Agents of influence, p.17
Agents of Influence, page 17
While Roosevelt was considering this article, one of his guests in the White House was Robert Sherwood, another Century Group linchpin who was also in touch with the British. Stephenson later described Sherwood as perhaps ‘the most persistent and effective’ of his ‘avenues of influence’ at the White House. Sherwood urged the president to put Donovan in charge of this new intelligence agency.12
Several days after he had left, a new guest in the White House was John Winant, the new US ambassador to Britain, the anglophile replacement for the isolationist Joe Kennedy. Later described as a Stephenson ‘confidant’, he too urged the president to have Donovan installed as the chief of this new agency.13
In a different part of the capital, Godfrey, Fleming and ‘Wild Bill’ himself were now working on a more detailed description of how their agency would look. Again this document was based largely on British expertise.
On 10 June 1941 their ‘Memorandum of Establishment of Service of Strategic Information’ arrived at the White House. Later that day Admiral Godfrey also arrived at the White House, where he was due to have dinner. His aim was to win over the president to the idea of this new agency. But to his dismay it turned out to be a large dinner and during the meal he did not get the chance to speak to Roosevelt. Afterwards everyone went to watch a film, about snake worship in Laos. Again Godfrey was separated from the president. It was beginning to feel like a wasted venture when Roosevelt ushered him into the Oval Office.
FLYWHEEL, the MI6 codename for Roosevelt, was in a playful mood that night. As soon as the two men were alone the president began to tease the elderly admiral about the decline of the British Empire and the shoddy state of British intelligence. The future model for ‘M’ was not expecting this, and nor was he used to it. But this was the president of the United States, so he nodded and grunted as best he could, and let FLYWHEEL do most of the talking. But in the momentary gaps, Godfrey jumped in to make his points. He praised Donovan and talked up the need for a centralized intelligence agency, but he was careful not to link the two.
If the president felt he was being pushed by the British into choosing Donovan he might do the opposite. Instead Godfrey suggested half-heartedly that John Winant could be the ideal man to run this agency, because he had such good judgement. Winant had spent the last week talking up Donovan’s virtues, as Godfrey knew. Also he had just begun his posting in London, as ambassador, so was unlikely to be called back so soon.
Roosevelt responded as Roosevelt generally did: he gave nothing away. Godfrey left the White House feeling ‘doubtful if he’d really made his point’.14
Another of Godfrey’s meals in the capital was with three government officials each passionately opposed to this new intelligence agency – the Director of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, the Director of the Office of Naval Intelligence, Captain Alan Kirk, and the man who continued to pose the greatest threat to Stephenson’s organization: Adolf Berle.
This State Department official had not forgotten about Stephenson and his covert operation in New York. It continued to annoy him. But for now Berle held back. It is certainly possible that over lunch in the capital Godfrey assuaged some of Berle’s fears concerning Stephenson. Perhaps the admiral reassured him that this undercover office was of little consequence. He certainly did not let on that he and Stephenson were then frantically manoeuvring to bring into existence a new American intelligence agency under their friend and ally Bill Donovan.
Eight days after Godfrey’s visit to the White House, shortly before 12.30pm on 18 June 1941, a scene played out in the Oval Office which Bill Stephenson must have imagined many times before. The president of the United States was sitting behind a broad wooden desk cluttered with objects. Bill Donovan was before him, either standing or sitting. After some polite conversation, Roosevelt formally asked him to set up and run a new centralized intelligence agency.
Everything was playing out as Stephenson had hoped, until one of the actors went off script.
‘I told the President that I did not want to do it,’ Donovan later confessed.
Had he got wind of a political position about to open up? Or heard from a friend in the military that they wanted him back?
The president urged Donovan to reconsider.
Until then, Donovan had been torn between wanting to be a soldier and a politician. But in the moments after turning down this job something changed. Perhaps he realized finally that running this new agency was a way of doing both: it would allow him to be a political soldier. After all, he would be in charge of American political warfare. Donovan agreed to take the job, but only on three conditions:15 other government departments must provide him with assistance; his funding should be kept secret; and he would report exclusively to the president.
Roosevelt accepted. He wrote on the cover sheet to Donovan’s memorandum, the one that had been drafted with the help of Stephenson, Fleming and Godfrey, ‘please set this up confidentially’.16
The Office of the Coordinator of Information, or COI, had been born. The new Coordinator’s first move? He went to see his friend in MI6.
‘Bill saw President today,’ Stephenson wrote to ‘C’ several hours later. ‘After long discussion wherein all points were agreed he accepted appointment.’ He added, ‘Bill accuses me of having “intrigued and driven” him into appointment. You can imagine how relieved I am after three months of battle and jockeying for position at Washington that “our man” is in a position of such importance to our efforts.’17
The epithet ‘our man’ is suggestive. It hints at the possibility that Donovan was now formally working for Stephenson and was on the books at MI6. Another cable to London confirms that he was not. Godfrey had suggested Churchill send a ‘personal message of exhortation’ to Donovan, in recognition of what had happened. This idea was shot down immediately. As one British official explained, if Churchill had written this message and it had leaked then Donovan would be accused of being a British agent, ‘instead of the splendid free-lance that he is’.18
‘Splendid free-lance’ is the more revealing phrase. Even if it had been possible for MI6 to recruit Donovan as an agent it was not in their best interests to do so. He could achieve more for them by remaining outside the formal aegis of MI6. The same is true of most agents of influence.
