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It was a desperate time for England. Faced with the growing prospect of war with Germany in 1939, the British government mounted a massive secret political campaign in the United States to weaken the isolationists, bring America into World War II, and then influence U.S. war policy in England’s favor. Desperate Deception reveals Britain’s widespread use of front groups, agents, and collaborators and shows how its agents manipulated polling data and influenced election campaigns. This eye-opening book details a vast program that not only helped change the course of the war but also the face of American politics. It is the latest addition to Brassey’s Intelligence and National Security Library, a volume series editor Roy Godson calls “a milestone book on covert action and intelligence.”

The Author

Thomas E. Mahl teaches college history in Ohio. He holds a doctorate in diplomatic history from Kent State University.

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DESPERATE DECEPTION

British Covert Operations in the United States, 1939-44

‘Thomas E. Mahl

od Ny NG) y 4 ‘acta BRASSEY’S Washington * London

940.5486 M278d Mahl, Thomas E., 1943-

Desperate deception British covert c1998.

Copyright © 1998 by Brassey’s, Inc.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise—without permission in writing from the publisher.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Mahl, Thomas E., 1943— Desperate deception : British covert operations in the United States, 1939-44 / Thomas E. Mahl. — Ist ed. i Cte,

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 1-57488-080-2

1. World War, 1939-1945—Secret service—Great Britain. 2. World War, 1939-1945—Secret service—United States. I. Title. D810.87M254 1998 940.54’8641—dc21 97-19550

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Io Ben and Mary Ternes Mabl, my grandparents

Contents

Pasewand Dy Oy CrOdsOi) 10.54 71 mee x eels awe ) wanes REGCACES” o Fria tis Cay PA Eeirrlaas BAe OLR SLA I ATA e eee eis

IntroductioneA, Calculated Risk ...6 104.4 euede ys a I Organization, Methods, and Offspring ............. 2 PL RNC Aen eral, a uly he RS de om sk ne Sel ae eet 3 “Those Who Rendered Service of Particular Value” .. . 4 ches Veiee OL the PRORle oi awd vom aha devemsdla ase AeN 5 Gati2—LtyGCommanderCrinnn, 10 an 9 ean Dde ee 6 Destroying Coneressmaiy Bish ae) sens wei a oe iw o's i) PEL AUT IEG tayele N'Y tin ees Osh dm hordes ogy BB os 8 SEV Want Vike? eacatnn saccade Masa aint mw Ata eS 9 uisiccesser DerentiOn:ty dase isa of ha weds a0 0ee Glossary of Individuals and Organizations ................. NGI Daewoo g s peraawe we « AME OG ee del De eRe Rd ends My Marae olin Pern Lee were, ec eee Sea tek Fe tu ean i ate ake wits HER ered eam oss Sag eee TE AGOUG TROUT: & adie kcetotaV eben? lpiateuatnRn ars

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Foreword

Brassey’s Intelligence and National Security Library is intended to provide citizens, students, scholars, and national security experts with a select set of books that make a unique or significant contribution to understanding the world of intelligence.

The intelligence literature contains much discussion but few stud- ies of covert action—the secret influencing of events in other coun- tries without revealing one’s involvement. Much of the focus has been on sensational paramilitary activities, and most of this has been about failures. There has been little detailed study of other aspects of covert action.

Desperate Deception helps fill the gap. It is a very readable account of British covert action in the United States in the years just before and during World War II. Faced with the growing prospect of war with Germany, the British government mounted in 1939 a massive secret political campaign in the United States (including the use of front groups, agents, collaborators, manipulation of polling data, involve- ment in election campaigns, etc.) to weaken the isolationists, bring the United States into the war, and influence U.S. war policy in England’s favor. This campaign helped change not only the course of World War II but also the face of American politics in succeeding decades.

While bits and pieces of the story have been told before and some of the details of the British campaign are lost to history, this is probably the best-researched and best-documented account we are likely to see on this crucial period of Western history. It is also a well-written story

Vil

vill *¢¢ Desprratrer DECEPTION

that combines both journalistic and avademie skills. Desperate Deception is a milestone book on covert action and intelligence.

Roy Godson

General Editor

Brassey's Intelligence and National Security Library

Oe%

Preface

“What you’re looking for, what I’ve looked for, is the file with the whole story in it. Vhat file doesn’t exist,” retired CIA historian Thomas F. Troy told me when | began my research on this book. “The material you want has been scattered to the winds—a sentence here, a para- graph there. You'll have to hunt them out just as I’ve had to.” This wild scattering is only one of the problems that confront scholars who at- tempt to explore the covert operations of intelligence agencies as they indistinctly reveal themselves in the public events of diplomatic and domestic history.

As Yale historian Robin Winks has written, “There is, in fact, very little careful, solid research on the...intelligence community...even though intelligence history is an essential component of our times.” Intelligence is truly “the missing dimension,” not only of diplomatic history, but of the domestic history dealt with in this book. A conse- quence of this void has been elementary errors that appear in academic histories. One better-informed study notes: “The distinguished editor of a major volume of military diaries published in 1972 failed to realize that the references to ‘C’ and ‘C’s information’ referred to the head of the Secret Intelligence Service.”!

British historian Ronald Lewin pointed out in his essay “A Signal- Intelligence War” that strict official secrecy has caused “most of the significant volumes in the United Kingdom series of Official Histories of the Second World War [to be] fundamentally misleading, inad- equate and out-of-date.” Lewin points to the ruses used to camouflage the Normandy invasion which tied down the German [5th Army.

x @¢0 Desprrare DECEPTION

Vhese deceptions led to the deceptions in the official histories about the invaston, He asserts that most of the oftticial histories and war stud- tes published betore the mid- 1970s should be rewritten.”

What Lewin and others have written about the secrecy surrounding code-breaking and signals intelligence is even more relevant to this book's topte: the covert action and dirty tricks used to move the United States coward war and destroy isolationism as a respectable intellectual position.

Several research problems contront the intelligence research scholar. First. many of the particulars were never put on paper. Among his many tasks, lawyer Frnest Cuneo (code name CRUSADER) was hatson between British Security Coordination and several departments of the U.S. government. Here he is writing to Dick Ellis, who had been second-in-comuand tor British intelligence operations in the Western Henusphere during World War IL: “L saw Berle at State, Eddie Tamm, J. Fdgar and more often the Attorney General; on various other mat- ters Dave Niles at the White House and Ed Foley at the Treasury, but so tar as | know [there] wasn't a sentence recorded. | reported to Bill Dorevan and George Borden [Bowden], and never in writing.”

Even those within the intelligence agencies have sometimes lacked a clear understanding of how events proceeded; 1t sometimes appears that the insiders only advantage over the outsider has been the insider's knowledge that he did not know. Ina recently declassified 1968 book review ot Ladtslas Farago’s lhe Broken Seal: The Story of “Operation \ewen ” wd che Pearl Harber Disaster, CIA reviewer Edwin C. Fishel wrote of Pearl Harbor: “It is becoming increasingly clear that if we want a straight story...—and that is surely a reasonable want—it is go- ig to have to be produced by professionals. This is true not only be- cause ot the unlikelthood of getting an adequate ‘outside’ study but also because a really complete study involves information still classified. Much of it does not even exist on paper.”*

Much ot that intermatroen which is on paper and stored in a rational, readily retrievable way remains classified. In Great Britain the Official Secrets Act was first passed in 1911 under fear of Irish and German subversion; it Was ughtened as recently as the 1980s and acts as a pow- ertul inhibition against research. Vhe British government has an arbi- trary night co withhold any document it wishes, the “thirty-vear rule” tor release notwithstanding. Hartord Montgomery Hyde worked for

Preface *** «xi

British intelligence in New York and later wrote about its personnel and operations. After his death in 1989 the British government closed many of his papers at Churchill College, Cambridge, until 2041. For- tunately several scholars, Canadian historian David Stafford and Timothy Naftali of Harvard being two, had scrutinized these papers before the veil fell.

In the United States the Freedom of Information Act would appear on the surface to be a solution to the problem of hidden documents, but in reality it is of limited usefulness. Firstly, there is what author James Bamford has called “quite likely the most secret agreement ever entered into by the English-speaking world,” the 1947 UKUSA agree- ment between the United States and Britain prohibiting the United States from releasing any document that the British will not allow re- leased.’ In effect the Official Secrets Act operates in the United States for some of the embarrassing information covered by this book.

Secondly, since a researcher must know exactly what he is looking for, he is often asked the impossible: to supply the very information for which he ts looking. Thirdly, using the Freedom of Information Act is very time-consuming. Begging too large a workload, government agencies seldom release material in timely enough fashion for a re- searcher to keep on a reasonable writing schedule. Fourthly, even after half a century the authorities often plead that the release of the re- quested information threatens national security.

Probably even more damaging than these research problems is the fact that until recently, the study of the intelligence history of World War II has lacked respectability. The conventional charge ts that it smacks too much of conspiracy—a word with a very unprofessional ring among American historians. How does the historian avoid the charge that he is indulging in conspiracy history when he explores the activi- ties of a thousand people, occupying two floors of Rockefeller Center, in their efforts to involve the United States in a major ware What should we properly call the rigging of a public opinion poll, the plant- ing of a lover, or a fraudulent letter by an intelligence agency in order to gain information or influence policy?

Graduate students are warned against the “furtive fallacy.” In fact, the only book similar to this one that was written by a respected his- torian—Charles Beard—and published by a respected publisher was criticized by the reviewers for this very reason and became an object

vibe) DD esper ary Decree tron

lesson used to team young historians. Beard’s President Roosevelt and ie Canon of wee Hie 1947 was cited tor being “deeply flawed by the furtive nae wn Its “a that Franklin Roosevelt and his cromes se- erety mantpulated American policy by a series of subtle and sordid trteks co bring their nation into war... Phe errors and distortions in Beard’s} aneerpretation are rather the result of his erroneous assumptions. ..in the way he believed history happened.”¢

Vheve is. ui fact, tar more information available than one might ex- pees, though wos often difticult to find because historians have only recently begun co build the base of recognizable names, theories, and verttiable tacts that smooths the path tor new research. Although the ieluves ot the tatelligence agencies may be officially closed, or their tiles “lose” much tatormation is avatlable to those who will persevere.

\lso. although intelligence agencies have strict procedures that theoretically prevent information trom reaching outstders, bureaucra- eres ave populated by human beings. Human beings make mistakes. Clerks mustile documents: weeders lick pertect knowledge, get sick, let thet attention wander. One department weeds what another does not. (gents acquire the telltale baggage of lite—spouses, children, mquisi- tive relatives, lovers, ex-spouses. Fy-agents collect details on those with when they worked as a hobby: they dic, and their children give the musty papers away. Diaries ave kept and memos made and misplaced. Protessional busy bodtes collect vast troves of intormaton. All of these tangential sources have supplied information for this book.

Last. but perhaps paramount, governments leak, sometimes in- ddvertenth, many times tatentionally. \ substantial relevant leak took pace more than three decades age. Strangely, these stunning revela- tions went unexplored by “outside” journalists and historians.

tlow and why Hartord Montgomery Elyvde’s The Quiet Camidian wublushed as Aoerr Sods in the United States) came to be published is not tally clear and remains a subject of controversy. What is indisput- able is that the book, particularly the British edition, was much too candid and thatmany inthe imtelligence conmmunity breathed a sigh of rehot when ne one tollowed up. Although the book sold well, no well- cueulated American aeadenne journal mentioned it, nor did any re- spectable journalist or historian pursue its fertile leads.

Unkwown to the mnocent in the press and academia, there was a

aunulmeus uproar behind the scenes. latelligence professionals in

Preface °** xiti

both Ameres and Britain were “astounded.” A classified CIA review sald, “The publicatien of this study is shocking....Exactly what British intelligence was dome in the United States...was closely held in Wash- ington, and very jitrle had hitherto been printed about it....One may suppose that Nir. Hyde's account...is relatively accurate, but the wis- dom of placing it on the public record is extremely questionable.”

After reading this, A. MM. “Bill” Ross-Smith, a World War II British agent in the Urited States. wrote me: “I am most interested in CIA review on OC......ast paragraph classes QC as relatively accurate—l agree with hina: it should not have been published....” Earlier Ross- Smith wrote that he was “astounded that he [Hyde] revealed Bellmonte Letver and LATA. operations at all.”* Hyde's discussion of the “Bell- monte” and “LATS.” operations revealed the success British intelli- gence had with phony documents it created. Along with a number of other relevant iterns these two operations are explained in the Glossary of Individuals and Organizations at the back of this book.

Other major sourees of information on the organization and opera- tion of British mtelligence during this period are the papers of the head of the OSS, Wilharns J. Donovan, at the U.S. Military History Insutute, Carlisle Barracks, Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and the Ernest Cuneo Papers at Franklin 1). Roosevelt Library, Hyde Park, New York.

J would Jike to extend my appreciation to Dr. Lawrence S. Kaplan for his patience and timely advice. Dr. Frank L. Byrne, Dr. John Jameson, Dr. Jarnes Best, and Dr. Allan C. Dooley also read the manu- script and made useful comments and suggestions. I profited greatly from conversations with fr. Nicholas J. Cull and from reading his doc- tora! dissertation, which he graciously supplied me. Dr. Timothy Naftali shared with me his insights into the operations of British intel- ligence and several pages of valuable notes. Dr. Francis MacDonnell was similarly generous with a prepublication copy of an article. Mary S. Lovell was more than generous with her insights and notes used for the hook Cast No Shadow. V he late A. M. “Bill” Ross-Smith saved me much wasted effort and gave me valuable insights into the operations of Brit- ish Security Coordination. “Thomas F. Troy gave me valuable help in starting my research, as did Walter Trohan and Edmond ‘Taylor.

Dan and Steve Farrow and Richard Henson were helpful in allowing me te sce documents from the Francis [enson Papers held by the fam- ily. Peter Griffith answered my questions and gave me valuable leads

xiv ¢¢¢) Drsprrare Decrperion

on the activities of his father, Sandy Griffith. Peter's sister Brenda MeCovey generously shared not only her memories but a number of photographs from the family album.*

Phere were a multitude of librarians and archivists without whose help this book could not have been written. Foremost among them was Naner A. Young, who presides over the Fight for Freedom Papers at Princeton.’ Mary K. Knill at the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library was very helptul with my requests for files trom the Drew Pearson Papers, as were Ronald M. Bulatott and Carol A. Leadenham at the Hoover Institution. Others who deserve mention: Rebecea Campbell Cape, at the Lilly Library, Indiana University: Vheresa Salazar at the University of Arwona: Matthew Gilmore of the Washington, D.C., Public Li- brary; Harold L. Miller ot the State Historical Society of Wisconsin; Vhomas Featherstone of the Walter Reuther Library, Wayne State University: George F. Henderson of the Queen’s University Archives, Kingston, Canada; John Taylor of the National Archives: Nancy R. Bartlett of the Bently Historical Library, University of Michigan; Carolyn A. Davis ot the George Arents Research Library at Syracuse Uiuaversity: Barbara R. Daily ot the Baker Library, Harvard University; Bernard ®. Crretal af tie Busler Library, Columbia University; William Ro Massa, Jr. and Judith Ann Schiff of Yale University Li- braty: Nanev Fb. Metger of the Penrose Library, University of Denver; Cora F. Pederson of the Herbert Hoover Library: Raymond Teichman and Nanev Snedeker of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library: Dr. Rich- avd J. Sommers at the US. Military History Institute, Carlisle Bar- racks, and the statt of the reference department of the Elyria Public Library.

No lst ot acknowledgments would be complete without mention of ov newhbers John and Svlvia McKenna. who valiantly read early drates of this book. Pheir suggestions and the wonderful editing job by led Johnson account tor whatever clarity is to be found in my prose.

“Loutse G. Parry shared her memories of Fight for Freedom and the activities mt tet husband, bert Parry. Crited States Congressman Sherrod Brown and his stift helped me gain access to the Dies Committee files.

‘Danean Strart, OMG. the SOF adviser at the Foreign and Commonwealth, panenth helped me trace cover svaibels and operations from the SOE files.

INTRODUCTION

eee

A Calculated Risk

I went up to father’s [Winston’s] bedroom....

“Sit down, dear boy....I think I see my way through.” He re- sumed his shaving. I was astonished, and said: “Do you mean that we can avoid defeat?”—-which seemed credible—“or beat the bastards?”—which seemed incredible.

He...swung around, and said:—“Of course | mean we can beat them.”

Me: “Well, Pm all for it, but I don’t see how you can do it.”

By this tme he had dried and sponged his face and turning round to me said with great intensity:—“I shall drag the United States in.”

—Randolph Churchill!

This is the story of the covert operations mounted by British intel- ligence to involve the United States in World War IL and destroy iso- lationism. ‘These operations profoundly changed America forever, helping it become the global power we see today—a power whose foreign policy leaders were freed to make, after the war, a multitude of global commitments unhampered by any significant isolationist opposition.

2 ee¢ DESPERATE DECEPTION

Little information on these operations has hitherto found its way into standard history texts. As recently as the fall 1995 issue of Diplo- matic History, prominent historian Justice Doenecke could write that “a full-scale study of secret British operations in the United States is much needed....”2 Without a fuller understanding of British intelli- gence operations in the United States, there is little chance of under- standing the political behavior of the world’s greatest power during those crucial years when it emerged to dominate the globe.

That these operations are little known or publicly debated is a mark of their success. Though covert operations often produce spec- tacular public results, one of their essential qualities is that the origins of events remain secret—that the historical credit or blame falls on the innocent, on citizens acting independently, or even better, on mere chance. The very fact that a covert operation is known to have been run by an intelligence agency marks it as a significant failure. Covert operations thus present conundrums for a republic that are not easily solved.

How can decisions be made about the efficiency of tactics about which even those thought well educated and informed are ignorant? In small part, this history of Britain’s effort to drag the United States into World War II is a contribution to the discussion over the usefulness of covert operations—an exchange presently unbalanced by the prepon- derance of examples of operations blown and bungled.

To understand British intelligence operations in the United States during the war it is necessary to review briefly the situation in which Britain, with her worldwide commitments and inadequate resources, found herself as World War I approached. Britain and France had been able to win World War I only by the intervention of the United States. Two decades later their prospects appeared grim. Germany on the eve of World War II had a population of 80 million with a workforce of 41 million; Great Britain had a population of 46 million with less than half Germany’s workforce. Germany’s total income at market prices had been £7,260 million in 1938, the last full year of peace, while Britain’s had been £5,242 million. More ominously, the Germans had spent five times what Britain had spent on armaments— £1,710 million versus £358 million. While rearmament and public works had given Germany full employment by late 1936, Britain still had 1.3 million unemployed when war came in September 1939.3

A Calculated Risk *** 3

Britain simply did not have the money for the three-year war her strategic planners envisioned. This had gradually become more and more apparent since 1936, when the British Admiralty had proposed a building program to meet the potential dangers from Germany, Italy, and Japan. The cabinet flatly responded that this lay “beyond the bounds of financial possibility.”4

The need for dollars, a hard currency, was the problem; earning them was difficult. Hancock and Gowing have written that in 1939 “and for some years past a net deficit on the international balance of payments had announced that the nation, even in advance of the war, was already beginning the process of overseas disinvestment.”°

Not only were the British failing to generate net trade dollars, they could not borrow dollars from the United States. The Johnson Act of 1934 stopped American citizens from lending dollars to any govern- ment in default on its debts to the United States. So the prospects for financial help from the United States appeared just as grim as the pros- pects for war.

The attitude of the American population was even more worrisome. Most Americans seemed determined to stay out of any European con- flict. They had, in large measure, been profoundly disillusioned by both the consequences of World War I and the devious way they had come to participate in it. The public’s disillusionment had started very quickly with John Maynard Keynes's erratically brilliant attack on the Versailles Peace Treaty, The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919). Over the next twenty years it had been followed by a whole series of books, many from respected authors and publishers, exposing how deft British propaganda and clever British agents such as Sir William Wiseman had maneuvered the United States into the Great War.

Adding to this in the mid-1930s came the startling revelations of the Senate’s Nye Committee linking banks and munitions makers to American entry into the World War. From these disclosures sprang a raft of neutrality laws. The Neutrality Act of 1935 stopped the ship- ment of arms to all belligerents whenever the president officially de- clared a state of war. The Neutrality Act of February 1936, though in many ways similar to the 1935 law, forbade loans and credits to the warring parties. In May 1937, Congress made permanent the principal provisions of the above acts and, in addition, forbade travel by Ameri- cans on belligerent ships.

4 eee DESPERATE DECEPTION

Supporting the resolve to stay out of any European conflict were a number of active groups, some motivated by pacifism, others by na- tionalistic isolationism. Most Americans, however, were not pacifists— they simply wanted to stay out of another European conflict.

As the British once again faced the looming threat of war, in the summer and fall of 1939, there was very little likelihood of defeating Germany without the help of the United States. It is the contention of this book that with the use of its intelligence agents and influential members of the American policy elite who made up various “front groups,” the British expected to be able to involve the United States in the war. This was a calculated risk, to be sure—but entirely rational.

