The Office of Strategic Services (OSS) was an intelligence agency of the United States during World War II. The OSS was formed as an agency of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) to coordinate espionage activities behind enemy lines for all branches of the United States Armed Forces. Other OSS functions included the use of propaganda, subversion, and post-war planning.
Voice of America is the international radio broadcaster of the United States of America. It is the largest and oldest of the U.S. international broadcasters. VOA produces digital, TV, and radio content in 48 languages, which it distributes to affiliate stations around the world. Its targeted and primary audience is non-American outside of the US borders. As of November 2022, its reporting reached 326 million adults per week across all platforms. It is financed by the U.S. Agency for Global Media after the approval of the Congress.
The United States Information Agency (USIA) was a United States government agency devoted to the practice of public diplomacy which operated from 1953 to 1999.
William Joseph "Wild Bill" Donovan was an American soldier, lawyer, intelligence officer and diplomat. He is best known for serving as the head of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the precursor to the Bureau of Intelligence and Research and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), during World War II. He is regarded as the founding father of the CIA, and a statue of him stands in the lobby of the CIA headquarters building in Langley, Virginia.
The Ministry of Information (MOI), headed by the Minister of Information, was a United Kingdom government department created briefly at the end of the First World War and again during the Second World War. Located in Senate House at the University of London during the 1940s, it was the central government department responsible for publicity and propaganda. The MOI was dissolved in March 1946, with its residual functions passing to the Central Office of Information (COI); which was itself dissolved in December 2011 due to the reforming of the organisation of government communications.
Operation Cornflakes was a morale operation by the Office of Strategic Services during World War II that aimed to trick Deutsche Reichspost into inadvertently delivering anti-Nazi propaganda to German citizens through mail.
The United States Office of War Information (OWI) was a United States government agency created during World War II. The OWI operated from June 1942 until September 1945. Through radio broadcasts, newspapers, posters, photographs, films and other forms of media, the OWI was the connection between the battlefront and civilian communities. The office also established several overseas branches, which launched a large-scale information and propaganda campaign abroad. From 1942 to 1945, the OWI reviewed film scripts, flagging material which portrayed the United States in a negative light, including anti-war sentiment.
The Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS) was an open source intelligence component of the Central Intelligence Agency's Directorate of Science and Technology. It monitored, translated, and disseminated within the U.S. government openly available news and information from media sources outside the United States. Its headquarters was in Rosslyn, later Reston, Virginia, and it maintained approximately 20 monitoring stations worldwide. In November 2005, it was announced that FBIS would become the newly formed Open Source Center, tasked with the collection and analysis of publicly available intelligence.
British Security Co-ordination (BSC) was a covert organisation set up in New York City by the British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) in May 1940 upon the authorisation of the Prime Minister, Winston Churchill.
The Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs, later known as the Office for Inter-American Affairs, was a United States agency promoting inter-American cooperation (Pan-Americanism) during the 1940s, especially in commercial and economic areas. It was started in August 1940 as OCCCRBAR with Nelson Rockefeller as its head, appointed by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
The Psychological Warfare Division of Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force was a joint Anglo-American organization set-up in World War II tasked with conducting (predominantly) white tactical psychological warfare against German troops and recently liberated countries in Northwest Europe, during and after D-Day. It was headed by US Brigadier-General Robert A. McClure. The Division was formed from staff of the US Office of War Information (OWI) and Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and the British Political Warfare Executive (PWE).
David Kirkpatrick Este Bruce was an American diplomat, intelligence officer and politician. He served as ambassador to France, the Federal Republic of Germany, and the United Kingdom, the only American to be all three.
Psychological operations (PSYOP) are operations to convey selected information and indicators to audiences to influence their motives and objective reasoning, and ultimately the behavior of governments, organizations, groups, and large foreign powers.
John "Frenchy" Grombach, born Jean Valentin de la Salle Grombach, was an American Olympic athlete, soldier, pioneer in radio cryptanalysis personnel management, public broadcaster and radio host, and divergent quick-tempered paranoid spymaster. He was involved in Allied efforts during World War II, and the efforts against the USSR during the Cold War. Director of one of the most secretive intelligence agencies in the world, the name of his intelligence organization, "The Pond,", was not known to the general public until an accidental disclosure of information in 2001. Initially recruited into the Office of the Coordinator of Information by Millard Preston Goodfellow, Chief of communications for William J. "Wild Bill" Donovan, the quick-tempered Grombach would eventually become one of Donovan's harshest critics. In later years, Grombach became a member of the U.S. Olympic Committee, writing and publishing the Olympic Guides for multiple years.
Morale Operations was a branch of the Office of Strategic Services during World War II. It utilized psychological warfare, particularly propaganda, to produce specific psychological reactions in both the general population and military forces of the Axis powers in support of larger Allied political and military objectives.
The head of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), William Donovan, created the X-2 Counter Espionage Branch in 1943 to provide liaison with and assist the British in its exploitation of the Ultra program's intelligence during World War II. A few months before, Donovan had established a Counterintelligence Division within the Secret Intelligence Branch of the OSS but rescinded this order upon development of the X-2. The X-2 was led by James Murphy, whose branch would have the power to veto operations of the Special Operations and Secret Intelligence Branches without explanation. Donovan modeled the Counter Espionage Branch on British Counter Espionage. With the creation of the X-2 Branch, the British insisted that it follow British security procedures to maintain the secrecy of Ultra. The X-2 established separate lines of communication for itself as a self-contained unit. By the end of World War II, the X-2 had discovered around 3,000 Axis agents.
Radio propaganda is propaganda aimed at influencing attitudes towards a certain cause or position, delivered through radio broadcast. The power of radio propaganda came from its revolutionary nature. The radio, like later technological advances in the media, allowed information to be transmitted quickly and uniformly to vast populations. Internationally, the radio was an early and powerful recruiting tool for propaganda campaigns.
The Research and Analysis Branch(R&A) was a branch of the Office of Strategic Services. (OSS) Established in the OCOI with the appointment of James Phinney Baxter III as the first Director of Research and Analysis, July 31, 1941, the branch became operational within the Office of the Coordinator of Information on August 27, 1941. With OSS General Order 1 on October 17, 1942, R&A was absorbed into the new structure of the OSS. On January 4, 1943, with the restructuring of the OSS in OSS General Order 9, R&A was placed under the leadership of the Deputy Director of the Intelligence Service.
Millard Preston Goodfellow, who often went by the name "Preston Goodfellow," was an American soldier, spy, diplomat, journalist, war correspondent, and newspaper publisher. A veteran of World War I, Goodfellow became a leading figure at the Office of the Coordinator of Information and the Office of Strategic Services during World War II.
Robert A. Solberg (Solborg) was a soldier and spy during World War I and World War II, becoming a key figure in the development of the Office of the Coordinator of Information and the Office of Strategic Services, precursor to the Central Intelligence Agency.
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