There are several points of view about Sihanouk and the Buddhists. Some say the Buddhist clergy no longer are charmed by Sihanouk and thus would be unlikely to try to persuade their followers. Others believe that Sihanouk still has a pretty strong hold on the Buddhist clergy and, through them, on the people.

THE FAMOUS "MIG" LEAFLET*

BY CARL BERGER

Subsequent results of messages will not always be predictable; it is therefore incumbent upon the communicator to scrutinize messages carefully and attempt to detect the potential for unintended effects, both positive and negative.

Occasionally, a special leaflet operation will produce important side effects. This was the case with the special offer made by the U.N. Command in April and May 1953, an offer of $50,000 to any Communist pilot who would deliver a MIG jet fighter or other modern Soviet jet to the United Nations forces in Korea. An additional bonus of $50,000 was promised the first pilot to bring in a plane.

The offer was disseminated by airdrops of special leaflets written in Korean, Chinese, and Russian. In addition, the offer was carried in these languages over the U.N. radio network. Both the leaflet and radio media gave detailed flight plans whereby Communist pilots could bring in planes safely under escort by U.N. fighters.

Not until several weeks after the July 1953 Armistice in Korea, did a North Korean jet pilot zoom out of the skies, land at Kimpo airfield near Seoul, and ask for political asylum. The pilot said he had never heard of the jet offer, but since American truthfulness was at stake, the U.S. Air Force paid the pilot the $100,000 reward and the offer was withdrawn. But this was not the whole story. General Mark Clark, U.N. Commander, later reported that the Air Force not only got its $100,000 worth in information from tests on the Russian jet, but the operation had had important military side effects.

According to Clark, the Communists' first reaction to the offer

was to ground all MIGs for eight days. It might have been because of the weather, or because they wanted time to screen out the politically unreliable pilots. Most likely, it was the latter. An eight-day break in MIG operations in Korea was most unusual. ... For whatever reason, the Communist MIG pilots who were permitted to fly after the offer was made were the worst-on their record- of the whole Korean War. They flew far fewer missions in those last ninety days than in the preceding three months, but American Sabrejet pilots shot down twice as many planes. In fact, the Sabres destroyed 165 MIGs against three friendly combat losses a record ratio of 55 to one.i

Conceding that the pilots knew of the offer-and Communist reactions appear to grant that point-here was an instance of a measurably successful psychological operation.

*Excerpts from An Introduction to Wartime Leaflets, Documentary Study No. 1, The American University, Special Operations Research Office, Washington, D.C., 1959, AD 220 821, pp. 74–76.

Since 1953 this type of leaflet operation has been used by the Chinese Nationalists, who have dropped leaflets over the Communist mainland, offering Red pilots who defected to Taiwan with MIG planes from 1,000 to 4,000 ounces of gold, depending on the model plane they brought in. As far as is known, no Chinese Communist pilots have taken advantage of the offer. The Nationalists also have scattered leaflets offering Chinese Communist naval personnel up to 100,000 ounces of gold ($3,500,000) if they brought in a light cruiser.

NOTES

1. Mark Clark, From the Danube to the Yalu (New York: 1954),

pp. 205-207.

PRETESTING THE PRODUCT*

BY WILBUR SCHRAMM

Pretesting the content of propaganda messages to assess in advance their potential impact on an audience will increase the chances of their being effective.

The problem in all types of psywar operations is to predict or estimate the effect of a psywar operation without being able to measure freely the actual responses of the target audience.

There are, in general, three ways to evaluate the effect of a psywar product in this difficult situation. Admittedly each one is only an approximation. None of them is as satisfactory as an uninhibited study of the target audience itself would be. Yet an evaluation of what psywar is accomplishing is so enormously important to planning and practice that any psywar operation stands to gain tremendously from whatever it can learn from these methods.

EXPERTS

The simplest of these methods is the jury of experts. These should be persons who are thoroughly acquainted with the target country, its culture, and its people. They should preferably have lived in the target country for a long time and should have left it only very recently. Ideally they should be natives of the target country. Their absolute loyalty to the country that wants to use them as jury members must, however, be beyond question.

The procedure is for this jury to be asked to read or listen to the psywar material being directed at the target in question and predict what its effect will be within the target. Will it attract attention? Will it be understood? What reaction will it produce? Will it be accepted and believed? Will it change any minds or lead anyone to take the action desired? How could it be made more effective?

*Excerpts from The Nature of Psychological Warfare, Operations Research Office, The Johns Hopkins University, Chevy Chase, Md., September 1953.

The jury, of course, can be asked to pretest as well as to posttest the psywar output. That is, a leaflet designed for the target can be shown to the jury before it has been disseminated, and the criticisms and predictions of the experts can be used either in revising it or in deciding when and where to disseminate it. This is also possible, though less convenient, in the case of radio broadcasts.

The report of the jury will be valid only to the extent that the jury is truly expert, that is, to the extent to which it can put itself in the place of the target audience and anticipate the processes by which the audience will respond to the psywar material.

SAMPLE OF PERSONS

A second method of evaluation is the use of a sample of persons as similar as possible to the target audience. These can be refugees, defectors, POWs, or other natives available to the psywar planners. Continuous effort should be made to match the sample as closely as possible to the actual target audience. For example, if there is any reason to think that different groups within the target might react in different ways to the propaganda, then representatives of each of these groups should be included in the sample. Thus if three-fifths of the target population is illiterate, a sizable proportion (ideally, three-fifths) of the sample should be illiterate, so that their reactions will be reflected more prominently in the results than the reactions of literates. If there is a powerful trade union group in the target, with opinions and probable reactions of their own, then trade unionists should be represented in some such proportion in the sample.

