Much of international relations centers on the role of great-power struggles, with other countries viewed as pawns in those dynamics. Yet little is understood about the conduct of middle powers in international cooperation, particularly in the international organizations (IOs) that they form. Are middle powers independent or are they beholden to greater powers, and what are the geopolitical dynamics within middle-powers IOs? Using textual analysis tools, including topic modeling, named entity recognition, and social network, on a large corpus of declassified US State Department cables from the 1970s, we explore how US officials reported on, and tried to influence, different developing country international organizations. We find that the US was not only concerned with what was happening in middle power IOs, but that they relied heavily on specific countries for information. Our findings suggest not only that text analysis is useful for the study of international organizations but that middle power IOs are important in the global landscape.