Agents of influence, p.24
Agents of Influence, page 24
Stephenson was decisive and had imagination, but above all he was a good administrator. His operation now covered the entirety of the thirty-fifth floor of the Rockefeller Center, and would soon expand into the floor above, but visitors and new recruits alike were struck by the efficiency of this office, and its energetic atmosphere, so hard to maintain in an operation of this size. Nowhere was this more pronounced than within the rumour factory.
‘Wounded Germans on the Russian front are being left to die, many commit suicide and others are killed by their comrades to spare them from slow death,’ the Newark Ledger assured its readers several days before Roosevelt’s Navy Day speech, one of many British ‘sibs’ then being fed to the American press. ‘Typhoid Epidemic Reported Raging Behind Nazi Lines’, the New York Post warned on the same day.2 Other ‘sibs’ described the Sicilian Mafia taking on the Fascists; the Germans running out of men; ersatz morphine causing thousands of deaths in the Germany army; Nazi generals spying on behalf of the Soviets or plotting to kill Hitler; desperate Gestapo purges; and, the pick of them all, the story of Italian troops in North Africa who were so terrified by the prospect of fighting the British that they had arranged to be seen by German psychologists.
In just one week in November 1941, twenty-one of these fake news stories appeared in an array of American publications from the New York Post and Boston Globe to the Chicago Times and the Christian Science Monitor. Others appeared regularly in the Herald Tribune, the New York Times and PM.3 British rumours that did not make it into newspapers went out over WRUL radio, or they were turned into whispers and spread among American dockers and stevedores. At the same time, Stephenson’s staff continued to run agents like Joseph Hirschberg inside interventionist pressure groups.
These were the central pillars of Stephenson’s operation: rumours and groups. Another was his collaboration with Bill Donovan. During the final few months of 1941 he had also developed a fourth and final element of his campaign, arguably more effective than any other.
By 1941, the American Legion was the nation’s leading association of military veterans. It had close to one million members and was staunchly isolationist. When polled shortly after the start of the war, almost two-thirds of its delegates said they ‘would take no sides’ in the conflict.4 Few had any objection to US manufacturers selling war materiel to Nazi Germany. The Legion was described in the New York Times as ‘one of the most influential organizations in the United States’ whose ‘endorsement of proposed measures or policies attracts a large following at once’.5 If the American Legion came out in support of a particular policy, there was a good chance that many middle-aged white Americans, who could be counted on to vote but who might evade the pollsters’ nets, were also likely to support it. Congress followed the pronouncements of the American Legion with interest.
In the days after Lindbergh’s speech in Des Moines, in September 1941, thousands of American Legionnaires descended on Milwaukee, Wisconsin, for their annual convention. The night before it began, America First held a rally in Milwaukee that was picketed by members of Fight For Freedom,6 who also managed to get inside the hall and heckle the speakers. One of those on stage was the ubiquitous Hamilton Fish, who was handed a note in the middle of his address by an elderly female protester labelling him a ‘fifth columnist’.7
Nothing about this protest was arrestingly unusual, or had the potential to change the way millions of Americans thought about the war. But elsewhere in Milwaukee that night an operation was under-way which might.
As Hamilton Fish struggled to make himself heard over the hecklers, British-backed pollsters were conducting a survey. They worked for Market Analysts, a private polling company run by a man called Sanford Griffith, who, since May of that year, had formally joined SOE and begun to work from Stephenson’s office in the Rockefeller Center.
The Market Analysts pollsters, paid for by the British, spent the night asking a cross-section of legionnaires whether they wanted their country to go to war. The next day, as thousands of veterans either took part in or watched the legion’s parade, described in the press as ‘a seemingly endless stream of colourful drum corps, strutting majorettes, gaily attired bands, and marching veterans’, witnessed by almost a million spectators,8 the pollsters carried on with their work. By the end of that day they had interviewed 779 legionnaires from a total of 38 states. They collated their data and passed it on to local representatives of Fight For Freedom, who then put it out in a press release the next day.
The results were astonishing. ‘Nearly three-fourths of those attending’, the release stated, including many ‘officials and delegates’, favoured ‘breaking diplomatic relations with Germany and Italy’. This would take the US dangerously close to war. The story was picked up by the two major news agencies, Associated Press and United Press, and relayed to newspapers throughout the country, including those in Milwaukee itself, where legionnaires now read that most of their fellow veterans appeared to be moving towards intervention.
The next day, the American Legion approved a controversial resolution, a complete reversal of its earlier position on the war: ‘Our present national objective is the defeat of Hitler and what he stands for’.9
‘Legion Routs Isolationists’ was part of a shocked front-page headline in the New York Times.10 A report in the Chicago Daily News attributed this turnaround to one thing: ‘the wishes of the rank and file’, which had been ‘borne out by a sampling poll’.11
As the last of the legionnaires left Milwaukee, an encrypted message went from Stephenson’s office in New York to SOE headquarters in London, confirming that they ‘had taken successful steps in connection with a vote taken at the National Convention of the American Legion’.12
What were these steps? Did the legionnaires genuinely want to go to war, or had their feelings been misrepresented? The story of another major convention targeted by Stephenson, less than two months later, gives a better sense of how these pollsters worked, and why their technique was so effective.
