|
Now
the evidence is in, and it turns out that Flynn was right.
At the center of the web was the British Security Coordination
(BSC), the American arm of British intelligence, and it was
charged with coordinating a British fifth column in this country.
The
story of British intelligence operations in America during
the crucial prewar years is a saga of psychological warfare,
black propaganda, and Byzantine intrigue at the highest levels
of the U.S. government – a gripping tale more fantastic
than any fictional thriller. While William Stevenson's 1976
book, A
Man Called Intrepid: The Secret War, gave us a glimpse
of the truth, not until Desperate Deception has anyone
revealed the extent to which the US was dragooned into World
War II by agents of a foreign power. In piecing together the
story of how British spooks, working in tandem with FDR and
other American Anglophiles, sought to "involve the United
States in World War II and destroy isolationism," Thomas
Mahl encountered two major problems: first, the refusal of
the US and British governments to release the relevant documents,
which are still "classified" in the name of "national
security"; and second, "the fact that until recently,
the study of the intelligence history of World War II has
lacked respectability." As Mahl puts it, "The conventional
charge is that it smacks too much of conspiracy." The
author throws his hands up in despair: "How does the
historian avoid the charge that he is indulging in conspiracy
history when he explores the activities of a thousand people,
occupying two floors of Rockefeller Center, in their efforts
to involve the United States in a major war?"
Covert
intelligence operations are by their nature conspiratorial,
and, in any event, there is no need to answer this spurious
charge. Mahl's carefully documented chronicle of British interference
in American elections, orchestrated smear campaigns against
anti-interventionists, and the planting of "agents of
influence" in the beds of American politicians is not
just an "intelligence history" of how the United
States got into World War II: It is the true history of that
calamity.
The
story of the BSC is wrapped up in the person of its chief,
William Stephenson, known today by his New York cable address,
"Intrepid." In 1940, Stephenson, a millionaire businessman
with a wide variety of business and political connections,
was sent to the United States to head up the BSC, where he
took over the 38th floor of the International Building in
Rockefeller Center, which the Rockefellers had generously
donated. The British Press Service and the pro-war "Fight
for Freedom" group were in the same building, also rent-free.
One
BSC recruit, Bickham Sweet Escott, describes his interview:
"For security reasons," he was told, "I can't
tell you what sort of job it would be. All I can say is that
if you join us, you mustn't be afraid of forgery, and you
mustn't be afraid of murder." Ernest Cuneo, the lawyer
and Roosevelt administration insider who served as liaison
between BSC, the White House, and various US government agencies,
relates in a recently declassified memo how the BSC operated:
"It
ran espionage agents, tampered with the mails, tapped telephones,
smuggled propaganda into the country, disrupted public gatherings,
covertly subsidized newspapers, radios, and organizations,
perpetrated forgeries, . . . violated the aliens registration
act, shanghaied sailors numerous times, and possibly murdered
one or more persons in this country."
Cuneo's
papers reveal several of the most active interventionist organizations
as "formed and acquired" by Stephenson's underground
apparatus, including the Fight for Freedom Committee, which
advocated an immediate declaration of war against Germany
and Japan, and the "Friends of Democracy," an anti-isolationist
spy and "research" organization that specialized
in the art of the smear. The most prominent British front
was the Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies,
chaired by William Allen White. These fronts were instruments
of the Anglophile propaganda campaign in favor of a peacetime
draft, the Destroyer deal, and Lend-Lease. They were especially
key in blocking the isolationists in the Republican Party,
making certain that in the 1940 presidential elections the
American people would have a "choice" between two
interventionists.
Mahl
presents irrefutable evidence that Cuneo (codename: "Crusader")
wrote many of Walter Winchell's columns and had close ties
to Drew Pearson. The BSC also had its tentacles in Hollywood
and among the literary set: a key document names Dorothy Thompson;
journalist Edmond Taylor; movie mogul Alexander Korda; co-founder
and president of the Viking Press, Harold Guinzburg; playwright
and presidential speechwriter, Robert Sherwood; and mystery
writer Rex Stout as dedicated agents.
