Like Cassandra, I Speak the Truth: US Army Psychological Operations in Latin America, 1987–89

Abstract

This article examines US Army psychological operations (PsyOp) as practiced during the waning years of the Cold War in Latin America. Certain themes, especially legitimacy, in-group/out-group, and safety/fear are demonstrated to be recurrent in regional PsyOp campaigns, largely because they seem to activate rich inference systems in the human brain. Yet anthropologists and other scholars of Latin America have paid little attention to military PsyOp. Despite our natural susceptibilities, we can best evaluate propaganda (and other claims to knowledge) by following the advice of Karl Popper: competing theories, including politically loaded ones, should always be explanatory and subject to criticism.

Notes

 1. This lack of connection between anthropology and the study of industrial society military culture has also been noted in a recent essay by Ben-Ari (2004), who reviews three rather novel ethnographies (Hawkins 2001; Lutz 2001; McCaffrey 2002) that tackle the subject.

 2. I am indebted to my fellow veterans William Depalo, Layton Dunbar, José Hernandez, Jeff Sloat, and Cynthia Wilson, for reading earlier versions of this paper and providing information during its development. I am grateful to David Deutsch for responding to my inquiries on Popperian epistemology. I also thank Ambassador Edwin Corr (Ret.), John Fishel, Donald Hamilton, and Annelise Riles, all of whom also read the paper; their observations proved to be incisive.

 3. I did visit Honduras in 1989 with elements from the battalion, but only in passing. Although I helped prepare the team deploying to El Salvador, my only visit there was as a graduate student in 1992.

 4. Except where otherwise noted, all definitions are derived from the US Department of the Army's Field Manual 33-1 Psychological Operations (1987), the manual supplied to my graduating class of PsyOp specialists.

 5. One event that I strongly suspect to be a black propaganda operation instigated by wealthy landowners occurred during my dissertation fieldwork. At 3:00 a.m. on 19 May, 2000, in a squatter settlement on the outskirts of Chilapa, Guerrero, Mexico, 30 well-armed masked individuals entered the shantytown yelling ‘long live the EPR’ (Ejército Popular Revolucionario, a local guerrilla movement) and burned down four homes while wounding four squatters. Landowners had been trying to remove the squatters, while the EPR had no known reason to displace the residents. This looks like black propaganda to me.

 6. See the notorious CIA Manual ‘Psychological Operations in Guerrilla Warfare’ (Tayacan 1985).

 7. Conversely, the CIA targets primary groups. See Tayacan (1985: 26).

 8. Our manual, FM 33-1 Psychological Operations (US Department of the Army 1987) indicates that ‘inevitability’ is one of the three most common themes, and indeed, it is widely used. However, I know of no empirical studies that measure theme usage. I have deleted ‘inevitability’ and substituted the ‘safety/fear’ theme, which I found to be more recurrent in our operations.

 9. Currently (as of late 2004), all loudspeaker teams have been amalgamated into a specialized tactical PsyOp Battalion (the 9th), which includes a Ranger School-qualified descendent of OpDet known as Detachment 940. See Cosner (2004) for more on Detachment 940. This Ranger training is a novelty, for in the 1980s we were generally permitted to attend only PsyOp, Language, Airborne, and Survival Schools. The 1st, 6th, and 8th Battalions remain regionally oriented units. A propaganda dissemination battalion has been created (the 3rd Battalion), and the reserves maintain as specialized PsyOp/Prisoner of War Battalion (13th PsyOp Battalion). See Starunskiy (2003) for further elaboration of current force standing.

10. According to Dunbar, peacetime PsyOp must be closely coordinated with the resident Ambassador and satisfy his need for control and accountability. Ambassadors are very territorial and when things go wrong they must answer to Washington and to the local government. The battalion's programs were always established to the satisfaction of the relevant Ambassador (Layton Dunbar, personal communication to the author, 14 September, 2004).

11. Established in 1983, Palmerola housed 2,000 US troops (Joint Task Force Bravo) that assisted US efforts in Central America's civil wars.

12. While flying through bad weather the PsyOp helicopter once landed by mistake in Guatemala, setting up an impromptu meeting with a Guatemalan army patrol that surprisingly let the Americans go with no fuss.

13. Regarding this turf war, Dunbar states the following: ‘SOFHAT was another 1st POB [psychological operations battalion] invention. I briefed the proposal to Army Special Operations Commander MG [Major General] Leroy Suddath, who was taken with the idea. I told General Suddath that since the ultimate purpose of humanitarian assistance activities was psychological, PsyOp should be in charge. Suddath agreed and that's how the program began. Putting PsyOp (1st POB) in charge and with the SF troops [Special Forces] attached and under the command of PsyOp was unheard of at the time. It had always been the other way around. The 7th SF [Special Forces] Group nursed that grudge for a long time, and as you point out, they eventually took it over, but not until General Suddath had retired’ (Lieutenant Colonel Layton Dunbar, personal communication to the author, 14 September, 2004).

14. According to Hamilton, (personal communication to the author, 18 October, 2004) the Embassy's Public Affairs section concentrated its propaganda on Salvadoran elites, via seminars, personal contacts, cultural affairs, etc.