This was the annual convention of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), a vast alliance of trade unions that represented over five million American workers. In November 1941 the CIO delegates arrived in Detroit, Michigan, for their annual conclave. Similar to the American Legion, this organization was famously isolationist, and its leader, John L. Lewis, who loathed Roosevelt and had a stranglehold on the CIO, wanted to keep it that way.
Stephenson had other ideas. His efforts to turn the CIO away from isolationism were centred on a poll remarkably similar to the one that had been used in Milwaukee.
As the CIO delegates arrived in Detroit they were approached by pollsters wanting to know if they supported Roosevelt’s foreign policy. The pollsters claimed to be working on behalf of Fight For Freedom, but really they were employed by Market Analysts, which was run by the British. According to their ‘partial poll’, taken as delegates arrived, 92 per cent of their sample ‘favoured America’s entry into the war against Germany’.13 The results of the next day’s poll were also manically emphatic: 98 per cent of the CIO delegates believed ‘it more important that Hitler be defeated than that the United States stay out of the war’.14
Both results received national coverage. They were also featured heavily in local papers and newsletters seen by CIO delegates at the convention.15 This was crucial. Very soon after, on 18 November 1941, to some amazement, the CIO delegates passed a resolution giving their full support to Roosevelt’s ‘forthright foreign policy’.16 On the front-page of the New York Times this was described as a ‘routing’ of ‘the isolationist forces’.17
How did the British consistently get the results they wanted? They made sure the wording of each question steered the respondent towards particular answers. The order in which the questions were asked mattered, and so did the emphasis pollsters gave to each one, and even the clothes they wore. Interviewees will always respond to the social background of the interviewer. Market Analysts also took the time to test out their questions beforehand on sympathetic CIO delegates, and used their feedback to change the wording. But the key to their success was the speed with which they worked. In both Milwaukee and Detroit, the pollsters had the results of their partial polls published during the first forty-eight hours of the convention, when many delegates were still taking the temperature and working out their position on key issues. Timing was everything.
For any American reading about these two conventions in the closing months of 1941 the message was clear. America’s workers had come round to intervention, and so had its military veterans. Few could have guessed at the role played by the British.
The isolationist cause appeared to be on the retreat, and so was the group at the heart of it.
43
The decline and fall of the America First Committee began with Charles Lindbergh’s speech in Des Moines, but it accelerated later that month. The final crisis in its short history began on 23 September 1941, when a man called Prescott Dennett received a phone call, after which he put down the receiver, thought for a moment, and panicked.
Prescott Dennett was a senior publicist at the Washington-based agency Columbia News Service. Unknown to most of his clients, he was also the only employee at Columbia News Service. Before the war this one-man band had worked for several isolationist politicians, before being approached by an urbane, witty American of German origin called George Viereck. Author of the acclaimed horror novel The House of the Vampire, Viereck was also a Nazi agent reporting to Hans Thomsen. Soon Dennett was working for Viereck, fully aware that he was being paid by Berlin, and a vital cog in the Nazi congressional franking scheme.
Dennett would pass on material from his handler, Viereck, to the likes of George Hill, secretary to Hamilton Fish, and distribute thousands of reprints and pre-franked envelopes to isolationist groups around the country, including various chapters of America First. Their system was detailed and elaborate, which is why it had gone undetected for so long, but it was fallible.
Dennett panicked on the phone because the man on the other end of the line explained that he had been subpoenaed for possible misuse of pre-franked envelopes. The Justice Department’s propaganda squad was on its way to seize Dennett’s files. Right now. They would be at his office in a matter of hours. This would not have been a problem, but for the twenty bulging sacks of pre-franked envelopes sitting beside him in the room.
Several months earlier, a Grand Jury investigation had begun to look into the alleged misuse of the congressional frank, and earlier that day, 23 September 1941, it had produced its first indictment, of an Ohio attorney accused of working for the Nazis. Dennett was set to be next.
In a panic he contacted George Hill, who arranged for a government vehicle to come round to the office and remove the incriminating sacks. Several hours later, the truck arrived. It was loaded up, and drove off. Not long after, officials from the Justice Department walked through the door.
Dennett had escaped. At least he thought he had. The truck lumbered across the capital, but rather than go to the storeroom used by Hamilton Fish, as it was supposed to, it went to the congressman’s office. George Hill was out. His other secretary could not think what to do with these twenty sacks of pre-franked envelopes, and decided to keep eight in the office and send the others to the local chapter of America First.
