Fergie's Tech Blog

Unclassified: Open–Source Intelligence From the Airwaves, 1941- 45

First FBIS headquarters in Washington, D.C. at 316 F Street, NE.
Image source: CIA.gov

In comparison with London, Washington was slow off the mark in establishing an official monitoring service. By 1941, much of the world was already engulfed in war and the Axis partners were flooding the airwaves. Apart from amateur radio operators and such corporate ventures as the CBS Listening Post in San Francisco, Americans were largely in the dark. One of the few sources of light was the Princeton Listening Center. Launched in November 1939 at Princeton University with funding from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Center was the US pioneer in the systematic monitoring, translation, and analysis of broadcasts from Berlin, London, Paris, Rome, and, to a lesser extent, Moscow.

Assistant Secretary of State Breckinridge Long became increasingly worried about the possible loss of diplomatic reporting and other information if the war caused American embassies to close. He looked to radio as a supplemental source of intelligence and turned to FCC Commissioner James L. Fly for action. In charge of regulating domestic radio, the FCC was given the expanded task of monitoring foreign broadcasts. The concept, according to a later article, was to launch “an official U.S. monitoring service, to give greater coverage and more detailed service than was possible through private radio chains or the newspapers.”

On 26 February 1941, the FCC received funding to launch the “Foreign Broadcast Monitoring Service,” the first name for FBIS. The service began its monitoring duties at 316 F Street, NE. On 1 October, FBIS opened its first bureau outside Washington—in a farmhouse at 13005 NE Glissan Street in Portland, Oregon—to monitor Japanese broadcasts. On 1 December, a bureau in Kingsville, Texas, went into operation to track broadcasts from Latin America. Other bureaus followed in the course of the war.

posted by Fergie @ 1/03/2007 11:14:00 AM