Finding SORO

As Research Assistant for Dr. Katherine Zien at the Department of English, McGill University

I was tasked with unearthing information about the Special Operations Research Office (SORO), later renamed the Center for Research in Social Sciences (CRESS). Very little information on this group is available on the Internet.

This office/center was a research group contracted under the US Military in the 1950’s at American University, Washington, D.C. It conducted research projects in counter-insurgency for the US Military for their various campaigns in Latin America in the mid-twentieth century.

Dr. Zien wanted to learn of their operations, research projects, findings, reports for her research on the US Military in Latin American. The task was to track every possible source from the very few references to them on the internet, because everything about them lies in redacted files in boxes in archives.

During this project, then, I was an authority on SORO/CRESS. As Dr. Zien referred to my findings were ”the real stuff, totally original research that has never been discovered or obtained.“