Agents of influence, p.16
Agents of Influence, page 16
During the summer of 1941 the role of these informants changed, even if they were unaware of it. From that point on, as well as listening out for interesting rumours they were also being used to spread them. They became the whisperers in a series of British whispering campaigns. Ross Smith later revealed his technique.
It was elegantly simple: ‘You tell something in “strictest confidence”,’ he explained. ‘That’s the best way to start a rumour.’14
Another way to start a rumour, as Stephenson was beginning to understand, involved astrologers.
On a warm night in June 1941, a tall, slender-looking man could be seen clambering up the fire escape of a luxurious hotel in New York. High above the street, he paused to knock on a window. After a while, a plump and bespectacled figure appeared on the other side of the glass. The window came up. At this point Eric Maschwitz handed over a large sum of money to the man inside the hotel, before scuttling back down the fire escape and disappearing into the night.
Maschwitz, whose song ‘A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square’ was now a global hit, had been summoned to New York to work for Bill Stephenson, after one of his staff described the good work Maschwitz had previously done in Section D.
Maschwitz had arrived earlier that month, and right away was introduced to the social complexities of life in Manhattan when his prospective landlord refused to lease him an apartment, explaining that he ran a ‘restricted house’.15 Maschwitz assured him he had no plans to sell liquor on the premises. The landlord replied that ‘restricted’ meant he would not allow either African-Americans or Jews to live there. Although Maschwitz’s father was Jewish, his mother was not; so the apartment was his.
Codenamed G.106, Eric Maschwitz’s first job for Stephenson was a peculiar one. He had been told to look after Louis de Wohl, a Hungarian refugee, British secret agent and celebrity astrologer. Maschwitz’s main task was making sure he got paid, which involved clambering up the fire escape of de Wohl’s expensive hotel once a week.
Louis De Wohl was part of a little-known British campaign to have Hitler’s death written in the stars. Department D/Q of SOE had various pet astrologers around the world, including De Wohl and others in Cairo, Istanbul and Lagos. Over the summer of 1941 they were told to start predicting the Nazi leader’s sudden demise, which they duly did.
Soon it was reported that a priest called Ulokoigbe in Nigeria had seen astrological evidence of Hitler’s coming death. The well-known Egyptian astrologer Sheikh Youssef Afifi was also heard to be saying much the same thing. Reports in several ‘Arabic weeklies’ about Hitler’s death were, SOE reported, ‘causing much discussion among Egyptians’.16 Hitler was ‘obsessed’ by astrology, De Wohl explained. ‘It is impossible that the whole world speaks of the death of one man, without this man becoming aware of it. It will haunt him.’17
For those who took astrology seriously, including millions of Americans, this might also help to undermine their notions of Nazi invincibility. In this way, De Wohl’s predictions were a tiny part of the broader British effort to change public opinion in the United States.
None of this endeared the astrologer-spy to his new handler, Eric Maschwitz, who later complained that De Wohl was ‘a right swindler… you never met such a character. He was up to everything and he was paid a lot of money and I know because I used to have to go and pay him once a week.’18
By June 1941, Stephenson’s operation to bring the United States into the war was larger, more expensive and emphatically more ambitious than it had been at the start of the year. His rumour factory could ‘spread a rumour throughout the length and breadth of the US within a few hours’.19 Using radio, news agency press releases, newspaper columnists, whispering campaigns, the Czechoslovak consulate, foreign language newspapers, and an overweight astrologer looked after by a world-famous lyricist, his office was now putting out a flood of stories. They were designed either to undermine America First and Lindbergh, or to convince the American people that Hitler was bad and he could be beaten.
Not only had Stephenson’s operation become larger and more ambitious, it was also more dangerous. Almost as soon as his assault on the American isolationists began, his office started to look into targeted assassinations. On 10 April 1941, as one recently declassified document shows, Stephenson’s office cabled SOE headquarters in London to say ‘it would be possible for them to arrange for the disposal of Gerhard Hentschke’. Hentschke was a Nazi diplomat stationed at the time in Guatemala.20 In June 1941, they were at it again. This time they ‘recommended’ that an American journalist of German origin, Karl von Wiegand, an isolationist and Nazi enthusiast who wrote for the Hearst chain of newspapers, ‘should be liquidated’.21
These two assassinations were either thwarted or more likely overruled by London. But the fact that they were even suggested is revealing. The character of Stephenson’s operation had changed in the space of just a few months; it was now more determined, ruthless and deadly. The man in charge was also becoming more selective about what he shared with London.
One senior figure in Whitehall later said of the British rumour factory in New York ‘that the Foreign Office were quite unaware of these operations, and were in fact extremely puzzled at the time by the apparently spontaneous publication of material all over the world’.22
Stephenson had by no means gone rogue. But the ties which bound him to some of his colleagues in London had loosened. In his drive to bring the United States into the war, he was taking more risks than ever. But none was as far-fetched as the plan he had recently set in motion involving the White House.
