Propaganda operation with a division

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William Donovan, then the director of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) viewed Nazi psychological tactics as a vital source of ideas to be used by American agencies. Donovan sought to utilize psychological warfare as a major military tool. His theory of psychological warfare was to adapt the “engineering of consent” techniques used in peacetime propaganda to open warfare. Donovan was a personal friend of Franklin Roosevelt and convinced the president to establish the Office of the Coordinator of Information, in 1941, with Donovan in charge. It was to conduct propaganda and covert operations both at home and abroad.

Bureaucratic rivalries soon changed the structure of this that sent the “white” official propaganda operations to the Office of War Information (OWI), while the “black” covert functions went back to phone number list the OSS under Donovan. One of Donovan's colleagues, John McCloy, established the highly secret Psychologic Branch of the War Department which was restructured and renamed several times. The Psychological Warfare Division under Eisenhower's command in Europe eventually grew to 460 men and women. Virtually all of the scientific community in the communications field during the 1950's, emerged from wartime projects.

Congress passed the National Security Act in 1947, which created the CIA as a now legitimized collection of many former unofficial and semi-official covert operations groups. The Act also established the National Security Council (NSC) to advise the president on political and military strategy. The CIA's general counsel, Lawrence Houston, at the request of the new CIA director, issued a legal opinion as to whether the 1947 Act authorized “secret propaganda and paramilitary operations” in peacetime. Houston's opinion stated that no, the agency's charter did not allow such covert operations, the charter authorized only intelligence gathering and analysis. Even if the president ordered covert ops, they would be illegal without further congressional approval.