Foreign Broadcast Information Service

FBIS staff listening to foreign broadcasts in January 1945

The year following the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, the system gained importance and changed its name to the Foreign Broadcast Intelligence Service partly to make it sound more like a war agency.[2][3]

At four different listening centers it recorded shortwave broadcasts on plastic disks. Selected material was transcribed and translated and then sent to War agencies with weekly reports. These special reports included special titles such as Radio Tokyo's Racial Propaganda to the United States, Underground Movements and Morale in Japan, and New Nazi Portrait of the American Soldier.[2] Monitored stations included official stations in many countries, and "black" stations that were not what they pretended be. These black stations broadcast attacks on President Franklin D. Roosevelt while pretending to be stations in the American Midwest. This tactic was used to stir up racial tensions and other issues.[2]

FBIS radio recording equipment in 1945

Multiple speeches and recording were monitored including speeches by Adolf Hitler, Joseph Goebbels, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Benito Mussolini, Philippe Pétain, Pierre Laval, and others; broadcasts over German radio by American citizens, including Fred W. Kaltenbach, Douglas Chandler, and Edward Leo Delaney; and broadcasts from Japan or Japanese-held territory, including news reports and commentary by "Tokyo Rose."[1] The FBIS kept track of a total of sixty black stations, which included a German-language station that pretended to represent an anti-Nazi army group, an anti-Nazi "Catholic" station, and an English-language station that attacked Winston Churchill.[2]

With the termination of the OSS following the end of World War II,[4] the service was transferred to the Department of the Army. Like many other wartime organizations, the service was threatened with disbandment. The possibility of its disbandment was roundly criticized in many different quarters, which helped ensure its survival. When President Harry S. Truman created the Central Intelligence Group under the direction of a Director of Central Intelligence by presidential directive on January 22, 1946,[5] the FBIS became part of that group.[6]

In 1946, the service was renamed the Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS), and became a part of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) as that organization was formed following the National Security Act of 1947. Its original mission revolved around radio and press agency monitoring, built on what was already becoming an “almost mature, trained and disciplined” organization from the war experience.[3]

In response to the Cuban Missile Crisis and START Treaty, FBIS was tasked with monitoring for clandestine and encoded messages from all nations and coordinating broadcast media contact points who could instantly broadcast urgent messages on "All Channels" and "All Calls".

In 1967, the Service's mission was expanded to cover foreign mass media transmitted by radio, television, and print.

Logo of FBIS in the 2000's.

In 2007, Readex announced its plans to create a digital edition entitled Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS) Daily Reports, 1941–1996. As of March 2017, this collection is available online via a paid subscription to Readex, as are Daily Report Annexes for 1974–1996.[7]

The Federation of American Scientists launched a successful campaign in 1997 to save FBIS from planned budget cuts. During its campaign, FBIS was described by academicians at the time as the "biggest bang for the buck in the American intelligence community."[3]

Larry Wu-tai Chin worked for FBIS from 1952 to 1981 and sold classified documents to China.

Office of National Intelligence Open Source Centre

BBC Monitoring

1. ^ Glasser, Susan B. (2005-11-25). "Probing Galaxies of Data for Nuggets: FBIS Is Overhauled and Rolled Out to Mine the Web's Open-Source Information Lode". The Washington Post. pp. A35.