There had been encouraging signs of cooperation from President Franklin Roosevelt. One was his “Quarantine Speech,” of October 5, 1937, in Chicago, denouncing aggressor nations and calling for collec- tive action to maintain order. John Buchan, Lord Tweedsmuir, the gov- ernor-general of Canada, who was intimately associated with the British intelligence services and covert propaganda, wrote that FDR’s speech “was the culmination of a long conspiracy between us. (This must be kept secret!)”6

But FDR’s pronouncement at Chicago, whether “trial balloon” or prod for others to take action, was met by strong public protest. Roosevelt had characteristically backpedaled under the criticism. Less public indications of FDR’s pro-British sentiments include the military talks to which he agreed in a December 16, 1937, meeting with the British ambassador, Sir Ronald Lindsay.

In the summer of 1939 large crowds enthusiastically welcomed the new British king, George VI, to the United States for a four-day visit to New York and Washington. On June 11, a Sunday, the president enter- tained King George and Queen Elizabeth at a grand public relations picnic at Hyde Park, the Roosevelt home on the Hudson River, north of New York City. There for all the American public to see in a profu- sion of newspaper photographs was flesh-and-blood royalty: not pompous aristocrats, but friendly, informal people who ate the pres- ident’s hot dogs and drank his beer—just like regular folks.

Besides cultivating goodwill with the great American masses, the visit gave the opportunity for two important conversations between George VI and President Roosevelt exploring the help Britain might expect from the United States in the looming war. Both talks contained

A Calculated Risk #*° 5

hints of the Destroyer Deal consummated more than a year later. Ac- cording to historian Benjamin Rhodes, the first of these dialogues was on the morning of June 11 at Hyde Park in the presence of Canadian Prime Minister Mackenzie King.

Roosevelt suggested that the United States could help patrol the At- lantic if the British would make Halifax, Nova Scotia, available to the U.S. Navy. Mackenzie King wrote in his diary that the mood of the conversation “was to the effect that every possible assistance short of actual participation in war could be given.”’

The next afternoon, in a private conversation the president told the king the United States had an interest in acquiring access to British bases in ‘Trinidad and Bermuda. The president indicated that given these bases the United States could patrol the Atlantic for a thousand miles out to sea. Throughout these conversations the president’s atti- tude was warlike. He said that U-boats seen would be sunk and that if the Nazis bombed London, the United States “would come in.”®

Roosevelt’s heart was in the right place, but evidence soon accumu- lated that these bellicose words had only modest practical significance; the president was not even able to push changes in the neutrality law out of the obstinate and unpredictable Senate Foreign Relations Com- mittee. Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain wrote to the Canadian governor-general that the U.S. Congress was “incorrigible.” He con- tinued, “Their behavior over the Neutrality Legislation is enough to make one weep...these pig-headed and self-righteous nobodies.””

The president favored the British, but FDR was by nature both cau- tious in the face of public opinion and a procrastinator. As a result, he would have to be prodded and cajoled into action.

There were other potential British allies on the American scene. These were the people sociologist C. Wright Mills later identified in his book The Power Elite (1956). The United States, wrote Mills, was controlled not by the mass of its citizens as described by democratic theory, but by a wealthy Anglo-Saxon Protestant elite from Ivy League schools. In a flurry of caustic reviews, critics, often Cold War liberals, heatedly denied that there was such an elite.'° That debate now seems over, as Douglas Little noted in a recent review article in Diplomatic History: “Far from rejecting the idea of a power elite...{the books under review] celebrate its short lived ‘Periclean Age’ during the quarter century after 1945.”!! In slight contradiction to Douglas

6 °¢¢ DESPERATE DECEPTION

Little, this book will show that this elite existed and was in a position of pivotal influence at least as early as 1939 and probably much earlier.

The British had not displayed any similar doubts about the existence of an American “power elite,” certainly not during World War I. There is substantial testimony that the views of Lord Robert Cecil, expressed to his cabinet colleagues in 1917, remained the view of the British rul- ing class for much of the next three decades. Cecil wrote that “though the American people are very largely foreign, both in origin and in modes of thought, their rulers are almost exclusively Anglo-Saxons, and share our political ideals.”

Most of the members of this establishment were middle- or upper- class Protestants of Northern European, often English, descent. They were college-educated professional men often from Ivy League col- leges or prestigious private schools at a tme when fewer than two in every hundred Americans held a college degree even from the most lowly normal school.!?

These people were concentrated in the Northeast, though there were enough of them scattered across the country that with a con- certed effort, their voices could be projected to seem to be the will of the country. Politically, they came from either party, the Democrats among them tending to liberalism of the Woodrow Wilson, League of Nations variety, the Republicans to various degrees of conservatism.

Many in this “power elite” were practitioners of the law, particularly international law. There was also a considerable number of academics, and a number of bankers and clerics. These people were oriented to- ward Europe and a stable international order; they were largely pros- perous and respected. If there were to be any changes, they wished them to be predictable and orderly and largely controlled by people they respected and felt comfortable with—the British—or by them- selves. The policy makers of this establishment were generally white males, though there were occasionally women, included either because they were in positions of power or for appearances—Mrs. Ogden Reid and Irita Van Doren were in the former category, Mrs. Wendell Willkie and Mrs. Calvin Coolidge in the latter.

This Anglo-Saxon East Coast establishment not only shared England's political ideals but literally loved England and English cul-

ture. A surprisingly large number had gone to school in or lived in

A Calculated Risk °°* 7

England. A number divided their time between homes in Great Britain and the United States. Despite their pro-British bias, these Anglo- philes were able to represent themselves as loyal, independent, dis- interested Americans at the same time that German-Americans or Italian-Americans were easily belittled as biased “foreigners.” This im- age of objectivity was a gross distortion of the facts; for example, the Anglophiles in the British intelligence front group Fight for Freedom were willing tools of British intelligence.

Ernest Cuneo was attorney to two columnists who worked closely with British intelligence—Walter Winchell and Drew Pearson. He was also liaison between British intelligence, the White House, the FBI, the Treasury, and OSS. In January 1988, in a five-page single-spaced letter to H. Montgomery Hyde, Cuneo wrote: “...as far as the British tricking the U.S. into war, FDR was at war with Hitler long before Chamberlain was forced to declare it. | was eyewitness and indeed, wrote Winchell’s stuff on it (volunteer). Of course the British were try- ing to push the U.S. into war. If that be so, we were indeed a pushover. It reminds me of that Chaucerian line, “He fell upon her and would have raped her—but for her ready acquiescence!”!4

I have organized my discussion of this book’s complex subject as follows.

Chapter 1 describes British Security Coordination (BSC), the Brit- ish intelligence organization run by Sir William Stephenson—‘“In- trepid”—and identifies several key personnel. This chapter also describes how and why “Intrepid” had President Roosevelt create the Coordinator of Information—later the OSS—despite the strong ob- jections of the FBI and military intelligence.

Chapter 2 examines the origins and operations of several British in- telligence front groups, among them Fight for Freedom, Friends of Democracy, France Forever, and the American Irish Defense Associa- tion. This chapter also describes how these fronts worked with the White House to build support for the president’s dynamic interven- tionist policies.

Chapter 3 discusses a number of influential Americans who aided British intelligence efforts. Among those mentioned in the British documents, and in this chapter, are prominent newspaper columnists of the day Walter Lippmann, Drew Pearson, and Walter Winchell, presidential speechwriter Robert Sherwood; and the heads of the Nez

8 eee J)ESPERATE DECEPTION

York Post. PM. the New York Herald Tribune, the Baltimore Sun, and the New York Times.

Chapter 4 covers the influence of British intelligence on World War II public opinion polls. This influence ranged trom BSC’s penetration of Gallup to the rigged polls done by BSC intelligence agent Santord Griffith that were used to influence Congress.

Chapter 5 documents the activities of British intelligence agent Sanford Griffith as he created front organizations, rigged public opin- ion polls. organized election opposition to the isolationist Republican congressman Hamilton Fish, and worked on the British intelligence effort to convict German propagandist George Sylvester Viereck in federal court.

Chapter 6 examines the extensive efforts of British intelligence and President Roosevelt to rid the Congress of Hamilton Fish.

Chapter 7 chronicles the switch from isolationism to international- ism by Senator Arthur Vandenberg and relates that change to three female British lobbvists who insinuated themselves with hun, including Briush intelligence’s most famous female agent, “Cynthia.”

Chapter 8 reexamines an old idea in the light of new evidence. It details how the Republicans, in the most bizarre convention of the twentieth century. forsook their isolationist front-runners-— latt, Dewey. and Vandenberg—in order to nominate a longtime Democrat, Wendell Willkie. It documents the work of British intelligence agents (subagents) in getting Willkie the nomination: Willkie’s trip to En- gland at the request of BSC head William Stephenson; Willkie’s work for the British intelligence front Fight for Freedom: his closeness to President Franklin Roosevelt: and his part in ridding the Congress of Hamilton Fish.

Through these ettorts. British intelligence, as an instrument of Brit- ish foreign policy. finally prevailed. The prewar isolationists were driven trom their places of power and their philosophy lost respeetabil- ity. Hitlerism was destroyed.

CHAPTER 1

Organization, Methods, and Offspring

British Security Coordination (BSC) was a wide-ranging, full-service, offensive intelligence agency that for its own purposes begot two American agencies in its own image and likeness. One of these agen- cies, the Coordinator of Information, is the direct lineal predecessor of the OSS and thus today’s CIA. The other agency, the “Rockefeller Of- fice,” as it became known, had a briefer but no less useful existence. !

The man in charge of British intelligence in the United States in 1940 was a prosperous forty-four-year-old Canadian-born business- man, William S. Stephenson, better known today by his New York cable address, INTREPID. He had been a flier in World War I. And though he had been shot down and taken prisoner, he had daringly escaped. One of the things he escaped with was a clever can opener he had come upon as a prisoner. This can opener was unpatented in the Allied countries, and by obtaining a patent and manufacturing it Stephenson made his first fortune.’

By the 1930s, Stephenson was a millionaire with major interests in a number of businesses that gave him reason to travel widely in Europe and discreetly gather intelligence on military preparations. For our story, Stephenson’s most important holding was Pressed Steel, a major producer of steel auto bodies for such assemblers as Morris, Humber, Hillman, and Austin.

It was through the steel business that he became aware that large amounts of German steel were being diverted to the armaments indus- try in violation of the Versailles Peace ‘Treaty. “Vhis information was

10 °¢¢¢ DESPERATE DECEPTION

passed along to the Secret Intelligence Service (MI-6), and from it to the little-known Industrial Intelligence Center under Winston Churchill’s friend Major Desmond Morton. The IIC eventually be- came part of the Ministry of Economic Warfare during World War II.

This was not the coup it might appear. The intelligence gathered by Stephenson and others was erroneous, and it led to policies that might have proved disastrous had not the United States come into the war. They reported prior to the war that the German economy was being fully mobilized for war, and in September 1939 that the German economy was strained to its limits—producing at a rate that was unsus- tainable. This analysis was totally wrong. The Germans had a great deal of excess capacity. The height of German production proved to be in 1944 during the intense Allied bombing campaign.

These beliefs about the German economy encouraged the British to feel that with the money and productive capacity of the United States behind them a war with Germany was winnable even if the United States was not a combatant.’

The interwar cover for the Secret Intelligence Service, SIS or MI-6, had been Passport Control offices throughout the world. William Stephenson was appointed to this position in New York in the spring of 1940. His predecessor had been Commander Sir James Francis Paget, RN,* a competent man but without Stephenson’s business or political connections, or his ruthless audacity. (According to author Anthony Cave-Brown, Stephenson had once volunteered to shoot Hitler with a high-powered rifle.)

Subsequently, Stephenson had been chosen by “C,” Stewart Menzies, the head of MI-6, to go to the United States as his personal representa- tive to “establish relations on the highest possible level between the British SIS and the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation.” The mandate given to Stephenson was to “assure sufficient aid for Britain, to counter the enemy’s subversive plans throughout the Western Hemisphere ...and eventually to bring the United States into the War.”¢

Stephenson first arrived in the United States on April 2, 1940, os- tensibly on an official mission for the Ministry of Supply. It was on this trip, even before Churchill’s May 10, 1940, ascension to prime minister, that the meeting took place which set the early close work- ing relationship between the Federal Bureau of Investigation and British intelligence.’

Organization, Methods, and Offspring °** 11

This meeting between Stephenson and J. Edgar Hoover had been smoothed by a mutual friend, the boxer Gene Tunney:* “I had known Sir William for several years. He wanted to make...contact with J. Edgar Hoover...[but] he did not want to make an official approach through well-placed English or American friends; he wanted to do so quietly and with no fanfare.”?

After a short time in the United States, Stephenson took over the thirty-eighth floor of the International Building in Rockefeller Center, which the Rockefellers, anxious to help, let for a penny rent. This was a convenient address. Several British agencies promoting intervention were also housed here. The British Press Service was located on the forty-fourth floor. The British intelligence front group Fight for Free- dom located its operations on the twenty-second floor in the same building, also rent-free.!° ye

By January 1941, Stephenson no longer worked under the tradi- tional SIS cover name Passport Control but under the new umbrella name British Security Coordination, which covered all the varied se- cret organizations Intrepid represented in the United States.!!

First and foremost, Intrepid represented Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service (called SIS or MI-6, or Broadway after its address), which was responsible for intelligence outside Britain and the Commonwealth— responsibilities much like those of today’s CIA. The London head of SIS had the designation “C,” or CSS, Chief of the Secret Service. This is the “M” of Ian Fleming novels. The first head of the SIS after its reformation in 1909 had been Captain Sir Mansfield Cumming. He died in 1923 and was succeeded by Admiral Hugh “Quex” Sinclair. Stewart Graham Menzies (pronounced Minn-giss), Sinclair’s right- hand man, became acting “C” on Sinclair’s death in early November 1939 and then in late November “C.” SIS was nominally under the Foreign Office (FO). Menzies’s day-to-day contact with that office was through the permanent head of the FO, Sir Alexander Cadogan.'”

Stephenson also represented Britain’s internal Security Service, MI-5, which is responsible to the home secretary and cares for the in- ternal security of Britain and its empire—responsibilities very similar to those of the FBI. One of MI-5’s great assets was its central registry of names that classified the loyalty of thousands who had come to the attention of the service. On June 10, 1940, Vernon Kell, who had headed this organization since 1909, was dismissed. In November, Sir

12 eee DESPERATE DECEPTION

David Petre took over as the director general. He was the former head of the Delhi Intelligence Bureau of India and thus a man with long experience at fighting subversives.!?

MI-6 and MI-5 are well known; volumes have been written on them. But Stephenson also represented lesser-known organizations— some of them little known even today. One of these was the Political Intelligence Department (PID). This was ostensibly a section of the Foreign Office. Here we see the shifting kaleidoscope of intertwined, interacting departments and covers that so bedevil the researcher. The PID, housed at Woburn Abbey, the site of a major black propa- ganda factory, was a real, nonsecret office between 1939 and 1943. The problem arises because from August 1941 until 1943 the name PID was also the cover for the secret Political Warfare Executive (PWE), and when in 1943 the publicly known PID was disbanded, the Political Warfare Executive continued to use the name Political Intelligence Department.

These cover-name practices confused not onty later historians but even the smartest of those who lived in this twilight world. One of these, Sir John Wheeler-Bennett, has confessed both his own confu- sion and his own somewhat idiosyncratic choice of employer labels: “Bruce [Lockhart] was to become the Director-General of what was, for some extraordinary reason which I never mastered, sometimes called P.W.E and sometimes P.I.D. (Political Intelligence Department) and was also to be appointed a Deputy Under-Secretary in the Foreign Office....{Later] I joined what I still prefer to call the Political Intelli- gence Department of the Foreign Office.”!4

Another of Stephenson’s charges was Special Operations Executive (SOE), itself an amalgamation of secret departments prepared in an- ticipation of World War II. On April 1, 1938, shortly after the Ger- mans took over Austria, SIS had begot “Section D” for “sabotage and subversion.” This dirty-tricks department, certainly a great April Fools’ creation, grew rapidly under the command of the dynamic and creative Major Lawrence Grand. By July 1940 it had 140 officers, a larger corps than SIS itself.

Though they were spared the details, recruits to Section D were left little doubt about the potential scope of their jobs. One recruit, Bickham Sweet Escott, has left us a record of his interview: “For secu- rity reasons, [ can’t tell you what sort of job it would be. All I can say is

Organization, Methods, and Offspring *** 13

that if you join us, you mustn’t be afraid of forgery, and you mustn’t be afraid of murder.”!5

A surprising number of the recruits of Section D later achieved fame, even notoriety, in the field of intelligence. Kim Philby and Guy Burgess, later discovered to be Soviet agents, worked for Section D. Sir William Stephenson and his biographer, Montgomery Hyde, were there too.

In July 1940, Churchill consolidated Section D with MI R, a War Office guerrilla warfare research group, and Sir Campbell Stewart’s covert propaganda unit, called Department EH after its location, Electra House. Churchill gave the new organization, Special Opera- tions Executive (SOE), the mandate to “set Europe ablaze.” SOE had three sections: SO.1 for propaganda, SO.2 for dirty tricks, and SO.3 for planning. A year later, SO.1 was separated from SOE, renamed the Political Warfare Executive, and put under the control of Rex Leeper and Robert Bruce Lockhart. |

In the British system, countries had code names. As 48 LAND was the MI-6 code name for the United States, the Special Operations Execu- tive code name for the United States was GROSVENOR. This may well be the origin of the prefix to SOE agent numbers in the United States— they had a “G” prefix and a three- or four-digit suffix. Thus journalist Walter Lucas, who worked for black-propaganda specialist Sidney “Bill” Morrell of SO.1 and planted articles in such publications as the Christian Science Monitor, was G.124. There was at least one exception to this system: While William “Wild Bill” Donovan’s MI-6 code nuin- ber was standard enough, 48917, his SOE symbol seems to have been “Q,” “referring to both him and his office.”!®

Stephenson's importance and position can be seen in the instructions given to agent Valentine Williams, G.131, an experienced playwright and radio broadcaster, who was sent to the United States in July 1941 by SOE operational head (CD) Frank Nelson. Williams had been in Section D of MI-6 since 1939 while claiming to be a member of the Foreign Office. “One reason I am concerned,” wrote Nelson in a mar- ginal note, “to get someone out to USA is to regularize our association with 48000. He is ‘C’’s man and is ‘running’ our show out there with- out remuneration etc. There is much that is unsatisfactory in this, viz, that we cannot just say to him—we are sending this man or that man!... He would be hard to replace—if he says ‘Find your own man and run

your own show.’ ”!”

14 eee DESPERATE DECEPTION

Stephenson also represented the British Office of Naval Intelli- gence (ONI), whose chief was Admiral Sir John Godfrey. Godfrey’s personal assistant was the stockbroker Ian Fleming of later James Bond fame. Fleming, it seems, was occasionally lent to Stephenson for special projects.

Of all the organizations under Stephenson’s BSC umbrella the Se- curity Executive remains one of the least known. Beyond the sketchy fact that Duff Cooper was for a time in charge of it in England and that it supposedly had worldwide security responsibilities in British possessions, the Security Executive is one of the black holes of intelli- gence history.

Lastly, Intrepid was the New York representative of the undercover section, the Special Branch, of Scotland Yard. Special Branch had been founded in the late nineteenth century to counter Irish terrorists, but by 1940 it worked with MI-S against all potential subversives—Com- munist, Irish, Fascist, or Indian.

As representative of these organizations in the Western Hemi- sphere, William Stephenson conducted covert diplomacy; provided raw positive intelligence to London; ran intelligence operations, in- cluding recruitment of agents and surveillance; conducted a whole range of special operations, from political warfare against isolationists to perhaps even murder; mounted covert propaganda operations; ran a hemisphere port security operation; built and operated Camp X, a clandestine training establishment in Canada; built and operated a clandestine international communications network; conducted a hemi- spheric ship-observer scheme; and played a major role in Britain’s air and sea control of the movement of people, mail, and commodities be- tween the Americas and Europe.!®

An example of the capabilities of the BSC operation was in the forgeries that it was able to effect. The skilled labor to produce this high-quality work was by the latter part of 1941 housed in a BSC forgery factory in downtown Joronto, Canada. It was called Station M, perhaps after its chief, Eric Maschwitz (cover symbol G.106). In more normal times Maschwitz worked as employee of the BBC; he wrote the lyrics of such popular songs as “The Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square” and “These Foolish Things.” Station M, which opened in the summer of 1941, was under cover of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

Organization, Methods, and Offspring ¢** 15

Evidence needed to frame Britain’s enemies or move the United States closer to war could be and was indeed manufactured. This was a truly frontal assault on the rules of evidence. In addition to “an indus- trial chemist, and two ruffians who could reproduce faultlessly the im- print of any typewriter on earth,” Maschwitz later wrote, “I controlled a chemical laboratory in one place, a photographic studio in an- other"?

In The Quiet Canadian, based on a secret after-action report on BSC activities (the “BSC Account”), Montgomery Hyde spends twelve pages chronicling the spurious documents spewed out by Station M and the devastating effects of these genuine-looking pieces of paper.

A newly released document stamped Most SECRET wonderfully illus- trates Eric Maschwitz’s willingness to do whatever necessary to move the United States toward war. One problem facing British intelligence in the United States was a shortage of good photographs of German atrocities. On November 26, 1941, in a memorandum ttled “Atrocity Photographs,” Maschwitz proposed a solution: “If asked to do so, my Section could quite easily provide a regular supply of atrocity pictures, manufactured by us in Canada.” Most problems seemed small and quite solvable: “the buying and hiring of costumes, the manufacture of small pieces of scenery and of dummies...a first-class make-up man... all of which could be carried out under some sort of cover.

