Agents of influence, p.12
Agents of Influence, page 12
In London, Stephenson had met the head of SOE, Frank Nelson, and they had agreed that the Canadian should ‘assume control’ of all SOE activities in the Americas. ‘No provision for staff was made at this time,’ ran the official record of this conversation, ‘and it was left to G’ – Stephenson’s new SOE codename – ‘to explore his way and make whatever recommendations to London that he saw fit.’4
Stephenson was now ‘our man in New York’ for MI6 as well as SOE, but he had not been given a free hand. He was told that his activities must not, under any circumstance, interfere with American politics. That was essential. The Foreign Office also insisted that this new SOE office in New York should avoid ‘subversive activities of any kind’.5 Instead Stephenson was permitted to look into broadcasting propaganda back into occupied Europe, or finding European refugees to be sent back into their home countries as SOE agents. That was it.
Perhaps sensing these instructions might not be followed to the letter, the head of SOE sent out a trusted officer to help run this new American office. But when Colonel G. G. Vickers, VC, arrived in New York he was in for a shock.
Stephenson explained to the colonel that unfortunately his job had already been taken by one of his staff. Vickers was confused. Stephenson replied that he was ‘determined to keep the organisation under his own control’, adding, perhaps in a more forgiving voice, that he was not saying this to be ‘uncooperative’, but was worried about security. He then launched into a meandering speech about ‘the dangerous circumstances in which his organisation was working’, adding cryptically at one point, ‘the use of knives and poison was not unknown’.
Vickers must have sensed this was simply an attempt to get him out of the way. But it worked. Rather than stand his ground, the colonel wrote back to London saying they should follow Stephenson’s recommendations, going on to praise his ‘efficiency’ and ‘power of quick decision’.6 ‘The New York organisation should never be asked to act except on an important and definite issue, and all detailed planning should be left to them,’ was the official conclusion in London, a complete reversal of the instructions Stephenson had been given several weeks earlier.7 Just two days after arriving in New York, Colonel Vickers cabled London asking for permission to come home, ‘as there was little more he could usefully do’.8
With Vickers out of the way, Stephenson was now running the American offices of MI6, MI5, SOE, BPC, and BIC in Bermuda. Suddenly he had more power than ever, perhaps more than he was ready for. He was beginning to feel a greater sense of autonomy, a shift reflected in the way he had the different offices under his control interact with one another. Rather than insist on their being separated by ‘watertight compartments’, as was the norm, he arranged for them to pool intelligence and work more closely together.9 Today this sounds like common sense. At the time, in the guarded, fractious and sometimes insular world of British intelligence, it was unusual.
Stephenson also decided on a new cover name for his rapidly expanding intelligence machine. Until then the name on the door had been ‘British Passport Control Office’. From late January 1941, this office began to be known as ‘British Security Coordination’ (BSC).10 If anyone asked, BSC was responsible for the security of British supplies before they were shipped across the Atlantic: a forgettable task which would hopefully deflect further enquiries.
But Stephenson’s biggest breakthrough in the weeks after his return concerned the White House. One of Stephenson’s most trusted American contacts was Vincent Astor, who had tipped him off about Dr Westrick the year before. Astor was also close to the president, and in early February 1941 he became the ‘personal liaison’ between Stephenson and the White House.11 No longer would the MI6 officer have to go through the FBI if he wanted to pass information to Roosevelt.
‘C’ monitored these changes from his desk in London and sensed trouble ahead. With Stephenson running a much larger office, with better access to the White House and much greater reach, it was almost inevitable that he would feel a lighter connection to London. ‘C’ told him to ‘remember that the old Firm has constant and imperative needs’,12 a gentle reminder that he had been sent to New York by MI6, he worked for MI6, and he continued to answer to the head of MI6.
Stephenson did not resent this. In the days that followed there were no signs of him launching any wild schemes, flexing his muscles, or reacting in a way that might allow ‘C’ to think he was moving out of his orbit. Stephenson had put together a team of many talents and had consolidated his power, but he had not put it to the test. His efforts to bring the US into the war continued to be steeped in restraint. By the start of February 1941, perhaps the most surprising thing about Stephenson’s rapidly expanding organization was just how little impact it was having on American public opinion.
Also surprising was how few American officials knew of its existence. But that was about to change.
20
Adolf Berle did not like spies. More than most US government officials he loathed secrets, intelligence-gathering, spy chiefs, and the ‘paranoid’ world these people inhabited.1 Another of Berle’s pet hates was the British.
‘Feeble and foolish’, he once called them, ‘terribly slow on the up-take’, and full of ‘obtuseness’ and ‘rank impertinence’.2 Yet what really set him off, if it was not spies or the British, was the idea of foreigners peddling propaganda inside the United States. A team of British spies spreading covert propaganda within America was the apotheosis of everything he disliked in life. Others felt the same, but Berle was in a position to act on it.
Adolf Berle had been a child prodigy, before going on to be the youngest ever graduate from Harvard Law School at the age of twenty-one. Later he was a key Roosevelt aide in the early stages of the New Deal, and knew the president well enough to address him in letters ‘Dear Caesar’ (a practice Roosevelt begged him to stop). By January 1941, as an Assistant Secretary of State, this precise and orderly bureaucrat ran the committee Roosevelt had set up to bring together the nation’s bickering intelligence chiefs.
