Idea Ripper // ArchiveCards: 1555 [Live] | Updated: 2026-10-14
Card #c998IR // #c998Synthesis

The Korean “brainwashing” panic, “the seedbed of so much creeping, Cold War fantasy,” turned out to be largely fictitious, debunked by Dulles’s own commissioned Cornell study. Yet “in response to the brainwashing bugaboo that the CIA itself had conjured, the agency constructed its own intricate mind control machinery.” The point: the invented threat funds the real weapon.

— In our words · Source: The Devil's Chessboard (David Talbot)

[Use when]

You need a budget for the weapon. Describe the enemy’s first.

[Why it matters]

A threat need not be real to be useful. It need only be believed long enough to build the response.

More from The Devil's Chessboard

#c986On April 10, 1953, Dulles warned a Princeton alumni conference of Soviet “brain warfare.” Three days later he signed the order creating…Someone is denouncing a practice with unusual volume and specificity. Check what they authorized last quarter. #c987Maheu and Associates: “a private detective firm staffed by former CIA and FBI employees that the intelligence agency used as a ‘cut-out’ to…An institution swears it cannot act somewhere, but its alumni keep showing up there on private letterhead. #c988Allen Dulles to the press, on the eve of his campaign: “Democracy works only if the so-called intelligent people make it work. You can’t…Someone praises democracy while arranging to bypass it. Listen for who counts as “the intelligent people.”