“...For the sake of accuracy,” Maschwitz continued, “we should be provided...with as complete a library as possible of photographs of German personnel, equipment, vehicles...also actual specimens of German...equipment....”

Only one problem loomed in G.106’s fertile brain, and it had noth- ing to do with the propriety of duping the American public. If the project was to be done they had better get busy. “The most obvious setting for atrocity pictures at the moment is Russia, so that we should get to work while there is still snow in Canada.””°

Clearly the major purpose of BSC was to conduct aggressive offen- sive operations against those it saw as the enemies of Britain. ‘These included not only Hitler’s agents in the United States, but those who simply wished to remain uninvolved in the European war.

The ruthless activism of British Security Coordination was one of Britain’s few advantages in the war against Hitler. Ernest Cuneo summed up the BSC offensive in a memo:

16 °°° DESPERATE DECEPTION

“Given the time, the situation, and the mood, it is not surprising however, that BSC also went beyond the legal, the ethical, and the proper. Throughout the neutral Americas, and especially in the U.S., it ran espionage agents, tampered with the mails, tapped telephone, smuggled propaganda into the country, disrupted public gatherings, covertly subsidized newspapers, radios, and organizations, perpetrated forgeries—even palming one off on the President of the United States— violated the aliens registration act, shanghaied sailors numerous times, and possibly murdered one or more persons in this country.”?!

No one should be surprised that the British used their intelligence system to help involve the United States in World War II. The British use of intelligence operatives on Americans has been, after all, sort of a tradition, dating back at least as far as the American Revolution.

British intelligence had certainly infiltrated Benjamin Franklin’s American embassy in France. Franklin’s chief assistant, Dr. Edward Bancroft, was a British intelligence agent who passed all the informa- tion he could gather on to England.’

In the period 1778-83 the problem was how to get out of a war with the Americans, but in 1916—17 it was how to get the United States into a war. Intrepid’s World War I counterpart had been Sir William Wiseman (1885-1962). His family background, sense of taste, good manners, and discretion highly recommended him to Edward M. House, President Woodrow Wilson’s closest adviser. “Colonel” House liked to associate with the famous and titled, and Wiseman could trace his lineage back to the time of Henry VII and his baronetage to 1628.

As Wilson had favored the British in World War I, Franklin Roosevelt was quite willing to work with British intelligence in World War II. One of the unnoticed consequences of Roosevelt’s cooperation was that Brit- ish intelligence promoted the creation of two American intelligence organizations. Most well known of these organizations was the Coordi- nator of Information, which became the Office of Strategic Services.

The other intelligence organization was so well camouflaged that it was not until 1976 that the first hint appeared that the “Rockefeller Office,” or more properly the Office of the Coordinator of Commer- cial and Cultural Relations Between the American Republics, later the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs, had been an intelligence op- eration. The book A Man Called Intrepid by William Stevenson (no re- lation to Intrepid) was, for all its flaws, the first to reveal that the

Organization, Methods, and Offspring *** 17

Rockefeller Office was an intelligence operation—one that brought the soothing balm of Rockefeller dollars to Intrepid’s ambitious but money-short Latin American operations.”3

Although Franklin Roosevelt created the Rockefeller Office by ex- ecutive order on August 16, 1940, the ostensibly initial move had been made by Nelson Rockefeller on June 14, 1940, when he submitted a memo to FDR’s close adviser Harry Hopkins. FDR accepted the plan on the condition that the youthful Republican Rockefeller accept a more mature Democrat, Will Clayton, as one of his assistants.’+

The German threat in Europe brought together a complex coinci- dence of ambitions and interests in Latin America—those of the Rockefellers with the family’s Creole Oil Company, those of the ad- ministration with the Monroe Doctrine and the more recent Good Neighbor Policy, and those of the British with their need to stop Ger- man economic and political advances.

Paul Kramer, another of Nelson Rockefeller’s assistants, writes that “the goals of the two partners were different. The one, Britain, sought to use BSC New York as a device for destroying Nazis and pro-Ger- mans wherever they might be (and also to bring the US in the war on the side of Great Britain); the other, the U.S., sought to use BSC’s as- sets—an intelligence network and mail intercept system and experi- ence in fighting Nazis by means of operational intelligence—to further its own policy of western hemisphere unity and defense.””»

The operations set in motion were part of one of the most important but least studied aspects of covert operations in a modern industrial world: economic warfare. By the end of August 1940 the Rockefeller Office was working on a “voluntary program” by which American busi- nesses would eliminate all their Latin American representatives who were Germans or German agents.

Information from BSC went to its New York FBI liaison, Percy Foxworth, who also had offices in Rockefeller Center. The informa- tion was transmitted to the Rockefeller Office located in the old State, War, and Navy Building, Washington, D.C. The documents, labeled “personal and confidential,” started, “We understand from a confi- dential source believed to be reliable,” or “Information has been received from a reliable confidential source.”*° At the Rockefeller Ot- fice this material would be put together in a system implemented by John S. Dickey, later president of Rockefeller’s alma mater, Dartmouth

18 °¢°¢ DESPERATE DECEPTION

College. Rockefeller and his assistants, Dickey, Will Clayton, Joseph C. Rovensky of the Chase Bank, Berent Friele of A&P, and Percy L. Douglas of the Otis Elevator Company, with others, put the British blacklist into effect. Thus the Rockefeller Office supplied the man- power, the connections, and the money to reinforce the hard-nosed British blockade and blacklist activities.

Seventeen hundred companies were contacted as part of this pro- eram. United States exporters eliminated more than a thousand “unde- sirable” agency accounts in Latin America during the first six months of 1941. These activities also had a salutary effect on the ruling classes of Latin America, writes Kramer: “Persons close to the rulers were plunged into financial oblivion as a result and this had the effect, in a broader sense, of persuading those in power to turn to the U.S. for aid and protection and relief.””’

Kramer is sure that this program had Roosevelt’s blessing, since FDR ordered J. Edgar Hoover personally to comply with Rockefeller’s request that an FBI agent be sent to talk to selected businessmen about cooperating with the blacklisting. On July 19, 1941, almost five months before Pearl Harbor, FDR gave the British blacklist the power of American law when the Federal Register included a long list of the proscribed businessmen. British Security Coordination’s information thereafter flowed to the State Department’s new division of World Trade Intelligence, headed by John S. Dickey. Dickey continued on the Rockefeller payroll, however.?®

The Rockefeller Office and British intelligence cooperated in two other areas. They worked together in subverting Boston’s outwardly independent 50,000-watt shortwave station WRUL by “secret subsi- dies through intermediaries.””? Also, both manipulated the Latin American press by buying advertising space. This complemented the existing BSC program of manipulating the Latin American press by controlling its access to newsprint.?°

The influence of British Security Coordination in America to in- volve the United States in World War II and to prepare the United States to participate in war is impressive, even startling. In the Cuneo Papers at the Franklin Roosevelt Library is an article written by Cuneo that, while its main purpose was to defend Cuneo’s friend Dick Ellis from charges of being a Soviet mole, captures a telling fact known to few people: British intelligence created William Donovan’s COI/OSS.

Organization, Methods, and Offspring *** 19

“If the charge against Ellis is true,” wrote Cuneo, “...it would mean that the OSS, and to some extent its successor, the CIA, in effect was a branch of the Soviet KGB.”3!

Cuneo is not the only insider to say bluntly that credit must fall to William Stephenson’s organization for the “conception and establish- ment of the COI.”32 Stephenson cabled this to London in mid-June 1941: “Donovan 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 in Washington that our man is in a position of such importance to our efforts.”??

Not only were the British the primary force in the conception and creation of the COI, which later became the OSS and whose pieces were finally reconstructed into the CIA, but a British officer, Dick Ellis, then ran the organization. This was done in deepest secrecy, be- cause as Winston Churchill’s personal intelligence assistant, Major Desmond Morton, wrote, “It is of course essential that this fact not be known in view of the furious uproar it would cause if known to the Isolationists.”>4

The isolationists never caught on, but Assistant Secretary of State Adolf Berle did, though he was misled by Ellis’s cover name, as he passed this explosive information on to Sumner Welles: “For your con- fidential information, the really active head of the intelligence section in Donovan's group is Mr. Elliott, who is assistant to Mr. Stevenson [sic]. In other words, Stevenson’s assistant in The British intelligence is running Donovan's intelligence service.”?°

The British were not deterred from mounting major operations by the fear of discovery and exposure. Those operations deemed impor- tant were given sufficient time and planning so that all of the mem- bers of the intelligence orchestra played their parts. Some of the protective coloration came from the British penchant for involving the right social and political strata. To push for Donovan’s organiza- tion, Intrepid had enlisted people close to President Roosevelt—Gil- bert Winant, ambassador to Great Britain; presidential speechwriter Robert Sherwood; and Vincent Astor, FDR’s kinsman and intelligence operative—to push for Donovan’s appointment.*°

For support back in Great Britain, Stephenson enlisted the help of two men in Churchill’s immediate entourage, “C”’s good friend General H. L. Ismay and Sir Desmond Morton.

20 **¢ DESPERATE DECEPTION

Years later when dictating a history of the founding of the Coordina- tor of Information, William Stephenson related how Donovan began sending the White House (he called it by its code name, “the Summit”) papers stressing the need for the United States to establish undercover services equivalent to the various British services—Secret Intelligence Service, Political Warfare Executive, Ministry of Economic Warfare, and external Counterespionage. “Of course my staff,” said Sir William, “produced the material for these papers and they were usually sent up in practically the original form.”?’

On May 9, 1941, the wealthy, well-connected Vincent Astor, FDR’s friend and New York area coordinator of intelligence, sent the presi- dent a clipping from the New York Herald Tribune that was probably a plant to build the consensus of voices calling for the plan British intel- ligence wanted. The Herald Tribune, as we will see later, was BSC’s fa- vorite outlet for planted articles. Moreover, the putative author, George Fielding Eliot, was a devoted British sympathizer, one of the most influential people in the BSC front Fight for Freedom, and a fa- vorite vehicle for planted articles.

Citing the threat from fifth columnists and enemy agents, Eliot pointed with alarm at the lack of a coordinator for FBI, ONI, and G-2 intelligence. The United States needed, wrote Eliot, “a special intelligence service to act as co-ordinator, responsible directly to the President, acting with his own authority, and provided with personnel to conduct investigations of its own when necessary.”38 And there were other members of the intelligence orchestra. One was William Donovan’s friend Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox. Another was BSC collaborator Robert Sherwood. Sherwood certainly had the op- portunity to plead Intrepid’s case. Sherwood spent twelve days as an overnight guest at the White House between April 23, 1941, and May 27, 1941.

Sherwood was positioning himself to be head of what was to become the Foreign Information Service of the Coordinator of Information. On June 16, 1941, Sherwood sent to Donovan a list of people he thought he could trust, “for the work we discussed...yesterday evening at your home.” The letter also contains a clear reference to another of those helping Stephenson: “Yesterday evening at your house was a wonderfully interesting one. I saw the Ambassador again today, He’s a honey” (letter from Sherwood to Donovan, 16 June 1941, Exhibits

Organization, Methods, and Offspring **° 21

Illustrating the History of OSS, vol. 3; quoted in Troy, “Coordinator of Information,” 103).

Sherwood’s favorite journalists, it should not be surprising, were also favorites of BSC—Edmond Taylor, Douglas Miller, E. A. Mowrer, H. R. Knickerbocker, and Raymond Gram Swing.’*? Fortunately, one of these, Edmond Taylor, has been quite forthright about his activities with American and British intelligence during this period. In his mem- oir, Awakening from History, Taylor wrote: “The propaganda wing, called the Foreign Information Service, was to be headed by Robert E. Sherwood, the noted playwright and one of President Roosevelt’s most talented speech writers. I knew Sherwood slightly, from some of the overlapping interventionist committees with which we were both con- nected, and admired him greatly.”*°

‘Tom ‘Troy, in his study done for the Central Intelligence Agency’s Studies in Intelligence series, credits Ambassador Winant as the man who “brought things to a head.” He had no fewer than five scheduled meetings with FDR between June 3 and June 15, 1941.7!

So Intrepid had the American organization he wished to have, with the man of his choice at the helm and with his own man, Dick Ellis, actually running things. “It was conceived by Stephenson,” Intrepid’s longtime friend and confidant Ernest Cuneo, “as an Ameri- can solution to British problems in the Western Hemisphere.” Given its parentage and the presence of Dick Ellis, it should come as no sur- prise that Donovan's office was created in the image and likeness of British Security Coordination. Writes Cuneo: “...before Pearl Harbor, Donovan was building a strategic service, a propaganda unit, a special operations service, an economics division, a morale unit, an SIS, anda Commando unit. COI (Coordinator of Information] was by design multi-faceted, multifunctional. Like BSC it was an integrated struc- ture, and a response to BSC’s need.””

Not only the wide-ranging organization but the aggressive, offen- sive spirit, the spirit of BSC at war, became embedded in the COI and moved to OSS when the name was changed in mid-1942. BSC passed on an attitude as much as it passed on specific technical skills. It passed on a way of looking at problems and an openness to possible solu- tions—no matter their legality or morality.”

This sometimes shocked others. After reading an OSS psychological warfare manual, the head of army intelligence, the usually tough

wrote

22 ¢¢*8 DESPERATE DECEPTION

General George Strong, “denounced” it as “devoid of every moral con- sideration.”** He could, with equal vehemence, have been speaking of any number of BSC documents, including large stretches of Mont- gomery Hyde’s The Quiet Canadian.

At the end of the war, President Roosevelt had an army colonel cata- loging the “illegalities and improprieties attributable to OSS, and a Congressional investigation was threatened,” according to Ernest Cuneo.*? It is this wartime modus operandi that the CIA was to take

into the Cold War.

CHAPTER 2

© 6

The Fronts

One thing is evident. Members of the American clite, including Presi dent Franklin D. Roosevelt, were not tricked into the war; they were not victims. They were as eager as the British to fight Hitler!

The Americans were eager to dance but did not know the steps; the British knew the steps but needed a rich partner. ‘hese clite interven- tionists invariably worked with and for and through a number of orga nizations that were fronts for British intelligence.

One of the startling documents that has come to light is a July 1941 report from Special Operations Executive officer Sidney “Bill” Morrell (G.101). In this memorandum, Morrell emphasizes the secret British financial support provided to the interventionist organizations. [1c stresses that these fronts had been “formed and acquired” by SQ.1, the secret propaganda arm of SOE. He listed them:

(i) The Non-Sectarian Anti-Nazi League. Used for the vehe- ment exposure of enemy agents and isolationists. Prints a wide variety of pamphlets, copies of which have been sent to you. Has recently begun to attack Lindbergh and the many other conscious or unconscious native Fascists...

(ii) The League for Human Rights. A subsidiary organization of the American Federation of Labour which in its turn controls 4,000,000 trade unionists....

(iii) Friends of Democracy. An example of the work of this orga- nization is attached. It is a complete attack upon Ifenry ord for his anti-Nazi [sic] leanings.

ap

24 #9e¢ DESPERATE DECEPTION

(iv) Fight for Freedom Committee. Both this and (iii) above are militant interventionist organizations whose aim is to pro- vide Roosevelt with evidence that the U.S. public is eager for action.

(v) American Labour Committee to Aid British Labour. Another branch organization of the American Federation of Labour. It is organized along the lines that British labour is in the front line defending American labour. The latest activity of this organization has been to inaugurate a week during which all American trade unionists are asked to donate towards a fund in aid of British labour...

(vi) Committee for Inter-American Co-operation. Used this for sponsoring SO.1 work in Central and South America. It is now being used intensively for penetration in all Latin Amer- ican countries, both as cover for agents and for sponsoring

pamphlets.

(vil) America Last. A purely provocative experiment started in San Francisco in an attempt to sting America into a fighting moold (sic).?

The secret “BSC Account” reiterates that Fight for Freedom was a BSC front and adds that BSC had close ties with the Italian-American Mazzini Society, headed by the academic and journalist Max Ascoli. Also claimed was a close working relationship with Salloum Mokarzel, editor of Al Shoda, the Arabic daily paper of New York City, and presi- dent of the Lebanese League for Progress.’

British intelligence agents had created and were running several other front groups by the fall of 1941. One of these was France For- ever, which ran the United States part of the British effort to finance and promote an obscure French officer, Charles de Gaulle, as the true voice of the real France.

Another organization merits mention because its leadership inter- locked with so many of the front groups above, and it was serviced by British agents who also served so many of the other BSC fronts. This was the CDAAA—the Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies—better known as the White Committee after its nominal chair- man, Kansas newspaperman William Allen White.

The Fronts °°* 25

By July 1941, when SOE’s Bill Morrell wrote his report, the British propaganda themes that had powered the CDAAA—“Give us the tools and we will finish the job,” and its concomitant “We don’t need your men”—had run their course. Taken off propaganda support, the White Committee withered, to be superseded by the more militant Fight for Freedom, which better spoke more aggressive themes.

These fronts had interlocking directorates, which worked closely to- gether doing the things the British needed done but did not wish to be seen doing: disseminating propaganda, promoting an American peace- time military draft, pushing through the Destroyer Deal, destroying or turning around the isolationists, making sure that the Republican Party nominated an interventionist in 1940.

In his memorandum describing his stewardship of SO.1, Morrell contended that these fronts were all unaware “of British influence, since this is maintained through a permanent official in each organiza- tion, who in turn, is in touch with a cut-out, and never with us direct.” Farlier, at the beginning of his report, Bill Morrell laid out his duties: “The activities of SO.1 in New York are three-fold: (1) Subversive pro- paganda in the United States for the exposure and destruction of enemy propaganda...; countering isolationist and appeasement propa- ganda.... (2)...directing ostensibly American propaganda towards the three Axis powers and enemy-occupied territories. (3) Subversive pro- paganda in South American countries as in (1) above.”*

Morrell’s memorandum with its simple declaration that the front groups he listed had been formed or acquired by British intelligence is, of course, a wonderful start for the historian. The “BSC Account” also names Fight for Freedom as a front. But since the British intelligence files are still closed and American intelligence—FBI, army intelligence, navy intelligence, and the CIA—will release little, the task of tracking the particulars of front group operations would, at first, seem formi- dable; fortunately, however, the Fight for Freedom Papers at Princeton contain a wealth of correspondence, which allows the researcher to es- tablish a paper trail for many events.

This most prominent of the BSC fronts went through several name changes during its eighteen months of existence, but 1s best known as Fight for Freedom. Initially it was known as the Miller Group because ” it first met (on Dunkirk weekend, June 2, 1940) at the Fairfax, Virginia,

home of Francis Pickens Miller. Miller was the organization director of

26 °*®*® DESPERATE DECEPTION

the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. The nine people present were Miller and his wife, Helen; the man who had called the meeting, Baltimore attorney Richard F. Cleveland; Stacy May of New York; Winfield Riefler of Princeton; Mr. and Mrs. Whitney Shepard- son of New York; Edward P. Warner of the Civil Aeronautics Board; and M. L. Wilson of the Department of Agriculture.

“The sense of doom was so strong,” wrote Miller later, “that we began our consultations by considering what the United States should do in view of the appalling catastrophe that had just befallen the French and British armies on the continent.” The group thought “there was a des- perate need for someone to speak for America. Why should not we?”¢

The result was that at Miller’s urging, British intelligence “collabo- rator” Whitney Shepardson took a pen and sat down at a desk and wrote a statement titled “A Summons to Speak Out.” The key para- graph reads: “The United States should immediately give official rec- ognition to the fact and to the logic of the situation—by declaring that a state of war exists between this country and Germany.” Because of the prominence of the people who affixed their names to this, the story was given large play in the New York Times and the New York Herald Tribune and other major news outlets.’

The Miller Group progressed during the summer of 1940 into the Century Group—named for the exclusive Century Club in New York City where it met. By the spring of 1941 this had evolved into what appeared to be a national organization, Fight for Freedom, but in real- ity the core of activist members remained the same East Coast elite and the headquarters remained in New York City.

