For over a century, the United States military has been dropping propaganda leaflets in deliberate psychological operations, or psyops, to achieve success in war. But the key question behind the effort remains unanswered: does it even work?
In 1918, the US released more than 3m leaflets behind enemy lines by plane and hydrogen balloon. To their delight, they found the leaflets helped erode morale and unit cohesion among the Germans in the first world war. Or so the story goes.
Between 1942 and 1945, much of this effort was coordinated through the Office of War Information. The dropping of propaganda leaflets continued not just in the second world war but in every major war the US has been involved in since.
Thanks to Khajistan, a New York-based digital archive group, many of these leaflets are now on display in an interactive exhibit titled Office of War Information (OWI) at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn.
Since 2022, Khajistan, which preserves “art, words, and media from forgotten or silenced communities, from the Indus to the Maghreb”, has collected hundreds of propaganda leaflets from US wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, along with a collection of leaflets dropped on Japan during the second world war.
While the official narrative is that psyop leafleting is hugely successful, internal documents reveal a complicated picture. One example is a now declassified 1971 report from the US air force that challenged psyops’ putative successes in Vietnam.
In that war, the amount of paper falling from the south-east Asian skies was immense. From 1968 to 1971, the US and the south Vietnamese government dropped about 5bn leaflets a year over Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, the report says, dispensing them “by the handful in 0-2Bs [a type of aircraft] or dumped wholesale in loads of 12 million from C-130s properly characterized as ‘B.S. [bullshit] Bombers’”.
Why bullshit? The air force document found that leaflets “often transgressed elementary rules of persuasion and therefore lacked credibility”. They “violated a basic rule” of persuasion, namely that “allegations about oneself or the enemy should not diverge widely from the facts as the target population sees them”. Upon closer examination of interviews with enemy prisoners of war, the air force found that the leaflets were not exactly used as intended.
“One PoW [prisoner of war] explained why he had two leaflets in his possession at the time of his capture,” the report says, “they were ‘carried as paper with which [the] source could roll his cigarettes.’ Another source explained that everyone in his unit ‘including the cadre, used leaflets as toilet tissue.’ Soldiers in some units collected the leaflets as souvenirs.”
These revelations notwithstanding, the military continued leafleting. In the Gulf war of the early 1990s, the US produced 29m leaflets, and according to one report, the sum of psyops messaging during the war “persuaded approximately 44% of the Iraqi army to desert, more than 17,000 to defect, and more than 87,000 to surrender”.
Those numbers seem hard to fathom, but the American public has had little access to these leaflets to make any kind of judgment of their own. That’s one of the contradictions of the genre. The leaflets speak in the name of the American people but are almost never seen by them. On the other hand, the same leaflets became commonplace items for Afghans, Iraqis and so many others who routinely encounter the United States as a mass of paper and bombs, falling endlessly from the skies.
When I ask Saad Khan, the founder of Khajistan, why he began collecting war propaganda, his answer is simple: “I come from war.” Khan, who was born and raised in Pakistan, described how he had just been in Islamabad with his mother and sisters when an Islamic State bombing occurred nearby. “We heard it,” he says. “It’s part of fucking life.”
According to Khan, the name Khajistan comes from a city that once stood near Herat, Afghanistan, though the archive is intentionally contemporary, focusing on “people who don’t get space in real life”.
It started as an Instagram account in 2016 and has grown into an impressive repository of “the unwanted, the unnecessary, the unusual, the unsavory” , including a documentary on the hidden lives of “showgirls” in Pakistan, a homoerotic photo book on Iranian male subculture, “smut” ephemera from south Asia and much more.
At Pioneer Works, the Office of War Information (OWI) recreates a wood-paneled office of an earlier era. Two genuine American propaganda posters supporting the mujahideen in Afghanistan in their fight against the Soviets are hung on one wall. An ancient TV sits in the room playing clips of Friends and Everybody Loves Raymond on loop. A cabinet that looked like it once showcased high school trophies displays rare propaganda finds, including an edition of The Alphabet of Jihad. (The Alphabet of Jihad was a USAID project from the early 1980s that taught children how to read in Pashto and Dari, Afghanistan’s two main languages, through anti-Soviet passages and illustrations of missiles, tanks and landmines. Now considered an embarrassment, the program cost $51m and ran from 1984 to 1994.)
Meanwhile, thousands of replicas of genuine leaflets are strewn across the floor in the exhibit, and new ones are printed every 10 minutes. Visitors can grab a leaflet and input the number placed on the corner of the paper on the old computers in the room, discovering a translation of the item and its details. Propaganda leaflets from the second world war that the US dropped on Japan hang on the corridor wall. All the walls are painted in an bright Tom and Jerry yellow. “Playfulness is very important,” says Khan, who curated the exhibit alongside Joey Chriqui and Amad Ansari. “Even in war, life goes on.”
Patterns quickly emerge when examining the leaflets. The ones dropped on Japan sound eerily like Donald Trump’s threats to the leadership of Iran today. One leaflet, in a dramatic red and white drawing, shows people fleeing in mortal fear from buildings collapsing in flames. The text on the back of the leaflet reads: “Do you remember the great damage done to your country by the earthquake in 1923? America is capable of producing earthquakes that will cause damage a thousand times greater … Your homes will be destroyed, factories will vanish, and your family killed. Note carefully the American style of earthquake; you will know the time when it will occur. You will be experiencing it!”
Leaflets dropped in Iraq usually contained more text than those dropped in Afghanistan, which focused more on images. (This presumably reflects Iraq’s higher levels of literacy.) Both Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein are frequently caricatured. Other leaflets advise cooperation with American authorities or emphasize bonds of brotherhood between ethnic groups, though it’s hard not to see a significant portion of the imagery as demeaning, if not downright bigoted. As they get closer to our era, the leaflets are also populated with more anime-style imagery.
All these materials are considered “white” propaganda. Among psyops professionals, propaganda is divided into white, gray and black varieties. White propaganda has an overt message that the propagandist believes is true. The source is also clearly identified. Gray propaganda does not attempt to identify or conceal its source. The propagandist may or may not believe in the message’s truth. Black propaganda deliberately conceals its source, pretends it’s from others, and is not beholden to any standard of truthfulness.
But just because these leaflets are “white” propaganda doesn’t mean they are innocent. They are burdened with their own assumptions. “Dehumanization is at the core of this shit,” Khan says. “Thinking that you can drop shit on people like this and think that they will change their mind. It’s the same idea [with the Americans in] Iran. You will assassinate all these people and then [believe that] people will come out for freedom and liberty? There’s racism in this. That is interesting to me.”
Khajistan’s exhibit doesn’t directly answer the question of whether such leaflets can help achieve battleground success, but it comes close. “These leaflets are just trash, like on the floor,” Khan says. “Are they even effective?” he asks, before answering his own question. “They’re dropped so that, after the war, in Congress, when they summon the guy, he’[ll say]: ‘we dropped the leaflets before [we bombed them].’” Khan pauses. “This is self-serving for Americans, like how America bombs and then sends non-profits. It’s part of that system.”