For other people with the same name, see Edward Hunter.
Edward Hunter (July 2, 1902 – June 24, 1978)[1][2] was an American writer, journalist, propagandist, and intelligence agent who was noted for his anticommunist writing. He was a recognized authority on psychological warfare.[3] Both contemporary psychologists and later historians would criticize the accuracy and basis of his reports on brainwashing, but the concept nevertheless became influential in the Cold War-era United States.
He went on to work at several newspapers and periodicals, including The Newark Ledger, The New Orleans Item, and in his home state, The New York Post, The New York American, Tactics, and Counterattack.[2] He later worked in France at the Chicago Tribune's Paris edition. Hunter was also active in the Newspaper Guild, the journalists' trade union, which he felt was dominated by communist sympathizers.
In January 1964 he began publication of the Tactics newsletter under the auspices of Anti-Communism Liaison, Inc.[6] Hunter served as chairman of the organization and editor of the newsletter until 1978.[6]
Critical reception
Historian Julia Lovell has criticized Hunter's reporting as "outlandish" and sensational. By 1956, US government psychologists largely concluded after examining files of Korean War POWs that brainwashing as described by Hunter did not exist, but the impact of his reporting was significant, and helped shaped public consciousness about the threat of Communism for decades.[7] Lovell argues that Hunter created "an image of all-powerful Chinese 'brainwashing' ... [that] supposed an ideological unified Maoist front stretching from China to Korea and Malaya", but declassified US documents show a much more complicated and contested picture of Chinese influence and international aspirations in Asia.[8]
After the war he "helped close up shop" and continued his intelligence work under various other agencies such as SSU, the Strategic Services Unit of the U.S. Army.[10] When the CIA was organized in 1947, Hunter joined under journalistic cover.[1][2]
Psychological warfare
Hunter is widely acknowledged as having coined the term brainwashing in a 1950 article for Miami News.[11][12] He first used it publicly in an article for the Miami News on September 24, 1950.[13] In this article and in later works, Hunter claimed that by combining Pavlovian theory with modern technology, Russian and Chinese psychologists had developed powerful techniques for manipulating the mind.[13] It was Hunter's variation of the Chinese term "xinao", meaning "cleaning the brain." As author Dominic Streatfeild recounts, Hunter conceived the term after interviewing former Chinese prisoners who had been subjected to a "re-education" process.[14] He applied it to the interrogation techniques the KGB used during purges to extract confessions from innocent prisoners, and from there, variations were conceived - mind control, mind alteration, behavior modification, and others.[14]
A year later, Hunter's magnum opus Brain-Washing in Red China: The Calculated Destruction of Men's Minds was published, warning of a vast Maoist system of ideological "re-education."[15] The new terminology found its way into the mainstream in The Manchurian Candidate novel and the movie of the same name in 1962.[14]
He saw no difference between the various communist countries and warned that both Yugoslavia and China were as bent on communist world domination as was the Soviet Union.[10]