27
‘It was quite clear to me that he could think about seven stages ahead of the average man,’ a future professor of mathematics at Columbia University would write of Bill Stephenson, before going on to describe him processing new information: ‘it was terrifying to watch. Not a muscle in his face moved, nor did his eyes shift around as people’s eyes often do when they’re reflective, he looked straight ahead of him, he looked much more like a champion chess player who sees three possibilities for a mate in five and is just wondering which to choose.’1
In late 1940, while ruminating on how to bring the United States into the war, Stephenson had seen a possible checkmate. The first two moves would be the hardest. He needed to convince Bill Donovan to run a new American intelligence agency. Then he had to find a way to bring this agency into being.
Stephenson’s efforts to win over Donovan had begun with those long drinking sessions in the 21 Club, hugger-mugger among the socialites and businessmen as he made the case for this new agency, occasionally having to shout to be heard over the band. His campaign continued in London, several weeks later, in December 1940, as Donovan was showered with comforts, access and secrets, to the point where the secrets themselves felt less important than the act of their being shared. Each was a gift as much as a test. Keeping one to himself was a nod of loyalty to those who had placed so much faith in him, and none more so than Bill Stephenson.
After being fussed over in London and taken on a tour of the SOE training schools Stations XII and XVII, Donovan appeared to have been won over to the idea of a new American intelligence agency geared towards special operations and ‘dirty tricks’. He later confessed that he ‘had never been treated in such royal and exalted fashion’,2 and was soon evangelizing in Washington about the need for an American equivalent of SOE. ‘Donovan has been working in our interests like a Trojan since his return,’ Stephenson reported back to ‘C’.3
Donovan also made the case for this new agency to the president. On 4 April 1941 Roosevelt told his cabinet at length about the need for a new kind of centralised intelligence agency, referring throughout to how the British ran their intelligence operations, information he had been fed by Bill Donovan.
Stephenson’s plan was starting to work. What helped was Roosevelt’s fascination with intelligence work. It was unusual for an American president to show such an interest in spying. The last one to embrace the possibilities of espionage, counter-espionage, and the need for a centralized intelligence agency, had been George Washington. Since then most US presidents had resisted calls for an all-powerful intelligence organization, partly because spying seemed to be so un-American. Espionage reeked of Europe and the Old World. It was duplicitous and dishonest, and probably best left to the British.
By the start of the war, rather than having a single, controlling agency there were three separate government bodies in the United States which specialized in gathering intelligence: the FBI, the Military Intelligence Department (MID) and the Office for Naval Intelligence (ONI). They operated independently of each other, frequently covered the same ground twice, and seemed to be constitutionally incapable of cooperation.
In an effort to bang their heads together, Roosevelt had told the chiefs of these three rival agencies to have regular meetings. But either they failed to attend these meetings or they sent their deputies. So it was hardly surprising that by April 1941 the president wanted a fresh start. Nor did it come as a shock to anyone in Washington that the three existing intelligence chiefs did not.
In a sudden show of unity, these three men put aside their differences to produce a joint memorandum arguing against this new agency, on the grounds that it offered ‘only negligible advantages.’4 After hearing that Donovan might be running it, Hoover sent the president an unsourced report dismissing ‘Wild Bill’s’ recent trip to Europe as a ‘failure’ because he was ‘not schooled in the art of diplomacy’.5 For the MID chief, the prospect of a ‘super agency controlling all intelligence’ was ‘very disadvantageous, if not calamitous’.6
The president had said he wanted a new, all-powerful intelligence agency. But rather than show him how this could be done, his three intelligence chiefs had told him he was wrong to want it. The teacher had set a demanding essay, and in response most of the class had refused to do it. But one student quietly got to work.
On 26 April 1941 Bill Donovan completed a four-page memorandum explaining how this new intelligence agency could operate. Precise and detailed, his document oozed authority. It covered the relationship between the new organization and, variously, the White House, political parties and existing intelligence agencies. It also explained where funding would come from, who should control this agency, its areas of operation and function, and even the make-up of its advisory committee. Donovan insisted that the new agency must not be limited to gathering intelligence; it should specialize as well in ‘the use of propaganda’ and ‘the direction of subversive operations’.7 In other words, it should closely resemble Britain’s SOE.
This memorandum was so authoritative that in places it read as if it had been put together by someone with experience of running an intelligence agency, which, for the most part, it had been. The student who had quietly gone off to write the essay had also received outside help.
Stephenson later said that ‘C’ would have been ‘horrified’ if he had known the extent to which ‘I was supplying our friend [Donovan] with secret information to build up his candidacy for the position I wanted to see him achieve here.’ When asked about this particular memorandum and two more that followed, Stephenson was clear. ‘Of course my staff produced the material for these papers.’8
But Roosevelt was not ready to approve this new agency. With every day that he prevaricated, the opposition gathered strength. The chiefs of the FBI, MID and ONI had never been so close. Another figure who began to voice his concerns, rather worryingly given his potential role in the agency, was Bill Donovan himself.
Donovan had cooled on the idea of being a spy chief. He said he ‘wouldn’t reach for the job’, Stephenson explained, and ‘felt he shouldn’t seek it’.9 In part, this was to do with pride. Donovan did not like to feel he was angling for a position. He preferred in life to be courted and pursued. His withdrawal was also linked to the dilemma he had been tussling with since the start of the war.
