Its first chairman was former head of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) William Joseph Donovan, who had left the government after the war and was in private law practice.
[1] The vice-chairman was Allen Welsh Dulles, who also had left the government and was in private practice.
[1] Other board members were Walter Bedell Smith,[1] who would later become the CIA's first director and Tom Braden,[2] who was recruited by the OSS when the US entered the war.
The structure of the organization was outlined in early summer of 1948 by Donovan and Dulles in response to assistance requests by Richard von Coudenhove-Kalergi, then Joseph Retinger and Winston Churchill,[3] and resembled that of the Free Europe Committee.
[4] An article in The Daily Telegraph in September 2000 noted, "The State Department also played a role.