Although ‘Wild Bill’ described himself as ‘driven’ into this job by Stephenson, their relationship had not become lop-sided. It was a partnership. The historian Thomas Troy, who has studied the birth of the COI in forensic detail, concluded it was an ‘equal collaboration’.19 Between them, the two Bills had been instrumental in the birth of America’s first centralized intelligence agency, which would later evolve into the OSS and later the CIA. Given the sometimes fractious relationship between the CIA and MI6 in the decades ahead, it is remarkable to consider the role one played in the birth of the other. Today their staff might refer to each other occasionally as ‘cousins’ or ‘friends’. Perhaps ‘brothers’ is more apt.
Bill Donovan was now responsible for coordinating all American intelligence and for launching ‘offensive operations’.20 He had to build up his organization from scratch. Once that was done Stephenson might be able to activate the next part of his plan, taking him several moves closer to the checkmate he had foreseen in late 1940 that could finally bring the US into the war.
‘That night,’ Stephenson wrote, ‘I took five instead of the usual four hours sleep.’21
29
It had been a strange few weeks for Charles Lindbergh, rounded off by the moment he had a vision of his dead grandfather. The celebrity pilot’s world began to unravel when he heard from a friend that Roosevelt had publicly described Lindbergh’s analysis of the international situation as ‘dumb’, as he did on 25 April 1941, before comparing him to the defeatist Civil War politician Clement Vallandigham, leader of the Copperheads,1 a Unionist who had called for an end to the war because he thought it could not be won. The president had also said that Lindbergh, who had a commission in the US Army Air Corps, would not be called up on account of his political views.
Lindbergh was beside himself. He resigned his commission in protest, an act which had an immediate, liberating effect on him. Only by cutting himself off from the military did he understand the ways in which he had been held back. Having recently become a member of the America First Committee, after months of helping behind the scenes, he could now give as many speeches as he liked, and could be more candid with the American people about his fears for the future. ‘If we enter this war, it won’t be like the last,’ he wrote in his diary, after hearing about Roosevelt’s Copperhead jibe, ‘and God knows what will happen here before we finish it – race riots, revolution, destruction – America is not immune to any of these.’ He finished on a more dangerous note: ‘We are due for a bath of fire, possibly it would be the best thing that could happen to us.’2
Not long after, Lindbergh was walking through a field near Lake Michigan when he felt as if he had been transported to his childhood, with his grandfather next to him. ‘It all came back so clearly that it seemed he was there beside me – that if I turned my head he would be there, walking along with his paper bag for mushrooms in one hand, and a bunch of wildflowers in the other.’3
This vision of his grandfather also brought back memories of his father, the congressman. When Lindbergh gave a speech several days later to a ‘cheering, frenzied audience of 12,000 people’ in Minneapolis, where his father had been a representative, he spoke for the first time in public about Charles Lindbergh Senior. ‘His meetings were broken up,’ he told the audience, ‘his patriotism questioned, and the plates of his book were destroyed by government agents.’4 The parallels to his own plight were obvious. But his father had been right, Lindbergh added, indignation creeping into his voice: he had predicted that America’s involvement in the last war might drag the country into future wars. Lindbergh also told the crowd that his own predictions had been right, and again they applauded, both for Lindbergh and for the memory of his father.
Standing up on stage in his favourite blue suit, Lindbergh experienced a flash of relief. The audience’s reaction was all the more poignant because of where he was: Minneapolis, where his father had stood for governor of Minnesota shortly after the First World War and been rejected by the local electorate. ‘I think the greatest satisfaction I have had at any of these meetings,’ he wrote, ‘lay in the applause I received when I spoke of my father tonight. People are beginning to appreciate his vision and his courage.’5
When Lindbergh raced back from Europe in 1939 his only aim was to keep the United States out of the war. But since then, as he swam further out from the political shore, and as the situation around him continued to change, he had begun to feel a need to address other issues. The nation he had come home to seemed to be riddled with problems: the president was too strong, the media was strangely hostile to the isolationist cause, and elsewhere he felt that hidden forces were trying to sabotage his campaign and in other ways drag the country into the conflict. As this stewed in his mind a narrative formed that appeared to make sense of it all: everything that was going wrong in the US was down to ‘Jewish influence’.
Like most anti-Semites, Lindbergh had convinced himself, first, that a hidden network of wealthy and powerful Jews existed, and that its members were advancing a secret agenda. Once the idea had taken root, he was able to see ‘Jewish influence’ in almost anything that went wrong.
At a recent America First rally in Philadelphia, in late May 1941, Lindbergh noticed that by the end of the night many people were wiping sweat from their brows.6 ‘It is quite possible that the ventilators were turned off intentionally,’ he wrote, calling this ‘mostly Jewish inspired’.7
Less than a fortnight later, when a friend went to visit Lindbergh at home, he found the pilot with his son ‘cleaning and reassembling’ an arsenal of firearms, including several new rifles. ‘The floor was littered with them,’ Lindbergh admitted, ‘a real “5th column” reception.’8 The pilot explained that he had been teaching his son how to shoot.
