One of Linebarger’s responsibilities was analyzing Japanese radio transmissions and preparing propaganda material. It was not possible at the time to record enemy broadcasts, which meant one had to stay up all night and summarize them so that they would be ready first thing in the morning.
In 1942, Linebarger suggested printing up “surrender passes”, or safe-conducts aimed at overcoming the moral resistance of the enemy when a soldier chose to desert. His book Psychological Warfare is richly illustrated with this type of pamphlet.
He insisted that the passes “be made to look like an official document, with banknote-type engraving and with formal style. Unfortunately, it was printed in green, instead of the old-fashioned orange-gold of the U.S. Treasury yellowbacks and was sent to the jungle areas of the South and Southwest Pacific, where everything was green to start with.”18 On one occasion he released false information, advising Japanese art lovers to take care that their paintings and sculptures would not be damaged in the imminent bombings. Four days later, he learned that a Nazi radio station in Luxembourg had used this bit of news to accuse the “Yankees” of being enemies of culture. “The author —he recalls— “enjoyed seeing his item go all the way around the world, but in retrospect he wonders whether he did any good other than to please himself. He did do the actual harm of giving the Nazis another point to distort.”19
In reality, what Linebarger longed for most was to return to the Far East, and ultimately he managed to be transferred. A person was needed for a sensitive intelligence operation in China, and Linebarger, the only candidate who met all of the many requirements, was chosen for the mission.
As a result, in 1943 he was sent to the Headquarters of the China-India-Burma theatre, based in Chongquing. The Chinese nationalist government (at this time backed by the Russians) had established its capital there, following the Japanese occupation of Beijing.
Paul remained in Chongquing for a year, performing a broad range of tasks, everything from interviewing refugees to elaborating strategy. He also organized the operation he would later call “the Yenan manoeuvre”.
From his headquarters in Yenan, Mao Zedong was negotiating yet another in a series of pacts with the nationalists aimed at mounting a common front against the Japanese. Some in Washington believed the Japanese would ultimately defeat Chiang and reasoned it was in their favor to shift all of their support to Mao as reinsurance of the presence of the United State in China. A few generals offered promises to the Maoist guerillas while others continued to support the Generalissimo, such that “the Chinese never could figure out if the Americans were stupid or liars.”20
Linebarger, wanting to remain loyal to Chiang, criticized the contradictory discourse of his government: “President Roosevelt (...) promised Manchuria to the Chinese, Korea ‘in due course’ to the Koreans, and the integrity of the French Colonial Empire to the French (...) The British promised Palestine to both the Arabs and the Jews in World War I, and consequently got themselves into a political mess which, thirty years later, was still a mess.”21
To Linebarger’s mind, these attitudes were not merely disloyal but ineffective. “It is useless to try to cooperate with Communist guerrillas (...) on the argument, ‘We all oppose the Axis together! Ideologies don’t matter when brave men fight side by side’—if at the same time the guerrillas know we have a strong domestic campaign on against Communism. Telling a Communist that ideologies don’t matter is like saying to a Jesuit, ‘Let’s skip the superstitions, Father, and leave religion out of it. Get down to business.”22
In 1944, Linebarger spent several weeks at the revolutionary base in Yenan discussing “matters concerning psychological war” with Mao Zedong and Chou En-lai. He also met Michael Lindsay, a British Marxist who had joined the revolutionaries.23 They would remain friends for the rest of Linebarger’s life.
Paul could not sing the praise of the Chinese Communists who helped him write his propaganda pamphlets enough. He spoke admiringly of their talent for indoctrinating Japanese prisoners, who received unsurpassable treatment: one had even been elected councilman of the municipal government.
The manual abounded in praise of Chinese culture and character. Among the great strategists of history, it ranks Sun Tzu alongside Clausewitz, taking examples from the saga of the Han, the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, and the history of Genghis Khan. It respects Chiang Kai-shek for resisting indoctrination while in Moscow and using the techniques of “terror and propaganda” against the Communists, learned from the Russians.
