Foreign Relations of the United States, 1977–1980, Volume XXX, Public Diplomacy

181. Draft Staff Study Prepared in the General Accounting Office¹

ID–79–54

Washington, undated

[Omitted here are a September 11, 1979, letter from Fasick to Reinhardt (transmitting the draft staff study), the table of contents, and a list of abbreviations.]

PREFACE

INTRODUCTION

Reorganization Plan No. 2 of 1977 created the U.S. International Communication Agency (USICA, or simply ICA) as of April 1, 1978. It combined the programs of the “old” U.S. Information Agency (USIA) and those of the “old” Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (CU) until then a part of the Department of State. The new Agency therefore embraced the full panoply of international education and cultural exchange, international broadcasting (Voice of America), and media programs (American publications, exhibits, films and television prepared especially for use in the Agency’s activities abroad) of those two former organizations.

Significantly, whereas the major mission of USIA had been to tell the outside world about America and its potential, the new Agency was now charged with a “second mandate”—to inform Americans also about other peoples and other cultures.

In view of the reorganization and this added dimension, it seemed worthwhile to take a broad look at USICA, as it completed its first year of operation, with the goal of identifying some of the significant issues confronting it. This study is a part of the continuing work of the General Accounting Office (GAO) in the field of public diplomacy.

SCOPE OF WORK

This study deals in some detail with seven issues on which we have developed sufficient information to sustain a significant presentation. These analyses include backgrounds, current problems, and occasional suggestions for improvements, as reflected in several scores of interviews with individuals and/or groups, inside and outside the Agency, who follow seriously its operations.

We recognize that important issues confronting the Agency are not limited to these seven. Others may merit equal attention. To that extent, choice of those to be discussed in this study might be said to be arbitrary.

Profiting by the presence of a GAO consultant with long experience in the programs in question, we held discussions with Agency personnel and, to a limited extent, with officers abroad. We also reviewed current public sources of information, such as the substantial record of Congressional hearings compiled during intensive study of the reorganization proposals; however, interviews were indeed the principal source of the information used in preparing this study.

SUMMARY

The study is divided into seven sections, the titles of which define pretty much the content; they might be delineated as follows:

1. Search for Recognition—For both foreign audiences and American public there is a vague uncertainty about who the ICA is (its identification) and where it fits (its identity).

2. The Second Mandate—For the first time in the history of public diplomacy, the Agency is being asked to assist the American people in learning about foreign nations, as well as the contrary. This raises old questions and new, legal and otherwise.

3. Coordination—There is a double coordination problem for ICA—the effective organization and operation of the Agency itself, and the execution of the Presidential directive that ICA coordinate all programs conducted by the U.S. Government in the field of public diplomacy.

4. Washington vs. the Field—There is chronic rivalry between supporting elements in Washington and “front-line” elements in the field, and, in parallel fashion, between the Agency’s media services and the area offices—not entirely without benefit to the program as a whole.

5. New Problem in Overseas Assignments—A new problem that would seem to be important enough to justify that one sally into the personnel field: how does one direct a foreign service in which a growing number of career officers no longer wish to serve abroad?

6. New Programs at the Price of Old—Mining programs of proven worth to create or increase programs of hopeful worth needs careful assessment based on a long look back.

7. The Maintenance of Quality in Exchanges—Less intense as a problem for the new Agency than at first feared, maintaining the high calibre of official exchanges remain nonetheless a constant and justified preoccupation.

Appendix 1 contains charts indicating trends in appropriations for the programs covering the past twenty years.²

[Omitted here is an undated ICA organizational chart.]

CHAPTER 1SEARCH FOR RECOGNITION

As the new executive body combining the U.S. Information Agency and the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs came into being, there was an unprecedented effort to convey through a carefully chosen title something of what the new organization was intended to be. This led to more attention, on the part of the Congress and the press, than a mere change of name would ordinarily have provoked. Along with it came a reassessment of the position in Government that the new agency should occupy—a much more profound question. This chapter will analyze the background to the discussion and the current standing of the new Agency as it tries to execute its mandate.

