Origins

In 1938, John R. Whitton of Princeton University was heading the Geneva (Switzerland) Research Center, and in conversation with Edward R. Murrow of CBS Whitton became more aware of the growing impact of radio as a propaganda medium. Becoming both concerned about and impressed with the propaganda potential of radio, he hired researcher Thomas Gran-din to study developing political uses of radio. In the course of his study, Grandin established a small receiving post in a Paris hotel to better follow selected broadcasts.

On his return to the U.S. in late 1938, Whitton sought funding to set up a continuing radio monitoring service. This led to creation of the Princeton (University) Listening Center in November 1939 with a Rockefeller Foundation grant designed to cover a period of experimentation. In June 1940, Rockefeller extended support for another year. The managing committee included Whitton, sociologist Hadley Cantril (who was co-director of the Office of Radio Research) and William S. Carpenter of Princeton, O.W. Riegel of Washington and Lee University (author of an early book on propaganda), B.R. McCrutcheon (an engineer), and Harold N. Graves (as administrator). Graves recruited a staff of ten to record and transcribe the most important shortwave broadcasts.

From 3:00 P.M. until 11:00 P.M. six days a week, broadcasts were recorded on wax cylinders. Over the 20 months the Center operated, this process produced more than 100 volumes of exact transcripts totaling 8 million words. Broadcasts from Berlin, Rome, Moscow, Paris, and London were included. Some 20 booklets summarizing the detailed findings were widely distributed to American media and researchers between December 1939 and mid-1941.

Early in 1941, the Defense Communications Board asked the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to develop a more extensive government-supported foreign broadcast monitoring process (as a number of foreign governments had already done). President Roosevelt authorized the transfer of $150,000 (nearly $2 million in 2003 dollars) from war emergency funds for the purpose, and the Foreign Broadcast Monitoring Service (FBMS) was created in late February. Personnel from the Princeton operation were vital to this operation, with Graves acting as director until June 1941. Slowly an organizational structure was established.

Wartime Operation

During the first part of 1942, the FBMS established a number of listening posts to better monitor broadcasts. These were located in Portland, Oregon (the first site, it began operation in October 1941), San Francisco, Kingsville, Texas, Santurce, Puerto Rico, and in London. On 28 July 1942 the FBMS was renamed the Foreign Broadcast Intelligence Service (FBIS). The number of employees and operations reached a peak in March 1943. More listening posts (sometimes dubbed field offices) were established, in Silver Hill, Maryland (just outside of Washington, D.C.), and in Hawaii as well as several other foreign locations.

With teams operating around the clock, recordings were made at each field office. Transcripts and translations were then teletyped, cabled, or mailed to the Washington headquarters. Washington personnel summarized and analyzed the more important broadcasts and distributed them to government offices. The process of analysis soon attracted unwanted attention.

FBIS came under Congressional investigation in the spring of 1943, part of a long and highly critical political review of the FCC. Criticism centered on both FBIS personnel and operations. Partially as a result, most FBIS analysis functions were transferred to the Office of War Information. FBIS continued its basic monitoring and recording functions throughout the war.

In December 1945, the FCC announced plans to close down FBIS. Instead, the War Department took over the operation and in August 1946 it was transferred to the Central Intelligence Group of the National Intelligence Authority. It was renamed the Foreign Broadcast Information Service two months later. The FBIS became a part of the Central Intelligence Agency when the CIA was formed in September 1947.

Postwar Developments

As a "charter member" of the intelligence establishment, FBIS slowly expanded its operation to nearly 20 listening posts in the U.S. and overseas. In 1967 the responsibilities of the FBIS were expanded to include keeping track of foreign newspaper and magazine (and news agency) output, in addition to broadcasts. In 1974 FBIS daily reports came available on a subscription basis to the general public, providing some of what the monitoring service was recording and translating. Some material was restricted for government-only use for six months. Attempts to close down some FBIS functions in the post-Cold War period have occurred at several points, usually in Congressional attempts to save funds.

Television and satellite transmissions were included in the FBIS operation by the 1970s and 1980s, respectively. In the 1990s, technological change had expanded FBIS even further to include commercial and government databases and so-called "gray literature" (where the source and veracity of the material is not always clear). Automatic (unmanned) monitoring by the 1990s expanded FBIS capabilities still further, while fax machines and computer data links allowed faster distribution of time-sensitive material. The agency was dealing with material in more than 60 languages; that number expanded with the end of the Cold War and initiation of media in local languages in many parts of the former USSR.

Because of the FBIS's language capability, its functions have often included translation services for different government needs. While much of what the FBIS records come from "open source" (public) entities such as radio and other media, it also collects information from other sources. The intelligence function of FBIS is best seen in two widely-reported events three decades apart (for which credit is usually shared with its British counterpart, the BBC Monitoring Service)-its recording of Radio Moscow broadcasts that the Soviets were withdrawing their missiles from Cuba in 1962, and the first word (monitored from the TASS news agency) of the short-lived August 1991 coup in Moscow against the government of Mikhail Gorbachev.