Secret American society founded in 1927 by group of wealthy New Yorkers who had military intelligence backgrounds or who felt intelligence work had a romantic interest. Its principal founders included Vincent Astor and Kermit Roosevelt. Other powerful men in the Room included banker Winthrop W. Aldrich and Foreign Service officer David K. E. Bruce. Others who joined were two future U.S. intelligence chiefs: William Donovan and Allen W. Dulles. The Room, writes James Srodes in Allen Dulles, Master of Spies (1999), “also established the precedent for leaders of corporate America to provide the government with cover and subsidized operations -- through transportation, finance, and propaganda -- which Washington could not undertake alone.”
When World War II began in Europe in Sept. 1939, the Room changed its name to the Club, and it took a more active role in providing intelligence directly to President Roosevelt.
