Yes, Edward Bernays was one of the great Americans of the 20th century. He was employed by government and top corporations to teach them mass propaganda.
And Edward Bernays wrote the book called, Propaganda.
But it is probably wise to keep in mind the distinctions between ideology, propaganda, advertising and psychological warfare. Naturally they have some things in common but they have different histories and different aims.
Certainly they differ, but mostly in application. On job training is almost invariably required for any kind of "applied psychology". It often takes a "feel" which requires experience. Some go into marketing, which packages a lot of ideology and advertising. It's a small jump to generating propaganda, and another small jump to psychological warfare. It's all about convincing people, as a group, to act (or believe) a certain way.
Many fiction books talk about governments that have deep intelligence networks that disseminate information to the masses in an ordered and structured way. Almost any major government has a tangible and formalized system to do this. They invariably have inputs from all the major intelligence organisations, as well as their own, and outputs into the major speaking heads. A lot of this is transparent, or white. Sure, the big events take up most of the news space but most of the work is actually administrative, complete with rigid procedures, internal politics and all the joys that come with that kind of organisation.
All in all, it's pretty boring.
Psy-Ops isn't particularly shadowy. You write up an evaluation of the targets; often this is just someone's feel for target demographic (eg: market research). And typically a bunch of people sit around discussing how to achieve some end goal (eg: the brainstorm). And the execution is like any other project. Although overthrowing governments is big news, a lot of it is about changing public opinion, the little version of revolution. The only reason it is considered shadowy is because of public opinion (somewhat ironically). We do not like being manipulated and it makes us really uncomfortable when we know it happened to others.
We should be uncomfortable though. Engineered demand for cigarettes, meat, etc. Everything around us is touched. Food pyramid to bacon/eggs for breakfast. Who we vote for. Our opinion on China. Organic food. Everything. And these aren't fly-by-night operations, but systemically planned and executed. This doesn't even hit the major ones we all know, like De Beers. Probably one of the best lies is individualism; largely encouraged and harnessed for "making your own decisions", making us blind to the outside influences. This wasn't planned (probably), just a viable pathway to modify behavior that many have picked up on.
It doesn't take a lot of resources to do this, only precision. Creating viable memes that can propagate is possible even for the individual, and teams working together can create a reality that severely influences people. Add in large amounts of money and it's remarkable how powerful it is. All major corporations have a media department, the equivalent "white" group. Many have grey operations, influencing media again competitors or doing ghost marketing. Like writing reviews online or on forums. And there are the equivalent of black operations although they are much better hidden. They sometimes come out in court but there is no real information act for corporations.
Most would be astounded how conspiracy-ish a lot of the events in the world are. There are cases of lawyers outsourcing fear mongering to justify class action lawsuits, for instance.
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So I wouldn't say the goal is to
So the object of the psychological warfare is provoked to behave rashly, inadvisedly, to break the rules, to put themselves in danger, and to harm themselves.
Psychological warfare is a means. It's used as much to secure support as it is to overthrow governments.