Ideally, then, the sample should be a perfect miniature of the target audience. The picture as regards sex distribution, age distribution, geographical distribution, occupation distribution, economic status, educational levels, political viewpoints, and the like, should be the same as within the target. Practically, this is very hard if not impossible to achieve. It is considerably harder to put together a reliable miniature sample than to put together a panel of experts, for the miniature sample is only as good as it is really representative.

But if a representative sample can be obtained, then very useful results can be expected. The procedure is simply to expose the panel to the psywar material, and find out, from responses to before-and-after questions, what happens to the readers or listeners. Did they read or listen to all of it? What did they think of it? Did they understand it? Did they change any opinions as a reulst of it? What made them believe it, or kept them from believing it?

There are some real dangers involved in both methods, even when the experts using them are really expert and the sample is really representative. One of these dangers is that the members of the jury or the sample may give the opinions they think the questioner wants to hear. This is especially likely when the respondents are impoverished and insecure (for

example, refugees, defectors, and prisoners highly dependent on the income or preferment promised them for their cooperation and perhaps reluctant to criticize the questioners' propaganda unfavorably). It is still more likely when prisoners of war are used for the jury or the sample, since they may give deliberately false answers in the hope of making the propaganda ineffective. The evaluators must therefore investigate potential jury or sample members as carefully as possible before retaining them. Subsequently, these members must be tested from time to time with, for example, deliberately planted propaganda that is known to be poor or to differ in some important way from the material previously given, so as to find out whether their answers change with the changing material.

ENEMY SOURCES

The third kind of evaluation consists of a number of techniques, all of which in one way or other belong under the rubric of intelligence. The psywar unit should use every available avenue of intelligence in its attempt to find out about the effects of its propaganda on the target. Here are some of the ways in which intelligence sources can be used: [See Chapter VII of this casebook.]

Undercover Agents. These can be used as participant observers to report on the way psywar material is being received in their areas, and on the effects it produces. This is perhaps the most reliable single device; the agent can discuss the psywar with members of the target audience, listen in on conversations about it, and observe any actions that appear to result from it. All this calls, of course, both for an able agent and a good channel through which he can report. Prisoners of War. These can be interviewed soon after capture. They can be asked what psywar material has come to their attention, what their own reactions are to it, what are the reactions of their fellow soldiers and superior officers, and what is the general state of opinion and morale in their military units.

Routine Intelligence. News, intercepted letters, captured documents, statistical reports, and information from defectors and other persons interviewed can and should be screened for information bearing upon the effectiveness of our psywar.

The Enemy's Actions. These often tell us something about the effects of our psywar messages. For example, variations in the number of surrenders are often revealing. So are the enemy's countermeasures. His counterpropaganda, monitored and analyzed, sometimes tells us which of our campaigns are proving especially bothersome. In the case of broadcasting, the programs he jams may tell us what we are accomplishing with what messages.

No psywar unit will rely on any one of these methods exclusively. Not to use all possible evaluative information out of available intelligence is inexcusable. Any operation will be able, without too much trouble, to set

up a small jury of expert observers; a representative sample is not beyond the resources of most field operations. But the information obtained from any one of these methods ought to be checked against what comes from the others; for example, what the jury says about a leaflet ought to be checked as often as possible with POWs who are being interviewed, and also with the information that comes out of the target country. When the judgments from the various methods tally, the presumption in favor of their validity is greatly increased.

EXPLOITATION OF CHANNELS OF COMMUNICATION

Use of different media forms to simplify the flow of messages and appeals from communicator to target is discussed in the papers in this section. The psyoperator's choice of media will depend on the size and distribution of the target and the cultural ways of the audience. In some cases the audiences for the same message will be diverse, yet circumstances may preclude tailoring the message to individual groups within the larger audience. The use of visual communications in the Nigerian civil war is an example of such a situation.

The third essay points out that media choice should also depend on the control authorities may have over the means of communication. This is a special consideration, particularly when developing propaganda campaigns for totalitarian societies. "News Broadcasting on Soviet Radio and Television" indicates the specific place radio and television broadcasting have in Soviet agitation and propaganda.

Leaflets, magazines, and wall posters are three widely used channels of communicating propaganda messages and appeals through printed matter. Technical matters such as the attention-getting features of magazine content, particularly when geared to intellectual groups, are of major importance. The wall poster, as illustrated in "Tatzepao: Medium of Conflict in China's Cultural Revolution'," one form of mass media which does not depend on a high degree of literacy and availability of receivers, is one of the most dramatic means of communicating political ideas.

Accessibility of the target to the psyoperator's messages and appeals has been a serious problem in PSYOP campaigns. Some unusual techniques include the use of loudspeakers in broadcasting appeals from captured enemies, the use of postage stamps, and the use of cannon and balloons. The Vietnam experience in the development of aircraft as a PSYOP medium is reviewed in "Psychological Operations and Air Power: Its Hits and Misses."

Culturally designed techniques of communicating political ideas have been used extensively in Southeast Asia. Theater is not widely used as a propaganda device in the Western world, but in some cultures where the tradition is strong, drama teams, as political communications, may be one of the most important means of reaching a largely illiterate rural population if the messages are congenial to audience predispositions. Similarly, the North Vietnamese government uses songs to generate greater loyalty among its citizens.