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39 Chapter Two Mountain Home and Georgetown Base activities that related directly to psychological warfare were considered “classified,” which meant secret or secretive to one or another degree—the official term “restricted” being the least secret among them—and were not to be talked about except among our peers. To encourage this secrecy the various units of the Mountain Home ARCS program were housed separately. We of Colonel Beeks’s psychological warfare school were given our own small complex of prefabs that had been partitioned to provide classrooms and office space for our CO, a major, and his administrative staff. As we reported for duty on the morning of our first day in the old buildings , we knew next to nothing about what we would be taught, nor about where in ARCS we would belong. After signing in and other preliminaries, we were told that we would be trained in propaganda and that our classwork would relate to essay writing and radio broadcasting. It was in this regard that we soon learned of the invisible line separating us from the rest of our on-base 581st (and 580th) colleagues, a line that reflected two major divisions of the practice of psychological warfare. “Psywar” embraces a seemingly endless array of operations, most of which are secretive and are deployed both on the battlefield and behind or beyond enemy lines. They range from frontline radio broadcasting to supplying partisans with weapons, planting spies, and even arranging assassinations of enemy military or civilian bigwigs. 40 C h a p t e r T w o At one end of this spectrum, psychological warfare involves the use of propaganda composed of actual facts. During the Second World War this telling of the truth became known as white propaganda and its practitioners were called white hats, while black operations, with their black-hat practitioners, were based on outright lies or closely related deceptions. And at Mountain Home these two pronouncedly different approaches to waging psychological warfare were expressed by the invisible line, with us white hats on one side of it and the black hats on the other. Ordinarily, there is so little glamour attached to white-hat activities that few historians care to write about them, though black-hat missions, fraught as they typically are with danger and intrigue, fascinate writers and readers alike, so that the resulting literature is abundant. The Second World War, especially its European theater, is a happy hunting ground for writers of black operations, some of them gruesome, some bloodless but bizarre, and most all of them fascinating .1 In the Korean War, on a smaller scale, ARCS black operations covered many of the same activities as those of the Allies in World War II. At our white-hat school we came to refer to black-hat territory as “the other side of the base,” and it was made clear to us that whatever was happening on the other side was none of our business. As we would know eventually , what they were up to both in the air and on the ground was impressively realistic combat training. Even at Mountain Home, a long way from Korea and the Mediterranean, many of their operations were officially “Secret” or “Top Secret.” Further, while most of us at the school were new to military life, a very large percentage of both their air crews and black-hat ground personnel were seasoned veterans of the Second World War. As enumerated by Haas (1997, 79), the aircraft of both the 580th and 581st included, at Mountain Home, twelve specially modified B-29 four-engine heavy bombers, four C-119 twin-engine heavy transports, and four SA-16 twin-engine amphibians, all of which were hard to hide on the flat sagebrush prairie. One would think that in their missions, the goings and comings of these noisy machines would be highly noticeable reminders of the presence of the two combat wings. But in fact, they practiced amazing stealth, a principal reason being that most frequently they were ordered out on long-distance night missions in all sorts of weather and over all sorts of terrain. The routes and purposes of such missions were known only to their crews and commanders, and of the three types of aircraft the only one we white hats ever saw at close range were the quite incredible B-29s, whose squadrons we filtered through on our way to the once-a-month review parade. Accidents on both night and...

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