In terms of supply, the materials gathered by the other agencies went to the Outpost Service Bureau, which ran a virtual informational Sears Roebuck for the outposts. Foreign demands for American materials were unpredictable. The OWI learned rapidly and effectively, and the material going out of the outposts to foreign audiences very soon reached a high level of quality. Other psychological warfare agencies at the national level were the CIAA (Coordinator of [later the Office of] Inter-American Affairs) which conducted propaganda exclusively to Latin America and the Caribbean, and the OSS (Office of Strategic Services), which serviced the Joint Chiefs of Staff with intelligence and policy materials, and served as a home base for its own units which operated abroad under Theater authority. No U.S.-based black propaganda operations were reported to the public.[36] Reduced to the concrete terms of definite policy execution (as opposed to the making of policies that might or might not ever reach their supposed executors) and the routine working of operations, the national level was not important except for the two functions stated above, global shortwave, and source of supply. The decisive choices were made in the theaters or at the outposts, half the time in ignorance of what Washington policy-makers had decided in conclave on that particular topic. (When the author was in China, he found that the OWI China outpost decoded its week-to-week propaganda instructions only after they were hopelessly obsolete; they were then filed.) The theaters were able to use psychological warfare as and when they pleased. Between the ETO and Washington close politico-military coordination was possible. Between Washington and the others it was impracticable.