About Overseas News Agency

Overseas News Agency

The Overseas News Agency (ONA) was a New York general news agency founded in July 1940 as an offshoot of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA). To its subscribers — within a year, some 50 American and Canadian daily newspapers, eventually including The New York Times, the New York Herald Tribune, the San Francisco Chronicle, The Philadelphia Inquirer and The Washington Post — ONA appeared to be what its founding statements promised: a straightforward wire service that would report the facts and indulge in no propaganda. Decades later, declassified records established what its managers had concealed: the agency had been secretly funded by British intelligence, which, according to the documents, exercised effective control over it, used its press credentials to cover British spies, and planted fabricated stories through it in the American and international press, aimed at discrediting Nazi Germany and drawing the United States into the Second World War.

ONA is thus a double institution in the historical record: a functioning wartime news wire whose correspondents did real reporting, and one of the most remarkable documented cases of an intelligence service operating a news agency as a propaganda instrument.

Why the JTA Created a Second Wire

The Jewish Telegraphic Agency had been founded by Jacob Landau in The Hague in 1917, as the Jewish Correspondence Bureau, and had moved its headquarters to New York in the early 1920s. By 1940 it was the established wire of the Jewish world — which, as war broke out in Europe, became a commercial problem. According to a 1984 JTA account of its own history, The New York Times and other subscribers felt they could not continue to use material under the JTA name, saying it was too "parochial" and implied biased news reporting.

Landau's solution was a general-news subsidiary with a neutral name. Founded in July 1940 and based in New York City, with Landau as its managing director, the Overseas News Agency would sell war and world news to mainstream dailies under a banner that announced no communal affiliation. Its public promise was explicit: it would report the facts and "indulge in no propaganda, preach no theory or philosophy."

The British Connection

The secret history, reconstructed by journalist and author Steven Usdin in his 2018 book Bureau of Spies: The Secret Connections Between Espionage and Journalism in Washington, from declassified documents, is that British intelligence funded the new agency in exchange for two things: ONA press credentials for British spies, and the right to use the outlet to spread fabricated stories in the United States and international press. The British partner was British Security Coordination, the New York outpost of MI6, Britain's foreign intelligence service, which ran a large clandestine campaign to shift American opinion toward intervention in the war.

Usdin's judgement, based on the declassified record, is unusually strong: MI6 does not, in those documents, talk merely of having influence over the wire service; it says, in effect, that it had effective control over ONA. From the start, in his account, ONA made attacking Nazi Germany a priority over reporting the truth, aligning itself with the interests of British Security Coordination. There is, Usdin notes, no evidence that ONA's working reporters knew of the arrangement — a distinction that matters for judging the journalists, if not the institution.

What the Agency Published

Operationally, ONA worked like any wire. Within a year of its founding, 50 American and Canadian dailies carried its stories, and its client list grew to include many of the most respected papers in the United States. Some of its output was genuine journalism of quality: Meyer Levin, later a well-known novelist, served as a war correspondent in Europe during the Second World War representing both the Overseas News Agency and the JTA. The agency was still functioning as a news organization after the war — in January 1947, for example, Jacob Landau wrote from ONA to Albert Einstein soliciting his reaction to Norbert Wiener's article "A Scientist Rebels," and received the physicist's signed statement setting out an ethical code for scientists, an exchange preserved and later sold at auction as an Einstein autograph.

Interleaved with that legitimate reportage, on the British account, were the planted items: invented stories designed to discredit Hitler and to enlist American help for the war in Europe, fed into the same distribution channel and printed by the same trusting subscribers. It is precisely the mixture — real correspondents, real clients, fabricated plants — that made ONA effective as a covert instrument and makes it disquieting as a journalistic one.

Landau and the FBI

Landau, the Austrian-born founder who ran both JTA and ONA, attempted to interest American intelligence in a similar arrangement. In April 1942, FBI assistant director Percy E. Foxworth wrote to J. Edgar Hoover about a meeting at which Landau proposed that JTA and ONA, with their network of South American Jewish contacts and foreign-language newspaper clients, could assist the Bureau. Foxworth, noting that Landau's English was poor and his exact proposition hard to follow, asked him to put it in a written memorandum.

In that memorandum Landau suggested, among other things, that ONA could employ non-citizens with extensive information — pointing out that the Bureau's employing such people directly had obvious disadvantages. The pitch went nowhere with the FBI. Usdin's reporting also indicates that ONA's relationships may not have stopped with the British: the wire reportedly tried, in vain, to work with the FBI and may have collaborated with the predecessor of the Soviet KGB — a claim that, like much of ONA's covert history, rests on the partial declassified record and is best treated as reported rather than settled.

The Ethical Argument

ONA's exposure, three-quarters of a century after the fact, forced an unusual debate. The journalistic norm it violated — a news agency secretly controlled by a foreign intelligence service, planting fabrications in client newspapers — is about as fundamental as the profession has. Usdin, who uncovered the record, nonetheless defended the bargain on existential grounds: there are times, he argued, when people claim it is acceptable to compromise an ethical principle because of an existential threat and it is usually not true — but in the case of Hitler, it was, and had he been in Landau's position he would have done it and been proud of it.

Other readers of the record have been less forgiving, noting that the subscribers and readers who trusted ONA's promise of "no propaganda" were never consulted, and that the mechanism built for anti-Nazi stories was, by design, usable for any story British Security Coordination wished to plant. Both positions are part of ONA's permanent record; the agency is now routinely cited in discussions of state propaganda precisely because the documentary evidence of control is unusually explicit.

Place in the JTA Family

Within the history of Jewish journalism, ONA occupies a peculiar place: the general-news sibling created because the parent wire's name was considered too Jewish for wartime mainstream subscribers. The JTA itself, which survived the century and operates today, does not detail the British collaboration in its own accounts of its history, and MI6, asked about ONA, declined to comment beyond referring enquirers to the official history of the wartime period it had released. The fullest public account remains the declassified-document record assembled by Usdin and the coverage it generated in 2018.

How the Story Came Out

None of the British arrangement was public during the agency's lifetime. Subscribers who printed ONA copy, and readers who trusted it, knew only the founding promise of factual reporting without propaganda. The documentary record emerged gradually through the declassification of wartime intelligence files, and it was Steven Usdin's research for Bureau of Spies, published in 2018, that assembled the evidence — the funding, the credentials for spies, the planted stories, and the internal British assessment of effective control — into a single public account, which religious and general news coverage then carried to a wide audience in October 2018. The Einstein correspondence of January 1947, surfacing at auction, independently confirmed the agency's ordinary public face: a New York wire whose managing director could write to Princeton soliciting a great scientist's views, and be answered, like any legitimate news agency of the day.

Legacy

The Overseas News Agency matters to media history for three reasons. It is a documented instance — rare in its paper trail — of an intelligence service founding and effectively controlling a commercial news wire. It illustrates the wartime transformation of American journalism, in which the boundary between reporting and the information war blurred even inside respected newsrooms' supply chains. And it preserves, in the contrast between its founding promise and its secret funding, a permanent teaching example: a wire service's claim to independence is only ever as good as its ownership, its money, and its willingness to disclose both.