Agents of influence, p.18
Agents of Influence, page 18
Henry Hoke had stumbled upon Hans Thomsen’s congressional franking scheme, but he did not have the resources to investigate further. He passed on what he had found to the Postmaster General, US Naval Intelligence (ONI) and the FBI. He wrote articles about what he had found, gave talks, and even issued press releases telling the world that he had ‘declared war on German mail activities in this country’.6
Nobody seemed to care. The Postmaster General argued correctly that no laws had been broken, and the FBI and ONI felt there was nothing they could do. Hoke was starting to run out of ideas when one of the people he had met suggested he see a Canadian in New York who might be able to help.
Stephenson realized at once that Hoke’s investigation could, if he was lucky, uncover proof of a link between the American isolationists and Berlin. He offered to provide all the help he might need. Hoke agreed, and was soon working with members of Stephenson’s office.7
Their first challenge was to identify who was sending this mail. Hoke had collected a number of letters which he thought might be part of the Nazi franking scheme. All had been addressed automatically using a machine with a distinctive, light blue font. Stephenson had several typewriter specialists in his office, including the multi-talented Eric Maschwitz, and between them they discovered what kind of device was being used.
‘We found that the addressing had been done by an old-fashioned Elliott Addressing Machine which had been out of general use for more than twenty years,’ Hoke explained.8 Stephenson’s team also discovered that there were just three organizations in New York using this type of machine. One of these, suggestively, was the Steuben Society, a German cultural association with ties to the German embassy.
Either a British agent or Hoke himself went to the Steuben Society headquarters in New York to find out more. In there, they happened to see a notice inviting supporters of the society to a special meeting, at which they would be given copies of a recent speech by the isolationist Senator Wheeler. They would also be given envelopes with his congressional frank, which they were encouraged to use to send copies of his speech on to anyone they could think of.
This was a breakthrough. A US senator had allowed his frank to be used by a German organization with ties to the Nazis. In late May 1941 Hoke wrote an open letter to Wheeler, accusing him of working with the Nazis.9 Wheeler might have just ignored it. But in this case he had broken the law, as it was illegal for a member of Congress to use their franking privilege for the benefit of a group or association, such as the Steuben Society.
At last, the story attracted more coverage. Wheeler insisted he had done nothing wrong. Stephenson tried to fan the flames by supplying more details of the franking scheme to Fight For Freedom, where senior staff put out press releases designed to bait Wheeler. Details of this investigation even ended up at the White House. Fight for Freedom members urged the president to comment on the story.10
But Roosevelt refused, and after the Post Office Department fined the Steuben Society for illegally distributing franked mail the scandal lost momentum. Stephenson and Hoke had made a start, but they needed to dig deeper.
Hans Thomsen, German chargé d’affaires and architect of the Nazi congressional franking scheme, was concerned by what had happened. But he was not especially worried. It did not seem to hurt his propaganda activities. The announcements which came out of the White House several weeks later were different.
On 14 June 1941 Roosevelt ordered all German government assets to be frozen, and two days later he closed every German consulate in the United States, as well as the German Transocean News Service, the German Railway and Tourist Agencies, and the German Library of Information.
This was mainly in response to a recent incident at sea. Several weeks earlier, an American merchant ship, the SS Robin Moor, a low-slung, dumpy-looking freighter, had been on its way to Mozambique when it was stopped by a German submarine. The passengers and crew had been ordered onto lifeboats and the ship was torpedoed and sunk. Although this was not the ‘incident’ that the president had been hoping for, as there had been no loss of life and no US warships involved, Roosevelt would not let it go unpunished.
His closure of the German consulates and the asset freeze was a reaction as well to the recent arrest and deportation of several German undercover agents operating in the US, including two of Thomsen’s best propagandists, Manfred Zapp and Guenther Tonn, and the Abwehr agent Kurt Rieth. The first two were uncovered by the FBI, while the identity of the third had been revealed by Stephenson’s office.
