The Foreign Service Journal, June 2022

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | JUNE 2022 49 in 1930-1932 for the Swedish publisher Erik Åkerlund. The U.S. government had rented it on and off since 1933 for the U.S. Minister and ultimately purchased it in December 1942 at Minister Johnson’s urging. Jensen and what would eventually be roughly 45 full- and part-time staff, including more than a dozen Americans, moved in. They boarded over the basement swimming pool and set up printing presses. The first-floor reception rooms and upstairs bedrooms were converted into offices. A radio tower was installed on the roof. Then they went to work. Jensen’s deputy, a Swedish-born photographer, over- saw the flow of U.S. and Allied information into Norway and Denmark, including illustrated magazines. Others supplied Swedish newspapers (as well as Finnish ones) the latest news and photos from the front and, together with their British colleagues, helped break what had been a Nazi news blockade. In time, hundreds of thousands of Swedes each week watched OWI-supplied United Newsreels. OWI-supplied American movies, including the 1943 OWI short “Swedes in America” featuring Ingrid Bergman, soon supplanted Ger- man films in the theaters. Other OWI staff, among them a former Vogue editor and a celebrated novelist, made a persuasive case for American culture to Swedish women and men. Still others provided U.S. outlets with news about Germany. Jensen and what today we would call his public diplomacy team played a key role in winning what one American journalist labeled the “Battle of Sweden.” They also helped lay the groundwork for the close people-to-people ties the United States and Sweden enjoy today. To learn more about OWI’s Stockholm outpost, please see the 2021 exhibit, “The U.S. Office of War Information’s STOCKHOLM OUTPOST 1942-1945,” which is now posted in digital format on U.S. Embassy Stockholm ’ s website. Karl Jensen, head of OWI Stockholm at Villa Åkerlund in 1944. ©2022.THELIBERTYLIBRARYCORPORATION At times, Voice of America broadcasts were at odds with U.S. foreign policy. tendentious, such as programming intended to demoralize U-boat crews. (It was only later, during the Cold War, with the division of labor between Voice of America as a softball voice and the CIA-sponsored Radio Free Europe and its sister Radio Liberation [later renamed Radio Liberty] playing propaganda hardball that the VOA’s identity as a bastion of objectivity could truly emerge and be eventually enshrined in the charter of 1960.) The effectiveness of the OWI broadcasts was widely noted. On one occasion, when the captured captain of U-662, Hein- rich Eberhard Müller, not only confessed his enjoyment of the broadcasts but also asked to meet the broadcaster known as Commander Bob Norden, a meeting was duly arranged with the man behind the nom de guerre Norden, Ralph G. Albrecht of the U.S. Naval Reserve. A skilled German-language speaker, Albrecht went on to serve on the prosecution team at the Nuremberg war crimes trial. Conflicting Aims and Unintended Consequences Tension between government policy and the political views of individual reporters also surfaced. Some Voice of America writers were overly enthusiastic about the U.S. alliance with the Soviet Union, and a few at OWI and VOA were explicitly affiliated with the Communist Party. At times, Voice of America broadcasts were at odds with U.S. foreign policy. One of the most notorious clashes came as Italy left the war in July 1943. A VOA report included a reference to the “moronic little king” of Italy and dubbed the interim leader of the country a “high- ranking fascist.” The slip made the front page of The New York Times . Other slips became visible only in retrospect. As concerns increased, the Roosevelt administration cleaned house. Some leftwing writers bridled at the turn to what they saw as boilerplate patriotic propaganda at home and left the agency. The administration moved out other political writers associated with the New Deal and promoted veterans of the commercial media as voices of the mainstream. Some communists were explicitly fired. The widespread OWI sympathy toward the Soviets led to misrepresentation of some