Mark Lincoln Chadwin in his major study of these “Warhawks,” as he calls them, has identified the activist members who dominated the Miller Group/Century Group/Fight for Freedom. The most promi- nent members will be examined more closely in the next chapter, but here is a simple list:

¢ Francis Pickens Miller, executive director of Century Group

e FH. Peter Cusick, Fight for Freedom office manager, executive

secretary, day-to-day policy maker; later described as a “shadowy figure”

e Dr. Henry P. Van Dusen, faculty member, Union Theological

Seminary, member of the policy committee of the White Com- mittee (CDAAA)

The Fronts ¢** 27

Lewis W. Douglas, head of Mutual Life Insurance Company, member of the executive committee of the CDAAA Ulric Bell, Washington correspondent of the Louisville Courier- Journal; replaced Miller in October 1940, became executive chair- man of Fight for Freedom in April 1941; according to Chadwin Bell was “leading actor” in Fight for Freedom Ward Cheney, head of Cheney Brothers silk fabric maker, quiet financial angel for Century Group Herbert Agar, editor of Louisville Courier-fournal, signer of «at Summons to Speak Out,” prominent speaker and policy maker for Fight for Freedom Geoftrey Parsons, chief editorial writer of New York Herald Tri- bune; wrote the foreign affairs part of Wendell Willkie’s accep- tance speech ¢ John Balderston, journalist screenwriter; in late summer 1940 directed the British-founded front William Allen White News Service ¢ Joseph Alsop, journalist, relative of Franklin Roosevelt ¢ Elmer Davis, CBS newsman, only Midwest native active in Fight for Freedom ¢ Will Clayton, founder of world’s largest cotton-trading firm, vice president of Export Import Bank, assistant to Nelson Rockefeller at Rockefeller Office, which worked with BSC blacklisting operations ¢ Whitney H. Shepardson, in 1940 coauthor of Council on Foreign Relations series The United States in World Affairs ¢ James P. Warburg, banker, writer ¢ George Watts Hill of Durham, North Carolina, active in banking, cotton manufacturer, signer of “A Summons to Speak Out” ¢ Dean G. Acheson, international lawyer, with offices in New York and Washington * Allen W. Dulles, lawyer, intelligence operative By the last quarter of 1941, Fight for Freedom closely resembled the central propaganda agency Bill Morrell had envisioned: “The most ef- fective of all propaganda towards the US would be through a unified organization which could be used to attack the isolationists, such as America First, on the one hand, and to create a Nation-wide campaign for an American declaration of war upon the other.”®

28 #e¢ DESPERATE DECEPTION

Though it does not name Fight for Freedom specifically as a British intelligence front group, The Hawks of World War II: The Interventionist Movement in the U.S. Prior to Pearl Harbor by Mark Lincoln Chadwin supplies a wealth of information showing its interaction with both Brit- ish intelligence and the Roosevelt administration. Indeed one of the “Warhawks” who worked closely with British intelligence, Lewis Douglas, was considerably disturbed by Chadwin’s research.

In a 1968 letter to British intelligence operative Sir John Wheeler- Bennett, Douglas wrote: “...Mr. Chadwin called me on the phone.... He indicated that he had some written evidence that you and Mr. Morgan [British propagandist] had been in touch with one of the groups [Century Group/Fight for Freedom]. I told him...[ thought as a matter of discretion he should delete references to you and Aubrey

Mistiean....”? What, if anything, Chadwin cut because of Douglas’s objection is not known. He wrote: “...Bell [chairman of executive committee] and

Cusick [executive secretary] continued and expanded their relationship with Aubrey Morgan and John Wheeler-Bennett of the British Infor- mation Service, talking with them by telephone once or twice a week. On several occasions during the following year, Bell and Cusick were even asked to be present at the BIS office in Rockefeller Center while the British agents received confidential telephone messages from offi- cials in London about which they wanted the Warhawks immediately informed.”!°

Douglas need not have worried. American historians barely noticed that British propagandists who worked with and for British intelligence were suggesting activities for Fight for Freedom. Douglas was much more discreet; his relevant correspondence is missing. As for Professor John Wheeler-Bennett, he appears repeatedly as a coworker when British intelligence decisions are being made. He admits in his autobi- ography to having been “one of the earliest workers for the secret pro- paganda unit, Department EH which was amalgamated into Special Operations Executive.”!!

In 1942, after the secret Political Warfare Executive (PWE) was separated from Special Operations Executive (SOE), Wheeler- Bennett became head of the New York office. The purpose of this office was to maintain liaison with the American Office of War Infor- mation. “The reason for this appointment,” writes Wheeler-Bennett,

The Fronts @#*¢ 29

“was that I alone, of the staff of the Mission had any knowledge at all of the United States.... Moreover, the leaders of the O.W.I. in New York were all personal friends of mine, especially James Warburg and George Backer, who had been firm friends of Britain in the ‘Fight for Freedom’ movement.”!?

Although he had technically been employed by the British Informa- tion Service—whose head, Sir Gerald Campbell, worked “hand in glove” with Bill Stephenson—in Rockefeller Center in 1941, Wheeler- Bennett has this to say about British Security Coordination: “...S.O.E. had established an office in New York under the direction of Bill (later Sir William) Stephenson....I had known many of them from pre-war days...{and] I had maintained a fairly close contact with them.”!?

There was also a close connection between Professor Wheeler- Bennett and President Franklin Roosevelt. From the fall of 1938 to the spring of 1940 the professor taught a class in international law at the University of Virginia. The students included later novelist Louis Auchincloss; Tony Bliss, later of the Metropolitan Opera; Marshall Field, son of the rich interventionist of the same name; Larry Houston, later deputy director of the CIA; and the most immediately important of them all, Franklin Roosevelt, Jr.

One result of the FDR Jr. connection was that Wheeler-Bennett spent a weekend as a White House guest in early 1939. This included a Sunday morning spent discussing international affairs with the president. !#

These ties were, of course, unknown to the public. Also unknown to the public was the close rapport between Fight for Freedom and the White House—a relationship so close that FFF’s New York office spoke by telephone with FDR’s assistants Steve Early and “Pa” Watson “at least once or twice a day.”!> This covert White House-FFF connection allowed the White House to coordinate and build a bogus independent demand for interventionist policies that FDR could then follow.

In a March 6, 1941, memo from Peter Cusick to Ulric Bell and Wil- liam Agar concerning a mass meeting to be held on March 30 at Madi- son Square Garden, Cusick wrote: “[David] Niles [of the White House staff] will take care of getting all the people that will be needed for the general effect of the presentation.

“Niles is coming to New York this afternoon and wants to talk to Mr. Bell and Mr. Agar and would like to arrange...to go over the details of

x“

30 eee DESPERATE DECEPTION

the financial end of this as it is necessary to put $800 up for the Madi- son Square Garden binder.”!®

So the White House helped to create the demand for actions the president or his advisers wished to take. Just as SOE agent Bill Morrell had suggested in his memo, FFF was always trying to give the public the impression that important people or a large segment of the public supported the president’s interventionist policies.

Not all the cooperation between the White House and FFF was co- vert. During 1941, Roosevelt met with FFF’s Lewis Douglas, Wayne Johnson, and Marshall Field; there were several picture-taking sessions with President and Mrs. Roosevelt in 1941. In 1941, Wendell Willkie,

— of the Navy Knox, Vice President Wallace, and even Mrs. Roosevelt spoke at Fight for Freedom rallies.!”

On May 7, 1941, presidential assistant Lowell Mellett wrote asking for help in placing an article attacking Lindbergh’s analysis of the Ger- man air force. A week later the president requested that Fight for Free- dom advise Director of Civilian Defense Fiorello La Guardia “in regard to the whole subject of effective publicity to offset the propa- ganda of the Wheelers, Nyes, Lindberghs, etc.” The result was that FFF’s Peter Cusick went to Washington during May and June 1941 to work with La Guardia.!®

Since the leaders of Fight for Freedom had always demanded a dec- laration of war against Germany, they were always willing to prepare the public by advocating extreme positions toward which the president could work, in his cautious, even devious way. Once when Warhawks wondered whether they would offend FDR with their charges against the administration/ Ulric Bell went to the White House and read the questionable text to the president. “If you’re going to give me hell,” he said, “why not use some really strong language? You know, ‘pusillani- mous’ isn’t such a bad word.”!9 — /

Fight tor Freedom’s location in Rockefeller Center, the home of nu- merous British organizations and British Security Coordination, was convenient and efficient. The Rockefellers provided the rent-free space for BSC and FFF. Moreover, Laurance D. Rockefeller also made an arrangement for FFF’s expenses at the Rockefeller Center Club.2°

Laurance Rockefeller, Republican congressman Lucius Littauer, and Mrs. David kK. Bruce (wife of the later London OSS chief and ambassa- dor to Britain) were among those who gave $10,000 or more to Fight

The Fronts **¢ 31

for Freedom. Most of the other significant donors to FFF seem to have had the deep pockets necessary for such generosity: movie men Darry] Zanuck and Jack and Harry Warner; Mrs. Harry Payne Whitney; Mr. and Mrs. Marshall Field; Mr. and Mrs. Frank T. Altschul. One donor listed by Chadwin as particularly generous, Dr. Max Ascoli, a dean at the New School for Social Research, was also working for British intel- ligence through his Italian-American Mazzini Society.*!

Labor and labor unions, many with close Communist connections, presented the British and the White House with some of their greatest concerns during the period of the Hitler-Stalin Pact, 1939-41. Fight for Freedom claimed great success in bringing unions into the inter- ventionist cause. ‘Uhis triumph, though, may have been caused as much by the German invasion of the Soviet Union as by the efforts of Fight for Freedom. Ernest Cuneo writes: “...1 was...FDR’s personal liaison with the United Automobile Workers, United Aircraft Workers and the United Farm Machinery workers.... There was damn little to do after Hitler attacked Russia. Before that, there was tough going. The Communist-led unions were doing as much damage with strikes as a couple of U-Boats in the Atlantic.””?

David Niles of the White House staff (Ernest Cuneo’s intelligence contact at the White House) and Isador Lubin, the commissioner of labor statistics, successfully promoted Abe Rosenfield to organize Fight for Freedom’s labor division. ‘That Cuneo was “in the loop” with Fight for Freedom and David Niles is evident from a telegram from Fight for Freedom’s Peter Cusick to David Niles at the Carlton Hotel in Washington, D.C.: “Hope that you can talk to Ernest Cuneo today in Washington. He is at the Anchorage [Cuneo’s apartment] for the Day is Anxious to talk to you.”??

Fight for Freedom made a major effort to reach unions by publish- ing advertising in local papers and by its weekly Labor News Service. This “news service” consisted of five legal-size pages of short items for shop stewards and union newspaper editors.

Typically the articles told of yet another union leader or union that had decided to back President Roosevelt’s foreign policy or, in the words of the man behind the front, SOE’s Bill Morrell, “provide evi- dence that the U.S. public is eager for action”: “NINETY-NINE A.E-L. AND CIO Leapers Urce Fut Measures To Drereav Axis MEN- ACE....We say to you, Mr. President, Go forward. Go forward boldly,

32 ©¢¢ DESPERATE DECEPTION

uncompromisingly. We know you love liberty as we do. We will sup- port you completely till tyranny is erased and liberty wholly victori- ous”; “CLEVELAND FEDERATION Supports F.D.R., AMALGAMATED Approves ROOSEVELT ATTITUDE ON DEFENSE STRIKES.””4

The central theme of these notices and news items was that Presi- dent Roosevelt and Britain were good for workers—“PROVIDE BRITISH FOR Post-War Social SECURITY PENSIONS: First LADY REFUSES TO STRIKE-BREAK WITH WilttE House Launpry” and that the Nazis were bad for workers, particularly unionized workers—“Nazis ARREST UNION LEADERS IN NORWEGIAN Rounb- Up.” Also typically present was an article attacking pacifists or isolationists: “WHEELER HAILED IN AXIS Papers; MONTANA SUPPORT DWINDLES.”2>

Fight for Freedom made at least one humorous faux pas for an in- telligence front group. Labor News Service sometimes carried a per- sonality profile or puff piece on a union man who was a close ally of Fight for Freedom. The December 6, 1941, issue ends with this: “Note to Editors: Through an unfortunate typographical error the story appearing in last week’s labor news service on Emile Rieve, president of the Textile Workers Union of America, C.LO., said, ‘He was an international spy.’ The sentence should have read, ‘He was xo international spy.”?°

It was on the labor issue that Fight for Freedom intertwined with another of Bill Morrell’s fronts, the American Labor Committee to Aid British Labor (ALCABL).

This front was tied to the American Federation of Labor. The hon- orary chairman was William Green, president of the AFL, but the real driving force was chairman Matthew Woll, the third vice president of the AFL. Woll was in turn also president of yet another of Morrell’s fronts, the League for Human Rights.”

Woll is most likely the “permanent official” with whom British intel- ligence had contact. The ALCABL was organized in early March 1941, as Woll wrote Franklin Roosevelt, “to mobilize sympathies and re- sources of organized labor in this country to help relieve sufferings of British Labor fighting heroically against dictators.” It was formed dur- ing the visit of Britain’s Sir Walter Citrine to the United States in re- sponse to the CIO’s Communist-influenced opposition to aid for Britain.** The tactic of British intelligence was to find people with use- ful views, then fund them, counsel them, guide them, and promote

The Fronts °*** 33

them. These people, given the proper guidance and proper coordina- tion, were then used to attack Britain’s enemies, namely the American isolationists, and move the United States toward war.

Though the committee was only formed in March 1941, Woll and Green had been hostile to Hitler since at least 1933. At that time they had reported on Hitler’s crushing of the German labor movement, and they had quickly followed by pushing through a resolution boycotting German goods and services.’ At that time, before the Germans’ June 22, 1941, attack on the Soviet Union, Woll had shown another endear- ing attribute: he was strongly anti-Soviet.

The CIO, on the other hand, had a number of influential Commu- nists, usually referred to as the “left wing,” and its local unions were, until June 1941, a real problem. In May 1941, Abe Rosenfield of Fight for Freedom’s labor division contacted another BSC front, the League for Human Rights: “We are preparing a statement exposing the ‘Na- tional Labor Committee Against War’ as a Communist front for ‘Tuesday’s papers. Won’t you please secure names of A.F. of L. and C.I.O. leaders in New York City who would lend their names to such and phone them to me immediately.”>°

Woll contacted the White House at least two more times, first ask- ing for a presidential endorsement of his organization and then for the president’s press statement on “Aid British Labor Week.” In return he received a letter of encouragement and one letter of support, which he was “at liberty to release” to the press.?!

On the occasion of American troops occupying Iceland on July 7, 1941, Woll was quoted in Fight for Freedom’s Labor News Service under the headline “CIO, A.F. or L. LEADERS APPROVE OCCUPATION OF ICE- LAND”: “In making this move as a measure of vital national defense and not as an act of aggression, the President deserves the wholehearted support of the entire nation.”

Another of BSC’s fronts, Friends of Democracy, was, if anything, even tougher and more aggressive than FFF. Friends of Democracy, whose national director was a Unitarian minister, the Rev. Leon M. Birkhead, had been formed in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1937. On its stationery it still listed Kansas City as headquarters and persisted in this practice until at least 1951. By 1940, however, it operated from its “Eastern Regional Office” at 103 Park Avenue, New York City. Ac- cording to Fight for Freedom and OSS executive Francis P. Miller, Dr.

34 eee PESPERATE DECEPTION

Birkhead “is a grand person who has organized the best private agency in this country for collection of information regarding Nazi activi- ties.”33 Friends of Democracy specialized in sensational, hard-hitting attacks on isolationists and America First. Historian Wayne Cole rates these attacks as “especially prominent and effective.”>*

As an example of the good works he was directing, SOE black-pro- paganda specialist Bill Morrell included in his memorandum to SOE headquarters a sample of Friends of Democracy’s work—a “complete attack upon Henry Ford.”?>

It is certainly that: in a large ten-by-fourteen-inch format with swas- tikas running across the top, the cover announces, “HENRY Forp Must Cnoosr.” Inside, Ford is labeled an anti-Semite and tied to Hitler and the Nazis. It was also a grab bag of any accusation that might damage Ford's reputation. There was a section titled “E.R. Scores Ford in Last War for Anti-American Propaganda.” Another Friends of Democracy project was a similarly tabloid-sized pamphlet, THE AMERICA First Comarrrer: Tit Nazi PRANSMISSION BELT, which labels the commit- tee as a mouthpiece for the Nazis.*®

As should be expected, these British intelligence fronts worked in concert. Fight tor Freedom and the White Committee, for example, distributed Friends of Democracy’s pamphlets. Mystery writer Rex Stout, who worked for British intelligence, was an officer of Friends of Democracy and was also a sponsor of Fight for Freedom. Both Birkhead and Stout spoke at Fight for Freedom meetings.>7

‘The Rev. Vir. Birkhead wrote to FFF’s Ulric Bell in early February 1941: “...we are going to take on about fifteen key anti-democratic leaders and organizations....We hope to do with these organizations and individuals something of the same sort of things we did with Coughlin and McWilliams, and to some extent, with Verne Marshall.”38 Bell wrote back that “if we have anything good enough to destroy the people we are talking about it would be good enough for the White [louse to spring.” He continued that “it will be a simple matter for us to get the material into the proper hands.”3?

When Lindbergh spoke at Madison Square Garden on April 24, 1941, the rally was picketed by Friends of Democracy, which handed out a pamphlet titled hat One Medal Can Do, referring to the medal that Goering had given Lindbergh on his 1938 trip to Germany. Birkhead announced that this meeting would be “the largest gathering

The Fronts e*¢ 35

of pro-Nazi and pro-Fascists...since the American Bund rallies...” Fight for Freedom sponsored British intelligence collaborator Rex Stout and James Warburg in a radio reply to Lindy, and shortly there- after Birkhead charged that Lindbergh had already “been selected by Hitler as the ‘Fuehrer’ of America.”4

Although Lindbergh’s stand against intervention had by 1939-40 alienated his friends, his attorney, and his in-laws in the establishment, the reaction of the general public is harder to gauge. The crucial event was his Des Moines, Iowa, speech of September 11, 1941, in which he mentioned Jews as one group interested in getting the United States into war. The public reaction, as opposed to the media and intellectual reaction, at first blush seems to have been mild.

When Lindbergh spoke in the very center of the establishment in New York’s Madison Square Garden on May 23, 1941, he drew twenty thousand people inside and perhaps another fourteen thousand out- side. On October 30, 1941, he spoke again at Madison Square Garden before nearly twenty thousand, but this may be misleading. As part of its persistent political warfare and dirty tricks against Lindbergh, BSC claims to have printed a duplicate set of tickets, hoping to create fights and turmoil over seating. BSC claims this had the effect of inflating the attendance when the original crowd proved small and the ushers more alert thén anticipated.*!

Another BSC front, France Forever, was the American phase of the British effort to finance and promote Charles de Gaulle as the true voice of France. Eventually Churchill was to get heartily sick of the pompous and prickly general, but in 1940-41 he was of major use to British propaganda.*

British intelligence controlled France Forever largely through BSC agent Sandy Griffith and Market Analysts Inc. In a “Dear Ernie” letter of August 3, 1940, Griffith wrote to Ernest Cuneo: “I have been asked to head up a committee of Americans who are in sympathy with the best of old French ideals and want no traffic with the Vichy France. This committee will include prominent Harvard and Columbia people and will be militant. Have you any candidates?”*

In the sophisticated public relations form that typified these front groups, France Forever held its charter signing ceremony at Indepen- dence Hall in Philadelphia. The president of France Forever, oilman Eugene J. Houdry, took the occasion to praise de Gaulle and reiterate

36 ©¢8 DESPERATE DECEPTION

the British theme that de Gaulle was fighting for the liberation of France in accordance with France’s pledged word.

Another organizer of France Forever, Dr. Albert Simard announced the organization’s creed. It incorporated two basic themes of British propaganda: “We are convinced that France and all enslaved European democracies can be freed only by a British victory and that a German victory over Britain will be the signal for an attack on all the Americas.”*

De Gaulle’s London headquarters announced on October 6, 1940, that committees had been formed in nine countries—Brazil, Argen- tina, Uruguay, Chile, Mexico, Canada, Egypt, South Africa, and the British colony of Mauritius—“to act in close cooperation with the Free French forces.” A following New York Times article of October 7, 1941, concludes that the headquarters of de Gaulle’s followers “is at 8 West 40th Street, New York City under the name ‘France Forever.’ ” By March 9, 1941, the office had been moved to 30 Rockefeller Plaza, convenient to British Security Coordination and Fight for Freedom.*

In the Ernest Cuneo Papers is a “Notice of a Press Conference” sent to Cuneo by Francis A. Henson, Sandy Griffith’s assistant at Market Analysts Inc. The press conference in Washington’s Mayflower Hotel on December 6, 1940, presented “Mr. Jacques de Sieyes, personal rep- resentative of General De Gaulle and a founder and member of the Board of France Forever.” Also introduced was Dr. Fred G. Hoffherr, the head of the French department at Barnard College of Columbia University. Hoftherr was chairman of France Forever’s public relations department. Jean Delattre-Seguy, a Washington representative of France Forever with offices in the Shoreham Building, was also present. On the top of the release, in ink, Henson had written: “Ernie —Stop by If you can—conveniently FAH.”4

British intelligence exerted covert influence on France Forever in other ways. Always sensitive to the American fear of being bamboozled by clever British propaganda, British Ambassador Lord Lothian had promoted the formation of the Inter-Allied Information Committee (LAIC). This allowed British propaganda to emerge from Czech or Polish or French lips.*”

The IAIC first met on September 24, 1940, with Robert Valeur, once of the New York office of the French Information Bureau, repre- senting France Forever. Valeur served [AIC in the influential position

The Fronts ¢** 37

of director of publications. [AIC’s information center was housed— where else—in Rockefeller Center.

The New York Times gave good coverage of France Forever’s activi- ties—rallics, public meetings, and interviews. As always with British intelligence fronts, the list of outside speakers was impressive and instructive. At a packed December 20, 1940, rally at Carnegie Hall, British intelligence collaborators Robert Sherwood and Clark Michel- berger, executive director of the CDAAA, urged “no appeasement with the appeasers.”