Berle may not have liked the secret world, but running this committee made him one of the most powerful figures within it. In the months that followed, if there was ever a hint of the British trying to influence American public opinion, or so much as thinking about running spies inside the US, Berle would push for an investigation. One Foreign Office official described him as ‘very anti-British’; another replied, ‘we might start a BERLE file.’3 Berle would have been flattered.
Underlying his suspicion of Britain and the British was the fear he had that the American government might repeat some of its mistakes from the aftermath of the First World War. Berle had been part of the US delegation at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, and had come away frustrated and angry. ‘We came so [far] into the English camp that we became virtually an adjunct to the British war machine,’ he complained. The British ‘kept that position after the war was over, and the result of that was that we got not one single thing that we really desired in the ensuing peace. This time it seems to me that the thing should be the other way around.’4
But increasingly he felt as if he was on his own. Berle worried that his colleagues were ready to do everything they could to help Britain, a country he saw as America’s oldest enemy. He bemoaned his countrymen’s apparent lack of political nous, seeing himself as a Cassandra figure whose role was to warn against British influence.
On hearing a speech by Charles Lindbergh, in October 1940, Berle conceded ‘of course this is Berlin stuff, pure and simple’, and yet, he went on, ‘if he means we ought not to get too deep into English intrigue, I agree with him, for I have a good working notion that when this mess is over, we shall find that the British were no more truthful with us now than they were in 1917.’5
So Berle was understandably suspicious when in February 1941 he heard about a new British agency in New York called British Security Coordination. According to the British embassy it prevented sabotage against British supplies. Berle asked colleagues at the State Department to find out more, and their investigation suggested otherwise. Although they were unable to discover where this new British agency was based, they had at least found out the name of the man in charge: Stephenson.
The most curious thing about Stephenson, as Berle discovered, was that none of the American officials working on counter-sabotage had ever heard of him. Berle was also told that Stephenson, whoever he was, had undercover officers and agents working for him throughout the United States. As the State Department report concluded, this new British agency was cloaked in ‘the utmost secrecy’.6
Berle decided to find out more.
21
In the past, when Charles Lindbergh spoke out against the war, whether it was in a radio booth or at an outdoor rally, he read from a script. This was a man who longed to be in control, and to know what was coming before it arrived. But on 23 January 1941, that was set to change.
Lindbergh was in Washington DC to give evidence to the House Foreign Relations Committee. As usual, he arrived too early on what was a blustery, grey-looking day. To kill time, he took a brisk walk around Capitol Hill, past the buildings and monuments he had seen as a boy in the days when his father had been a congressman, before returning to the new House Office Building, known today as the Longworth Building, where he found hundreds of his supporters waiting for him.
The question of whether the United States should enter the war had been largely in the background over the last twelve months. The conscription bill, the destroyers-for-bases deal, and the massive increase in defence spending had brought it briefly to the fore, and in the closing weeks of the election it had been on many people’s minds. But otherwise this question appeared to be settled. The US was staying out. Roosevelt had said as much on the campaign trail.
In January 1941 this changed, abruptly, when the president introduced his ‘Lend-Lease’ bill. Now the question of whether to go to war was the single most important political issue in the United States, and would remain as such for the rest of the year.
The ‘Great Debate’ had begun.
Roosevelt’s Lend-Lease bill was divisive, unusual and counter-intuitive, and that was if you asked his supporters. It was the president’s ingenious response to Britain’s fragile financial position, which had been laid out to him in a letter signed by Churchill but drafted by Lothian. The president read this message repeatedly during a Caribbean cruise in the days leading up to Christmas. ‘Then one evening,’ recalled Harry Hopkins, Roosevelt’s aide, ‘he suddenly came out with it – the whole program. He didn’t seem to have any clear idea how it could be done legally. But there wasn’t a doubt in his mind that he’d find a way to do it.’1
Roosevelt’s idea was inspired, and so was the way he presented it. In a White House press conference shortly before Christmas he asked the journalists to imagine a homeowner who finds that their neighbour’s house is on fire. Naturally, the president explained, they would lend their neighbour a garden hose if they had one. They would not first ask their neighbour for $15 to cover the cost of the hose. ‘If the hose were returned undamaged,’ he went on, ‘he would expect the thanks of the neighbour; if it were damaged, he would expect the neighbour to replace it.’ In the same sense, the president wanted the United States to lend war materiel to Britain, and after the war this could be returned undamaged or replaced in kind. ‘There would not be too much formality,’ the president assured them, trying to make a radical idea sound folksy and simple, ‘and as long as he got back the hose or its equivalent he would be satisfied.’2
He followed up in late December 1940 with one of his ‘fireside chats’, in which he addressed the nation informally over the radio, one of his many successful innovations as president. ‘There is danger ahead,’ he warned, ‘we cannot escape danger, or the fear of danger, by crawling into bed and pulling the covers over our heads.’ If London fell, ‘all of us, in all the Americas, would be living at the point of a gun’. The United States had to become ‘the great arsenal of democracy’.3
The president’s argument was that by giving more aid to Britain, the United States would improve its chances of staying out of the war. The isolationists saw this as mere sophistry. For them, Lend-Lease was just another step towards intervention. By empowering the president to decide which countries received military aid, how much, when, and the manner in which they had to pay it back, all without going to Congress, Lend-Lease also took the nation closer to an imperial presidency.
