CIAA

The Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs (CIAA) was a wartime US government agency created on August 16, 1940, by order of the Council of National Defense and placed under the direction of Nelson Rockefeller. Its official mandate was to promote hemispheric solidarity and counter Axis influence in Latin America; in practice it functioned as the first official US propaganda operation, a vehicle for expanding American corporate dominance in the hemisphere, and a testing ground for the psychological warfare and covert operations techniques that would be institutionalized in the postwar CIA.¹

The agency began as the Office for Coordination of Commercial and Cultural Relations between the American Republics (OCCCRBAR) and was formally placed within the Executive Office of the President by Executive Order 8840, signed July 30, 1941, by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The office was renamed the Office of Inter-American Affairs (OIAA) by Executive Order 9532 on March 23, 1945, under incoming director Wallace Harrison, and dissolved by Executive Order 9710 on April 10, 1946, effective May 20, 1946, when all remaining functions and subsidiary corporations were transferred to the State Department.²

The CIAA spent approximately $140 million between 1940 and 1946, far beyond its initial $3.5 million authorization. By 1942 its annual budget had reached $38 million with 1,500 employees. The agency produced radio broadcasts throughout Latin America, subsidized press access to CIAA-controlled newsprint, produced newsreels, political cartoons, and films, and published the monthly magazine En Guardia (750,000 copies per issue at peak circulation). The operation was staffed by American corporate executives and coordinated with the Rockefeller family's business interests in the hemisphere.³

CIAA records from 1937 to 1951 are held at the National Archives and Records Administration as Record Group 229 (Records of the Office of Inter-American Affairs), totaling 812 cubic feet including 45 reels of motion picture film, 24 sound recordings of radio broadcasts, 3,386 still photographs, 79 posters and drawings, and 55 maps of South American locations.⁴

Origins and Mandate

Roosevelt created the CIAA out of two converging needs. First, Germany had built substantial commercial and cultural influence in Latin America during the interwar period: German airlines controlled trunk routes in Brazil, Colombia, and Bolivia; German trade had grown dramatically during the depression; and Nazi propaganda operations were active throughout the hemisphere. Second, Latin America held raw materials essential to the US war effort: rubber from the Amazon, tin from Bolivia, oil from Venezuela and Peru, quinine from the Andes.

The CIAA was to remove German influence and tie Latin America's resources to the US war machine. In Colombia, the German-managed airline SCADTA (Sociedad Colombo-Alemana de Transportes Aéreos) had operated since 1919 and employed 80 German staff when the State Department, coordinating with the CIAA's predecessor, pressured Pan American and the Colombian government to act. On June 8, 1940, all 80 German SCADTA employees were dismissed; on June 14, the airline was reorganized as Avianca.⁵

The CIAA competed briefly with William J. Donovan's Coordinator of Information (later the OSS) for control of Latin American psychological warfare. Roosevelt ruled in Rockefeller's favor in 1941, restricting Donovan's future OSS to Europe and Asia and leaving the Western Hemisphere to the CIAA and the FBI's Special Intelligence Service (SIS), which had been established on June 24, 1940, and which J. Edgar Hoover insisted must exclude OSS jurisdiction. Over seven years the SIS deployed more than 340 undercover agents across Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, Paraguay, Venezuela, and other countries, identifying 887 Axis spies and 281 propaganda agents before transferring its networks and personnel to the nascent CIA.⁶

The CIAA's Inter-American Affairs Committee, as established under Executive Order 8840, included designees from the State, Treasury, Agriculture, and Commerce departments along with the President of the Export-Import Bank and other agency representatives, with Rockefeller chairing as Coordinator. The Export-Import Bank's lending authority was increased from $200 million to $700 million to support CIAA commercial programs.⁷

Personnel and Corporate Character

The CIAA's top positions were filled with corporate executives. John Hay Whitney, financier and film producer, led the Motion Picture Division. Will Clayton, chairman of Anderson, Clayton and Company and at one time the world's largest cotton trader, served as deputy coordinator with responsibility for commodity and raw materials programs. Percy Douglas of Otis Elevator oversaw exports management. Paul Nitze, investment banker, served as finance director from 1942, then moved to the Metals and Minerals Branch of the Board of Economic Warfare in 1943, before becoming director of the Foreign Procurement and Development Branch of the Foreign Economic Administration. Wallace Harrison, the architect who had worked on Rockefeller Center, was appointed director of the renamed OIAA in March 1945 at an annual salary of $10,000 per Executive Order 9532.⁸

