Black Propaganda.
These subversive groups were formed by political means. Propaganda aid was offered to such an extent that it was often difficult to tell how much of the quisling movement was spontaneously native, and how much mere cover for a purely German operation.
In the latter phase of the European war, the Russian Communists followed the German Nazi example of having tame natives ready to take over the government of occupied areas. In Poland, the so-called Lublin Committee took over the government from the constitutional Polish Government-in-exile at London. In Jugoslavia, the Russian-trained propagandist, Tito, seized the leadership from the recognized Minister of War, Draja Mikhailovich, after the British and American governments had shifted their support to him; later Mikhailovich was put to death. The Russian army brought along to Germany a considerable number of German Communists. In Czechoslovakia the strength of the constitutional regime was such as to compel the pro-Russians to allow the prewar leadership a precarious toehold in the new government. The same cadres of sympathetic persons who had been useful as propaganda sources for psychological warfare during the period of hostilities became useful instruments of domination after hostilities ended. The British and Americans, with their belief that government should spring from the liberated and defeated peoples, did not prepare and equip comparable groups to rival the Communist candidates; only in Italy and Greece did the friends of the Western Allies stay in power, and then only because they were the nearest equivalent of de jure authorities. In the Scandinavian and Low Countries the national leadership reemerged without prodding or interference by the Western Allies; they passed from the sphere of psychological warfare (that is, of being someone's cover) to that of world politics.
Specific black propaganda operations were of considerable value. However, black propaganda is more difficult to appraise than overt propaganda. Analytical and historical studies, gauging the results obtained by Black operations in relation to their cost, are not yet available. (Certain particular operations are described later in this book, pages [208] and [237].)
American Operations: OWI and OSS.
The American problem of propaganda was thus not a simple one. Total psychological warfare was out of reach if we were to remain a free people. Otherwise the simple-seeming thing to have done would have been to put a government supervisor in every newspaper, radio station and magazine in the country, and coordinate the whole bunch of them together in the national interest. Simple-seeming. Actually, such an attempt would have been utter madness, touching off a furious political fight within the country and meeting legal obstacles which would have remained insurmountable as long as there was a Constitution with courts to enforce it. The simplest official action which the United States could take was therefore hedged about by the presence of private competitors who would watch it enviously, jealous of their established rights and privileges, and by the operational interference which vigorous private media would have on public media.
The then Mr. or Colonel, later General, William Donovan had tasted the delights of political warfare when President Roosevelt sent him to Belgrade to talk the Serbs into fighting instead of surrendering. He was successful; the Serbs fought. He came back to the United States with a practical knowledge of what political warfare could do if qualified personnel operated on the spot. The outbreak of the Russo-German war lent urgency to American action in the political-intelligence field as well as in the propaganda field. On 11 July, 1941 President Roosevelt issued an order appointing Colonel Donovan as Coordinator of Information. The agency became known by the initials COI.[27]
The primary mission of COI was the collection of information and its processing for immediate use. Large numbers of experts were brought into its Research and Analysis Branch, designed to do for the United States in weeks what the research facilities of the Germans and Japanese had done for them over a matter of years. The inflow of material was tremendous and the gearing of scholarship to the war effort produced large quantities of political, sociological, geographic, economic and other monographs, most of them carefully classified SECRET, even when they were copied out of books in the Library of Congress. However, it was not the research wing of the COI that entered the broadcasting field.
Radio work was first done by an agency within COI called FIS—Foreign Information Service. In the few months before Pearl Harbor the group became organized in New York under the leadership of Robert Sherwood, the dramatist, and got a start in supplying the radio companies with material. The radio scripts were poorly checked; there was chaos in the matter of policy; little policing was possible, and the output reflected the enthusiasm of whatever individual happened to be near the microphone. Colonel Donovan had moved into this work without written and exclusive authorization from the White House; hence there followed a lamentable interval of almost two years' internal struggle between American agencies—a struggle not really settled until the summer of 1943, well into the second year of war. The occasion for struggle arose from lack of uniform day-to-day propaganda policy and from an unclear division of authority between the operating agencies. But the work was done.