In 1942 the US government created a new organization called the Office of War Information, headed by Elmer Davis. This organization absorbed the functions of several other government departments such as the Office of Facts and Figures (OWI's direct predecessor), the Office of Government Reports, the Division of Information of the Office for Emergency Management and the Foreign Information Service.
The OWI had representative in countries abroad and participated not only in news gathering activities but also Anti-Axis propaganda and even espionage. Especially in Bern, Switzerland the local station, headed by Gerald Mayer, cooperated closely with the OSS -Office of Strategic Services station of Allen Dulles.
The book ‘Hitler, the Allies, and the Jews’, p265 says about Mayer:‘Gerald Mayer was officially OWI’s man in Bern but in fact he was Allen Dulles’s cover and right hand man’
The same book mentions an OWI message from Mayer to Elmer Davis from May 1944, decoded by the German codebreakers. The Germans were not the only ones reading OWI communications from Bern. The Finnish codebreakers also read these messages, as can be seen from a decode found in the Finnish national archives:
Bern-Washington 9.3.1944 No.1438 (to Elmer Davis OWI from Mayer)
