Hunt probably chose De Rochemont because he had once worked for him on The March of Time series. The March of Time, sponsored by the Time-Life Company, was a popular monthly series for over a decade before ending in 1951. Before the war, in 1935, De Rochemont had created The March of Time, a new form of screen journalism that combined the newsreel and documentary film into a 15- to 20-minute entertaining short that went behind the news to explain the significance of an event. Hunt selected Louis De Rochemont to be the film's producer at Paramount. "As a measure of thanks", a CIA official named Joe Bryan made the arrangements for the meeting, according to The Paper Trail, edited by Jon Elliston. Mrs Orwell signed after Alsop and Farr agreed to arrange for her to meet her hero, Clark Gable. This is well documented in The Girl from the Fiction Department by Hilary Spurling.
Mrs Orwell probably knew Farr as she moved in literary and artistic circles as an assistant to the editor of Horizon magazine. It was Alsop and Farr who went to England to negotiate the rights to the property from Sonia Orwell. Working with Alsop was Finis Farr, a writer living in Los Angeles. His contact in Hollywood was Carleton Alsop, brother of writer Joseph Alsop, who was working undercover at Paramount. Howard Hunt, who became infamous as a member of the Watergate break-in team, is identified as head of the operation. To use Animal Farm for its purpose, as Stonor Saunders reveals, the CIA's Office of Policy Coordination, which directed covert government operations, had two members of their Psychological Warfare Workshop staff obtain the screen rights to the novel. Almost, but not quite, because the book's ending shows both the pigs and humans joined together as corrupt and evil powers.
The CIA's choice of George Orwell's Animal Farm to produce as an animated film almost makes sense. When Frances Stonor Saunders published Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War, she mentioned a single animated film, John Halas and Joy Batchelor's Animal Farm, which was made in 1954. By the late 1940s, the CIA was spending tax dollars creating culture as a secret weapon to combat communism around the world.
A merica's use of animated propaganda during the second world war is fairly well known, but propaganda made after the iron curtain went up is rarely seen or discussed.
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