The connotations which usage lends to certain terms rub off on other terms around them. Thus “information”, a quite acceptable, respectable word if left alone, assumed a certain connotation because it had appeared in the title of the two patently propaganda agencies at the very beginning of American public diplomacy—the Committee on Public Information, of World War I, and the Office of War Information, of World War II. No amount of subsequent defining has freed it entirely in the public mind from those initial associations, even though the names themselves are no longer a part of the public vocabulary. Further, the word “information”, as some foreigners use it, has overtones of intelligence-gathering—a fact they cannot always fully forget when they hear the term in connection with the American public diplomacy program. Yet of the dozen and a half titles applied to the successive main official overseas programs since the original “Creel Committee” (the Committee on Public Information cited above), ten have included this ambiguous word.³

Most experienced public diplomacy officers would probably agree that “information” has over the years complicated their information task, arousing at times vague suspicions and eroding in various degrees their credibility among those to whom they address their program. But most would no doubt also agree that foreign audiences, after hearing the term ever since Liberation, had largely made their peace with it—they came to know what it is by seeing what it does.

ANOTHER NEW NAME

Then came the reorganization of 1978, erasing USIA (the overall designation) and, generally, USIS ⁴ (though long habit still keeps this latter acronym alive here and there), and creating the U.S. International Communication Agency. In the opinion of some senior officers and observers, the Agency found itself set back in its concern with identification, forced all over again to win confidence for its title. This time too the task is complicated by a slightly ambiguous term: “communication” (singular) tends in certain minds to have technical, rather than social, implications.

There has apparently been little controversy over the name in the history of ICA’s predecessors. USIS as a title had appeared out of World War II, adopted in country after country as liberation progressed. And successive titles for the Washington-based side of the organization were adopted mainly to indicate changes in structure, not to reflect any deep feeling about general connotations. Even the separation of information and exchange programs in 1953 passed without much discussion of name; each side simply designated in the title the part of the program that was largely left to it—the U.S. Information Agency on the one hand, and the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, Department of State, on the other.

Title was given greater consideration as Reorganization Plan No. 2 came up in 1977. Policy leaders in USIA hoped that a fresh name would reflect changes in emphasis in the new organization, and especially the accent on “mutuality” of which everyone at the time was talking. They came up with “Agency for International Communication,” a title that at least evoked purpose, even if it did not go far to define that purpose. Later compromises brought it to the present International Communication Agency, with the ambiguity cited above.

Five Public Affairs Officers (PAO) in Western Europe were consulted during the review concerning this matter of title and its effect on their work. They take it quite seriously, recognizing the validity of the statement in the January 1973 report of the U.S. Advisory Commission on Information:

“To foreigners abroad the USIS symbol means the information, cultural and education arms of the United States. Next to the American Embassy, USIS has become the best-known American public institution abroad.”⁵

But these PAO’s do not agree in assessing the importance of the current change of name.

One of them regretted particularly that all the rhetoric expended in the discussion had created expectations of program and support that will be very difficult to realize. He echoed a senior officer in USICA Washington who speaks of the “over-selling of the ICA.” He believes that the change of name is indeed a complication, one that the communication effort could have done without, and therefore he is not insisting on its use among his clients; they come from a people conservative in such matters, and he believes they will continue for a long time to refer to the organization as “USIS”.

Two of his colleagues react similarly. “The name is a recognition problem,” said one. “USICA has not become an identifying term and will not do so.”

The other two PAO’s feel less strongly about the matter. One of them admitted that “the CIA connotation is there”; but he believed that time was already starting to take care of the initial confusion and doubt.

As for the fifth officer, he considered the question of title “not very important; the change represents only a temporary complication.”

In practical terms, the discussion is now moot—the Agency’s letterhead has been changed worldwide, and for the foreseeable future, USICA it is.