Documents
cited by Mahl reveal the names of top British agents in journalism,
including George Backer, publisher of the New York Post;
Helen Ogden Reid, the de facto publisher of the New York
Herald Tribune; Paul Patterson, publisher of the Baltimore
Sun; A.H. Sulzberger, president of the New York Times;
Walter Lippmann; Ralph Ingersoll, editor of the leftist tabloid
PM; and Ingersoll's boss, Chicago Sun publisher
Marshall Field. The Overseas News Agency, which reached millions
of readers, was a wholly owned subsidiary of the Brits. Besides
using its journalistic assets to browbeat the American people
into war, the BSC sought to undermine and, if possible, destroy
those remaining sources of news that could be neither bought
nor bullied. Public enemy number one, in their view, was Colonel
Robert R. McCormick, whose Chicago Tribune was the
flagship newspaper and voice of the Old Right. The BSC's Sandy
Griffith set Albert Parry of Chicago's Fight for Freedom chapter
on a "We Don't Read the Tribune" campaign
that culminated in a rally and bonfire of freshly printed
newspapers.
While
the public stance of the British and their fifth column was
"aid short of war," the BSC agitated for a peacetime
draft. A key aspect of their campaign was the manufacturing
of phony public opinion polls purporting to show overwhelming
popular support for conscription. Mahl unmasks the pollsters,
showing that surveys conducted by Gallup, Roper, and Market
Analysts "were all done under the influence of dedicated
interventionists and British intelligence agents." An
even nastier intrusion into the American political process
was the BSC operation against Representative Hamilton Fish
(R-NY), the feisty isolationist from FDR's home district.
Mahl documents the involvement in the election campaign of
BSC agents who masterminded newspaper ads linking Fish to
Hitler, Ribbentrop, and Fritz Kuhn of the German-American
Bund. In a memo after the 1940 election, agent Griffith maps
out a strategy of hectoring, harassment, and October surprises.
"There were other harsh suggestions made by agent Griffith,"
writes Mahl, "and most of them happened to Fish over
the next four years as his political career lurched from one
disaster to another."
Of
all the operations conducted by British intelligence in this
country, none had a more long-range effect than the turning
of Senator Arthur Vandenberg. The Michigan Republican was
a staunch isolationist in the late 1930's, when he co-sponsored
the resolution establishing the famous Nye Committee hearings
on the political influence of the munitions industry. Many
historians have remarked on the abruptness of his reversal
in the mid-40's, when he suddenly signed on to the whole panoply
of post-war globalist nostrums, including the U.N. and NATO.
How does one explain the defection of the man who was considered
the leader of the Senate Republicans and a possible GOP presidential
candidate in 1940? Internationalists have naturally attributed
it to Vandenberg's growing "maturity." Mahl puts
the Senator's conversion in a new light: "British intelligence
operations on Senator Arthur Vandenberg were based on a very
simple human assumption – those who are sleeping with a senator
are most likely to have his ear."
Mahl
documents Vandenberg's romantic attachments to three women
with strong ties to British intelligence. In 1940, all Washington
knew he was having an affair with Mitzi Sims, wife of British
attaché Harold Sims, a monied British aristocrat who
ran the code room at the embassy. The glamorous Mitzi, an
international jet-setter before the advent of jets, was just
the sort of cosmopolitan vamp to enamor the vainglorious Vandenberg,
who once said: "I had no youth. I went to work when I
was nine, and I never got a chance to enjoy myself until I
came to the Senate."
