Hearts and Minds Before Hashtags

Winning “hearts and minds” began long before hashtags — and the first battlefield wasn’t online. It was psychological, political, and deeply human.

In Eyes to Deceit, I wanted to explore the summer when America learned to bend truth into strategy. In 1953, Operation Ajax toppled Iran’s democratically elected government — a covert success that would echo for decades. Behind the cables and code names were men who believed they were defending democracy, even as they dismantled it. That paradox — belief turning to betrayal — sits at the heart of this novel.

Walker, my protagonist, begins as the archetypal Cold War idealist — young, patriotic — but when his mission turns inward and the line between loyalty and deceit blurs, he discovers that the war for “truth” has casualties you can’t see on a map.

The world that ensnares Walker was built by real men — architects of secrecy whose power outlived their era. The Dulles brothers, Kermit Roosevelt, Norman Darbyshire — they built the template for modern information warfare. The stories they told the world, and themselves, changed history.

Allen Dulles, the CIA’s first civilian director, was both architect and evangelist of this new power. Under his watch came coups in Iran, Guatemala, and elsewhere — each justified by the same gospel of containment and control. Dulles believed secrecy was strength, that moral clarity could be manufactured like a headline. His downfall after the Bay of Pigs ended his official reign, but not his influence: even in retirement, he remained a presence in Washington’s shadows, summoned back after Kennedy’s assassination to help investigate the very government he had shaped.

My novel opens with Walker visiting Harry Truman, who warns him about Dulles and the agency he built.

Truman himself had grown uneasy about what the CIA had become. In an extraordinary op-ed published in The Washington Post exactly one month after Kennedy’s assassination, he warned that the agency he’d founded for intelligence-gathering had strayed into “peacetime cloak and dagger operations.”

If Dulles weaponized secrecy, Edward Bernays taught the world how to weaponize perception. Often called the “father of public relations,” Bernays was Sigmund Freud’s nephew and Madison Avenue’s first modern manipulator. His 1928 book Propaganda was a manual for shaping opinion in mass democracies — and it influenced everyone from corporate America to Joseph Goebbels. In the 1920s, “propaganda” wasn’t a dirty word. It was seen as a tool — neutral, even noble — for engineering consent. Bernays made influence sound like innovation.

One of Bernays’s most infamous campaigns came in 1929, when he helped the American Tobacco Company convince women that smoking was a symbol of independence. He branded cigarettes as “Torches of Freedom” and staged a photo op of debutantes lighting up during New York’s Easter Parade. The event was hailed as a feminist milestone — and cigarette sales soared. It was propaganda rebranded as progress, and it worked.

For Walker, Bernays’s world of engineered consent becomes a mirror. He learns that the same techniques used to sell cigarettes or shape headlines can also sell a war — and that belief, once manipulated, becomes its own form of captivity.

The legacy of both men endures. Today’s disinformation campaigns, digital PSYOPs, and algorithmic echo chambers all trace their DNA to that mid-century faith in narrative control. The tools have changed. The impulse — to mold belief, to weaponize a narrative — has not.

Before hashtags, there were headlines. Before algorithms, there were men like Dulles and Bernays — shaping what the world would believe.

In Eyes to Deceit, Walker discovers what that belief costs — not just for nations, but for the people who carry its weight. The lies of power have always worn the language of purpose — and his story reminds us how easily that language can sound like truth.

Fiction can’t fix history.
But sometimes it can make us feel the cost of forgetting.

For readers who want to dig deeper into the history behind the story, I recommend the documentary Coup 53 from director Taghi Amirani with editor Walter Murch, and Stephen Kinzer’s book All the Shah's Men.

Eyes to Deceit is available November 4, 2025, from Level Best Books at Amazon or your bookseller of choice.