Over and above the contradictions and difficulties involved in the operation of at least two governmental systems and many private systems of U.S. news communication and dissemination systems in foreign areas, there is the further problem of additional U.S. facilities. Sources such as _The Washington Post_, Joseph Alsop, James Reston, and other well-informed Washington journalists often hinted gloomily and darkly that U.S. cloak-and-dagger operations are still going on; Dorothy Thompson was often troubled by what she regarded as the feckless successors of the wartime OSS. Many times Americans resident in local areas concerned seemed never to have heard of the hush-hush operations in their own overseas homes, operations which were denounced with purple prose in Washington; we can say that covert operations, when they have been really uncovered, as in the case of the _Time_ story about overzealous U.S. support of a German nationalist resistance group, turn out to be much more pale than the lurid columnists or inside stories from Washington would lead one to believe. More serious have been the duplication, and triplication, and occasional quadruplication of _official_ informational activities. The overseas economic and military aid program, known successively as Economic Cooperation Administration (ECA), Mutual Security Administration (MSA) and Foreign Operations Administration (FOA) has not only supplemented the existing leaflet, broadcast, and other informational activities of the State Department and the armed forces with a third set of information programs; it has itself had a fourth rival in the Point Four administration, the Technical Cooperation Administration (TCA), which was both a part of State and not a part of State, depending upon the particular situation overseas. =Radio Free Europe and Radio Free Asia.= Over and above the Government's operations in this field there have been the quasi-private undertakings of the Committee for a Free Europe and the Committee for a Free Asia. These have been privately sponsored and privately financed by altruistic organizations dedicated to broadcasting those things which the State Department finds it impolitic to put on the air. The degree of governmental contribution or participation is not known, although it is often touched upon in the U.S. press; that the organizations are to a definite extent private is evident in their ability to broadcast local and controversial news to particular Iron Curtain countries and by the fund drives which they have waged with little contribution boxes inside the USA.