Sherwood blamed the war on isolationists and called for the forma- tion now of a union of all the democracies. Vhe president of France Forever, Kugene Houdry, reverberated the propaganda theme the British used in the run-up to Lend-Lease. ‘Vhe claim was that Britain did not need American troops; American supplies were all the British needed to defeat Germany. ‘Vhe claim was false, but deflected isola- tionist criticism. ‘here was never any hope that the British could in- vade the continent of Kurope without American manpower.®

There were also the voices of the administration. On May 27, 1941, Assistant U.S. Attorney General Francis M. Shea told a dinner audi- ence assembled to hear President Roosevelt’s radio speech that the United States should fully support the Free French and not “the faith- Jess men of Vichy.” Wrote the New York Times of the occasion: “Miss [Dorothy] “Phompson led the applause during President Roosevelt's specch....At the moment he proclaimed the national emergency she excitedly embraced Edgar Ansel Mowrer....When the President fin- ished she told a friend, ‘I am sick with happiness.’ ”4”

Edgar Ansel Mowrer, a correspondent for the strongly intervention- ist Chicago Daily News who also spoke at this dinner, has been named as a British intelligence agent. Dorothy “Vhompson has also been simi- larly named; see Chapter 3.

At France Forever’s Bastille Day event, held at the Manhattan Cen- ter, New York City, the administration was represented by that master of personal attack Sceretary of Interior Harold L.. Ickes. Two thousand people witnessed the specch and many more heard it on radio station WMCA. This station broadcast many interventionist speakers spon- sored by British intelligence front groups.°”

The New York ‘Times said Iekes’s speech was “one of the most bitter attacks ever made on Mr. Lindbergh by any member of the administra -

38 eee DP ESPERATE DECEPTION

tion.” Ickes called Lindbergh “the knight of the German Eagle” and a “mouthpiece of the Nazi Party line in the United States.”*! Another British intelligence agent spoke at the 1941 Armistice ceremony of France Forever at the Manhattan Center. He was Colonel Rex Benson, whom the New York Times identified as the military attaché of the Brit- ish embassy. Benson was, in fact, a British intelligence agent and an old friend of “C”—Sir Stewart Menzies, the chief of the Secret Intelli- gence Service (MI-6).°?

After centuries of conflict with Britain, the Irish could not bring themselves to fight on Britain’s side and so declared themselves neutral in World War II. This was much to the consternation of the British, who coveted bases in Ireland to better protect convoys from North America. The British plotted all their tried-and-true stratagems to bring the Emerald Isle to heel. John Colville, Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s private secretary, wrote in his diary entry of December 3, 1940: “At dinner he [Churchill] conspired with Cranborne, Rob Hudson, Kingsley Wood and Oliver Lyttelton about means of bring- ing pressure to bear on Ireland. Refusal to buy her food, to lend her our shipping or to pay her our present subsidies seem calculated to bring De Valera to his knees in a very short time.”>?

In January 1941, Wendell Willkie, who had gone to England at the request of the head of BSC, William Stephenson, made a quick side trip to Ireland to attempt to get the bases. Willkie warned that Ireland’s relationship with the United States would be threatened if Britain were not given the bases. This also failed.°+

At almost the same time, January 23, 1941, Christopher Emmet, Chancellor James Byrne of New York University, and Professor Wil- liam Agar (brother of Fight for Freedom activist Herbert Agar) sent out a form letter to American interventionists of Irish descent. The results of this ploy were published in March. Byrne headed the list of 129 Irish-Americans who urged Ireland to grant the bases to Great Britain. The Irish were unmoved.*> If 129 petitioners were of no avail, perhaps a full-blown front group was needed.

SOE documents on the Irish American Defense Association sched- uled for release in 1998 give the only extensive inside view of the planning and resources BSC devoted to even its smallest and least suc- cessful front. In half of a dozen reports to London, the details of the TADAs plans and ploys are given in detail reminiscent of a major

The Fronts ¢e¢ 39

corporate effort to market a new product. The “Index,” really a table of contents, to the report of October 18, 1941, lists 123 pages of person- nel, activities, and reports: “National Activities Planned, Irish Amer- ican Opinion Polls (Work in Progress), ‘The Case for Irish and American Unity’—First draft of 24-page pamphlet....”

The BSC cover letter to Report number SO/458 of October 18, 1941, says, “Attached is the first report on our activities in connection with the... FORMATION AND ACTIVITIES OF THE COMMITTEE FOR AMERI- CAN-IRISH DEFENSE.... The Report has been compiled by G.112 [Sandy Griffith] and his collaborators....We are subsidizing the MOVEMENT at the rate of $1,500.00 per month...” [about $15,000 per month at 1997 prices].

Sandy Griffith writes in this report: “I have reserved effective con- trol of the organization....the proposed activities have been discussed informally with people in the Administration, with Secretaries Knox and Welles and with Colonel Donovan....We have close friendly rela- tions with the Committee to Defend America and with Fight for Freedom....Efie bases for America are an immediate tangible objec- tive....[as are] anti-Nazi, anti-Coughlin, and other patriotic resolu- tions”

In another “Dear Ernie” letter of October 2, 1941, on the stationery of Market Analysts Inc., Francis Henson, Sandy Griffith’s assistant, wrote: “I enclose some material on an Irish American Unity campaign for which we are working. Some of your State Department friends may be interested. There is to be a 24 page pamphlet out soon with an in- troduction by Frank Murphy.”*’

The material he enclosed is a “Petition of the Committee for Ameri- can Irish Defense” with the same street address—8 West 40th Street, New York City—as Market Analysts Inc. and the CDAAA (White Committee). It was not long, however, before the petitions had a new address and a new addressee; it was William Agar, Suite 301, 1270 Sixth Avenue, RKO Building, New York City. Yet another BSC front took up residence close to British intelligence in Rockefeller Center. ‘Uhe press release stated: “Prof. William Agar of Columbia University, dis- tinguished author and scientist and a leader of the Fight for Freedom.” The executive committee lists James Byrne as honorary chairman, Rossa F. Downing as national chairman, ‘T. James ‘Tumulty as secretary, and Christopher Emmet as treasurer.°®

40 ee¢ DESPERATE DECEPTION

James Byrne was the father-in-law of John F. C. “Ivar” Bryce. Ivar Bryce was a Special Operations Executive agent working for BSC. One of James Byrne’s other daughters, Helen, once the wife of Foreign Affairs editor Hamilton Fish Armstrong, had been, since March 1938, the wife of columnist Walter Lippmann, who the “BSC Account” says was “among those who rendered service of particular value.”*? Chris- topher Emmet, the treasurer, worked on many British intelligence projects with British intelligence agent Sanford Griffith and after the war on MI-6 and CIA projects. He was the cousin of Robert Emmet Sherwood.

Christopher Emmet in a fund-raising letter of November 1941 clearly stated the purpose of the organization. The AIDA sought to counter the likes of “America First, Father Coughlin and others still defying the majority verdict” of “an openly and legally recognized Shooting War in the Atlantic.”

The AIDAs slogan was, “You can count on the Irish, Mr. President.” Emmet also said: “Our first rally was held on Armistice Day at Father Duffy’s statue in New York...attended by 6,000 people.”® All the bandwagon tactics usually so effective—the testimonials by scholars and prominent citizens, the rallies, the petitions, the radio broad- casts—fell flat. The bitter truth was that the president could not count on the Irish.

In the end, the Irish would have none of it; no amount of slick propa- ganda could convince them that Britain was the last hope of civiliza- tion. Mark Chadwin says of the Fight for Freedom interlock with this Irish campaign: “...in one of the few instances in the fall when it seized the initiative and sought to influence diplomatic events concurrently with administrative action, the Century Group failed completely.”®!

For the BSC fronts that specialized in hard-hitting, even malicious, attacks it was an ignominious end. The AIDA was reduced to whining about “vicious attacks by the Coughlinite Irish Organizations and Press.” The masters of distortion were left complaining that the Irish had “distorted” AIDA pronouncements.”

Lastly, we come to the Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies (CDAAA), better known in its day as the William Allen White Committee. This was in fact the second William Allen White Committee. The first White Committee had been the popular name for another interventionist front, the Committee for Concerted Peace

The Fronts @** 4]

Efforts, and its official name had been just as cleverly and misleadingly contrived: Nonpartisan Committee for Peace ‘Through Revision of the Neutrality Law. ‘These were all interventionist organizations. “The Committee for Concerted Peace Efforts was in effect a front for the League of Nations Association,” writes historian Jane Harriet Schwar.®?

The first William Allen White Committee (WAW I) had lasted only a few weeks in the late summer and fall of 1939. It was of major impor- tance, however, since it marked a “definite shift toward conservatism in the leadership of the interventionist movement.” Left-wing radicals had been replaced by pro-British conservatives.

As was truc of the other interventionist committees, such as Fight for Freedom, with which it interlocked, half the 550 members of the White Committee lived in the Northeast. One hundred forty-three of these lived or worked in New York City. Fewer than a hundred mem- bers lived west of the Mississippi. ‘The dozen men who made the CDAAA run were white male Protestants of largely British descent and old familics who had gone to the better Eastern colleges.04

Onc of the White Committee connections to the British was through its William Allen White News Service, launched by the British puppet Inter-Allied Information Committec, also located in Rockefeller Cen- ter with numerous other interventionist groups and BSC.%

‘The head of the William Allen White News Service was John Balderston. [le had been a war correspondent in the Great War. His highly emotional articles had been favorable to the British, and he had continued in this vein in 1917, when he became director of information in Great Britain for George Creel’s Committee on Public Information. He then spent from 1923 to 1931 in London as correspondent for Herbert Bayard Swope’s New York World. Wis days with the British in London seem to go with him to Hollywood, where he spent the 1930s as a screenwriter on such films as Lives of a Bengal Lancer (British army heroics on the Northwest Frontier of India) and The Prisoner of Zenda (Englishman defeats plot against the king of Ruritania).™

Like many in the Century Group/light for Freedom, he greatly en- joyed his contact with British Ambassador Lothian. Balderston quickly informed Lothian of the Century Group's finances and his own hopes for ties with Clarence Streit’s Union Now Movement, which sought to forma union of the United States and Great Britain. Pe wrote or told

42 eee DESPERATE DECEPTION

Lothian of the Century Group’s efforts to discuss its program with Sec- retary of State Hull and Secretary of War Stimson and the effort to obtain the cooperation of Republican presidential nominee Wendell Willkie.°?

In 1940 the British Ministry of Information had been confident enough of its ability to influence the White Committee that it felt the need for a direct telephone link. The British ambassador at Washing- ton, Lord Lothian, ever wishing to use intermediaries and covert links, was horrified: “It would be most disastrous to the William Allen White Committee were it ever to be established that it was communicating and collaborating with any branch of His Majesty’s Government.””?

Most prominent was the energetic leader of WAW I, Clark Eichel- berger, the national director of the League of Nations. Quiet support also came from an interventionist group organized around the promi- nent New York attorney Frederic R. Coudert. Coudert had been a vo- ciferous interventionist before United States entry into World War Land had been legal adviser to the British embassy during that war. Between the wars, Coudert’s law firm represented the French government. In this capacity he not only gave advice to the French embassy but made himself useful by writing pro-French articles for American newspapers.’! The Coudert group invited White to a luncheon on October 20, 1939.

The group had two goals. The first was to repeal the neutrality laws, which were impeding the flow of greatly needed goods to Britain and France. Second, after this effort to get the neutrality laws changed had succeeded, the friends of Britain and France faced up to an even more dangerous problem. They had to make sure that both political parties nominated candidates who supported aid to the Allies. There was great fear that in the heat of the election either party, but particularly the Republicans, might cater to antiwar sentiment. All those present at the April 1940 meeting agreed to try to prevent this.’> How this second concern was turned into action is the subject of Chapter 8.

Some of those present at this October meeting were official mem- bers of the Nonpartisan Committee (WAW I). These would include William Allen White himself, Clark Eichelberger, Frederick Coudert, and Thomas K. Finletter, a member of Coudert’s law firm. Others in the Coudert Group who attended this luncheon were Wendell Willkie, the president of the J. P. Morgan-controlled utility Commonwealth and Southern Corporation; Thomas J. Watson, president of IBM and

The Fronts °° 43

the International Chamber of Commerce and a major factor at radio station WRUL, which British intelligence controlled; Henry L. Stimson, a staunch interventionist active in various pro-intervention organizations; and Frank L. Polk, international lawyer and member of the firm of Polk, Davis, Wardwell—he was acting secretary of state while Wilson and Lansing were at the Versailles Peace Conference. Allen Dulles, a veteran intelligence operative and member of the For- eign Service, may also have been present. The record is conflicting.” By July 1940, charges that the committee was dominated by Wall Street seem to have brought on the formation of an official policy committee, in which the Wall Street connection would be less obvious, to replace the informal relationship with the Coudert Group. To be sure, Frederic Coudert and Thomas W. Lamont, senior partner at J. P. Morgan, continued behind the scenes. However, “committee leaders,” writes historian Jane Schwar, “thinking of the possibility of a congres- sional investigation, prudently did not record Lamont’s presence in the

nemutes.””*

Though two interventionist committees were named for him, Will- iam Allen White, “the Sage of Emporia, Kansas,” himself need be ex- amined only briefly, because he turns out to have been anything but a real insider. The ignominious end of White as leader of the William Allen White Committee came when he gave an interview, to Roy Howard of the Scripps Howard chain of newspapers, denying that his Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies was intervention- ist. In a widely published response, White replied: “The only reason in God’s world [ am in this organization is to keep the country out of war.” White went on to say that if he were to make a motto for the committee it would be “The Yanks are not coming.”’*

Clark Eichelberger and several members of the strongly interven- tionist policy committee of CDAAA were meeting on December 23, 1940, at the home of one of the most deeply interventionist members Lewis Douglas. “We were stunned...” reports Eichelberger. If the committee was “stunned,” William Allen White was “very much sur- prised and hurt at the reaction of members of the committee....” White resigned, but his name was so useful that he remained as honor- ary chairman.’6

White gave the impression of having a confused mind, and this was true, but many people would have a confused mind given his

44 «ee DESPERATE DECEPTION

circumstances. In his daily life in Kansas the people he met were dis- tanced from the action in Europe, both physically and emotionally. They did not identify with Britain, and they questioned the efforts of White and his Eastern establishment friends to get the United States to abet Britain. The Eastern-based captains of finance and law and intellectual life whose respect White desired were, on the other hand, emotionally committed to a British victory.

CDAAA even moved into the foreign broadcasting business by sponsoring daily shortwave broadcasts in French over the 50,000-watt Station WRUL. Ostensibly these broadcasts were summaries of Amer- ican press opinion; in reality they were British black propaganda. WRUL was founded to spread “international goodwill,” but Mont- gomery Hyde wrote in The Quiet Canadian: “By the middle of 1941, Station WRUL was virtually, though quite unconsciously, a subsidiary of the Stephenson organization, sending out British propaganda in twenty-two different languages and dialects....” The official “BSC Ac- count” says: “Through cut-outs, BSC began to supply it (WRUL] with everything it needed to run a first-class international programme wor- thy of its transmitting power....BSC subsidized it financially. It re- cruited foreign news editors, translators and announcers to serve on its staff. It furnished it with material for news bulletins, with specially pre- pared scripts for talks and commentaries.” The man who financed the French broadcasts for the CDAAA was its treasurer, Frederick Chad- wick McKee.’’

Documents that have recently become available confirm Hyde’s ac- count and specify how WRUL was controlled by BSC. In his report to London of July 1941 Sydney Morrell wrote: “...WRUL has been the station on which British organizations have concentrated their efforts. This station was privately endowed by the Rockefeller Foundation....A few months ago a new subsidy was paid by S.O.1 to ‘France Forever’ for separate French broadcasts from WRUL...and another subsidy was paid to the Mazzini Society for Italian broadcasts.”

Later in his report Morrell detailed the mechanics of the WRUL operation. “...G.112 [Sandy Griffith]...has set up an office to deal with radio programs....all commentators work receiving their instructions and writing their broadcasts....[these are] approved by the State De- partment Censor, recorded, sent to WRUL in Boston and then broad- cast under the sponsorship of the Fight for Freedom Committee.”

The Fronts #9 45

The daily WRUL Broadcast Schedule from the SOE archives shows the responsibility for running the broadcasts divided between G.112, Sandy Griffith, and G.111, Alexander J. Halpern, once (1917) secre- tary to the Kerensky government in Russia, now working at BSC, and soon to become the head of its Political and Minorities Section with a new cover symbol, G.400. A note at the bottom of the schedule says, “Where no particular control is indicated we have indirect control.”’®

So the CDAAA was one of many interventionist groups used by BSC to project its interventionist message. It is little wonder then that Fight for Freedom’s Francis Miller could later say: “Right-wing ‘revisionists’ may have grounds to accuse the Warhawks of a ‘conspiracy’ to involve the United States in a War.” The post-World War II revisionists— those who contributed to editor Harry Elmer Barnes’s book Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace are an example—spotted the gaps and glitches in the standard histories, but their own works, heavy on logic and analysis, unavoidably light on documents, were also vulnerable.

CHAPTER 3

GSe

“Those Who Rendered

Service of Particular Value”

In early 1969 the United States Supreme Court ruled that wiretap re- cordings must be revealed in open court, even in cases of national secu- rity. Ernest Cuneo, once the liaison between British intelligence, the White House, the FBI, and OSS, wrote a caustic denunciation of this ruling and sent it to J. Edgar Hoover at the FBI. ”Friendly and neutral powers,” wrote Cuneo, “are quaint and laughable terms unrecognized in the world of international intelligence. Every major nation taps ev- ery other major nation, none more than its Allies.”

The purpose of these taps, he explained, is “to trace down the for- eign country’s apparatus in this country. Who is talking to whom is as important as what is said. To whom each speaks afterward is even more important, because it leads up to the chiefs in command. The process of unveiling this is called ‘going up the ladder.’ ”!

This chapter reverses the process by going down the ladder to locate British agents, informers, and collaborators; explore how they helped to implement British policy; and examine how they helped move the United States toward World War II and then toward a peace that was in Britain’s interest.

“British Security Coordination (BSC): An Account of Secret Activi- ties in the Western Hemisphere, 1940-45” very explicitly depicts a number of people as helpmates of British intelligence. ‘Vhe attack on the American isolationists and defeatists by BSC was a thorough, clas- sical case of covert political warfare. Of the Americans who aided BSC, the “BSC Account” says: “The press and radio men with whom BSC

47

48 eee PESPERATE DECEPTION

maintained contact were comparable with subagents and the interme- diaries with agents. They were thus regarded.”

The World War II intelligence community was appalled by the pub- lication of Montgomery Hyde’s The Quiet Canadian because they feared that some historian or journalist would use the methodology of intelligence to track the revealed agents to other and darker opera- tions. Ernest Cuneo wrote to Intrepid’s assistant, Dick Ellis: “No great harm came of it, but Montgomery Hyde broke confidences which I was assured were inviolate. They involved newspaper friends of mine who accepted my personal assurances and, indeed, a President for whom | bore deepest affection.”

Who were the newspaper people who were particularly useful to British intelligence? The “BSC Account” gives a partial list: George Backer, publisher of the New York Post; Ralph Ingersoll, editor of PM, Helen Ogden Reid, who controlled the New York Herald Tribune; Paul Patterson, publisher of the Baltimore Sun; A. H. Sulzberger, president of the New York Times; and Walter Lippmann.*

The “BSC Account” also lists the Overseas News Agency (ONA), which was a branch of the Jewish Telegraph Agency. In return for co- operation, BSC began subsidizing ONA in April 1941.° Jacob Landau had founded the Jewish ‘Telegraph Agency during World War I. The headquarters, first in London, was soon moved to New York; branches were established in Paris, Berlin, Warsaw, and Jerusalem. The money to run this news agency came only in part from newspapers; the re- mainder came from wealthy contributors, the major one being the banker Felix Warburg.

The ONA evolved from the Jewish Telegraph Agency in the spring of 1940 as an agency to provide news and feature articles on the persecu- tion of minorities. The guiding hand behind this transformation was the militant interventionist Herbert Bayard Swope, who eventually became vice chairman of the New York Fight for Freedom Committee. At a meeting at Swope’s home the board of directors was set up; George Backer of the New York Post and Harold Guinzberg of Viking Press, both leaders of Fight for Freedom, were among the board members. Swope became “Correspondent and Chairman of the Board,” as his business cards identified him. ONA did well during the war, providing copy in twenty-eight languages for the Office of War Information. Addition- ally, it served United States papers with five million circulation.°

“Those Who Rendered Service of Particular Value” °°° 49

In the VENONA Project the United States intercepted and then decrypted hundreds of messages between Moscow and its intelligence apparatus in the U.S. Recently released VENONA messages show that Landau was working for the British, but alas the VENONA messages reveal this because Soviet secret intelligence, the NKVD, had so thor- oughly penetrated BSC and its offspring OSS.

On September 8, 1943, one of the Soviet agents within British Secu- rity Coordination, UCN 9 (probably Cedric Belfrage), reported of the Overseas News Agency: “On instructions of the British, LANDAU left for the ‘COUNTRYSIDE’ [Mexico] to meet “TYuLEN’ [Soviet am- bassador to Mexico Konstantin Umanskij].” Landau was in Mexico City for two months and had several meetings with the Soviet ambassador.’