Nelson Rockefeller's own fraternal network ran the operation: brother Laurance Rockefeller's aviation investments and Eastern Airlines directorship dovetailed with the CIAA's aviation dominance program. The family's Standard Oil subsidiaries benefited directly from CIAA-built infrastructure (roads, airfields, rubber programs) across the hemisphere.⁹

Staff critics complained that CIAA coordinating committees in Brazil and elsewhere were composed of "the biggest businessmen" with "the most reactionary" policy views. Josephus Daniels, the liberal former ambassador, warned Roosevelt that the war would see "the forces of privilege" return to control of government, "with monopoly strongly entrenched in business, manufacturing, finance and government."¹⁰

The CIAA was penetrated by Soviet intelligence during the war. Venona project decrypts identified six American employees who engaged in espionage on behalf of the Soviet Union; the agency's code name in Soviet intelligence communications was "Cabaret."¹¹

Propaganda Operations

The CIAA built or subsidized shortwave broadcasting infrastructure reaching every country in the hemisphere. Its flagship radio operation was La Cadena de las Américas, founded in 1941 as a joint project with the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) under CBS president William S. Paley and journalists Paul White and Edmund Chester. The network consisted of 64 stations across 18 countries and broadcast in Spanish and English; after the war its supervision was gradually transferred to the State Department's Voice of America. The CIAA also produced the CBS Viva América program.¹²

The CIAA controlled Latin American press access to newsprint, a critical wartime scarcity, conditioning that access on editorial cooperation. It compiled a "Proclaimed List" of Axis-owned or Axis-sympathizing newspapers and radio stations across the hemisphere, circulated beginning July 1941 under the informal Latin American name "La Lista Negra." Some 1,800 firms and individuals were publicly declared Axis-affiliated and frozen out of US goods and credit. During the first half of 1941 alone, US exporters dropped more than 1,000 South American accounts under CIAA pressure.¹³

Hollywood studios were pressured to deny films to theaters showing German or Italian content, and the CIAA filled the vacuum with its own newsreels and political films. In early 1941 the CIAA reached out to Walt Disney, whose studio had been facing financial difficulty; Nelson Rockefeller arranged a government-underwritten goodwill tour of South America for Disney and roughly twenty composers, artists, and technicians. The tour produced Saludos Amigos, which premiered in Rio de Janeiro on August 24, 1942, and opened in the United States on February 6, 1943, and The Three Caballeros (1944). Both films were shown throughout Latin America using CIAA mobile projectors. The CIAA sponsored goodwill tours by Orson Welles, Bing Crosby, George Balanchine, and John Ford in 1941-1943.¹⁴

The CIAA's Publications and Information Division, run by Francis Jamieson (a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and future Rockefeller campaign manager), produced the magazine En Guardia (registered with the US Postal Office on April 8, 1941, with the first issue in summer 1941 and the third issue circulating in October). Circulation reached 750,000 copies per issue by peak production, distributed free to politicians, journalists, and business executives. Propaganda posters and editorial cartoons were produced through contractors coordinated by Jamieson's New York office; these materials are documented in NARA Record Group 229, series "Propaganda Materials, 1941-1945" (NAID 540082) and "Status of Projects Reports, 1942-1945" (NAID 2067594).¹⁵

Aviation and Infrastructure

The CIAA funded and coordinated displacement of Axis-affiliated airlines from South American routes and integrated Latin American air forces into a US-led hemispheric defense system. The Panair do Brazil operations in northeastern Brazil (a Pan American subsidiary) received War Department financing to build airfields beginning in June 1941; the Natal airbase was built in 1942. CIAA-funded airfields and trans-Andean highways served the immediate war effort while creating the infrastructure for postwar corporate penetration of the interior.¹⁶

The trans-Andean highway to Pucallpa, Peru, funded by the CIAA, passed within fifteen miles of the Ganso Azul oil field, the Amazon basin's only proven petroleum source at the time. This highway also enabled the Summer Institute of Linguistics to establish its Amazonian base at Yarinacocha adjacent to the road.¹⁷

Record Group 229 at NARA includes a Department of Transportation series totaling 129 linear feet, documenting CIAA aviation, ocean shipping, railway, and highway programs across the hemisphere.¹⁸

Rubber Program and the Amazon

The CIAA was assigned the task of reviving Amazon rubber production after Japanese forces overran British Far East plantations in 1942, eliminating 92 percent of the US rubber supply. The US and Brazil entered a formal rubber agreement in March 1942 under which the US committed a $5 million fund to improve raw rubber production in the Amazon and guaranteed purchase of all Brazilian exportable rubber through 1946 at fixed prices. The US paid the Brazilian government $100 for each worker delivered to the Amazon as a "rubber soldier."¹⁹