In late January 1941, thirteen days after the text of this controversial bill had been released, Lindbergh prepared to testify against it before the House Foreign Affairs Committee. His supporters flooded the gallery, giving the room ‘the atmosphere of a gala occasion’. The man they had come to see was dressed entirely in blue – light blue shirt, blue suit with a herringbone pattern, dark blue knitted tie – and as he walked in he seemed to project an unassailable certainty. ‘He went about the business of testifying with the air of a veteran,’ wrote one impressed reporter. ‘There was no trace of shyness in his manner as he instructed the photographers to get their pictures at once and not to set off any flashlight bulbs while he was testifying.’4
Beneath this was a man who wanted to be elsewhere. Lindbergh hated the way the room had been ‘flooded with brilliant lights for the motion picture cameras’, and resented the presence of ‘two or three dozen “still” photographers gathered around the table where I was to sit – almost all the things I dislike, and which represent to me the worst of American life in this period.’5
None of this affected his performance. Over four and a half hours, Lindbergh answered questions and spoke engagingly and well about the prospect of Lend-Lease and whether the United States should participate in the war. Germany was simply too strong, he argued. She could not be defeated even by an alliance of Anglo-American forces. One of the congressmen asked if he thought Germany was sure to win. ‘She already controls the continent,’ he replied, adding that in Britain ‘there is famine and a total upset of normal life.’6 Rather than help one belligerent or the other, he argued, the White House should do everything in its power to end the war.
‘To my amazement,’ Lindbergh wrote, ‘I found that the crowd was with me. They clapped on several occasions!’ So did the committee, which rose to applaud him at the end of his marathon session. Among those looking on in admiration was the congressman who had invited him to testify, Hamilton Fish.
Lindbergh’s testimony was widely reported and his answers raised tricky questions in the debate over whether to enact Lend-Lease. His performance was a boost to the isolationist cause. America First continued to grow at a monstrous rate, and would soon have as many as 800,000 members and more than four hundred chapters nationwide. Hundreds of other isolationist groups also sprang up in the weeks after Roosevelt introduced the Lend-Lease bill.7 Americans all over the country were now staging meetings, organizing petitions, paying for advertisements in their local newspapers, or going door to door with badges, bumper stickers and posters, many of them urging people to contact their representatives in Washington and register their opposition to Lend-Lease. Congressional offices on the Hill were being swamped with letters and phone-calls, most of them protesting against the proposed legislation.
Only a handful of those involved in this vast campaign had any idea that the Nazis were involved as well. Hans Thomsen reported to Berlin that he was busy ‘promoting the organization of the isolationist opposition’,8 and had ‘good relations’ with ‘isolationist committees’, including America First, and was able to ‘support them in various ways’.9 He was not secretly running the American isolationist movement, as some would later imagine. Rather than being the director of this ensemble piece, Thomsen was more like a wealthy investor who liked to attend rehearsals and offer advice.
As well as helping America First, Thomsen was using undercover agents to ‘induce as large a number as possible of the American voters to write to the congressmen and senators of their districts letters of protest’, all at ‘considerable expense’.10 He had helped coordinate a women’s march on Washington, was in touch with isolationist senators and was working ‘with the Irish-American press and Irish-American leaders’, in particular the New York Enquirer, to have them put out more pro-Nazi stories. At the same time, agents of his offered support to the radio celebrity Father Charles E. Coughlin. As many as 40 million listeners tuned in each Sunday to hear Coughlin’s CBS broadcasts, each one an unlikely blend of organ music, Bible stories, easy-going homilies and tirades against Jews.11
But the biggest breakthrough for Thomsen, Coughlin, America First and all those doggedly campaigning against intervention and Lend-Lease was an interview which appeared in the press shortly before Christmas. A leading interventionist, the newspaper editor William Allen White, had switched sides. ‘The Yanks are not coming,’ White said in that interview. All that mattered now, he explained, was ‘to keep this country out of the war’.12
This was a major scalp for the isolationists. Lindbergh wondered if it was now time ‘to welcome him to the camp of the “isolationists”.’ In any case, Lindbergh concluded, ‘the anti-war sentiment seems to be gaining, at least momentarily, in this country.’13 A few weeks later he was sounding more optimistic than ever. ‘I think we still have a good fighting chance to stay out.’14
Opposition to the Lend-Lease bill had never been so strong. All over the country Americans seemed to be following White’s lead by moving away from intervention and putting their weight behind the isolationist cause. The anti-war movement was flourishing, and so was the Nazi influence campaign.
Meanwhile the mood in Whitehall was becoming desperate. ‘We do not know how long Congress will debate your proposals,’ Churchill reminded Roosevelt, ‘and we are fighting for our lives.’15