‘To this list we should add—as the “BSC Account” does—the names of two columnists to whom Cuneo had undoubtedly given his solemn

word that their ties to British intelligence would remain secret, Walter Winchell and Drew Pearson. Cuneo (code name Crusader) writes on Pearson and Winchell: “...1 controlled the world’s largest newspaper and radio circulation, centering on Walter Winchell and his near 1,000 papers and the only near approach was Drew Pearson’s Washington Merry-Go-Round. Drew had been my instructor at Columbia, and for the next half century we were the closest of friends....From 1933 on, we were intent on bringing down Hitler/Mussolini and along with Franco had been waging all-out journalistic and legal war on them.”®

Other BSC ties to the world of media were columnist Dorothy Thompson, journalist Edmond Taylor, movie mogul Alexander Korda, presidential speechwriter Robert Emmet Sherwood, and mystery writer Rex Stout.

Rex Stout was not only an officer in the BSC front Friends of De- mocracy and a major spokesman for another BSC front, Fight for Freedom, he also admits to working directly for BSC agent Donald MacLaren. In the fall of 1941, MacLaren recruited Stout, George Merten (from BSC’s George Office economic warfare operations), and syndicated New York Post economic columnist Sylvia Porter to write a propaganda booklet titled Sequel to the Apocalypse: The Uncensored Story: How Your Dimes and Quarters Telped Pay for Hitler’s War.

As in the case of front groups, there were often several British intel- ligence agents, subagents, and collaborators working the same organi- zation. ‘here is another tendency that should be noted about these

50 ¢** DESPERATE DECEPTION

competent and trustworthy agents and collaborators who worked closely with British intelligence in the 1939-41 period. They fre- quently reappeared in Donovan’s Coordinator of Information intelli- gence service or his Foreign Information Service propaganda arm run by British intelligence collaborator Robert Sherwood. There is noth- ing very unusual here; this was merely the very human tendency to hire familiar people who had previously served and performed well. The first list of people Sherwood sent Donovan, “for the work we dis- cussed,” included Edmond Taylor, Douglas Miller, E. A. Mowrer, H. R. Knickerbocker, and Raymond Gram Swing.!°

The journalist Edmond Taylor has written me of his cooperation with British intelligence and described the subtlety of the British technique: “What they did more often, especially before Pearl Har- bor and in the early months of the war, was to connive, usually as non-committally as possible, with Americans like myself who were willing to go out of regular (or even legal) channels to try to bend U.S. policy towards objectives that the British, as well as the Ameri- cans in question, considered desirable.”!!

In fact, the New York office of Donovan’s organization, run by Allen Dulles, was Room 3663, 630 Fifth Avenue. The address of Brit- ish Security Coordination was Room 3603, 630 Fifth Avenue. BSC agent Sandy Griffith’s man at Fight for Freedom in Chicago joined OSS, as did SOE man and Walter Lippmann brother-in-law Ivar Bryce. Donald Downes was another. In one case—that of George Merten, a German economist who had turned over to BSC evidence that the Schering drug company was Nazi-owned and who had then worked completely for BSC, gathering economic intelligence and planting articles in the press— an entire operation, the “George Of- fice,” was unloaded onto OSS.”

The British vigorously maneuvered their agents into positions in Donovan's organization and probably other departments as well. Re- member that Intrepid’s assistant at BSC, Dick Ellis, was the person really running William Donovan’s COI office.

‘To be sure, there were degrees in the anglophilia of Donovan’s per- sonnel. Here is Ernest Cuneo, a powerfully built former NFL football player, on an agreement he had worked out on the fate of Italy: “I went to the O.S.S. Office in New York. De Witte Poole, the assistant to Allen Dulles, hailed me. ‘Oh Mr. Cuneo,’ he said, “That Italian Treaty

“Those Who Rendered Service of Particular Value” °** 51

is off! Cancel it!’ I said, ‘Mr. Poole, the President has approved it. There were some minor things which have to be ironed out, but it’s been finally approved by the President.’ He said, ‘It doesn’t matter. Sir Ronald Campbell just called. He doesn’t want it so it’s off’ I simply lifted him from his seat and slapped his face back and forth and threw him back in his chair."43

Among Donovan's papers is a four-page memo. Handwritten across the top is “Provided WJD-by Bill Stephenson (Pre C.O.1.).” It is titled “British Recruitment and Handling of Agents.” Though it warns that “definitions of the term ‘agent’ vary considerably” and that its “discus- sion is in terms of normal, not wartime, intelligence operations,” this memo still serves as a guide to the world of recruiting intelligence agents. It also helps to explain the origins and rationale of the CIA recruiting practices that have come under such close scrutiny in recent years. “Such persons are initially recommended to the service either by friends already in the service or by particular alumni of the service des- ignated for this purpose....Both MI6 and MIS have such former offic- ers appointed for this purpose, particularly those who are connected with British universities....By far the largest number of British agents are not “agents” properly speaking, but voluntary informers....”!+

The following sketches look more closely at the collaborators, agents, and voluntary informers who, as the “BSC Account” states, “rendered service of particular value” to British intelligence.

George Backer (1903-74). Backer was publisher of the New York Post. During the 1930s he worked for the election of FDR. For his work helping Jews escape from Nazism during the 1930s he was made a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor. From 1932 to 1942 he was married to Dorothy Schiff, granddaughter of the legendary German Jewish philanthropist Jacob H. Schiff. In 1939, Dorothy and George acquired the New York Post.

Backer helped British intelligence in the numerous ways open to a wealthy publisher. He was a generous donor to Fight for Freedom." As previously mentioned, Backer was a founding board member of the Overseas News Agency, which worked with BSC. Before the United States entered the war he provided journalist cover for Virginia Hall (field name Marie of Lyons), one of SOE’s greatest agents in France.!°

British intelligence agent and propagandist John Wheeler-Bennett counted Backer and James Warburg among Britain’s friends in Fight

52 eee DESPERATE DECEPTION

for Freedom. He also worked closely with them in the American Office of War Information.!7

Arthur Hayes Sulzberger (1892-1968). When Harrison Salisbury published his history of his employer, the New York Times, in 1980 he did not have the benefit of David Ignatius’s article at the rival Post. Though he readily admits that the New York Times was used by British intelligence, Salisbury is at pains to convince the reader of the owner's dedication to objectivity. Salisbury writes: “...World War II was to bring to Arthur Hays Sulzberger another concern....Not long after the outbreak of the war Sulzberger learned that a number of these corre- spondents had connections with M1-6 the British intelligence agency.” Salisbury wrote that this revelation made Sulzberger “very angry,” but apparently not angry enough to stop it or to fire the culprits. According to one old Times staff man, Hanson Baldwin, “leaks to British intelli- gence through The Times continued after U.S. entry into the war.”!§

One of those to whom Sulzberger expressed his anger about MI-6 use of his staff was Scotty Reston. Reston may well have been one of these BSC people himself. When Frank Thistlewaite of Britain’s Joint American Secretariat was asked to pass on one of numerous items that the British planted in the American press, he responded that he would ask Robin Cruickshank if “it would be a suitable topic to feed to one of his tame journalists.” Cruickshank liked the idea. Historian Susan Ann Brewer identifies the tame journalists as James Reston of the New York Times, Geoffrey Parsons of the New York Herald Tribune, and Frederick Kuh of the Chicago Sun.'?

Salisbury recorded that Sulzberger had refused the 1942 proposal of Colonel Donovan that the Times be at the disposal of the OSS. The presently unanswerable question is whether Donovan was approaching Sulzberger cold or if he thought the head of the Times would cooperate with the OSS because he had cooperated with British intelligence. There were also other indications that Sulzberger’s cooperation with British intelligence in the 1939-42 period and later with the CIA was not always as enthusiastic as the wholehearted cooperation shown by the New York Herald Tribune.

An August 194] Fight for Freedom internal memo complains: “Here is another example of the same thing. The Tribune gives us a break and the Times doesn’t.”*° Sulzberger’s apparent ambivalence might have remained without explanation but for one of the reports

“Those Who Rendered Service of Particular Value” °° 53

found in SOE agent Valentine Williams’s personal file in the SOE ar- chives. Williams had been sent out from London under Ministry of Economic Warfare (MEW) cover to advise Intrepid on propaganda matters, promote General de Gaulle, and pick up his old contacts. On September 15, 1941, Williams wrote to his boss Dr. Hugh Dalton: “T had an hour with Arthur Sulzberger, proprietor of the New York Times, last week. He told me that for the first time in his life he regret- ted being a Jew because, with the tide of antisemitism rising, he was unable to champion the anti-Hitler policy of the administration as vig- orously and as universally as he would like as his sponsorship would be attributed to Jewish influence by isolationists and thus lose something of its force.”?!

Walter Winchell (1897-1972). In a letter to Sir William Stephenson of January 4, 1988, complaining about the inaccuracies of the book A Man Called Intrepid, Ernest Cuneo wrote of Winchell: “My relation- ship with BSC was one of the many source-relationships I maintained as part of my de facto editorship of Winchell’s policies.... We ‘moved’ about 1,200 words a day, six days a week and had also to prepare a Sunday broadcast. For years I did this as a service to FDR. Thereaf- ter, I was paid more than a million and W.W. left me his papers. Un- fortunately, there is an overtone that Winchell was a British agent. He was not. He was, in fact, fighting Hitler long before anyone else in the U.S. or Britain. He was a free man, under the control of no one (including himself).”?7

As Cuneo admits, he was the one actually writing the column and radio show and maintaining contact with BSC.’ It is also clear from his papers that he was working with British intelligence agents, such as Sandy Griffith, in 1940 and was certainly working for Britain’s interest at the outbreak of the war. “I had worked,” wrote Cuneo, “on the hold- ing up of the Bremen for 24 hours at the beginning of the war, broad- casting her hour of departure en clair so the British Navy could kill her as she cleared Sandy Hook. They couldn’t spare the destroyer.”°*

Helen Reid (1882-1970). Born Helen Rogers in Appleton, Wiscon- sin, she graduated in 1903 from Barnard and went to work as social secretary for Mrs. Whitelaw Reid. From 1905 to 1911, when Whitelaw Reid was ambassador to Great Britain, she divided her time between England and the United States. She married Whitelaw’s son, Ogden Mills Reid, in 1911.25 Mrs. Reid had effective control of the paper not

54 eee DESPERATE DECEPTION

only because she was a strong-willed and talented woman but because her husband, Ogden Mills Reid, had a drinking problem.

According to intelligence historian Anthony Cave-Brown, Whitelaw Reid was a family friend of MI-6 head Stewart Menzies and attended Menzies family functions.’° No newspaper in the United States was more useful to British intelligence during World War II than the Her- ald Tribune. A descripton of BSC’s work with the Herald Tribune fills a dozen pages of the secret “BSC Account.”

Dorothy Thompson (1894-1961). During the period under study, Dorothy Thompson exhibited an amazing ability to reflect the British propaganda line of the day. This is one of the few useful conclusions to be gained from reading the hundreds of pages in her FBI file. (A num- ber of paragraphs and several pages were withheld from the 1940s with the “b-1” “national security exemption.”)*’ Thompson's diary, kept for only a dozen entries in early 1942, also illustrates her close ties to the intelligence community.

January 3—Emmy Rado [a refugee working for Donovan’s Coordinator of Information] came in the afternoon about

Paul.

January 4—Called J. Wheeler-Bennett [as we have seen, a major figure in British Information Service, British intelli- gence, and Political Warfare]. In the evening I worked on a

memo for D. [Bill Donovan, head of COJ].

January 5—Went to lunch with Agars, Goldsmiths and George Field....Agreed to organize the “opening” party Jan. 17th. Wrote end of memo to B.D. [Bill Donovan] in af- ternoon.?*

Walter Lippmann (1889-1974). Walter Lippmann was a syndicated Herald Tribune columnist closely tied to British intelligence. Not only does the “BSC Account” list Lippmann “among those who rendered service of particular value,” but he was not only taking advice, he was giving it.??

In late winter or early spring 1940, Lippmann even told the British to initiate Secret Intelligence Service operations against American isolationists. His exact thoughts are unknown. His specific ideas were

“Those Who Rendered Service of Particular Value” eee 55

“too delicate” for the British Foreign Office to put to paper, but the idea is quite clear. Lippmann was a heavyweight. His suggestions on how to handle the American public reached as high as the British War Cabinet.3°

Lippmann’s papers also contain remarkable examples of intelligence history as the “missing dimension” in conventional histories. Intelli- gence history has been so ignored that even first-class historians do not recognize the names of intelligence personnel. In his 1985 book of Lippmann’s papers, Public Philosopher, editor John Morton Blum iden- tifies the author of a letter to Lippmann thusly: “Ivar Bryce, a personal friend of Lippmann’s had written to express his distress about the Darlan deal.” ‘That Bryce was a friend was true, but hardly adequate. Ivar Bryce was Walter Lippmann’s brother-in-law and he was in fact a Special Operations Executive agent working for Intrepid.?!

Though Bryce’s name is not well known, one of the works he has claimed has a more public persona; in fact, President Roosevelt himself spoke of it in late October 1941.

Just when the administration was making its final push to have Con- egress repeal the Neutrality Acts, there emerged a most useful and in- triguing document. Said FDR: “I have in my possession a secret map, ( made in Germany by Hitler's Government, by planners of the new world order. It is a map of South America and part of Central America as Hitler proposes to organize it.”>?

Those who heard the president’s Navy Day speech were amazed, and none more so than Hitler and his underlings. They were so stunned by it that on December 11, 1941, they cited it as an example of the sort of provocative act that brought on Germany’s declaration of war.’3 Reporters were somewhat suspicious about the bogus map, but to little avail.

Lippmann’s brother-in-law, Ivar Bryce, worked in the Latin Ameri- can affairs section of BSC, which was run by Dickie Coit (known in the office as “Coitis Interruptus”). Because there was little evidence of a German plot to take over Latin America, Ivar found it difficult to excite Americans about the threat. In his 1975 memoir, kou Only Live Once: Memories of lan Fleming, Bryce wrote: “Sketching out trial maps of the possible changes, on my blotter, | came up with one showing the probable reallocation of territories that would appeal to Berlin. It was very convincing: The more I studied it the more sense it made...

56 ©¢@ DESPERATE DECEPTION

Were a genuine German map of this kind to be discovered...and publicized among...the ‘America Firsters,’ what a commotion would betcaused,”*4

Intrepid approved the idea. The skilled team at Station M, the phony document factory in Toronto run by SOE’s Eric Maschwitz, took only forty-eight hours to produce “a map, slightly travel-stained with use, but on which the Reich’s chief map makers...would be pre- pared to swear was made by them.” In Roosevelt’s hands the “docu- ment” had its desired effect, and Congress dismantled the last of the neutrality legislation.*°

John FE. C. “Ivar” Bryce (1906-1985). Bryce worked for both SOE and OSS. As an SOE agent he had the number G.140; as an OSS man he was 991. Among other jobs for SOE, Bryce describes himself as an agent recruiter: “and to find...[recruits] in Latin America was...my special responsibility.” >¢

Bryce wrote to Lippmann in March 1942: “If you felt at all inclined to write anything about the danger to S. America, I could give you any number of facts which have never been published, but which my friends here would like to see judiciously made public, at this point.”37

Earlier in the same letter he wrote: “J am sending you a copy of my friend Artuco’s book, which I think will interest you....Some of it sounds rather alarming & exaggerated but it is much more accurate than most books on South America.”38

This book, by Hugo Artuco Fernandez, is certainly one of the many planted books written at the behest of British intelligence and propa- ganda agencies. British propaganda targeted everyone—from the edu- cated classes with their thirst to be informed and in the know to the superstitious lower classes. The lower classes were fed comic books and bogus horoscopes. Ham Fischer, who did the Joe Palooka cartoons, was persuaded to change from a negative to a positive portrayal of the British. This came about when the British embassy became fearful that his cartoons were damaging their image; a British officer was sent to meet Fischer. It worked. In an interview with propaganda historian Nick Cull, Leonard Miall of the British Political Warfare Executive recalled that Fischer was fed pro-British material through the senior OWI officer Lew Cowan.??

The “BSC Account” reports BSC’s success at planting the fraudu- lent anti-Hitler predictions of a tame Hungarian astrologer named

“Those Who Rendered Service of Particular Value” °** 57

Louis de Wohl. BSC even built him up with bogus confirmations of his predictions with planted stories in the legitimate press. “It is unlikely,” says the “BSC Account” somewhat condescendingly, “that any propagandist would seriously attempt to influence politically the people of England, say, or France through the medium ©f astrological predictions. Yet in the United States this was done with effective if limited results.”40

The educated classes were targeted for this onslaught. They were subjected to an outpouring of books, many for the head and some for the heart. Concocting propaganda books and foisting them onto an unsuspecting public had been a very successful ploy in World War I, with many prominent authors producing the books and Wellington House secretly publishing them under the imprint of recognized publishers. In 1939 the British government again requested the help of its literati. H. G. Wells refused, but the majority of the first sev- enty authors approached accepted. Thus in World War II, major publishers—Penguin, Macmillan, Harcourt, and Doubleday—and big name authors—E. M. Forster, Somerset Maugham, historian Alan Nevins, Harold Callender of the New York Times—helped the British give an “ideological construction” to a war that many Americans were viewing as the same old European land-grab politics.*!

A book could be used not only to promote a propaganda theme but also to establish an agent. For example, soon after its creation on the perfectly fitting April Fools’ Day, 1938, Section D of MI-6 began ex- ploring ways of cutting off Germany’s supply of Swedish iron ore. In May 1938, Section D sent one Alfred Rickman (agent number D/1) to Sweden posing as a journalist. Not only did Rickman know noth- ing of the local languages or of Sweden, he did not know he was em- ployed by British intelligence. After several months, Mr. Rickman was told to write a book on Swedish iron ore. The book, published by Faber & Faber in August 1939, gave Rickman the credentials as an expert on Swedish tron ore and a cover. He was then told that he was working for British intelligence and set up as an importer of machin- ery, just in time for World War II.”

There was definitely a feeling in the Anglo-American intelligence community that this ploy of planting articles and books was worth the effort. Not only had it been very successful in World War I but those Americans who learned their craft from the British certainly preserved

S58 8¢8 DESPERATE DECEPTION

the tradition. ‘Vhe CLA carried on as a patron of literature into the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s.*3

‘Vhough there was little real danger of the Nazis taking over Latin America, here is Book Review Digest’s summary of the book Bryce sent Lippmann: “A native Uruguayan, who is a member of the faculty of the University of Montevideo, describes the Nazi infiltration and diaboli- cal workings throughout South America, especially in his own country and Colombia. ‘The author has made many radio addresses attempting to call attention to the Nazi organization in South America..."

Robert Emmet Sherwood (1896-1955), Sherwood exemplifies the way in which many who helped British intelligence were connected to each other and to England by blood, marriage, and residence.

On his mother’s side he was a descendant of the Anglo-Irish Protes- tant hero ‘Thomas Addis Kimimet. Lis mother, Rosina Emmet Sher- wood, was a prominent artist, as were nearly a dozen other female relatives. In 1934 his aunt Ellen Emmet painted the official portrait of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. By blood and marriage the Emmets tied together two of America’s great banking families: the Morgans of J. P. Morgan and the Aldriches of Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller.

Despite the talented family, Robert was a slow starter academically and received only a certificate of attendance from Milton Academy, near Boston, in 1914. his was not then thought an impediment to further academic work, and he attended his father’s school, Harvard, 1914-17. Rejected by the U.S. Army because he was too tall, he joined the Canadian Black Watch. According to one of his biographers, John Mason Brown, Sherwood “loved England, the England he had first known as a boy in its full majesty of Empire, and then in the desperate testing of the war years.” Sherwood also had relatives, the writer Henry James being one, who lived in England. From the late 1920s Sherwood resided in [england for increasing periods of time. For the twenty-three years after 1932 he lived half or more of the year at his large house, Great Eatron, at Whitley Surrey, England.*¢

By the fall of 1940, Sherwood was helping to write President Roose- velt’s speeches, and he habitually showed the important foreign policy speeches to Intrepid before FDR delivered them. When Intrepid was pushing Donovan as Coordinator of Information, he says, he “enlisted the help of several avenues of influence at the White House. Winant and Sherwood were the most persistent and effective, | think.” “Thus

“Those Who Rendered Service of Particular Value” °** 59

Sherwood was what intelligence officers call an “agent of influence,” a spokesman at the very center of the policy-making process.