For almost two decades Bill Donovan had been trying so hard to get into politics that he had blinded himself to his failings as a politician. Having recently become much closer to Roosevelt, he imagined that he might be closer than ever to landing a plum political position. More than that, as the prospect of the United States entering the war became clearer, he had begun to feel deep inside himself the call of the military. Donovan remained one of the country’s most decorated soldiers. By early June 1941 the pull of both the military and politics had become hard to resist. Rather than push to run this new spy agency, Donovan went to have an army medical examination.
Just when it needed to come together, Stephenson’s plan was falling apart. The man he had tried so hard to talk into taking this job had chosen soldiering over spying.
The idea of this new intelligence agency being run by a man so close to the British, like Donovan, had always been a stretch, the type of improbable scheme you might find in a playful spy novel. So it was perhaps fitting that one of the two officials sent from London to help change Donovan’s mind, and to bring this agency into being, was the future creator of James Bond.
28
On 25 May 1941 the luxurious ‘Dixie Clipper’ seaplane landed on the water at LaGuardia Airport in New York. Once it had pulled up alongside the quay and the gangplanks went up, out stepped the fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli, carrying a wicker basket reminiscent of the one made famous two years earlier by a seventeen-year-old Judy Garland in The Wizard of Oz. ‘This is what we now use for luggage in France, you see,’ Schiaparelli told the bank of waiting reporters, flashbulbs exploding around her; ‘we have no more leather.’1
Just behind her came two British intelligence officers in civilian dress. One was Britain’s Director of Naval Intelligence, Admiral John Godfrey, the other was his assistant, Lieutenant Commander Ian Fleming. From LaGuardia they were driven in to Manhattan, where their first appointment was with Bill Stephenson and his friend Bill Donovan.
The atmosphere as these four settled down together would have been lively and loud. Donovan had met Godfrey on his two earlier visits to London and had already offered to put him up in his apartment during his stay; Fleming had met Donovan before in Gibraltar, calling him a ‘splendid American, being almost twice the size of Stephenson, though no match for him, I would guess, in unarmed combat’;2 Stephenson, meanwhile, had friends in common with Fleming and probably knew him from before the war.
They all knew and liked each other. But what began as a friendly reunion evolved into something else. The three Britons had two objectives: first, to convince Donovan of the need for a centralized American intelligence agency; then, to persuade him he should run it.
Being a fresh voice and more senior to Fleming, Godfrey took the lead. Donovan’s attitude had not changed. He was transfixed by the same dilemma – politics or the military. But somehow Godfrey, one of the future models for Bond’s boss ‘M’, managed to frame the argument in a different way. We do not know how, only that by the end of this session Donovan had again come round to the idea.3 Next, they had to convince the White House.
Before travelling down to the capital, the two British visitors took a tour of Stephenson’s ‘highly mechanised eyrie in Rockefeller Center’, as Fleming remembered it.4 Godfrey was in awe. ‘How much I admire the wonderful set-up you have achieved in New York,’ he told Stephenson. ‘As the prototype of what such an organisation should be, I consider it beyond praise.’5 This was from a man who did not deal in hyperbole. Almost every visitor from London had a similar reaction, with one MI5 officer calling this office ‘amazingly good’ and Stephenson ‘first rate’.6
Walking just behind his boss on that tour of the office was Ian Fleming, sweeping up details as he went. One which stuck in his mind was the location of Stephenson’s clandestine operation just three floors below the Japanese consulate. In Fleming’s first novel, Casino Royale, published just over a decade later, James Bond is dispatched to the Rockefeller Center in New York with orders to kill a Japanese cipher clerk.
Fleming was no less intrigued by the man running this operation, later describing Stephenson as a hero of his, ‘one of the great secret agents of the last war’, a man with ‘a magnetic personality and the quality of making anyone ready to follow him to the ends of the earth’.7 He also remembered watching him mix what seemed to be ‘the most powerful martinis in America’.8 They were so powerful, and so good, that Ian Fleming jotted down Stephenson’s recipe: ‘Booth’s gin, high and dry, easy on the vermouth, shaken not stirred.’9
Meanwhile in Washington, the campaign for a new intelligence agency with Donovan in charge had escalated. Shortly before Fleming and Godfrey were shown round the Rockefeller Center, Roosevelt was handed a note from his Navy Secretary, Frank Knox, one of Donovan’s closest political allies, saying ‘frankly and privately, I am a little disappointed that the Administration is not making better use of Bill Donovan’s services. He has made such tremendous sacrifices and contributed in such an outstanding way, that it seems strange to me that some very important job is not assigned to him.’10 The president was then passed a cutting from the New York Herald Tribune in which Major George Fielding Eliot – a stalwart member of the Century Group – called for ‘a special intelligence service to act as co-ordinator, responsible directly to the President, acting with his authority’. It should have a budget of $500 million, he went on, to be spent on ‘propaganda, counter-espionage and sabotage – yes, sabotage’.11