Linebarger refers to a neglected event (the Chinese “bombardment” of Nagasaki in 1937 with propaganda pamphlets) to underscore the moral superiority of this action over the North American nuclear attack in 1945.
The manual is critical of US propaganda in World War I, which George Creel had directed “as if they were trying to sell something.” “America emerged from the war disappointed at home and discredited abroad —so far as the heated propaganda of ‘making the world safe for democracy’ was concerned. A more modest, more calculated national propaganda effort would have helped forestall those attitudes which, in turn, made World War possible.”24
Psychological Warfare, which sums up Linebarger’s military efforts, is more than a manual. Linebarger states that his knowledge of other groups of people enabled him to write a book that “was not about North American propaganda exclusively.” While at times it veers toward cynicism, it takes a philosophical turn near the end, speculating on the possibility of replacing crude warfare with a chess game characterized by intelligence and persuasion.
Ria Regardie
When the war ended, Linebarger had the rank of major and had earned two medals. He planned to resume his university teaching and was already sending his wife Margaret the first chapters of the novel Ria, which he had begun writing in remote military encampments.
Ria (1947) and Carola (1948), the novels Linebarger published under his “Chinese” pseudonym, recount the experiences from the educational period of his life. They appeared at the same time as the manual, in the midst of a personal crisis that led him to seek psychoanalytical treatment.
The predominant atmosphere of both novels is somber, a far cry from the almost ironic style of the manual.
Ria Regardie and Carola Lainger are both women in the midst of an identity crisis. Both have lived in the same places as Linebarger: Germany, China, and the United States. “Regardie” and “Lainger” might even be alliterations of “Linebarger”.
The character that bridges the two novels is Zickel Jone, a Chinese-American collaborationist that produces anti-Allied propaganda for Japanese radio in Shanghai. The woman who works for him as an announcer in Ria25 is Carola Lainger, the main character of the other story.26
The women’s identities are an enigma. They do not identify with the varied roles each has had to play in their lives and both sense the precariousness of their roots. Ironically depicted in Ria, Linebarger delves deeper into this ambiguousness in Carola.
Maria (Ria) Regardie Browne is an American teenager educated in Japan. During the twenties, she lived with her mother in Bad Christi, an archaic village in the Black Forest. Her life is reconstructed on the basis of memory and testimonies in a non-linear narrative that revolves around the mental block she suffers whenever she attempts to recall the past.
Action is almost totally absent from the novel, which is filled with philosophical banter and features odd characters from a troubled Germany that wield influence over Ria.
The Russian Prince Todschonotschidsche preaches a strange doctrine, “almost Eastern”, about the continuity of all living things. It defines and situates the entirety of human existence with the following formula: “sex divided by space over time.”
The crazy Jew Carlo Bräutigam dreams of creating a Steinerian method of agriculture that will pull Germany out of its stagnation. He lives surrounde
d by goats and claims that his cat Sardanápal is the reincarnation of a Martian sage. Ria is shocked when she happens upon him slitting his wrists after having sacrificed his cat in act of ritual magic. One night, the Gestapo takes him away.
There is also a young Nazi who will end his days on the Russian front; a virile Englishwoman with an appetite for excitement; a Japanese official who believes that all Western women are perverse; a beautiful Swedish woman that drives Bräutigam mad; and Ria’s mother, a self-assured American firmly convinced of the power of her dollars.
Exposed to such heterogeneous influences, Ria searches for an identity: “The forever unknowable first person singular.”27 “The more you live, the more you live your own life, the more you’re you. You settle down, you build up the world inside yourself. You furnish your own personality with all the gadgets and bric-à-brac you have ever wanted. And the funny thing is, it stays...”
According to the Russian prince, Bräutigam’s madness is the result of an inadequate identity: he is a man that does fit into the sex/space/time formula. He could have been born in India or Byzantium where they would have taken him for a saint.