‘Two major purposes of British propaganda were to excite American fears that Hitler would take over the Americas and to discredit isola tionists—to paint them as “fifth columnists” and traitors. On June 10, 1940, there appeared in the New York Times and other major papers full-page advertisements boldly headlined “Stop Eritrk Now.” The CDAAA, the William Allen White Committee, was the listed sponsor, but Sherwood and his first cousin Christopher /mmet (who worked on British intelligence projects with agent Sandy Grriffith) were respon- sible. Sherwood had written the copy and raised the $25,000 for space. Hitler’s agents, wrote Sherwood, were already infiltrating the Western Hemisphere. “Will the Nazis considerately wait until we are ready to fight them?...Anyone who argues that they will wait is cither an imbe cile or a traitor.” Among those who gave large sums for this advertise ment were Sherwood himself ($5,000); Dorothy and George Backer, owners of the New York Post (helpers of BSC); Ward Cheney, a silk manufacturer, also a heavy contributor to Fight for freedom; [lenry Luce; and publisher Harold Guinzburg, who was highly influential in Fight for Freedom and in intelligence circles.**

Paul Patterson (1878-1952). Patterson was publisher of the Baltimore Sun. In the case of the Su we havea competent ifirascible witness to give weight to the claim of the “BSC Account” --prominent journalist EL. L.. Mencken was on the Sun’s board of directors and had written for the paper until early 1941, when he stopped because of what he said was the paper’s wildly pro-British bias. Intrepid certainly would have been grati fied at the testimony to BSC’s effect on the Saw had he read Mencken’s diaries, which are now open. “Irom the first to the last,” wrote Mencken in an October 1945 summing-up, “they [the Sav papers| were official organs and nothing more, and taking one day with another they were official organs of England rather than of the United States.”

How did the British get Patterson to render the “service of particular value” mentioned in the “BSC Account”? Mencken also wondered about this, so in March 1944 when Patterson “dropped in” for their “long delayed palaver,” Mencken let him have it: “I told Patterson that, in my judgment, the English had found him an casy mark, and made a monkey out of him. He...did not attempt to dispute the main fact. In the course of his talk I gathered...that he is cntertamed while in London

60 ¢¢¢e DESPERATE DECEPTION

by an Englishwoman who is the head of one of the women’s auxiliary organizations—perhaps characteristically, he did not know its name. He also let fall the proud fact that she is a countess.”°°

The identity of the “countess,” the “head of one of the women’s auxiliary organizations,” the name of which Patterson professed not to know, was most likely a granddaughter of Queen Victoria, HRH the Princess Alice, Countess of Athlone, commandant in chief of FANY, the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry. FANY was the ladies’ auxil- iary of the black-propaganda and dirty-tricks organization Special Operations Executive.°! Alice was married to the Earl of Athlone, Queen Mary’s brother.

John Buchan, Lord Tweedsmuir, the governor-general of Canada, was a well-practiced behind-the-scenes operator well connected to British intelligence and propaganda. When he fell in the bath and died in February 1940, there was a need to place a similar person close to the United States. That person was the Earl of Athlone,*? one of the most powerful patrons of “C,” Stewart Graham Menzies, the head of MI-6.°? Princess Alice of FANY and SOE can be seen, not with a cloak and dagger, but at her fur-coated, smiling best in an October 1940 Time magazine photograph showing her and Franklin Roosevelt leaving St. James Church in Hyde Park. Time wrote: “After...lunch [Saturday], the President drove the Princess round the estate (the Earl had a cold)....that night the President talked international affairs with the big, bluff, grey Earl; again the next morning after church.”*+

This is the sort of person of whom Paul Patterson seemed so proud. The connection illustrates how difficult it has been, in this world of cutouts and go-betweens, for historians to identify meetings between FDR and British intelligence. Time, after all, did not tell its readers that the president spent the afternoon with a woman from Special Opera- tions Executive.

Ulric Bell (1891-1960). Ulric Bell ran the day-to-day operations of Fight tor Freedom. Chadwin listed him as the “prime policy-maker as well as the individual responsible for co-ordinating the efforts of the leaders of FFF and keeping in close touch with the administration.” In World War I he had been an infantry captain; he was personally close to Secretary of State Cordell Hull, having been Hull’s press secretary at the Montevideo Conference in 1933-34. Normally he was Washing- ton correspondent for Barry Bingham’s Lowisville Courier-Journal.>>

“Those Who Rendered Service of Particular Value” °°* 61

In the early fall of 1940, Bell replaced Francis Pickens Miller at the Century Group; Miller had returned to the Council on Foreign Rela- tions. Bell became executive director of Fight for Freedom when that name was formally adopted in April 1941. Bell’s part in the effort to use the movies for interventionist propaganda and then the effort to protect them when Congress started to investigate must have im- pressed one of the Fight for Freedom contacts, Spyros P. Skouras of Twentieth Century-Fox. After the war, Bell became Skouras’s execu- tive assistant.*°

Barry Bingham (1906-88). Bingham was the son of FDR’s first ambassador to England, the outspokenly pro-British Judge Robert Bingham. Barry inherited the paper on his father’s death in 1937. He employed both Ulric Bell and Herbert Agar at the Lowisville Courier- Journal and continued to pay both of their salaries while they helped run Fight for Freedom.*’

Barry Bingham was deeply involved with intelligence and attacks on the isolationists. From the spring of 1941 he was ostensibly in the navy, but attached to Fiorello La Guardia’s Office of Civilian Defense. Bingham became attached to this office about the time his subordinate Ulric Bell was asked by FDR to help organize the office “in regard to the whole subject of offensive publicity to offset the propaganda of the Wheeler’s, Nye’s, Lindbergh’, etc.”°°

From the over one hundred surviving pieces of correspondence in Barry Bingham’s file in the Fight for Freedom Papers it is evident that after Bell went back to Fight for Freedom, Bingham organized these anti-isolationist speakers for Fight for Freedom. Here are two typical examples of cables to Bingham at the Office of Civilian Defense from George Havell of the FFF speakers’ bureau. The first is dated Septem- ber22, 1941:

UNABLE TO CONTACT WILLIAM YANDELL ELLIOTT HERE. PLEASE PUT ALL POSSIBLE PRESSURE ON HIM FOR PITTSBURGH DINNER OCTOBER 13TH. UNDERSTAND HE DID A SWELL JOB ON AMERICAN FORUM LAST NIGHT AGAINST FISH.

The second is from September 26, 1941:

ANY PROGRESS ON PATTERSON OR FORESTAL FOR CLEVELAND EARLY IN OCTOBER. WILLIAM YANDELL ELLIOT DARIEN CONNECTICUT

62 29¢¢ DESPERATE DECEPTION

OCTOBER 17TH; SENATOR PEPPER FOR DAYTON, OHIO EARLY OCTOBER. WILL APPRECIATE WORD FROM YOU.

There is also an interesting letter from his brother Robert, who was visiting New York from his home in England: “I shall try to arrange for Scudder to see Raymond Gram Swing sometime this week, as | saw him myself on Friday. 1 will tell Herbert’s [[Terbert Agar’s] brother what happened as it is the same matter he has been working on. I think it is unwise to write letters about this.”°°

There are also strong indications that Barry Bingham was not only paying the salaries of two of the British intelligence front’s executives and recruiting speakers for it but was working directly with intelli- gence, particularly British intelligence.

Ingagletter of September 12, 1941, front Ulrie Bell's secretary: “...1 am enclosing a letter received today from Bishop Henry E. Hobson regarding his nephew George C. Mackenzie's desire to be of service in Intelligence work.”©? Another sign of Barry Bingham’s direct work with British intelligence is also from the Fight for Freedom Papers.

Donald MacLaren was a British intelligence agent working for BSC. In the fall of 1941, MacLaren was arranging for Rex Stout, George Merten, and Sylvia Porter to write a BSC propaganda booklet, Sequel to the Apocalypse, as part of the attack on Standard Oil of New Jersey. In the middle of November, MacLaren was apparently staying in Louis- ville, Kentucky, with his brother-in-law Robert F. Crone. From the telegrams and messages it is clear that Barry Bingham was trying very hard to make contact with MacLaren either at the Crone residence or at the Carlton Hotel in Washington, D.C.°!

FH. Peter Cusick (910-82). Cusick was a native of California, an advertising executive, a close adviser to Wendell Willkie, and execu- tive secretary of Fight for Freedom.®? During World War II he was decorated with the Croix de Guerre by General Jean LeClere of the Free French. At the time of his death he was a member of the Coun- cil on Foreign Relations and a private consultant on government and foreign affairs.

While they have not been named as British intelligence agents and were not permanent officials of a front group, the next four men worked so closely with British intelligence and propaganda and were so prominent in Fight for Freedom that they should be mentioned.

“Those Who Rendered Service of Particular Value” °** 63

Marshall Field (1893-1956). Field was born in Chicago but grew up and was educated in England at Eton and Cambridge. As the United States entered World War I he enlisted in the [linois Cavalry as a private; he rose to captain. Ficld’s Aunt Ethel married Arthur ‘Irce and had a son by him, Arthur Ronald ‘Tree; Marshall and his cousin Ronald were raised together. Ronald ‘Iree, the classic example of the Anglo-American gentry, became a member of the British Parliament and performed various propaganda functions in the United States.” Working closely with the Roosevelt administration and Fight for Freedom, Marshall Field started the Chicago Sun in October 1941 to counter Colonel Robert McCormick’s isolationist Chicago Tribune. According to Field’s editor, Turner Catledge, “It was carly in 1941 that Field resolved to start a newspaper....Roosevelt was trying to move the nation toward support of England...and Colonel Mc- Cormick was fighting him tooth and nail....Vhe Jiibune’s influence on the American heartland was great, and to Field and others who thought the United States must fight Nazism, McCormick’s daily ti- rades were agonizing. All this contributed to the haste with which the Sun was started.”

Marshall Field’s biographer Stephen Becker is more specific about the origins of the final effort that gave Micld the resolve to fight isola- tionists and help Franklin Roosevelt in Chicago. Becker says that Field’s determination to start the Saw came from his “attendance at a mecting of the Fight for Freedom Committee at the ‘Town Tall Club in New York on the evening of April 30, 1941.”

The man who plotted the Fight for Freedom attacks on the Chicago Tribune was BSC agent Sandy Griftith’s man at the Chicago [FF head- quarters, Albert Parry. It was the scholarly Parry (later Chairman of Russian Studies Department at Colgate and Slavic Studies Department at Case Western Reserve) who devised the slogans: “Millions for de- fense, but not two cents for the Tribune” and “What Chicago needs is a morning paper.” ‘Phe campaign against the 7ribune must have been important enough to leave Parry in place despite BSC’s need for the Russian-born Parry’s language and editing skills in subverting Boston shortwave radio station WRUL—one of Sandy Griffith’s projects. A cable from Chicago Fight for Freedom to FEF headquarters in New York says: “WIRE FROM PARRY’S BOSS SANFORD GRIFETEEL.. SAWS... NEED YOU BEGINNING COMING WEEK FOR IMPORTANT SHORTWAVE EDITORSHIP...

a

64 ¢ee DESPERATE DECEPTION

PLEASE, TELEPHONE GRIFFITH AND ASK POSTPONEMENT OF PARRY’S COMING TO NEW YORK....”66

One of the White House’s contributions was to use the FBI to call on small-town editors and urge them to support Field’s bid for a coveted Associated Press franchise. In the circular world inhabited by those at- tempting to help the British in their hour of need, Field also turns up as a major financial backer of Ralph Ingersoll’s newspaper, PM (Dorothy Thompson was another one of the original financial backers). PM never attracted enough circulation to make money, but it was a won- derful propaganda vehicle despite its small circulation. In September, Field bought out the other backers for twenty cents on the dollar. Ingersoll and his paper were also among those listed in the “BSC Ac- count” as “among those who rendered service of particular value.”°/

Guinzburg, Harold (1899-1961). Guinzburg was a Jewish native of New York City. He received his bachelor’s degree from Harvard in 1921 and then attended Columbia Law School, but dropped out after two years. In 1925 he became cofounder (with George S. Oppen- heimer) and president of Viking Press. According to Chadwin, Guinzberg was consulted on “day-to-day policy by Bell and Peter Cusick at Fight for Freedom headquarters.” Viking Press published a number of books by interventionist writers of the late 1930s and early 1940s.68

In Guinzburg’s FBI file is a letter from J. Edgar Hoover of March 12, 1942, saying Guinzburg “is presently employed by the Office of Coor- dinator of Information, New York.”®? After the United States entered the war, he went to work for Elmer Davis at the Office of War Infor- mation. At first he worked with the overseas branch; in 1943 he was put in charge of the Domestic Bureau of Publications; then in 1944 he was sent to London to direct the publications to be sent into liberated ar- eas. Curiously, his entries in Whos Who and Current Biography make no mention of Fight for Freedom.

Writing forty-five years after the events, Jerome Weidman, author of I Can Ger It for You Wholesale, may have garbled the sequence of events, but the basic information rings true. Weidman writes that he accompanied the drama critic Leonard Lyons, a favorite of William Stephenson, to plays on Friday nights because Mrs. Lyons, a deeply religious woman, would not accompany her husband the night before Jewish holidays.’° me Spvip7h BEGINS h7 SUNDOION

“Those Who Rendered Service of Particular Value” *** 65

In the lobby, during the first intermission, at the opening of Robert Sherwood’s play There Shall Be No Night, Weidman encountered Harold Guinzburg. Said Guinzburg: “Instead of going back for the sec- ond act, I wonder if I could persuade you to take a walk with me?... Willie Maugham suggested we have a talk.... No matter what you de- cide about what I tell you,” Harold Guinzburg said, “I must before I say a word have your promise that you must not repeat any of it.”7!

Weidman says that Guinzburg was recruiting him for Robert Sher- wood’ section of Donovan’s Coordinator of Information office. But the time is wrong. The COI did not organize until the summer of 1941, and Sherwood’s There Shall Be No Night had two openings— April 29, 1940, and September 9, 1940.72

Henry Luce (1898-1967). Henry Luce was born in Tengchow, Shantung Province, China, to missionary parents and educated at Hotchkiss, Yale, and Oxford. His mother was Elizabeth Middleton Root, a relative of the more famous Root family; Oren Root was the promoter of the Willkie Clubs.” He was a second lieutenant in field artillery in World War I. As publisher of Time, Life, and Fortune magazines, Luce was the only client for the Roper public opinion polls until Roper went with William Donovan as his deputy director.

Luce was very generous with his leaves of absence. In 1940 one of his vice presidents of Time, C. D. Jackson, took a leave to organize an anti- isolationist propaganda group called the Council for Democracy. After the war, Jackson, as editor of Fortune, brought together the prominent Americans who allowed their names to be used by the CIA front Na- tional Committee for a Free Europe.

Luce had been one of the founders of the Century Group/Fight for Freedom. It is correct that he did depart, but so did a number of oth- ers—among them Whitney Shepardson and Allen Dulles. Two of these, Shepardson and Dulles, heavily involved with intelligence. ‘The newsreel offshoot of Luce’s Time/Life, The March of Time, was under the direction of Louis de Rochmont, who produced the pro-British anti-Nazi film Inside Nazi Germany—1938. When Luce opened an of- fice in London, Britain’s heroic struggle became a major theme of The March of Time. Luce’s London operation was in fact intricately tied to British propaganda.’+

Luce also was not averse to requesting advice from British intelli- gence. One of Intrepid’s people was the philosopher Alfred Ayer,

66 °¢*%*® JD)ESPERATE DECEPTION

G.426, an officer in the Political and Minorities Section of SOE within BSC. In his memoirs, Part of My Life, Ayer wrote of Luce’s close adviser Raimund von Hofmannsthal: “When I met him he was working for the Time-Life organization, which had offices in one of the other build- ings in Rockefeller Center....he was...concerned with its editorial policy. He used to consult me on questions of world politics....””°

Luce had made himself so congenial to British intelligence that when, in June 1941, Ian Fleming, working for BSC’s naval intelligence section, wrote a proposal for Donovan’s Coordinator of Information office, he proposed Luce to run the foreign propaganda section. Be- cause Fleming was under urgent time constraints to finish this pro- posal, Luce must have been the first name that came to mind: the obvious man.” When the choice of Luce did not work out, Robert Emmet Sherwood, a man we can now see was a staunch collaborator of British intelligence, took this post.

The warm feelings did not last. The British soon found themselves in conflict with Henry Luce. His global internationalist vision of the “American Century” and his ability to publicize that vision were very useful when the British were trying to involve the United States in in- ternational events. But they became a threat to the British vision of the postwar world after Pearl Harbor. By early 1943, Henry Luce was on the list of “enemies” who endangered the British Empire.’”

Dr. Henry P. Van Dusen (b. 1897). Henry Van Dusen was born in Philadelphia. He graduated from Princeton, Edinburgh, and Union Theological Seminary. His years as a student at Edinburgh and his par- ticipation in international religious meetings had given him a large number of friends in both Britain and the United States.’8

Dr. Van Dusen was a member of the policy committee of the CDAAA (White Committee). Particularly on the sensitive issue of food for starving Europe, proxy propagandists such as Van Dusen and Bishop Henry Hobson were extremely useful. They protected the in- tegrity of the British blockade, piously explaining why the Europeans needed to be starved for their own good, while allowing the British to stay undercover. Dr. Van Dusen even helped British propagandists by arranging for Sunday radio talks by leading British churchmen.

Van Dusen was also helpful in promoting Britain’s black propaganda. For the British Ministry of Information he compiled a mailing list of prominent American churchmen, who then received, apparently from

“Those Who Rendered Service of Particular Value” °°* 67

a publisher unconnected to the British, a British propaganda publica- tion named the Christian Newsletter. The Ministry of Information was grateful for “an extremely valuable piece of propaganda...very much welcomed by the people to whom it is sent.””?

Alexander Korda (1893-1956). Alexander Korda (The Lion Has Wings, That Hamilton Woman) was a bona fide British intelligence agent, and several other prominent movie producers were working with the British.8° Ernest Cuneo included Korda in “the Club,” the intelligence people who gravitated to Bill Stephenson’s suite at Claridge’s in London.®!

In Secret Intelligence Agent—according to Bill Ross-Smith, once of BSC, a more candid book than The Quiet Canadian and more reliable than A Man Called Intrepid—H. Montgomery Hyde wrote that Alex and Vincent Korda were “secret service agents.” On a trip to see Korda in 1941, Hyde says he gathered “that at Churchill’s suggestion en- dorsed by Stephenson, Korda...had taken an office ostensibly as a mo- tion-picture headquarters but which really served as a clearinghouse for British intelligence.” ‘The eastern branch office of Korda’s intelli- gence cover-—filmmaking enterprise was, once again, in Rockefeller Center, New York City.8* This gave him ready access to BSC head William Stephenson. Elinore Little Nascarella, then a Stephenson sec- retary, remembers Korda as regularly “in and out” of Intrepid’s office.*?

Alexander Korda had been working for British intelligence since the 1930s. After Munich, Admiral Sinclair, the head of MI-6, fearing that his organization had been penetrated in the field, created a parallel or- ganization called the Z Network under “Uncle Claude” Dansey, the ruthless former Passport Control officer in Rome. The Kordas worked for Dansey. Alexander Korda recruited agents, and his London Films organization was used by Dansey as cover for Z agents in Europe. After the war started, and after many hours of consultation with Churchill and British intelligence, Alex was sent to the United States “to make major films that would subtly represent the British point of view...in a way that would seem patriotic but not propagandistic.”**

When the Films Division of the British Ministry of Information sent the prominent film executive A. W. Jarratt to Hollywood, it was Alexander Korda as the leader of the pro-British filmmakers who hosted a magnificent dinner in November 1940 so that his friends could hear of Britain’s needs. Present were Harry Cohn from Columbia, Sam

68 °° DESPERATE DECEPTION

Goldwyn from MGM, Arthur Kelly from United Artists, Sidney Kent of Twentieth Century-Fox, Hal Roach, the brothers Warner, Darryl F. Zanuck, and representatives from Paramount, RKO, and Universal. Louis B. Mayer seems to have spoken for the moguls when he said that the British could “count on the producers of Hollywood doing every- thing possible to help the great cause for which the British empire was fighting.” The promises were not only made but were followed by prompt action.

Alex Korda’s efforts were appreciated by Churchill and rewarded, even if the reward baffled outsiders. Korda was knighted in the King’s Birthday Honours List in 1942. Many questioned how it was that a divorced Hungarian Jew who had escaped the dangers of the European war, to live safely in the United States had become the first person in the movie industry to be knighted by the British king. After the war, Alex Korda hired British intelligence agent and later Stephenson biog- rapher Montgomery Hyde as his legal adviser.*5

‘There were other movie men who also helped the British. Fight for Freedom’s Walter Wanger was one. Wanger was born in San Fran- cisco, in 1894, to Jewish parents, but by World War IT he was an Epis- copalian. His higher education had been at Dartmouth, Heidelberg, and Oxtord. Wanger was versatile; he had been an attaché at Versailles and a motion picture director with Paramount Studios. He saw the movies as a powerful instrument for educating the public.8° He was trusted enough that British operative John Wheeler-Bennett was sent to Hollywood by Lord Lothian to discuss making pro-British films with him.’ Wanger produced two blatantly anti-Nazi films in the summer of 1940. In collaboration with the English director Alfred Hitchcock he made Foreign Correspondent, which Hitler’s Dr. Goebbels pronounced “a masterpiece of propaganda.”88

So BSC had available, willing, and powerful agents, subagents, and col- laborators at the very nerve centers of American politics, news, and entertainment.

CHAPTER 4

See

The Voice of the People

The World War II public opinion polls are widely used by historians. They are so convenient and the numbers so crisp and credible. Occa- sionally, it is true, some historian will point out that poll questions were “loaded,” or that “the right questions were not asked.” Despite these flaws, historians continue to employ them, often feeling, as one wrote recently, that “flawed polls are preferable to none.”! Few seem to won- der about the depth or the source of the defects.

