The FBIS - short for Foreign Broadcast Intelligence Service - is the organization that listens to the world's radios for Uncle Sam. It's monitoring station in Washington has, besides editors and annalists, some sixty fantastic linguists on its staff - people who are fluent at anywhere from three or four - up to a couple of dozen, languages apiece. Their job is to intercept and translate the shortwave broadcasts of Rome, Berlin, Vichy and a score of lesser stations, which daily pour out Axis propaganda in more languages than were ever spoken in the Tower of babel."
"The enemy is not quite so smart as we have been led to believe him. Nor are we ourselves so dumb. We labor under the delusion that the democracies do all the talking. Actually, the enemy talks plenty, trying to sell his glorious New Order to the world. And when he talks he gives himself away. Day in and day out a careful check of his utterances, comparing them with what he said a month, a year, two years ago, gives a clue to his weaknesses and his intentions. This checking is done by the Analysis Division, composed largely of transplanted college professors. In fact, the whole FBIS organization is rife with Ph.Ds, one of whom, Robert Devore Leigh (1890 - 1961), is the head of it. He is an ex-president of Bennington College in Vermont... The job of the Analysis Division is to point to such things as the gradual deflation of Hitler in his three October speeches, from the high of 1940 to the low of 1942."
The article was penned by Helena Huntington Smith, who could usually be read in the The New Yorker at that time.
- two from Amazon:
Records of the Foreign Broadcast Intelligence Service
Foreign Broadcast Information Service History: 1941-1947