Charles Lindbergh saw trouble ahead. Not from without but within. He felt the Jewish ‘problem’ could take America into a new ‘civil war’,9 which would climax in a nationwide pogrom against Jewish Americans. It might ‘not be pleasant to look forward to’, he conceded, but at the same time it would be ‘interesting’.10
In that one word, ‘interesting’, you can sense the strange and at times schizophrenic outlook starting to cloud his mind. He believed a civil war was coming, and in writing his diary he wanted future generations to know that he had predicted this and taken precautions, but on the question of whether he wanted this civil war to happen, knowing that it might lead to a pogrom, or if he was willing to light the touch-paper to get it started, he was more guarded. Lindbergh seems to have been gripped both by a fear of what was coming and a lurid fascination with how it might play out. He wanted this rupture and at the same time he was afraid of it. Very soon he would have to make up his mind.
30
Meanwhile the actual conspiracy against Charles Lindbergh and America First was gathering momentum. Pressure groups secretly under British control continued to picket America First meetings and distribute leaflets attacking Lindbergh. They also asked awkward questions in the press about the pilot’s links to Berlin. In the days before an America First rally at Madison Square Garden, on 23 May 1941, one of these groups, the ANL, had publicly urged Lindbergh to denounce Nazi Germany ‘with equal vigor to your denunciation of American participation in the war’.1 This he would not do.
At the rally itself, more than one hundred interventionist protesters showed up, although they had been forbidden to do so by the police. As America First supporters approached the venue they noticed these protesters, most of them women, stationed at street corners with police protection where they handed out what looked like flyers.
On closer inspection, these turned out to be thousands of copies of a derogatory advertisement about ‘ex-Col. Charles A. Lindbergh’ which had appeared in that day’s New York Times.2 The publication of that advertisement, the money to pay for the copies, the speed with which they had been produced, and the presence of so many interventionists: this was all the work of an energetic new pressure group which had begun to galvanize the interventionist movement. It was called Fight For Freedom, and it had not been infiltrated by British agents. That was because there was no need.
Only the month before, the Century Group – that secretive cabal of influential Americans including press baron Henry Luce, well-known commentator Major George Fielding Eliot, and White House speechwriter Robert Sherwood – had reinvented itself as Fight For Freedom. This was a larger, richer and supposedly more transparent version of the Century Group. Their long-term plan was to become the interventionist equivalent of America First. Where the isolationists had Lindbergh, they would use Wendell Willkie.
In their literature they presented themselves as a popular alliance of American interventionists, free from foreign influence or any ties to the administration. The reality was rather different.
By June 1941, Fight For Freedom officials in New York were on the phone to Roosevelt’s secretaries at the White House, Steve Early and ‘Pa’ Watson, ‘at least once or twice a day’.3 Most of Roosevelt’s off-the-record press conferences were read out to them over the phone to keep them au fait with the president’s thinking. The White House even suggested members of his administration to speak at Fight For Freedom rallies, and gave pointers on who to attack and when, and which line to take on vexatious political questions.
From the outset, Fight For Freedom was ‘an unofficial propaganda instrument’ for the White House.4 Its leaders were also hand-in-glove with the British. Stephenson’s office subsidized Fight For Freedom by paying to have its speeches copied and mailed out. They also used this new interventionist organization as an outlet for some of the stories pouring out of their rumour factory.
As they had done the summer before, during the campaign to get the public behind the transfer of fifty destroyers, the interventionists at Fight For Freedom, the British and the White House were pulling together. Before, they had been united by a desire to defeat Hitler. Now they were bound together by the realization that to take on Hitler they must defeat Lindbergh and America First. One of the ways to do that was by linking them to Berlin.
‘We feel there is German money and German direction behind the America First movement,’ one of Stephenson’s officers told a new agent at around this time. ‘If we can pin a Nazi contact or Nazi money on the isolationists, they will lose many of their followers. It might be the deciding factor in America’s entry in the war.’5
British agents were trying to find this link. Under Roosevelt’s direction, the FBI was also desperate to uncover it. Everyone in the interventionist camp was searching for proof of a connection, but so far they had found nothing. Then Bill Stephenson had a conversation which looked set to change all that.
Tall and good-looking, with wire-framed glasses clamped up against his face, Henry Hoke had spent most of his career in the direct mail advertising business. He knew everything worth knowing about mass mailings, and much that wasn’t. He could sense when a marketing mail-out felt wrong or was somehow fishy, even if he was not always able to articulate how.
The year before, Hoke had become intrigued by a series of mail-outs containing isolationist material from the Congressional Record. They had been sent in envelopes bearing a series of congressional franks. Hoke estimated that as many as 250,000 German-Americans were receiving these pre-franked letters. Although the congressmen whose signatures appeared on the envelopes represented constituencies from all over the country, most of the mail had been posted from New York. Hoke was convinced this was a Nazi propaganda ploy. But he had no proof.