Despite being foreign, Ria’s life in the Weimar Republic is fraught with anxiety. Hyperinflation erupts in Germany, and all doors swing open for anyone who possesses the mighty dollar. “If one had enough Dollars, even a few, one could ride the crest of disaster, enjoy stunning luxury, luxury accentuated by the contrast with misery all about. One could eat whipped cream while outside the window, rickety pale children sniffled and smacked their lips.”
Her mother, who believes in the manifest destiny of the United States, seems immune to these contrasts. She is determined not treat anyone as a stranger, “a rule to which Negroes were the sole exception.” Mrs. Regardie believes that “Yankee” superiority lies in Americans’ practical spirit and their technology. “The real art of America —speedometer, oil, water, ammeter.”28
Meanwhile, Ria begins to gain respect for the peculiar figures of a decadent world. Behind Miss Pidgin’s “plebian” tastes is a personality as forceful as her mother’s: “But while Mother represented clean-footed conquerors staking out new lands after sweeping aside inferior races, Miss Pidgin stood for the very persistence of those inferiors. Miss Pidgin, thought Ria in retrospect, was the Native, but the native in the very citadel of Whites: Europe.”
Ria suspects the world is not limited to North American pragmatism. She is also left in doubt when in history class, “the teacher pointed out a few more working-class atrocities with stomach-turning detail, but omitted mention of what the nobles had done.”
Carola Lainger
These suspicions become more explicit in Carola (1948), a story with a Chinese setting in the style of the novels of Pearl S. Buck. Also narrated in non-linear fashion, it is constructed on the basis of several decisive “Novembers”.
Carola, like Ria, is an American expatriate whose experience in China has been harsh. But “[t]here was something strange about her identity.”29 As a young girl, she identifies with her dead brother and suffers from hallucinations. As a teenager, she dreams that she is a man. She is a troubled girl for whom friendship is a source of guilt because she fears having lesbian tendencies.
Carola is an anti-heroine. She betrays causes to which she has pledged her loyalty, is disloyal to herself, and feels increasingly guilty with each betrayal. For a time she lives with an Italian-American communist but leaves him to go and fight for Mao together with a Chinese revolutionary.
In China she feels rejected. She loses a son and sees how her husband betrays the revolutionary cause. After a fling with a young Nazi engineer, she switches over to the Japanese side.
Now she rejects China and everything about her life there. Nostalgia and fear cause her to cling to an obscene image of North American prosperity. She scorns the Chinese but is forced to acknowledge that to a large extent she is one. “It made her smile inwardly to think of the way she had hated China, had felt American in China, when she was herself a Chinese bogey, and a good one, but as an American still a little odd and out-of-place.”30
The Communists assure her that the civil war is fueled by imperialism and that “when the revolution wins in China, it will be very easy. We will have democracy, real democracy, which leads to socialism.” Yet Carola cannot avoid comparing these revolutionary illusions with the complex web of lies and betrayals that confronted her when she witnessed the destruction of a peasant village.
Her only desire now is to take pleasure in comfort. Renouncing her nationality, she marries a Japanese official solely as means of leaving China, though she is still capable of observing, “America isn’t just a flag or a bunch of ideals or politics. America is the solid goodness that people live with. America is the success of a thousand years of comfort. America is the result of scrubbing and working and thinking hard and cleaning up and getting nice things for generation after generation. We have the things that other people die for. We are the world which their ideals, their communism and their fascism, are supposed to lead.”31
Carola longs for the American system, that “mixed society of men and machines, and the people had a job to do if they were to keep up with the trim perfection of their machinery. [...] Carola felt that she herself was part of the functioning city, and that her own existence fitted the pattern of mechanically accurate elegance around her.”32 Back in the United States, however, about to eat an “insipid steak...served with that sanitary precision so typically American,” she yearns for Oriental cuisine, which is a “mixed society of men and machines, and the people had a job to do if they were to keep up with the trim perfection of their machinery. [...] Carola felt that she herself was part of the functioning city, and that her own existence fitted the pattern of mechanically accurate elegance around her.”33
The novel reaches its climax when Carola rejects revolutionary ideals and crudely appeals to her true god: imperialism. She prays to “the tribal deity of her own beautiful wild people, who trampled continents into submission and subdued a world so that they might have wealth to throw away [...] Wake up, Blue-eyed barbarian God and smash into these people [...] You’re the God of big lands and fierce seas —Cadillacs and Chandlers— You’re the God who crammed the world full of good things like copper and gold and coal and oil, and then moved in Your people to dig these things up.”34
At this moment, she receives a visit from Ouyang, who unhesitatingly qualifies this entreaty as an act of magic and cautions her in the name of Confucius.
