, with the result that hundreds of thousands of words of propaganda commands remained in force, technically, but un-indexed and arranged only by weekly form.)
- (4) Specific in showing timing. (General controls should not be issued at the beginning of operations; when revised, the revision should supersede the revised section, and not be placed beside it. Other provisions should be given expiration dates, after which they pass out of effect.)
- (5) Mandatory. (Control should be expressed in do or don't; personal advice is better conveyed through informal channels.)
- (6) Non-security or low-classified. (This material, for the operators, should be accessible to the operators. Often the most important operator—the best newsman, the most effective leaflet artist—may be a rather doubtful citizen, an alien, or even an enemy volunteer. He cannot follow guidances unless he knows them, and it makes a farce of security for his superior to be able to tell him the guidance, so that he can memorize it, but not able to give him the document itself.)
These rules, though simple, are not always easy to follow. Here is an example of a bad guidance:
CLASSIFIED
Without superseding instructions concerning religion, we may use the occasion of the Sacred Banyan Tree Festival to needle the Provisional President. Make a dramatic story of the President's life. Undermine his use of religion to bolster the dictatorship.
Caution: do not mention religion. Do not indulge in scurrilous personal attacks. Material concerning our information of the President's biography is highly classified and must not be used.
The exaggeration may seem apparent, but it is a fair sample of the worst directives as actually issued and many, though not quite so bad, were near it. The same guidance in more acceptable form would read: