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"The men shared similar political views. They tended to hold liberal views on domestic issues. These attitudes were developed while they were students in the 1930s. They were also passionate anti-communists. This was the result of the men's experiences during the was and the events in Europe that followed the collapse of Nazi Germany in 1945. The vast majority were members of the Democratic Party but John Sherman Cooper and Desmond FitzGerald were both left-wing Republicans. As Sally Reston pointed out: "We were liberal anti-Communist, intellectuals, precisely the class and breed that Joe McCarthy hated and whose careers he wanted to ruin. It was the same old battle: the Republican right versus the Democratic left." It was members of the Georgetown Set that began lobbying for a new intelligence agency. The main figure in this was Frank Wisner. With the help of another member, George Kennan, the Office of Special Projects was created in 1948. Wisner was appointed director of the organization. Soon afterwards it was renamed the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC). This later became the espionage and counter-intelligence branch of the Central Intelligence Agency. . .Wisner also established Operation Mockingbird, a program to influence the American media. Wisner persuaded Philip Graham (Washington Post) to run the project within the industry. Graham himself recruited others who had worked for military intelligence during the war. This included James Truitt, Russell Wiggins, Phil Geyelin, John Hayes and Alan Barth. Others like Stewart Alsop, Joseph Alsop and James Reston, were recruited from within the Georgetown Set. According to Deborah Davis (Katharine the Great): "By the early 1950s, Wisner 'owned' respected members of the New York Times, Newsweek, CBS and other communications vehicles." J. Edgar Hoover became jealous of the CIA's growing power. He described the OPC as "Wisner's gang of weirdos" and began carrying out investigations into their past. It did not take him long to discover that some of them had been active in left-wing politics in the 1930s. This information was passed to who started making attacks on members of the OPC. Hoover also gave McCarthy details of an affair that Frank Wisner had with Princess Caradja in Romania during the war. Hoover, claimed that Caradja was a Soviet agent. Another members of the Georgetown Set, including Dean Acheson, George Kennan,, and Chip Bohlen, were also targeted. Joseph McCarthy also began accusing other senior members of the CIA as being security risks. McCarthy claimed that the CIA was a "sinkhole of communists" and claimed he intended to root out a hundred of them. One of his first targets was Cord Meyer, who was still working for Operation Mockingbird. In August, 1953, Richard Helms, Wisner's deputy at the OPC, told Meyer that Joseph McCarthy had accused him of being a communist. The Federal Bureau of Investigation added to the smear by announcing it was unwilling to give Meyer "security clearance". However, the FBI refused to explain what evidence they had against Meyer. Allen W. Dulles and both came to his defence and refused to permit a FBI interrogation of Meyer. Joseph McCarthy did not realise what he was taking on. Wisner unleashed Mockingbird on McCarthy. Drew Pearson, Joe Alsop, Jack Anderson, Walter Lippmann and Ed Murrow all went into attack mode and McCarthy was permanently damaged by the press coverage orchestrated by Wisner. . .": The Georgetown Set