Radio operations had to be coordinated with strategy on the one hand and foreign policy on the other, and we sought to develop methods for doing this. It is significant that all the major difficulties of American psychological warfare were administrative and not operational. There was never any serious trouble about getting the facilities, the writers, the translators, the telecommunications technicians. What caused trouble were problems of personality and personal power, resulting chiefly from the lack of any consensus on the method or organization of propaganda administration.
Military Intelligence Division had created an extremely secret psychological warfare office at about the time that the COI was established; this had broad intelligence and policy functions, but no operational facilities. It was headed by Lieutenant Colonel Percy Black, who began auspiciously by putting Dr. Edwin Guthrie in office as his senior psychological adviser. This ultra-quiet office was called Special Study Group; it and the COI developed very loose cooperative relations, consisting chiefly of SSG making suggestions to COI which COI might or might not use as it saw fit. Meanwhile, the Rockefeller Office was conducting independent broadcasts to Latin America; the Office of Facts and Figures was dispensing domestic information; and at the height of the psychological warfare campaigning, there were at least nine unrelated agencies in Washington, all directly connected with psychological warfare, and none actually subject to the control of any of the others.[28]
Chart I (Source: The author's observations.)
A year of wrangling produced the solution, after a Joint Psychological Warfare Committee had been set up under the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and had failed to fulfill an effective policy-supervising function. On 13 June, 1942 the President created the Office of War Information. This agency was given control directly or indirectly over all domestic propaganda, and over white propaganda abroad, except for the Western Hemisphere, which remained under the Rockefeller Committee in the State Department. The FIS was taken from the COI, and the COI took on the new name of OSS—Office of Strategic Services—under which it retained three major functions:
- (1) continuation of scholastic and informal intelligence;
- (2) black propaganda operations (given explicit authority only in March, 1943);
- (3) subversive operations, in collaboration with regular military authority.
The OWI was placed under Mr. Elmer Davis, a Rhodes scholar and novelist who had become one of the nation's most popular radio commentators. The FIS was perpetuated under the control of Mr. Robert Sherwood, who had a most extraordinary coterie of odd personalities assisting him: Socialist refugees, advertising men, psychologists, psychoanalysts (of both the licensed and lay varieties), professional promoters, theatrical types, German professors, a commercial attaché, young men just out of college, oil executives, and popular authors (novelists, slick writers, Pulitzer winners, pulp writers, humorists, poets and a professional pro-Japanese writer, fresh off the Imperial Japanese Embassy payroll).
The War Department agency, under the Military Intelligence Service of G-2, had been renamed Psychological Warfare Branch and had executed within the G-2 structure the equivalent of a knight's move in chess, ending up at a new place on the TO with no observable change in function or authority; it had passed under the authority of Colonel (later Brigadier General) Oscar Solbert, a West Pointer with wide international and business experience; he had been out of the Army as a top official with Eastman Kodak, after a cosmopolitan army career which sent him all over Europe and gave him one tour of duty as a White House aide. With the establishment of OWI, Colonel Solbert's office fissiparated like an amoeba; the civilian half of Psychological Warfare Branch, with a few officers, went over to OWI to be a brain-trust for the foreign broadcast experts, who failed to welcome this accession of talent; the military half remained as an MIS agency until 31 December, 1943, when OWI abolished its half and MIS cooperated by wiping out the other, leaving the War Department in the middle of a war with no official psychological warfare agency whatever, merely some liaison officers. Psychological warfare became the responsibility of designated individual officers in OPD—(the Operations Division of the General Staff), an outfit celebrated for conscientious overwork, as well as in MIS and the War Department got along very nicely. Meanwhile OWI and OSS fought one of the many battles of Washington, each seeking control of foreign propaganda. The D.C. and Manhattan newspapers ran columns on this fight, along with news of the fighting in Russia, Libya, and the Pacific. For one glorious moment of OSS, it seemed that the President had signed over all foreign propaganda functions conducted outside the United States to OSS, cutting the OWI out of everything except its New York and San Francisco transmitters; the OWI was stricken with gloom and collective indigestion. The next day, the mistake was rectified, and OWI triumphantly planned raids on the jurisdiction of OSS. Meanwhile, the following things were happening:
Highly classified plans for psychological warfare were being drafted for both the Joint and Combined Chiefs of Staff. These were discussed at various meetings and then classified a little higher, whereupon they were locked up, lest the propaganda writers and broadcasters see them and break security on them by obeying and applying them.
Broadcasts—thousands of words in dozens of languages—were transmitted to everyone on earth. They were written by persons who had little if any contact with Federal policy, and none with the military establishment, except for formal security. The plans at the top bore no observable relation to the operations at the bottom.