This was starting to affect Thomsen’s work. Americans were more suspicious of him, his staff and his country, and much less willing to work with them than had been the case twelve months previously. Thomsen had fewer agents to call upon and it was harder to make payments. But just as the Nazi influence campaign was starting to stutter, the argument for staying out of the war received an unexpected boost.
Less than a week after the closure of the German consulates, on 22 June 1941, an avalanche of German tanks rumbled into the Soviet Union. They were soon taking territory almost as fast as they could drive. Early reports of Operation Barbarossa suggested a rout. In itself, this unexpected invasion of Russia did nothing to help the isolationist cause in the United States. But the anti-war movement was invigorated by the news that Roosevelt had come out in support of Stalin, as he did several days after the German invasion.
‘I should a hundredfold rather be enslaved by Nazi Hitler than by Red Stalin,’ Hamilton Fish thundered on the floor of the house,11 a feeling shared by many Americans.
The isolationist campaign was revitalized.
Until then even the interventionists had described the Soviet Union as an enemy in all but name. Russian financial assets in the US had long ago been frozen, and the Soviet and Nazi regimes were often depicted as two sides of the same totalitarian coin. Now the interventionists had to persuade the American people of the virtues of the Red Army. It had been hard enough trying to convince them that Britain was worth saving.
By the end of June 1941, the isolationists were on the front foot again. In the days after the invasion of Russia, Churchill was told that Moscow would probably fall within the next three months. Once Stalin was defeated, Hitler would turn to London. Meanwhile British losses in the Battle of the Atlantic were worse than ever. In that year alone they had lost 2.6 million tons of shipping. Even the most bullish Briton would concede that their armed forces stood no chance of defeating Hitler alone. ‘We shall lose,’ Churchill privately told an American journalist several weeks later, ‘unless you come in – and with all you have.’12
Events on the Eastern Front gave the campaign to bring America into the war a new urgency. For Stephenson and many others, Britain’s future was no longer being measured in years, but months. He had to go further, and risk more.
31
‘The American people,’ Stephenson wrote, soon after the German invasion of Russia, ‘are like an audience watching an exciting movie. Hitler is the cunning villain; England the brave but not too bright hero. The sympathy of the entire audience is with the hero but that’s about all. They do not see that they are called upon to do anything about it.’1 His job was to change that, to make them feel that this movie was real and it was taking place in their backyard.
In May of that year, J. Edgar Hoover, Director of the FBI, had come to Stephenson for help. The White House wanted the FBI to investigate a rumour that the Nazis might be planning a coup in Bolivia, but Latin America was beyond the FBI purview. So Hoover asked Stephenson to look into it on his behalf.
Roosevelt’s interest in this Bolivian coup was partly down to tungsten, a vital material in the production of various machine tools which was abundant in Bolivia. The president’s interest was also a reflection of his ‘good neighbor’ policy towards Latin America. Throughout his time in office Roosevelt had been friendly and protective towards Latin American countries like Bolivia, always looking to improve trading relations and diminish European influence. This policy had its roots in the Monroe Doctrine, developed in 1823 by President Monroe, which held that just as the US would remain aloof from European affairs, Europe must keep out of the Americas. Hitler seemed to have forgotten his side of this unspoken arrangement.
To investigate the rumoured coup, Stephenson sent one of his brightest young officers to Bolivia. This was Montgomery Hyde, who arrived in the Bolivian capital La Paz with just one contact, a British railway manager. Through him, Hyde met a Bolivian, never named, who agreed that he had heard rumours of this impending coup. But that was it. He had no leads. Indeed Hyde was unable to find anything to shed light on who was behind this plot, when and how it was going to happen, or if it even existed.
Aged just thirty-three, Hyde was a combustible blend of ambition, intellect and a bustling imagination. In peacetime he had been a barrister and would later become a prolific author and Conservative politician. As he threw himself around La Paz in search of clues, no doubt feeling the effects of the high altitude, a wild idea formed in his mind.