NEW STATEMENT OF MISSION

There is significant improvement, however, in one aspect of identification: the Presidential mandate of ICA is more specific than most of those preceding it, so that it serves, in some part at least, as guide to officers charged with carrying out programs and as definition to those interested in ICA programs. President Carter’s statement of March 13, 1978,⁶ called for “the broadest possible exchange of people and ideas”, the encouragement of private institutions “to develop their own forms of exchange,” “sufficient information * * * to give foreign peoples the best possible understanding of our policies and our intentions,” help “to insure that our government adequately understands foreign public opinion and culture” and assistance to individual Americans and institutions in “learning about other nations and their cultures,” “the maximum flow of information and ideas among the peoples of the world,” and “negotiations on cultural exchanges with other governments.” Foreign policy guidance is to come from the Secretary of State. Both the exchange program and the Voice of America are to be protected in the proper execution of their respective functions, and the Agency “will undertake no activities which are covert, manipulative or propagandistic.”

Whether the gist of this slightly repetitive list can be grasped and retained remains to be seen, since the text contains neither catchy phrase nor inspirational expression, and the Agency’s title evokes so small a part of it. “Communication” (singular) appears nowhere in the President’s March 13, 1978 memorandum to the Director of ICA, save in the Agency’s title. Reference to “international communications” (plural) in paragraph numbered 4 does not seem to carry quite the same connotation as the term in the title. Inside the Agency itself, the search for a satisfying identification, as one long-time officer points out, is shared by the players themselves: “When it comes to our own definition of the ICA, we don’t agree!”

This latter remark leads one to believe there is a question not only of identification—which may or may not turn out to be of much long-range importance—but one also of identity. What is ICA and where does it fit? What does it mean to those who work in it and for it?

ICA’S POSITION IN GOVERNMENT

For many, sense of identity is tied directly to the Agency’s relative position in the national government. Does the Agency “count” in international public affairs decisions of an Administration, or not? Here the Director’s standing with the President becomes extremely important—if he has direct access to the Chief Executive he can perform those aspects of his job which require such access, and he enjoys the kind of support that aids him in his leadership of the Agency. The last Advisory Commission for USIA, reporting just as reorganization was seriously getting underway, felt so strongly on this point that for the first time they recommended legislative steps that would “guarantee” high status to the Agency:

“USIA should be granted more legitimate authority within the foreign affairs community as the paramount agency for international communications. The Director of USIA should have direct access to the President, access guaranteed by law and not dependent upon the fluctuation of personal ties or whim * * * this Agency must have a direct relationship to the President.”⁷

No such legislative prop has yet been furnished to the organization, and its leaders, rarely bolstered by the White House or the State Department to the degree they had dreamed in advance, have had to seek their own highest-possible level of participation.

The point at hand involves more than protocol and the company one keeps. An Agency Director who has a part in the development of the overall foreign policies he will be asked later to explain and defend obviously holds an enviable position. Besides, his contribution to policy decisions, on the basis of his knowledge of worldwide public opinion, can and should make for sounder U.S. international programs and relations as they are conceived. Public diplomacy probably will not come fully into its own until this kind of collaboration is recognized as part of desirable standard procedure.

The Agency’s present Director, addressing his first letter (September 6, 1978) to PAO’s⁸ recognizes this; he puts the perspective in two pointed sentences:

“Neither USIA nor CU was ever acknowledged as full partners in diplomacy, nor in some cases even as important contributors to national goals. One effect of our perceived lack of relevance in the past has been at least a mild case of institutional self-doubt.”

He could of course have cited like opinions expressed again and again in the Advisory Commission’s reports. Thus the 26th report (1973), carries this statement of position:

“* * * We reiterate our belief that the National Security Council structure developed in recent years should include representation from the government’s arm which specializes in foreign communication and in understanding foreign public opinion * * *

“The importance of positioning the director of foreign communications at the strategic levels of the government * * * is that this enables him to be thoroughly familiar with Presidential initiatives and thinking in foreign affairs.”

The Commission’s 27th Report stated that

“* * * the Commission believes that it is more important than ever for the Agency to have greater access to the Secretary’s decision-making mechanism. If USIA is involved, it will be more thoroughly informed on policy decisions and can better present and interpret them to the world. Conversely, it can better perceive and report back the impact of these policies on foreign public opinion.”

And then comes the rather plaintive statement:

“But unfortunately the Agency continues to remain a neglected resource and only a potential contributor to the foreign and national decision-making process.”