15. In the Spring of 1988 the battalion was tasked with delivering a similar PsyOp course to the Peruvian military that would go beyond mere training and instead produce actual propaganda to be used against the shadowy Shining Path guerrilla movement. The project received the code name ‘Inti’ in reference to the Sun God of the Inca Empire. Officers from Peru's Estado Mayor arrived at Fort Bragg in May and were divided into two-person teams, each paired with a US team consisting of an officer and several enlisted personnel. Each of these joint US-Peruvian teams was responsible for the production of a separate line of products (e.g., leaflets, television, and so on). The themes selected to highlight in the campaign, ‘visión y acción’, were targeted at the Peruvian Armed Forces in an effort to promote a more humane conduct of the war. The final product also included leaflets and posters demonizing the Shining Path's leader, Abímael Guzman, and a video utilizing Pink Floyd's Run Like Hell that extolled the virtues of the Peruvian Armed Forces.

16. According to Sgt. Sloat (personal communication to the author, 10 September, 2004), pre-testing in most cases was limited to showing the propaganda to available family members or friends of the Salvadoran PsyOp specialists. To my knowledge, no pre-testing was done using a more stringent research design.

17. On 23 October, 1984, Monterosa captured what he though to be a transmission station used by the FMLN's propaganda dissemination unit, Radio Venceremos. Actually, he had taken possession of a well disguised booby-trap that exploded, killing Monterosa and several of his associates in mid-flight (US Institute of Peace 2004).

18. Ambassador Corr reported this incident to me. The section on operations in Honduras draws on interviews I had with Col. William Depalo (Ret.), Col. Layton Dunbar (Ret.), Maj. José Hernandez (Ret.), and Sgt. Jeff Sloat. The discussion of El Salvador rests on interviews with Ambassador Edwin Corr (Ret.), Counselor Hamilton, Col. John Fishel, Maj. Hernandez, and Sgt. Sloat. The section on operations around Arraijan, Panama, relies on my personal notes and memories. For Operation Just Cause I rely on various sources, both published and unpublished, and conversations with Sgt. Sloat.

19. I participated in this OpDet mission in Panama from 24 June, 1988, to 24 October, 1988, and again from 5 January, 1989, to 30 April, 1989.

20. The Marine who died, Corporal Villahermosa, had been killed by friendly fire when the Marines split into two groups to track down suspected intruders and inadvertently fired at the wrong target. The Panamanian government asserted that the Marines were simply being spooked by monkeys or deer, while the Marines argued that intruders were probing their positions. I was unable to ascertain exactly what was going on. Various incidents involving gunfire continued at Arraijan throughout 1988 and early 1989.

21. During 1987 and 1988, anti-Noriega propaganda was disseminated in Panama by the CIA-affiliated Radio Liberty, a clandestine operation headed by US citizen Kurt Muse. One broadcast actually overrode Noriega's official state of the nation address, infuriating the strongman. Muse was eventually captured, but was subsequently liberated by US Army commandos (Hunter 2004).

22. I was one of two PsyOp troops on duty at Arraijan during this incident, which occurred at Tank 15.

23. The officers had their moments too. During the late 1980s, one US officer (not a member of the 1st Battalion, but one who nevertheless was involved in PsyOp in El Salvador) would allegedly get drunk one Saturday night in Panama and fire a pistol in the air in front of the Nicaraguan Embassy while challenging the Sandinistas to a fight. He may be a reason why US Ambassador to Panama (and ex-Ambassador to El Salvador) Dean Hinton did not always maintain tranquil relations with his PsyOp advisors.

24. Incidentally, one US soldier broadcast a surrender appeal in Spanish so broken that it prompted the following shout from a surrounded Panamanian soldier: ‘Speak English so we can understand you!’

25. However, state-level societies also have mechanisms to do dirty work, and for the United States, it was the CIA that created the more troubling propaganda, such as that instructing Contras in the arts of implicit and explicit terror (see Tayacan 1985).

26. The most colorful example of invoking God that I am aware of occurred during the early 1960s as part of an anti-Castro operation in Cuba. Rumors were spread announcing Christ's immanent return and the Cuban people were urged to rise up and overthrow the regime (Wright 1991). On the suggested date of return, a US submarine was supposed to surface off the coast of Cuba and set off fireworks, a sort of pre CGI example of special effects intended to simulate Jesus' arrival. I have heard rumors that something similar was considered prior to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, but that story may be apocryphal.

27. I did consult with David Deutsch, a theoretical physicist well grounded in Popper's philosophy, about the matter. Deutsch notes that if we suspect an argument to be propaganda we should not reject it on that account. Alleged ‘facts’ suspected of being propaganda should be analyzed in terms of a conflict between two rival theories of the origins of those ‘facts’. For example, we might conjecture that someone is lying; or that someone is mistaken, or perhaps card-stacking. In each case we should make sure that our theories are explanatory (requiring them to be testable is in general too strong, but whenever we can make them testable we should) and take seriously the implications of those theories, and earnestly seek out ways of criticizing them (Deutsch, personal communication, 2 November, 2004).

28. According to Popper (2002[1959]), scientific theories cannot be proven true, but if they are false they can be demonstrated to be untrue. The logic inherent in the growth of knowledge is unidirectional towards disproof. Compare this to the 1930s logical-positivists, who sought verification of theories, whereas Popper sought only their falsification. For good overviews of Popperian epistemology, see Deutch (1997), Magee (1983), and Miller (1994). See Radnitzky and Bartley (1996), Chalmers (1999), and Mayo (1996) for promising new ideas that may come to be regarded as improvements on Popper.