Hyde arranged to see his Bolivian contact again. He asked how this Nazi coup might play out. The two of them agreed that it would no doubt begin with a senior Bolivian diplomat in Germany, perhaps Major Elias Belmonte, the country’s military attaché in Berlin and a fervent pro-Nazi, sending plans for the overthrow of the Bolivian government to his fellow plotters in La Paz. He would probably send these plans to the German Legation in Bolivia, most likely in a sealed diplomatic bag.
‘Why not anticipate this development by fabricating the kind of letter Belmonte would be expected to write,’ Hyde wondered to himself, without pausing to consider the answer, ‘and give it the maximum publicity?’2
Excited by his idea, Hyde flew back to New York and presented it to his boss.
Those who worked for Stephenson sensed that he enjoyed big decisions, and had a ‘refusal to be either hurried or harried’.3 Nor was he afraid of risk. ‘He was quite ruthless when he came up against a situation where it was necessary to take very great measures,’ his deputy later said.4 This was one of them. Rather than being asked to sign off on a fake story about an imaginary British parachute raid, like the one at Berck-sur-Mer, a member of his staff wanted him to sanction a forgery that could easily finish his career as MI6 Head of Station in the US.
But if this forgery worked, in the sense that it was accepted as real and widely publicized, it might help to bring the United States closer to war. Most polls continued to show that the majority of Americans did not think their country should declare war on Nazi Germany. But if the question was adjusted to include German meddling in South America, the result was transformed. When a special Gallup survey asked in May 1941–‘If Brazil, Argentina, Chile, or any other Central or South American country is actually attacked by any European power, do you think the United States should fight to keep that European power out?’–81 per cent of those surveyed said yes. The American people felt differently towards Latin America, and had a more sensitive and, at times, proprietorial relationship with their southern neighbours.
The same was true of Roosevelt’s administration. Since the start of the war, in almost every meeting of the joint planning committee of US War, Navy and State Departments the first item on the agenda had concerned Latin America. Roosevelt had recently asked the military to draw up a plan for sending an expeditionary force south in the event of a Nazi-backed coup in a country like Bolivia.
Stephenson understood the possible effect of this story about a Nazi plot in Bolivia. The idea of Germans meddling in Latin America was offensive to most Americans, and there was even a chance it could lead to a nationwide call for war, as a similar story had helped to do just over twenty-four years ago.
In early 1917, the British intercepted and decoded a genuine cable from the German Foreign Secretary, Arthur Zimmermann, which had been sent to the German ambassador in Mexico. This telegram revealed the existence of a German plot to form an alliance with Mexico and Japan and attack the United States. The British passed this to the Americans, it was publicized and became known as the Zimmermann telegram.
Today this is seen as the catalyst to America’s entry into the First World War. More than any other incident, the Zimmermann telegram destroyed President Wilson’s resolve to stay out of the conflict.
The fake letter from Major Belmonte which Hyde had just proposed could have a similar effect. But was anyone in Stephenson’s office even capable of producing it? How would they choose the wording of this imaginary letter? Where would the paper come from? What typewriter to use? Who could fake the all-important signature?
Stephenson would soon find out. With German tanks arrowing deeper into Soviet territory, and a feeling taking hold in his office that time was starting to run out, he approved Hyde’s plan.
The forgers got to work. ‘First, I was able to obtain a genuine letter signed by Belmonte,’ Hyde wrote. This came from the British Censorship station in Bermuda, which also supplied an example of the type of official-looking letter a Bolivian diplomat might send, as well as the right paper. Next Hyde asked his Bolivian contact to write a draft of Belmonte’s letter, making sure to imbue the text with the right mixture of diplomatic pomposity, cunning and urgency.
It soon became clear that their greatest difficulty would be faking Belmonte’s typewriter and his signature. This was where Eric Maschwitz came in.