The 28th and final Advisory Commission’s report picks up this regretful tone as it laments “* * * only a spotty record * * * in providing our Presidents with information about foreign perceptions of the U.S.,” on the one side, and “* * * an almost total lack of appreciation of its [USIA’s]⁹ potential power and influence abroad by Presidents in office and members of Congress,” on the other side. Then it makes its own recommendation on this point: “This Commission, as its predecessors, reiterates the need to have USIA representation at the highest levels of Government * * *.”

In his inaugural speech on April 3, 1978,¹⁰ the current Director expressed his determination to meet the “reiterated need”:

“* * * the President and others can look first to ICA for advice on the conduct of our overall cultural relations with other societies.

“The President and others can look first to ICA for sound counsel on the development and implementation of international communications policies.

“The President and others should look routinely to ICA as a source of original thought on major international initiatives.

“The President and others * * * can look first to ICA as a principal vehicle for enhancing our knowledge and understanding of other peoples.

“The President and others, in short, can view ICA as an Agency of singular importance in our dealings with other nations and other peoples.”

But do “the President and others” indeed look to ICA, “first” or even later than first? The Director implies the affirmative. At the time of the hearings for Foreign Relations Authorization for Fiscal Year 1979 (February 21, 1978), the following exchange took place between him and the Chairman of the Subcommittee on International Operations, House Committee on International Relations:

“Mr. Reinhardt: * * * We anticipate that the new Agency will be an integral part of the total process.

Mr. Fascell: Well, that remains to be seen yet. You are meeting more frequently with the Secretary of State?

Mr. Reinhardt: We meet frequently with the Secretary of State, with the head of the National Security Council, and we meet on substantive issues.

Mr. Fascell: You have not had an opportunity yet to sit in on what might be called a combined session, with the President chairing?

Mr. Reinhardt: No; we are not members of the National Security Council.

Mr. Fascell: Well, I was thinking more of invitations. Of course, I would rather have you be a member of the National Security Council * * * Well, we will be interested in watching very closely how the relationship develops between the Department and the White House with respect to the Director of this new Agency.

Mr. Reinhardt: We anticipate a harmonious relationship and one that will enable us to play a leading role.”¹¹

Most of that conversation might be said still to be . . . anticipatory. More than a year has passed since it took place, and one can find few initiated individuals, inside or outside the Agency, who believe that the Agency’s identity has been sharpened by either a contribution to the decisions of the Executive Branch or receipt of significant support from that Branch. Old hands at the information game are not prone to err on this score. Said one, an experienced officer, “The Agency cannot be truly effective unless it is a part of the NSC process. The fact remains that at present the White House ignores the Agency.”

TARDY APPOINTMENTS

One patent neglect by the White House is manifest in the tardiness of Presidential appointments to two important advisory panels of significance both for background counsel and for program guidance. One of these is the Board of Foreign Scholarships (BFS), existing through Presidential appointments since the early post-War, to direct the Fulbright academic exchange program, approve or reject its candidates, and maintain and protect the integrity of the program and its high standing in academe. It has represented one of the most solid links between Government and higher education and as such is one of the rare valid hopes for establishing a domestic constituency for ICA.

The new Agency was born April 1, 1978. Assuming that the BFS, traditionally a “working” group, would be promptly reconstituted for effective functioning, those responsible for the various aspects of the exchanges had a first surprise with the announcement that the Board would be named in September—five long months after ICA’s beginning. In reality, it was finally completed in December (8 months delay) and announced publicly only after the start of the new year.

The story of the other Presidential group, the new U.S. Advisory Commission on International Communication, Cultural and Educational Affairs, is worse. Intended to replace both former Advisory Commissions—one for USIA and one for CU—and to exercise a broad responsible role in the new ICA arrangement, for nearly 18 months it did not have a chance to do either, despite the specific role envisaged in Section 8(b) of Reorganization Plan No. 2:

“The Commission shall formulate and recommend to the Director, the Secretary of State, and the President policies and programs to carry out the functions vested in the Director or the Agency, and shall appraise the effectiveness of policies and programs of the Agency. The Commission shall submit to the Congress, the President, the Secretary of State and the Director annual reports on programs and activities carried on by the Agency, including appraisals, where feasible, as to the effectiveness of the several programs. The Commission shall also include in such reports such recommendations as shall have been made by the Commission to the Director for effectuating the purpose of the Agency, and the action taken to carry out such recommendations. The Commission may also submit such other reports to the Congress as it deems appropriate, and shall make reports to the public in the United States and abroad to develop a better understanding of and support for the programs conducted by the Agency.”

