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.