Hyde had worked with Maschwitz earlier in the war in a sub-section of Section D called Section D/L. Both had been involved in ‘Operation Letter Bags’, a scheme that fed fake anti-Nazi messages into genuine letters destined for Germany. The operation did not last long and achieved little, but by the end of it Maschwitz knew how to open and reseal a letter and had become expert in customizing typewriters. After poring over examples of Belmonte’s letters, Maschwitz worked out which brand of typewriter the Bolivian liked to use, before constructing ‘a suitable machine’.5
Everything was in place apart from the signature. Hyde had a go at faking it and so did Maschwitz, but neither man was particularly good at copying signatures. Luckily they knew someone who was: Hyde’s wife.
Dorothy Hyde also worked in Stephenson’s office, and with another member of staff, Betty Raymond, she ran the secretive ‘Room 99’ dedicated to forgeries and counterfeits. This was a vital element in the expanding British rumour factory. Nobody was allowed into Room 99 apart from Raymond, Hyde and Bill Stephenson himself.
Their speciality was faking signatures, but already Belmonte’s was proving tricky. ‘We practised it,’ Raymond remembered, ‘because you must practise, and it was a desperately difficult signature to do.’6 But no matter how many times they tried, it did not look right.
‘Until one day we found to our amazement she could do one half, and I could do the other.’7
Using their modified typewriter, Hyde and Maschwitz typed out the text of the message on paper purloined from Bermuda. The unsigned forgery was taken into the sanctuary of Room 99, which was quiet and understandably tense. There was only enough of the right paper to produce one fake letter. So Dorothy Hyde and Betty Raymond had to get their signature right first time.
Standing in Room 99 that day it was impossible to hear the merry din of the street below, of Manhattan on a sultry summer’s day. Everything about that airless space left you feeling detached from the world outside, from the office and from New York. Instead the two women focused on the sheet of paper before them. The entire operation pivoted on this moment.
‘You cannot hesitate on a signature,’ Raymond later said. ‘Otherwise you are undone. Because nobody pauses on their signature. You just do it. And if there’s the slightest hesitation, but the slightest – it is a forgery.’8
So they did it.
Everyone inspected the signature. It looked right. But Stephenson wanted to be sure. So he told Hyde to take this forgery to Ottawa and show it to several handwriting experts in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.
‘We think this is a forgery,’ Hyde told the unwitting Canadians, handing over what was in fact his, Maschwitz’s, Raymond’s, and his wife’s handiwork.9
The experts examined the document carefully, comparing the fake signature to genuine Belmonte specimens. They looked at the weight of the line, the looping curve of the letters, the speed with which it had apparently been written, before concluding that the fake was genuine.
The final precaution involved Hyde and Maschwitz disposing of their customized typewriter. Late one night in July 1941, the two men went for a walk over the Brooklyn Bridge, pausing at one point to remove the typewriter from a bag and hurl it into the East River. With a satisfying splosh, their work was done.
Now the spotlight fell upon Stephenson. He had to find a way to feed this fake letter into the public domain, and to make it believable. One option was to use the Herald Tribune. But there was another approach that might be even more effective. If he could devise a suitably good ‘paperclip’ to explain how this letter had come into his possession, he might be able to have it presented to the world by the Bolivian government itself.
Stephenson contacted Hoover at the FBI with dramatic news. As he explained, MI6 sources had revealed that a German courier called ‘Fritz’ would soon be arriving at Recife, Brazil, before heading to Bolivia. He had also heard that this courier was carrying documents relating to the imminent Nazi coup. Stephenson explained to Hoover that a British agent was going to intercept the Nazi courier and ‘possess himself of the documents’.10
The next instalment in this melodrama came several days later. Stephenson contacted Hoover again to say that amazingly his intrepid agent had found the courier and befriended his female secretary, who had revealed that her boss had on him ‘a sealed letter addressed to the German Minister in La Paz’.11 Perhaps he paused for effect at this point. Next, the German courier had flown to Buenos Aires, where another dashing British agent had shadowed him into a crowded lift and relieved ‘Fritz’ of his secret papers without his realizing. This sealed letter had since been sent securely to New York, and now Stephenson was willing to have it couriered over to Hoover. The FBI Director eagerly agreed.