On March 22, 1978, a few days before the ICA birth date, President Carter nominated as first member of the Commission, for one year, the President of an active, progressive American university.¹² The nominee was confirmed by the Senate on April 6. On April 7, President Carter designated him as chairman of the Commission, and there was a White House promise that the rest of the Commission would be nominated within 60 days (by June 1). Just before Congress recessed in the late fall a second nominee for the Commission was confirmed by the Senate.¹³ There followed a series of announced dates for the naming at last of the remaining members. The Agency’s first anniversary apparently jogged no appropriate memories to action; it passed without public reference to the ill-fated Commission, and it was a full month later (April 30, 1979, thirteen months after the Agency’s founding) that all remaining members but one were finally designated.¹⁴ The last individual was nominated and confirmed June 28, 1979—fifteen months after the Agency might otherwise have begun to profit from his counsel.¹⁵ The first formal meeting of the Commission took place August 16–17, 1979.

Meanwhile, help with all the aspects of the new Agency’s program with which the Commission in its advisory capacity might have concerned itself—relationship with the White House; role in “the NSC process”; liaison with the domestic public in explaining and/or demonstrating ICA’s mission; the christening of the new organization; the dissemination of the new “doctrine” of the Agency; the support of Agency morale; and (perhaps most important of all) the integration of USIA and CU forces to form a working and effective whole—help with all those aspects has been denied to ICA and to those who guide it, by the continuing procrastination in manning this key Commission.

ICA AND THE AMERICAN PUBLIC

Finally, there is the ongoing problem of identity of the ICA in the eyes of the American public. At first glance, one wonders how this can be a problem at all. Has not the President, in his March 3, 1978 memorandum to the Director, reassured the American people by his directive that “* * * the Agency will undertake no activities which are covert, manipulative or propagandistic?”

One bears in mind, however, that, save for certain important parts of the exchange of persons program, all apsects of the Agency’s activities are addressed overseas. Indeed, by law¹⁶ they may not be presented to the American public. There is therefore no very precise image conjured up among Americans when the Agency’s name is heard, despite the good media coverage at the time of the reorganization; for the average American, there is simply no experience to which to tie it. For although Americans know such terms as the Voice of America and the Fulbright exchange programs, they rarely associate these elements with the broader, overall organization.

One of ICA’s basic problems is therefore to maintain its credentials at home as a responsible, experienced, well-balanced agency with solid capabilities for doing overseas what it claims it can do. In the absence of a broad domestic constituency, “presenting its case” to the American public has not been easy. As a result, says one of its ranking officers, “the Agency suffers from vague identity.”

[Omitted here are Chapter 2: The Second Mandate; Chapter 3: Coordination; Chapter 4: Washington vs. the Field; Chapter 5: New Problems in Overseas Assignments; Chapter 6: New Programs at the Price of Old; and Chapter 7: Maintenance of Quality in Exchange.]