The
Senator had such a good time that, at one point, his wife
returned to their Grand Rapids home because the randy Vandenberg
had practically moved Mitzi into their Washington flat. Harold
Sims proved far more tolerant of his mate's infidelity. While
Washington tittered over the scandal, the Senator continued
his close friendship with the Simses until May 1940, when
Harold Sims died of a stroke. Vandenberg took charge of the
funeral arrangements, and shortly afterward Mitzi departed
for Montreal. Mitzi made a dramatic reappearance,
however, just as the crucial vote on the Lend-Lease Act was
coming before the Senate. Another femme fatale appeared on
the scene at this time. Betty Thorpe, the elegant spouse of
a worldly British diplomat, was sent to Washington from Buenos
Aires to catch the senator's eye. Mrs. Thorpe was no ordinary
housewife but the famous British Mata Hari known by her nom
d'espionage, "Cynthia." In her biography of Cynthia,
Cast No Shadow, Mary Lovell relates that both Vandenberg
and Senator Connally were targeted for seduction; while Connally
told Cynthia, "You're wasting your time, my dear,"
Vandenberg was easier prey.
Yet
another of Vandenberg's BSC romances was with Eveline Paterson,
a charming, statuesque blonde and a professional publicist
for the cause of Great Britain: Chicago Tribune Washington
bureau chief Walter Trohan, the FBI, and Drew Pearson all
had her correctly pegged as a British intelligence operative.
As an "agent of influence," Eveline's success can
be measured by the senator's 1946 vote for loans to Britain
and legislation forgiving British war debts. Mrs. Paterson's
scrapbook contains a number of Vandenberg items, among them
an article from the April 30, 1945, issue of Time,
which featured the senator's picture on the cover. The article
praised him in his new role as chief of the Republican internationalists.
The Office of Naval Intelligence also kept a file on Vandenberg's
dalliances with foreign agents. In his memoirs, Walter Trohan
relates how, at the 1948 Republican convention, where Vandenberg
was a major contender for the nomination, Joseph Pew, head
of the Sun Oil Company and a heavyweight contributor to party
coffers, somehow got his hands on a copy of the ONI file.
Pew threatened to take to the floor and read aloud the sordid
details of Vandenberg's betrayal.
Too
bad Pew was dissuaded from doing so. If only he had revealed
the lascivious details of Vandenberg's treason: Such a bombshell
might have blown the cover of the fifth columnists in our
midst, and exposed the truth about the internationalist Republicans.
If Pew had taken to the microphone, Wendell Willkie might
have remained in the obscurity from which he was plucked.
How
an unknown lawyer for J.P. Morgan & Co., without having
held any previous political office, and without even being
a registered Republican, could come to be the GOP presidential
nominee is a mystery pondered long and often by conservative
commentators over the years. In her classic book A
Choice, Not an Echo, Phyllis Schlafly attributes Willkie's
nomination to the decision of the "secret kingmakers"
and mentions the influential role played by Lord Lothian,
the British ambassador, and Thomas W. Lamont, the chief enforcer
of Morgan interests. With the New York Herald Tribune
as his house organ, and Wall Street putting heavy pressure
on the delegates, the dark horse Willkie stampeded the isolationist
conservatives before they knew what hit them. Mahl shows that
the "secret kingmakers" were nothing so vague as
the "Eastern Establishment," and he amasses considerable
evidence that British intelligence was directly involved.
Apart from re-electing FDR, the BSC was working to ensure
congressional approval of conscription and of a deal giving
the British a part of the American fleet. These were the "secret
kingmakers," or, as Schlafly calls them, the "hidden
persuaders," who reached into the bag of dirty tricks
– possibly including murder, as Mahl tantalizingly speculates
– all too familiar to students of intelligence history.
It
is not an unusual view that identifies the Roosevelt administration,
an Anglophilic elite, and the Rockefeller-Morgan financial
interests as the three groups whose agitation eventually dragged
a reluctant nation into World War II. Mahl's great contribution
is to identify the BSC as the puppet-master behind American
interventionism. What the author of this invaluable volume
calls "intelligence history" has not been considered
"respectable" precisely because it penetrates the
propagandistic pieties promulgated by the court historians
and exposes the ruthlessness and utter immorality
of ruling elites. This is not "intelligence history,"
but real history without illusions, if not without regrets.
This
article originally appeared in Chronicles
Magazine.
|
