John "Frenchy" Grombach, born Jean Valentin de la Salle Grombach, was an American Olympic athlete, soldier, pioneer in radio cryptanalysis personnel management, public broadcaster and radio host, and divergent quick-tempered paranoid intelligence officer.

[5] André worked in the dry goods import business, primarily between Mexico City, Tampico, San Salvador, Cuba and New Orleans.

[4] From 1926 to 1928, Grombach was sent by the G-2 to be headquartered in the Panama Canal Zone (at that time still an American colony) to perform undercover operations as the Assistant Provost Marshall.

[8] Then he was assigned the area of New York City, officially to coordinate between the War Department and the motion picture and theatre industries.

[8] He attended theatrical performances and watched early black and white video productions as a part of his assignment, and learned to appreciate their value as not only entertainment, but morale devices.

In 1928, Grombach left the army and joined the New York National Guard, so that he could dedicate more time to the entertainment industry.

[9] Goodfellow had been given a directive by Donovan to carry on with the establishment of a communications network for the Office of the Coordinator of Information (COI) that had begun with cryptanalysis efforts by Elizabeth Friedman and Kermit Roosevelt, Jr.[9][10] Goodfellow recruited Grombach into the COI to help him establish this network not only because they had been friendly members of the 'Oh So Social' NYC elite - Grombach had written a seminole piece of military literature on the necessity of radio propaganda in the year 1940:[9] "The actual recreation, entertainment, and morale building qualities of radio are almost important as the propaganda and counter-propaganda which are in most cases carried within the talks and shows broadcast.

If radio is a "weapon," then we can carry the comparison further and call the entertainment the "propellant" by which it reaches the ears of millions, and propaganda the "disruptive" that either explodes theories and ideals, and leaves horrible debris of apprehension and confusion, or crystallizes the understanding and gives men the urge to fight on."

[9] Together, they followed the work of Friedman and built a radio intelligence program of collection, decryption, and analysis for the COI in Washington, D.C.[9] Later, they expanded to a larger center in New York.

[9] Grombach established the Foreign Broadcast Quarterly (FBQ), which was the front alias for the communications center, and COI purchased NBC's Long Island radio station on Maple Drive in Bellmore.

[9] The FBQ, however, was also dismantled in May when Donovan's rivals convinced President Roosevelt to order the COI to relinquish control over any communications efforts and propaganda to the War Department.

[4][11] The Army did already have an organization for intelligence gathering called the Counterintelligence Corps (CIC), having recently been helmed and perfected by FBN New York District Supervisor Garland H. Williams, but that unit was a much more investigational-structure organization not necessarily fit for the purposes desired by Strong, Kroner, McNarney, and Marshall.

Grombach oversaw The Pond from his office in New York's Steinway Hall building, where he masqueraded as a public relations consultant for Philips, the Dutch company that approached the American government when their country got invaded by the Axis; Philips provided an effectively blank check for much of the war to fund Pond activities.

[3] The Pond functioned covertly through various multinational corporations, including American Express, Chase National Bank, and the electronics giant Philips, headquartered in the Netherlands.

[13]The primary problem in cultivating agents from the State Department is that they are not trained in any of the arts of intelligence that are required to avoid enemy counterintelligence campaigns.

CIA's method was to... sift through the intelligence and only pass on to analysts what they deem important... Grombach was interesting... but he never lied.

"[3] Historian Thomas Boghardt from the Center of Military History, United States Army, writes in Covert Legions that: "In marked contrast to Grombach’s combativeness on the home front, his organization collected little of value.

The surviving files of the Grombach organization on Nazi Germany contain mostly trivia, and the Pond’s informants operated on the fringes of society...

Frustrated with the poor quality of Grombach’s information, an officer of the Military Intelligence Division once noted that it “meant absolutely nothing.” [14] The FBI caught wind of a strange operation on April 10, 1947, that was calling itself the "Commercial Research Bureau," run by Grombach during the war and onward, which they suspected of having ties to USSR spies.

[3] In 1955, Allen Dulles had received intelligence of Grombach meeting with Senator Joe McCarthy, possibly feeding him names of suspected Communists.