United States Information Agency

"Public diplomacy" was the primary mission of the United States Information Agency (USIA), which served its country from 1953 to 1999. In 1999, before President George W. Bush reorganised the intelligence agencies, President Bill Clinton delegated the cultural exchange and non-broadcasting intelligence functions of the United States Information Agency (USIA) to the newly created Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs position at the United States Department of State. The USIA's broadcasting operations have been transferred to the Broadcasting Board of Governors, which was recently established. Formerly known as the United States Information Service (USIS) of the United States Embassy abroad, the agency's current name, the Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs Agency.

In his autobiography, written in 1995, former USIA Director of TV and Film Service Alvin Snyder recalled that "It is estimated that the size of the United States government's full-service public relations organisation was comparable to that of the twenty largest commercial PR firms in the United States combined. Its full-time professional staff of more than 10,000, spread out across some 150 countries, trashed the Soviet Union 2,500 hours a week with a 'tower of babble' comprised of more than 70 languages, at a cost of over $2 billion per year. This helped to burnish the image of the United States while at the same time trashing the Soviet Union ". The United States Information Agency (USIA) was described as "the most important component of this propaganda machine."