Ouyang, who later dies fighting the Japanese, explains to Carola that she and her people are unhappy because they have become immoderate, dream of omnipotence and seek immortality. These are the same excesses that Cordwainer Smith will condemn in the Jwindz and the Instrumentality. Also, a despised character, a man “of color” like Ouyang, will impart to them a lesson in wisdom.
Michael Dugan
The Cold War-era spy novels that made Ian Fleming and John Le Carre a fortune also had their precursor in “Carmichael Smith”. With this pseudonym Linebarger created his own James Bond: the spy Michael Dugan, the main character of Atomsk (1949), the atypical novel he wrote during one of the most difficult periods of his life.
Like his creator, Dugan is a major in the army. Similar to other legendary spies, he is a master of martial arts, an expert in the art of deception, and willing to swallow a cyanide capsule before surrendering.
Perhaps Dugan is indebted to a historical figure: Dr. Richard Sorge, the Russian spy that held top positions in the Nazi party. Dugan is a kind of American Sorge, disguised to appear Japanese in order to infiltrate the Japanese high command. It is said that he could have prevented Pearl Harbor if he had not been assigned to another mission. Sent by the Japanese to Germany, he wins the trust of Nazi officials and knows before anyone else of the existence of the extermination camps, though his reports are ignored in Washingto
n.
His ideology is sinisterly naive. The lightness with which Linebarger treats the matter of nuclear arms is startling though plausible given the historical context. In those years, few physicists even had a clear idea of the consequences of a nuclear war. Suffice to say that one year later, at the beginning of the Korean War, General MacArthur proposed an insane plan to launch fifty atomic bombs over China and a create a radioactive desert on the shores of the Yalu River.35
The spy in the novel sabotages a Soviet laboratory and releases radioactive waste into the sewers, thereby contaminating the nearest river, for the sole purpose of letting the enemy know he was there. Today we know this would have caused an environmental catastrophe, but in the story it barely occasions a diplomatic contretemps.
Michael Dugan has no life of his own: he is “a human weapon” at the service of national interests. While he regrets that “so many brave men” perished in Hiroshima, his primary goal is to prevent this from ever happening in the United States. He works to avoid nuclear proliferation so that all destructive power will be in the hands of his country and never wavers in the belief that this strength will be used for the greater good.
His messianism (which fifty years later would continue to inspire US foreign policy) makes him mistrustful of everyone, including his allies.
Like his creator, Dugan speaks Chinese, Japanese, German and Russian. He also shares some of his ideas: “liking people is the only way to win wars, or even better, to get out of them. (...) America will get sick and weak if it hates.”
Nevertheless, when it comes to crushing the enemy, Dugan has no scruples about lying, killing, betraying and stealing, driven by logic that oscillates between Machiavelli and Sun Tzu. Paradoxically, he states, “I’m alive right now, because I liked the Japanese while I was doublecrossing them (...) Defeating Japan was the best thing I knew of helping the Japanese people. I had friends, and I sent some of them to die.”36 He is even capable of expressing pride in having been decorated by both sides.
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