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This article examines the covert and unofficial intervention by the United States in Italian domestic politics from 1948 to the mid-1950s, which was often referred to as "psychological warfare" (or "psywar").
Conventionally, the difference between regular and psychological warfare should correspond to that between the body and the mind of human beings. While normal warfare aims at defeating the enemy through physical damage, psywar aims to conquer the "minds and hearts" of the people in the symbolic conflict that always complements the military one. In the first years of the Cold War, there was a strong fascination in the United States with the idea of psychological warfare. The pedagogic belief that it was possible to influence and condition political allegiances, private and public behaviors, and even individual and collective identities was largely a product of the time. As the State Department official Albert P. Toner recalled, "Psychological was a fashionable word in those early fifties. You heard for the first time, or more than previously, about psychological warfare or strategy or whatever." The Korean War popularized the Orwellian notion of brainwashing, which ended up exercising a wide attraction in American public opinion. It also stimulated the belief that the diabolical techniques of mind control allegedly developed by Communism could be virtuously reversed to promote and propagate Western democratic values.1
At the same time, the particular nature of the bipolar clash between the United States and the Soviet Union further legitimized psychological warfare as a necessary tool of American foreign policy. The Cold War was a total and absolute conflict between two antagonistic, but equally universalistic, models that did not acknowledge each other as legitimate enemies, as justi hostes. The totality and absoluteness of the war conflicted nonetheless with the impossibility of solving it by military means. Psychological warfare, therefore, rapidly became a surrogate for a war that could not be fought-at least in the traditional way-and came to occupy a preponderant role in the United States anticommunist arsenal.2
But the absolute nature of the bipolar conflict combined also with the substantial opaqueness and ambiguity of the concept of psychological warfare in transforming it into a sort of catchall formula. Since anything could have psychological repercussions, and since in a total war any act is automatically...