>In this month's Harper's, Lewis Lapham sez:
>
><quote>
>
>George Kennan in 1949 advanced the "messianic concept" of the
>"necessary lie;" his doctrine of Cold War containment (cultural as well
>as military) embraced the virtues of plausible deniability, the
>vocabularies of misleading statemetns, the manufacture of ideologcial
>consent.
>
><endquote>
>
>I can't find those two quoted phrases associated with Kennan. They don't
>seem to be in the "long telegram" of 1947. Does anyone know what he's
>quoting from here? It could be have some connection with Frances Stonor
>Saunders' book, which occasioned his column, if anyone has a copy of that
>handy.
[from Frances Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (New Press, 2000), pp. 39-40]
The foremost articulator of the shared convictions of America's elite was George Kerman, diplomat-scholar, architect of the Marshall Plan, and as director of the State Department's Policy Planning Staff, one of the fathers of the CIA. In 1947 he advocated direct military intervention in Italy in what he saw as its imminent collapse into a civil war supported by the Communists: 'This would admittedly result in much violence and probably a military division of Italy,' he told the State Department, but 'it might well be preferable to a bloodless election victory, unopposed by ourselves, which would give the Communists the entire peninsula at one coup and send waves of panic to all surrounding areas.' Truman, fortunately, didn't go along with this precipitate suggestion, but he did authorize covert intervention in the Italian elections instead. By July 1947, Kerman had modified his views not about the nature of the Soviet threat, but about how to deal with it. In his famous 'X' article in the journal Foreign Affairs, he set forth the thesis which dominated the early years of the Cold War. Claiming that the Kremlin was committed to dominating 'every nook and cranny available ... in the basin of world power' with its 'fanatical ideology', he proposed a policy of 'unalterable counter force', and 'firm and vigilant containment'. As part of this policy, he advocated 'the maximum development of the propaganda and political warfare techniques', which, as director of the Policy Planning Staff (designed to oversee the ideologicalpolitical containment of Europe), he was perfectly placed to implement. 'The world was our oyster,' he later wrote of this office.
In a speech to the National War College in December 1947, it was Kennan who introduced the concept of 'the necessary lie' as a vital constituent of American post-war diplomacy. The Communists, he said, had won a 'strong position in Europe, so immensely superior to our own ... through unabashed and skilful use of lies. They have fought us with unreality, with irrationalism. Can we combat this unreality successfully with rationalism, with truth, with honest, well-meant economic assistance?' he asked. No, America needed to embrace a newera of covert warfare to advance her democratic objectives against Soviet deceit.
On 19 December 1947, Kerman's political philosophy acquired legal authority in a directive issued by Truman's National Security Council, NSC-4. A top-secret appendix to this directive, NSC-4A, instructed the Director of Central Intelligence to undertake 'covert psychological activities' in support of American anti-Communist policies. Startlingly opaque about what procedures should be followed for coordinating or approving such activities, this appendix was the first formal post-war authorization for clandestine operations. Superseded in June 1948 by a new - and more explicit - directive drafted by George Kennan, NSC-10/2, these were the documents which piloted American intelligence into the choppy waters of secret political warfare for decades to come.
Prepared in the tightest secrecy, these directives 'adopted an expansive conception of [America's] security requirements to include a world substantially made over in its own image.' Proceeding from the premise that the Soviet Union and its satellite countries were embarked on a programme of 'vicious' covert activities to 'discredit and defeat the aims and activities of the United States and other western powers', NSC-10/2 gave the highest sanction of the government to a plethora of covert operations: 'propaganda, economic warfare, preventative direct action including sabotage, anti-sabotage, demolition and evacuation measures; subversion against hostile states including assistance to underground resistance movements, guerrillas and refugee liberation groups'. All such activities, in the words of NSC-10/2, must be 'so planned and executed that any U.S. government responsibility for them is not evident to unauthorized persons, and that if uncovered the U.S. government can plausibly disclaim any responsibility for them.'