On June 14, 1952, a former U.S. navy pilot named John “Buz” Sawyer received a late night phone call from his boss, a Frontier Oil executive named Wright. “Sawyer,” Wright said, “You’re just the fellow we need to handle a little job in Iran.” The job, which involved spraying “a potent new insecticide” in the Iranian countryside to help avert a locust plague, was part of the Truman administration’s Point Four Program of Technical Assistance to Developing Nations, a cornerstone of the liberal anti-Communist approach to the cold war: Win the hearts and minds of the world’s poor by showing them American know-how promised a better future than Soviet central planning. Buz Sawyer cut the ideal American figure to represent the free-market-utopian goals of Point Four: Clean-cut, handsome, humble, and square-jawed, he won over the Iranians not with speeches about baseball and representative democracy, but with respectful displays of can-do pragmatism. With the help of his eager crew, he defeated the locust threat with U.S. chemicals: “I sure hope you boys know something about spraying locusts. I don’t.” (This was 1952, so no debates about organic food or carcinogens.) Iran’s grateful peasantry thus saw with its own eyes America’s bottom-line virtue, and the perfidy of the Soviet Union, when a Russian agent attempted to sabotage Buz’s equipment. “You’re the kind of foreigner I like,” said Ali, a grateful locust control officer. “You don’t criticize my country; you pitch in and help.”

If Buz Sawyer seems a little too good to be true, that’s because he was: He was a comic-strip character, created by the cartoonist Roy Crane. Buz Sawyer appeared in nearly 300 newspapers across the country and was the prism through which millions of Americans understood their government’s actions abroad. Now, thanks to discoveries made in the Syracuse University Archives, where Crane deposited his papers before his death, we know that Crane had a powerful collaborator for his work: the U.S. government.

Before the publication of the Iran strip, a State Department official named Eugene V. Brown sent Crane a ten-page memo, explaining in precise detail the plot points the government wanted for Buz Sawyer, along with what purpose those points served. These included finding a way to “stress [the] importance of Private Enterprise” and to portray “the manner in which Communism attempts to discredit development and improvement programs of the West.” Crane, meanwhile, should do his best to steer clear of certain delicate topics. “It would be best to avoid any reference to OIL in discussing Iran.” Because winning hearts and minds was key, Brown wanted a story showing “a strong bond of friendship” between Buz and an Iranian pilot named Sandhu, the purpose of which was to “provide entry of Buz into local situation on common level with indigenous forces.” (Crane followed this direction, although he used the name Ali instead of Sandhu.) Other plot points were designed to provide “further evidence of machinations of Communism” and “display American individual’s ingenuity in coping with operations.” Six months after the strip appeared, Crane praised Brown’s contribution in a letter to Dean Acheson, Truman’s secretary of state and one of the key architects of the cold war, noting the locust storyline, which was “intended to combat anti-United States propaganda,” was greatly aided by his “cooperation and insight” and “sold me on the Point Four Program.”

The 1952 Iran storyline, published one year before a CIA sponsored coup in the real Iran, was far from the only time Crane depicted the propaganda aims of the U.S. government in comic form. From his creation of the Buz Sawyer strip in 1943 until his death in 1977, Crane was an eager handmaiden to U.S. foreign policy, showing Buz fighting his country’s enemies in Central America, the Middle East, and Asia. From Iran to Cuba to Vietnam, there were few cold war conflicts that Buz didn’t have a hand in.

If it seems odd today that high-level government officials would take the trouble to craft a comic strip, remember that during their mid-twentieth century heyday, newspaper strips had a universal popularity that rivaled that of Hollywood. They were among the most popular features in newspapers, with adults as likely to read them as children. As Edward Brunner, an English professor at Southern Illinois University, is quoted in Pressing the Fight: Print, Propaganda, and the Cold War, newspapers were “powerful delivery systems for information and entertainment,” no section more so than “the funny pages—the one place visited by almost every reader, young or old, urban or rural, rich or poor, overeducated or uneducated.” A 1950 poll by New York University found that 82.1 percent of college-educated newspaper readers read the comics. Crane’s reach was significant: His audience, at its peak, grew to between 20 million and 30 million people. So if you wanted to get out a message—and the government clearly did, and still does, for that matter—comic strips were as logical a place to do it as any. Contemporary entertainers like Kathryn Bigelow (Zero Dark Thirty) and Joel Surnow (24) have been branded as mouthpieces for the U.S. anti-terror agenda, carrying water for the government’s escapades in the Middle East. It’s hard to deny Zero Dark Thirty served up the CIA’s justification for using torture to find Osama bin Laden, and 24 helped normalize the government-friendly idea of torture as an instrument of policy. But—as far as we know!—no one in the U.S. government dictated to Bigelow or Surnow what should be in the work. With Crane, however, we have a clear and well-documented case study in how government officials can micromanage the production of popular culture, a salutary lesson in how propaganda works.