The then Mr. or Colonel, later General, William Donovan had tasted the delights of political warfare when President Roosevelt sent him to Belgrade to talk the Serbs into fighting instead of surrendering. He was successful; the Serbs fought. He came back to the United States with a practical knowledge of what political warfare could do if qualified personnel operated on the spot. The outbreak of the Russo-German war lent urgency to American action in the political-intelligence field as well as in the propaganda field. On 11 July, 1941 President Roosevelt issued an order appointing Colonel Donovan as Coordinator of Information. The agency became known by the initials COI.[27] The primary mission of COI was the collection of information and its processing for immediate use. Large numbers of experts were brought into its Research and Analysis Branch, designed to do for the United States in weeks what the research facilities of the Germans and Japanese had done for them over a matter of years. The inflow of material was tremendous and the gearing of scholarship to the war effort produced large quantities of political, sociological, geographic, economic and other monographs, most of them carefully classified SECRET, even when they were copied out of books in the Library of Congress. However, it was not the research wing of the COI that entered the broadcasting field. Radio work was first done by an agency within COI called FIS--Foreign Information Service. In the few months before Pearl Harbor the group became organized in New York under the leadership of Robert Sherwood, the dramatist, and got a start in supplying the radio companies with material. The radio scripts were poorly checked; there was chaos in the matter of policy; little policing was possible, and the output reflected the enthusiasm of whatever individual happened to be near the microphone. Colonel Donovan had moved into this work without written and exclusive authorization from the White House; hence there followed a lamentable interval of almost two years' internal struggle between American agencies--a struggle not really settled until the summer of 1943, well into the second year of war. The occasion for struggle arose from lack of uniform day-to-day propaganda policy and from an unclear division of authority between the operating agencies. But the work was done. Radio operations had to be coordinated with strategy on the one hand and foreign policy on the other, and we sought to develop methods for doing this. It is significant that all the major difficulties of American psychological warfare were administrative and not operational. There was never any serious trouble about getting the facilities, the writers, the translators, the telecommunications technicians. What caused trouble were problems of personality and personal power, resulting chiefly from the lack of any consensus on the method or organization of propaganda administration.