The Special Operations Research Office (SORO) was created at American University in 1956 by the Army's Psychological Warfare office. (In fact, it was at first called the Psychological and Guerrilla Warfare Research Office, PSYGRO, but this name was changed three days after American University and the Department of Defense signed a contract to create the agency.) Initially focused on creating handbooks for United States personnel overseas, SORO soon expanded into studies of the social context for counterinsurgency. Its researchers could pore through boxes of classified military and intelligence reports unavailable to most university researchers. By the 1960s, the Army was paying SORO $2 million each year to study topics as the effectiveness of United States propaganda and including research into the social and psychological makeup of peoples around the world.