1. Source: National Archives, RG 306, Bureau of Information, Office of Information Resources, Library Programs Division, Special Collections Branch, Office of the Historical Librarian, Subject Files, 1953–1999, Entry P–195, Box 2, USICA/Investigations and Studies, GAO Report—Some Issues Facing the ICA, Leslie Brady, Sept. 1979. No classification marking. In a November 23 letter to Reinhardt, Staats indicated that the General Accounting Office had been developing an “inventory of issues facing” ICA following its establishment and that GAO had planned to examine these “problems and issues.” “However,” Staats concluded, “after careful consideration of how to best do this, we have decided to wait until the Agency has had further time to solve some of these issues. We do not plan, therefore, to proceed further on the subject at this time.” (National Archives, RG 306, USIA Historical Collection, Reports and Studies, 1953–1998, Entry A–1 1070, Box 95, General Accounting Office Report, 1977)
2. Attached but not printed.
3. A chronological listing will indicate to what extent organizers were brought back and back to a limited terminology to designate the offices carrying out American public diplomacy: Committee on Public Information (1917); Interdepartmental Committee on Cooperation with the American Republics (1938), soon to become the Interdepartmental Committee for Scientific and Cultural Cooperation, soon again to become the Office of Coordinator of Commercial and Cultural Relations Between the American Republics, soon still again to become the Office of the Coordinator on Inter-American Affairs (1938), and finally to become the Office of Inter-American Affairs; the Coordinator of Information (1941), including the Foreign Information Service, the parallel Office of Facts and Figures (also of 1941); the Voice of America (1942); the Office of War Information (1942); the Interim International Information Service (1945); the Office of International Information and Cultural Affairs (1946); the Office of International Information and Educational Exchange (1947); the Office of International Information and the Office of Educational Exchange, set up to operate abreast (1948); the U.S. International Information Administration (1952); the U.S. Information Agency (1953); and the International Communication Agency (1978). And this list does not include the parallel title, the U.S. Information Service (USIS), applied to the field (overseas) operations of the public diplomacy programs from the liberation of Europe until the abolishment of USIA. Thus the term of ambiguity over all those years has been in a sense the very term representing continuity. [Footnote is in the original.]
4. The elements of USIA operating overseas were designated USIS (United States Information Service). [Footnote is in the original.]
5. The last report of the Commission (the 28th of May 1977, p. 5) carried this further telling paragraph on foreign identification of the “old Agency”: “The American experience of more than a quarter of a century with foreign information and cultural programs has earned the appreciation and plaudits of foreign governments as well as foreign populations * * * If emulation is a factor in effectiveness, then USIA has been an effective operation in the minds of many host governments to which it has been accredited.” [Footnote is in the original. For additional information about the 1977 report, see Document 46.
6. See Document 121.
7. Reorganization Plan No. 2 of 1977 states, “The Agency shall be headed by a Director * * *, who shall serve as the principal advisor to the President, the National Security Council, and the Secretary of State on the functions vested in the Director. The Director shall report to the President and the Secretary of State. Under the direction of the Secretary of State, the Director shall have primary responsibility within the Government for the exercise of the functions vested in the Director.” But these specifics indicate duties rather than position “guaranteed by law.” [Footnote is in the original.]
8. See Document 150.
9. Brackets are in the original.
10. Reference is to Reinhardt’s speech at the April 3 inaugural ceremony. See Document 125.
11. For Reinhardt’s testimony, see Foreign Relations Authorization for Fiscal Year 1979 Hearings Before the Subcommittee on International Operations of the Committee on International Relations House of Representatives Ninety Fifth Congress Second Session January 31; February 1, 7, 8, 14, 16, 21, 23; March 14, 15; and April 5, 1978. (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1978)
12. Reference is to Robison. The White House announced on March 15, 1978, that the President planned to nominate Robison to fill a 1-year term and serve as the Commission’s chairman. (Public Papers: Carter, 1978, Book I, pp. 510–511)
13. Reference is to Manilow. The White House announced on October 6, 1978, that the President planned to nominate Manilow to fill a 3-year term. (Public Papers: Carter, 1978, Book II, p. 1720)
14. On April 27, 1979, the White House announced that the President planned to nominate six individuals to the Commission: Franklin, Sherburne, Silverstein, Talley, Robison, and Manilow. The White House submitted the nominations to the Senate on April 30. Silverstein would serve for 1 year, Franklin and Sherburne would serve for 2 years, Manilow and Talley would serve for 3 years, and Robison until 1982. (Public Papers: Carter, 1979, Book I, pp. 729–730 and 787)
15. Reference is to McKee. The White House announced on June 13, 1979, that the President planned to nominate McKee to fill a 3-year term. (Public Papers: Carter, 1979, Book I, pp. 1037–1038)
16. U.S. Information and Educational Exchange Act of 1948, as amended, Title V, Sec. 501. [Footnote is in the original.]