The imaginative labor of psychological warfare: Paul M. A. Linebarger and Cordwainer Smith

This article examines the concept of “imaginative sharing” as a way of understanding the role of imaginative labour in the work of national security agencies in the mid-century United States. The concept is drawn from the archives of Paul M. A. Linebarger, an important but understudied figure in the development of psychological warfare for the OSS and CIA from 1942 to his death in 1967. I analyse the unpublished CIA training manual Linebarger wrote in 1950, The Handbook of Black, alongside the science fiction he published as Cordwainer Smith, showing how his parallel careers should be understood as part of a single whole. I argue that the concept of imaginative sharing deeply informed Linebarger’s literary output just as it did his theorization of black operations in the Cold War, and suggest how fiction offered Linebarger a way of negotiating the complex and multifaceted ethical and political problems presented by the conflict.