Bill Stephenson was one of the first to hear about the arrival of these bags, because he had an agent inside this particular chapter of America First.1 Here was the breakthrough he had been dreaming of. At last, he had a thread clearly linking America First and the isolationists to Berlin. Stephenson called Hoover, and soon the FBI raided the America First premises, where they discovered the twelve bags of pre-franked envelopes.2
The weeks that followed saw the indictment of Viereck, the Nazi agent with an interest in vampires, who was later convicted for his failure to give a full account of his activities in the United States. Dennett was indicted on charges of sedition. Officials from America First were called to give evidence to the Grand Jury. A Washington Post reporter found members of the local America First chapter burning controversial papers in an alley behind their office late at night. Fish’s secretary, George Hill, appeared in court and denied everything, but evidence from the British Censorship station in Bermuda proved he had been lying, and he was convicted on two counts of perjury.
Hamilton Fish, meanwhile, argued he was the victim of ‘a smear campaign’ and initially refused to appear before the Grand Jury. Eventually he was subpoenaed and forced to testify.3 Although he was never found guilty of a crime, Fish’s reputation was tarnished and two years later he would lose his seat in Congress.
The full details of the Nazi congressional franking scheme in all its byzantine complexity did not emerge for years. But for now, in the eyes of the American people it seemed that the isolationists and America First were somehow in league with the Nazis. The criminal exposure of the congressional franking scheme was a final nail in the coffin of America First. The isolationist cause was on its last legs and staggering. Meanwhile the man who for so long had been its figurehead was turning his attention elsewhere.
In the wake of his Des Moines speech, Charles Lindbergh confessed to feeling ‘written out’ on the war.4 He was tired, and had begun to look for an escape. ‘This is not a life I enjoy,’ he told an audience of just 3,000 supporters at an America First rally on 3 October 1941 in Fort Wayne. ‘Speaking is not my vocation, and political life is not my ambition.’5
It was not exactly the public apology that so many needed to hear after Des Moines. But it contained at least a note of contrition. On the advice of the America First chairman, Lindbergh did not mention his earlier speech.
In his diary the next day he touched upon his plans to leave politics, make a new home for his family and return to the biological research he had begun to carry out before the war with the Nobel Prize-winning surgeon Alexis Carrel. Little known to his critics or many of his supporters, during the 1930s Lindbergh had invented a pioneering glass perfusion pump which could be used in heart surgery. Now he hoped to continue where he had left off.
By October 1941 Lindbergh was losing interest in the battle to keep the country out of the war, and so were some of the senior figures in America First. What had once been a tiny student protest group, so small it did not have a name, and had gone on to become an enormously popular and influential movement with grassroots support throughout the country, an organization that had faithfully channelled the Founding Fathers’ fear of foreign entanglements, had since morphed into a smaller and angrier group with an extremist edge. In the days after Lindbergh’s anti-Semitic speech and the escalation of the congressional franking scandal, America First had begun to attract a different type of member. Applications to join were now pouring in from white supremacists, Nazi sympathizers, supporters of the conservative radio priest Father Coughlin, members of the German Bund, the Ku Klux Klan and William Pelley’s Fascist Silver Shirts. On hearing Lindbergh’s speech in Des Moines, many of them urged the America First leadership to launch a public campaign against American Jews.
Senior figures at America First understood what had happened and were close to giving up, when they heard that the president had launched a contentious new bill.
On 9 October 1941 Roosevelt formally asked Congress to revise the Neutrality Acts, so that in future US merchant ships could be armed and enter combat zones delivering goods to countries taking part in the war. For many isolationists the Neutrality Acts were the symbolic and legislative embodiment of isolationism, and had played a vital part in keeping the country out of the war. Hearing that Roosevelt wanted to have them dramatically rewritten was an affront.
America First threw everything it had at this. Across the country, its remaining supporters handed out lists of congressmen who might vote in favour of the revisions, insisting they ‘must be deluged with mail’.6 In Congress itself, isolationists delivered a drudgery of speeches designed to drag out the debate. For his part, Lindbergh agreed to address one last America First rally.
On 30 October, just a few days after Roosevelt’s Navy Day speech, he took to the stage at Madison Square Garden in New York. The turn-out was good, but the atmosphere was somehow off.
Unknown to Lindbergh, in an attempt to disrupt the rally, Stephenson’s agents had come up with a cunning plan. They had produced thousands of fake duplicate tickets to the event and handed them out on the streets of Manhattan. They hoped that with two people fighting over each seat there would be chaos in the arena and Lindbergh might be forced to abandon his speech. But they had not anticipated the extent to which his support had withered away. There were so few genuine ticket-holders that those who arrived with fakes were shown to the thousands of empty seats. At some expense, the British had merely increased the size of the audience at an America First rally.
In spite of this, Lindbergh’s speech received little coverage, and the press was soon dominated instead by what happened the next day.
An ageing American warship on escort duty, the USS Reuben James, had been torpedoed by a German submarine and sunk, with 115 American sailors killed. This was the first time a German attack had led to the sinking of an American warship with significant loss of life. On hearing the news a young folk music star, Woody Guthrie, began a new song. ‘The Sinking of the Reuben James’ was a protest against the injustice of what had happened, a call for revenge. Unlike the attacks on the Robin Moor, the Greer or the Kearny, the sinking of the Reuben James seemed to pierce the public consciousness. It fuelled the desire for intervention.