The rubber program was administered through a network of agencies: the Rubber Reserve Company (incorporated June 28, 1940, as an RFC subsidiary), which controlled stockpiling and disposal; the Rubber Development Corporation, which managed Amazon operations and was financed through special funds established under the Washington Accords governing Brazil's wartime cooperation; the Brazilian SEMTA (Serviço Especial de Mobilização de Trabalhadores para a Amazônia), which recruited labor; SAVA for labor placement; the Banco de Credito da Borracha for production financing; and the SESP health and sanitation service.²⁰

Between 1943 and 1945 approximately 60,000 people were recruited to work as rubber tappers in the Amazon interior. The results were catastrophic for the workers: roughly one-third died within the first year of the program, a ratio that climbed toward one-half before the war ended. Survivors were indentured to seringal operators through permanent debts inherited across generations. CIAA-administered health and sanitation programs for rubber workers, documented in NARA Record Group 229, included the Servicio Especial de Saude Publica, with quarterly reports from 1944 and 1946-1950, and architectural and engineering plans for water supply, drainage, and sewer systems from 1937-1951.²¹

The CIAA also oversaw the Metals Reserve Company (incorporated June 28, 1940, as an RFC subsidiary), which procured approximately 50 kinds of strategic metals and minerals from 51 countries; Bolivia's tin and tungsten, Chile's copper and nitrates, Colombia's platinum and mercury, and Venezuela's oil were among the primary Latin American targets of preclusive buying. By January 1941 the CIAA had been assigned the specific task of assembling data on Axis purchases of strategic materials in Latin America to support preclusive buying recommendations.²²

Health and Sanitation Programs

Beginning in spring 1942 the CIAA developed a major health and sanitation program for Latin America, operating through the Institute of Inter-American Affairs (IIAA), incorporated as a US government corporation in 1942. The IIAA established joint US-Latin American "Servicios" organizations across the hemisphere, each representing cooperative programs in public health, sanitation, agriculture, and education. Coordinating committee records for Brazil and Peru, covering 1941-1946, are held in Record Group 229; they include architectural and engineering plans for 660 health and sanitation infrastructure projects across the hemisphere.²³

Dissolution and Succession

Rockefeller was appointed Assistant Secretary of State for American Republic Affairs at the State Department's general reorganization on December 20, 1944, when the position was formally created. He served under both Roosevelt and Truman through 1945.²⁴

After Rockefeller's departure, Wallace Harrison became director of the renamed Office of Inter-American Affairs under Executive Order 9532 (March 23, 1945). Executive Order 9608 (August 31, 1945) transferred OIAA informational activities to the State Department after the end of the war. Executive Order 9710 (April 10, 1946, effective May 20, 1946), signed by President Harry S. Truman, abolished the office entirely; the Secretary of State received control over five subsidiary corporations: the Institute of Inter-American Affairs, the Inter-American Educational Foundation, the Institute of Inter-American Transportation, the Inter-American Navigation Corporation, and Prencin-radio, along with all records, property, funds, and remaining personnel.²⁵

The CIAA's personnel, techniques, and institutional relationships migrated into the State Department, the new CIA, and Rockefeller's private instruments, the IBEC and AIA. The FBI's Special Intelligence Service transferred its Latin American networks, communications systems, and personnel to the CIA during the same period. The CIAA's methods, particularly press control, radio operations, controlled newsprint, and the use of private business executives for public policy, became templates for CIA covert operations in the subsequent decade.²⁶

Archival Holdings

Records of the Office of Inter-American Affairs are held at NARA as Record Group 229, covering 1937-1951 and totaling 812 cubic feet. The collection is organized into 14 major sections:

• Immediate Office of the Coordinator (16 linear feet)
• Department of Economic Development (11 linear feet)
• Department of Transportation (129 linear feet)
• Department of Information (129 linear feet)
• Department of Press and Publications (12 linear feet)
• Department of Basic Economy (96 linear feet)
• Division of Agriculture (1 linear foot)
• Department of Special Services (1 linear foot)

Audiovisual materials include 45 reels of motion picture film documenting Latin American activities and dignitaries' visits (1940-1945), 24 sound recordings of Spanish and English radio broadcasts (1941-1947), 3,386 still photographs including the Rockefeller Collection, 79 posters and drawings (1941-1945), 55 maps of South American locations, and 660 architectural and engineering plans for health and sanitation infrastructure. Records of subsidiary corporations and minutes of their meetings cover 1942-1949.²⁷