The first thing to know when reading the public opinion polls com- monly cited from 1939 to 1942 is that none of them was produced by disinterested seekers of truth. The most prominently published polls were all under the influence of British intelligence, its friends, employ- ees, and agents. At the very best, when questions of the war or interna- tional relations are considered, the major polls should be thought of as what modern critics call “advocacy polls.”

Advocacy polls are polls that are used as a means to reach some pre- determined end. Their purpose, says polling expert Irving Crespi, “is to influence policy makers by claiming that the public wants a course of action espoused by the sponsoring group to be adopted.” Unfortu- nately, Crespi goes on to say that advocacy polls are suspect because their “intent is always apparent.”

The intent of these polls was not apparent. They purported to be the scientifically, objectively gathered voice of the people. Unknown to the public, the polls of Gallup, Hadley Cantril, Market Analysts

Inc., and Roper were all done under the influence of dedicated

69

70 ¢¢¢ DESPERATE DECEPTION

interventionists and British intelligence agents. Moreover, they often were unable to bear close scrutiny or comparison with other polls, even at the time.

The secret “BSC Account” makes three pertinent points about the Gallup polls, which were withheld from Montgomery Hyde’s Quiet Canadian/Room 3603: British intelligence had “penetrated” the Gallup organization; the Roosevelt administration also had a man named Hadley Cantril at Gallup; and Gallup was dissuaded from publishing some polls considered harmful to the British.’

There is considerable testimony corroborating the first two state- ments. BSC had David Ogilvy, more recently a very successful adver- tising man, at Gallup. The White House did have Hadley Cantril at Gallup. There is little reason, given the available evidence, to doubt the “BSC Account” on the third point. The polls were another instru- ment playing the correct notes from the right score in the British or- chestrated attempt to move the United States toward war.

By the late 1930s the public opinion polls had become a highly vis- ible barometer of public opinion. In Richard Steele’s words, they “be- came a political weapon that could be used to inform the views of the doubtful, weaken the commitment of opponents, and strengthen the conviction of supporters.”*

British intelligence agent Sanford Griffith (G.112), who worked under SOE officer Bill Morrell at BSC, clearly recognized the possi- bility of exploiting the polls. In November 1940, after a failed effort to get rid of isolationist Hamilton Fish, he put his ideas to paper un- der the title “Recommendations by Sanford Griffith for Hamilton Fish Campaign and Continuation.” Among the four pages of rec- ommendations are these thoughts on polling: “Opinion polls are a source of information, a propaganda weapon....Favorable results of the poll are accepted by the newspapers as news and are effective pro- paganda.”°

Polls were thus an integral part of BSC’s tenacious, and ultimately successful, campaign to damage Fish politically and finally to eliminate him. In February 1941, Elmo Roper released a poll undermining Con- gressman Fish’s opposition to Lend-Lease. The poll of Fish’s constitu- ents said that 70 percent of them favored the passage of Lend-Lease. This blatant attempt to hamstring Fish in the congressional debates was at least modestly successful, according to his biographer.

The Voice of the People *** 71

The poll had ostensibly been done for one of Fish’s constituents, James H. Causey, president of the Foundation for the Advancement of Social Sciences, tied to the University of Denver.® Fish, irate at these tactics, called for a congressional investigation.

The man in the White House, Franklin Roosevelt, was more subtle than Fish, but he was also subjected to heavy doses of interventionist opinion, of which the polls were a significant part. In FDR the British and their interventionist allies were confronted with a president who was, in his own devious way, extremely sensitive to public opinion and would not move without it.’

The group of devout Anglophiles who had gathered at the Vir- ginia home of Francis and Helen Miller on Dunkirk weekend, June 2, 1940, were anything but cautious in their pronouncements. They had quickly published “Summons to Speak Out,” demanding an immediate declaration of war on Germany.* These elitists who were to form the core of Fight for Freedom knew what they wanted and were impatient with the president’s concern for public opinion.

The British and their allies sought to eliminate obstacles to presi- dential and congressional actions that would prepare and speed the United States toward war. The president, though by nature a procras- tinator, was just as anxious to aid the British as they were to gain the aid; corroborative public opinion polls would help get needed mea- sures through Congress or, as in the case of the Destroyer Deal in Sep- tember of 1940, make the legislators feel they lacked a mandate to stop actions already taken. Author G. F. Lewis, Jr., writing in the June 1940 Public Opinion Quarterly, found that approximately two-thirds of con- gressmen considered polls in their foreign policy votes, even though they denied being so influenced.’

FDR’s attempts to gauge public opinion are clearly evident almost from the moment he took office in 1933. Routinely the president had taken the pulse of the people by traditional means: he started off his day by reading several major daily newspapers. These impressions were enhanced by a clipping service organized by his longtime political advi- ser Louis McHenry Howe, which monitored 350 newspapers and forty-three magazines.!°

During 1941, FDR received a series of reports from ‘Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau’s office, analyzing press opinion on

72 ©e¢ DESPERATE DECEPTION

Lend-Lease, taxes, and defense bonds. Other agencies sent similar re- ports, most of them “liberal interventionist.”!!

Steele gives numerous examples to illustrate the strong interven- tionist bias in these Treasury Department reports to the president. There is a replay effect at work here. Not only were the report writers biased, but so were their sources of information. The reports were based on material from the New York Times, the Washington Post, the New York Herald Tribune, the New York Post, and the Baltimore Sun—the very places BSC was most successfully planting articles.!? Once again, sections of the orchestra were working harmoniously to produce the interventionist music.

In May 1941, the president read: “the impact of events abroad has produced a mass migration in American opinion.... Today’s isolation- ist follows the precepts of yesterday’s interventionist.” In June the president was congratulated: “decisive Administration measures ‘have had an inspiring effect.’” In August: “...the degree to which the American press has enlisted in the war against Nazism is graphically illustrated by its reaction to the British invasion of Iran.” In Septem- ber: “The newspapers want a final showdown on foreign policy.” Steele is quite correct that the purpose of these reports was to correct “Administration timidity.”!?

In this circuitous world of intrigue and manipulation it is often diffi- cult to distinguish when others were attempting to correct the admin- istration’s “timidity” and when the administration has already planted a feigned public outcry to which it could then seem grudgingly to re- spond—calling it “the will of the people.” In September 1941, the William Allen White Committee “initiated” a letter and telegram cam- paign to Hull and Roosevelt calling for the rejection of any compro- mise with Japan that would not fully uphold American principles respecting China. There had been no real public outcry. The impetus for this action had come from within the administration itself.!+

The president also used visitors and correspondents to flesh out the views he and his wife, Eleanor, gathered in their travels. One of those who reported to him on a regular basis was John Franklin Carter (1897-1967), a syndicated newspaper columnist and radio commenta- tor who worked under the name Jay Franklin. “In 1941,” writes histo- rian Richard Steele, “Carter’s services to the White House were expanded to include various clandestine operations—the kind of secret

The Voice of the People *** 73

agent type activities that both he and the President loved.” Carter’s intelligence-gathering organization included comments on public opinion, “particularly within the New York business community.”!>

Another regular reporter of anecdotal opinion was Morris Ernst. Ernst was a well-known and well-connected trial lawyer and civil liber- tarian. He apparently reveled in knowing the powerful, because he was also an informant for J. Edgar Hoover. Ernst gathered the sort of gos- sipy information FDR so loved from the guests at his famous parties. The guests, however, hardly represented a cross section of national opinion. They might well be called the friends of British intelligence: “the publisher of the New York Herald Tribune (Helen Reid) and the New York Times (Arthur Hays Sulzberger); Henry Luce of Time-Life- Fortune, correspondents and columnists Dorothy Thompson, Ray- mond Gram Swing, William L. Shirer....”!° Their opinions were invariably little more than reiterations of the basic interventionist Brit- ish themes—send destroyers, send money, send supplies, help convoy, declare war.

The standing of the “scientific polling organizations” in the eyes of FDR and his minions varied. The White House thought Gallup was a backer of Willkie and was “suspected of coloring his reports.” ‘This may well have been correct, though Gallup himself may not have been the one actually coloring the reports, since he appears to have rarely written them.!”

The “BSC Account” is correct that President Roosevelt had his own interventionist plugged into the Gallup apparatus. That man was Hadley Cantril (1907-69), a social psychologist. With the benefit of Rockefeller money, Cantril ran the Office of Public Opinion Research at Princeton. Cantril had graduated from Dartmouth College and had done graduate work at the University of Berlin before receiving his doctorate from Harvard in 1931; in 1939 he was a major force in the establishment of the Princeton Listening Center to study German ra- dio propaganda.!®

In the uproar within the intelligence community over the publication of Hyde’s Quiet Canadian, former BSC officer David Ogilvy, an early wartime assistant to Gallup, wrote a letter for Hyde: “I beg you to re- move all references to Hadley Cantril and Dr. Gallup....Dr. Gallup was, and still is, a great friend of England. What you have written would cause him anguish—and damage. One does not want to damage one’s

74 ¢*¢ DESPERATE DECEPTION

friends....In subsequent years Hadley Cantril has done a vast amount of secret polling for the United States Government. What you have writ- ten would compromise him—and S.LS. [Secret Intelligence Service— MI-6] does not make a practice of compromising its friends.”!°

Cantril operated from the assumption that the president needed “an approving body of public opinion to sustain him in each measure of assistance to Britain and the U.S.S.R.”2° Cantril told David Niles of the White House (also the BSC contact at the White House) how it was done.

While analyzing Gallup results in 1943, Cantril came up with the startling observation that FDR’s prospects for the presidency were in- versely related to the prospects of peace. If peace was at hand in 1944, FDR would have serious trouble getting reelected. Niles asked if the results could be suppressed. Telling Gallup what not to publish had never been his style, Cantril told Niles, “but I have tried to influence poll results by suggesting issues and questions the vote on which I was fairly sure would be on the right side.” All of this was strictly confiden- tial and beyond the grasp of prying congressmen and Cantril’s business and academic associates.?!

British intelligence claims to have been less shy, and there is no rea- son to doubt the “BSC Account” claim that BSC persuaded Gallup (or more likely someone in his organization) to drop the results of ques- tions that reflected poorly on the British cause.”

Scattered through the literature are numerous footnotes and schol- arly asides suggesting that there was something wrong with the 1939-44 polls. Typical is this comment by scholar Jane Harriet Schwar on the Destroyer Deal the British were so desperate for: “Of those expressing an opinion, 61% supported the sale of destroyers. It should be noted, however, that the questions asked were heavily loaded in favor of the destroyer transfer.”*? Despite these suggestions there has been little systematic, coherent analysis of them. This seems strange given the many ways polls can be influenced once you have someone on the inside.

In Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics Michael Wheeler points out the problem: “Proving that a given poll is rigged is difficult because there are so many subtle ways to fake data...[as easy as faking results but less detectable]....a clever pollster can just as easily favor one candidate or the other by making less conspicuous adjustments, such as allocating the undecided voters as suits his needs, throwing out certain interviews

The Voice of the People *** 75

on the grounds that they were with non-voters, or manipulating the sequence and context within which the questions are asked....Polls can even be rigged without the pollster knowing it. If a candidate could get hold of a list of sampling points...[consequently]. Most major polling organizations keep their sampling lists under lock and key....”2+

The minimum requirement, of course, is that those determined to rig a poll have someone on the inside. This need was clearly fulfilled at Roper and Gallup, the National Opinion Research Center, and Market Analysts Inc.

British intelligence had “penetrated” the Gallup organization; there can be no doubt of this. British intelligence officer David Ogilvy later wrote about his days at Gallup: “I could not have had a better boss than Dr. Gallup. His confidence in me was such that I do not recall his ever reading any of the reports I wrote in his name. Once he had worked out the methodology of the research, he lost interest and moved on to something new.” David Ogilvy’s revered older brother Francis had been one of the earliest recruits to Lawrence Grand’s Section D of MI-6, the black-propaganda and dirty-tricks organization.”>

Although Ogilvy’s autobiography is brief, he drops several august names and emphasizes the intimacy of this Anglophile intelligence world: “J. C. Masterman and R. B. McCalum tried...to teach me his- tory....My other letter of introduction was from my cousin Rebecca West to Alexander Woollcott.” One of the first people Woollcott in- troduced Ogilvy to at his island in Vermont was Robert Sherwood. Ogilvy continues: “I find it difficult to describe my early days in New York without gushing about American hospitality. At the top of my list I put Charles C. Burlingham....Then there were ‘Tom Finletter, who later became Secretary of the Air Force, [and] ‘om Lamont, who had been a partner in J. P. Morgan since 1911—1 ate my first Thanksgiving dinner under his roof.” This was the Thanksgiving of 1938, just after Munich—a period when the British intelligence services were seriously gearing for war.*°

In a letter he wrote suggesting changes in H. Montgomery Hyde’s The Quiet Canadian, Ogilvy said that he had started to report to Laurence Grand of MI-6’s Section D in 1939. In his autobiography he reveals his dual role: “I had been moonlighting as advisor to the British government on American Public Opinion, but it was time I played a more active part.” Bill Ross-Smith, one of Intrepid’s assistants at BSC,

76 @¢ee JD)ESPERATE DECEPTION

wrote to Hyde on the publication of The Quiet Canadian: “PUBLIC OPINION POLLS—David Ogilvy acted as my sub agent on this for six to twelve months before I brought him in to B.S.C. proper.” The work for Ogilvy turned out to be economic warfare from an office in the British embassy in Washington.?’

There were other polls, to be sure, but almost all of them were con- trolled by British intelligence and its helpmates. For example, Elmo Burns Roper, Jr. (1900-71), had only one client, Henry Luce of Time, Life, and Fortune. In a 1968 speech to the American Statistical Associa- tion, Roper might well have been talking about Luce when he com- plained about those who employed pollsters but then released only those results that favored their point of view. Henry Luce was notori- ous for interfering with his writers and arbitrarily slanting the news.?8

Roper had attended the University of Minnesota and the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. He had gravitated into market research, even- tually forming Roper Research. In 1935, Henry Luce hired him to conduct polls for Fortune. His work for the interventionist Luce must have marked him as reliable, because he became “a charter member of Donovan’s ‘brain trust’ ” and deputy director of OSS. As discussed in Chapter 1, Donovan’s organization was a creation of British intelli- gence really run by an MI-6 officer, Dickie Ellis.”°

The National Opinion Research Center at the University of Denver was incorporated on October 27, 1941. Denver seems far from the Eastern foreign policy elite and the English, Gallup, and Hadley Cantril. But it only seems that way. The money for this enterprise had come from that prominent Fight for Freedom interventionist Marshall Field HI. Field, as we remember, was very close to his first cousin Ronald ‘Tree, the director of British propaganda. Field also financed the stridently interventionist PM newspaper.

Field had also founded the Chicago Sun, whose purpose was to “end the un-American monopoly” of Colonel McCormick’s Chicago Tribune. Describing a trip to the United States early in the war, Tree wrote: “I...went down to Long Island to spend the week-end with my cousin, Marshall Field, the proprietor of PM....Educated from boyhood in England, he wanted to do anything he could to help the British cause

If the money for the National Opinion Research Center came from Marshall Field, its founder was an Englishman named Harry Hubert

The Voice of the People *** 77

Field (no relation to Marshall Field). Harry Field (1897-1946), a native of Harrogate, England, had served in World War I and had worked with the Young & Rubicam advertising agency; in 1936 he helped George Gallup set up operations in England.*!

The official history of the founding of NORC says that Harry Field was following “Elmo Roper’s suggestion—that a government managed survey organization be established.” Hadley Cantril was one of NORC%s earliest advisers and directors.3?

Whatever its original purpose, NORC quickly became the contrac- tor for the U.S. government’s Office of Facts and Figures and then the propaganda-producing Office of War Information, testing the atti- tudes of the common people toward the war. Much was kept hidden from the Congress and the public, particularly studies for the State Department.}?

In 1940 and 1941, BSC rigged a series of polls, usually with the help of its friends in the Miller Group/Century Group/Fight for Freedom Committee. These polls were done by Market Analysts Inc. at national conventions to project the notion that the members of prominent or- ganizations were pro-British, avidly in favor of intervention, and in- tensely antagonistic toward America First.

William Stephenson’s A Man Called Intrepid refers to one of these BSC poll-rigging projects. This was an FFF poll of the membership at the CIO national convention which opened November 17, 1941, at the Moose Temple in Detroit. In what appears to be a direct quote from the “BSC Account,” Stevenson says: “Great care was taken beforehand to make certain the poll results would turn out as desired. The ques- tions were...to steer the delegates’ opinion toward the support of Brit- ain and the war....Public Opinion [was] manipulated through what seemed an objective poll.”4

BSC got just what it wanted—widely distributed front-page news that the delegates were uniformly anti-Hitler, anti-Japanese, and anti— Charles Lindbergh and that “Ninety-four percent of the delegates... thought defeating Hitler was more important than for the United States to stay out of war.”*> The “BSC Account” also states: “The cam- paign was particularly appreciated by some representatives of the Roosevelt administration who attended the convention as observers.” The persistent association of the White House and BSC and its front groups is again clearly evident here. Fight for Freedom’s labor division

78 #¢2 DESPERATE DECEPTION

had been organized at the behest of Commissioner of Labor Statistics Isador Lubin and David K. “Devious Dave” Niles of the White House staff.3© Documents in the Fight for Freedom Papers substantially cor- roborate the assertions of A Man Called Intrepid. Vhere is an FFF tele- gram to the Statler Hotel in Detroit: “Please reserve Suite of two Bedrooms on the Lower Floor for Fight for Freedom, Inc. Week be- ginning Sunday night November sixteenth.”>’ There is also mention of British intelligence agent Sandy Griffith (G.112):

Ulric [Bell]:—

Abe has probably kept you informed about the plans Sandy Griffith and he are working out re the CIO convention. They look very good.

I think we have an excellent opportunity to break some sto- ries from Detroit.

Would you approve sending Merle [Miller] out for one week? Things are much more likely to go right if he is on the spot than if we do it by remote control.

Bob [Spivak]3®

Fight for Freedom had taken over these polls earlier, but the exact date is not clear from their documents. It is clear that Market Analysts Inc. also did similar polling for the Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies. This should not be surprising, given CDAAA% close connections to British intelligence and propaganda agencies.

After World War II, Francis Henson, assistant to British intelli- gence agent Sandy Griffith, put this in his résumé: “Director of Washington Bureau of Market Analysts, Inc. New York City. The chief client was the Committee to Defend America to Aid the Allies [sic] (the William Allen White Committee); my job was to use the re- sults of our polls, taken among their constituents, to convince on-the- fence Congressman and senators that they should favor more aid to Britain. (1940-42)”39

Not every organization was so easy as the CIO. The National Asso- ciation of Manufacturers banned the interviewing of members between sessions and “also threatened to warn members individually against an- swering questions by poll takers.”

The Voice of the People ee 79

FFF’s Dr. Frank Kingdon’s telegram requesting NAM to lift its ban on polls is quoted to illustrate the breadth of FFF’s polling operation: “Our questionnaire is similar to those used by ourselves at national conventions of American Legion, National Labor Union conventions and asked individually of all members of Congress.” Kingdon’s suggestion that Sandy Griffith was using his polls to influence Congress is born out not only by Henson’s résumé but by research done on the De- stroyer Deal by British historian David Reynolds. He cites a “provi- sional poll [of the Senate] by Market Analysts, Inc., forwarded by [White House insider Ben] Cohen and seen by [Secretary of the Inte- rior Harold] Ickes on 8 Aug.” Cohen was, of course, working very close with the British on the Destroyer Deal. He and John Foster of the British embassy concocted the legal opinion that, when published in the New York Times, served to give a fraudulent legal gloss to the De- stroyer Deal.#0

Sandy Griffith did other, more public work on this project. In his book on the Destroyer Deal, Fifty Ships That Saved the World, British MP Philip Goodhart, records that at the 1940 Republican convention in Philadelphia—“according to a public opinion research firm called Market Analysis [sic]”—“some sixty per cent of the delegates favored extensive aid to Britain.”*! Again this is a familiar scenario: a poll at a

convention, by a man who was a British intelligence agent, producing results saying clearly that the delegates wished to send “extensive aid to Britain.”

Though the technique used at the conventions may have been to load the questions, there are other methods for affecting poll results without directly fabricating them. Leonard Doob in Public Opinion and Propaganda notes how he himself “has repeatedly demonstrated how the interviewer, the order of the questions on the ballot, the suggested replies, and the wording of the question may affect the results...”

Cornell political scientist Benjamin Guinsberg has written that “polls do more than simply measure and record the natural or sponta- neous manifestations of popular belief. The data reported by opinion polls are actually the product of an interplay between opinion and the survey instrument.”*?

In his 1944 book Gauging Public Opmion, Hadley Cantril, the inter- ventionist who was working with Fight for Freedom and the White House, gives an example of how answers to one of the most often

80 ¢¢¢ DesperareE DECEPTION

quoted Gallup polling questions of the pre-Pearl Harbor period was biased by the interviewers. ‘The question was:

Which of these two things do you think is more important for the United States to try to do—

To keep out of war ourselves, or

To help England win, even at the risk of getting into war?

It was apparent as early as October 1940 that ifthe interviewer favored helping England, then 60 percent of the respondents favored helping England. Ifthe interviewer favored keeping out, only +4 percent favored helping Fneland. Ina democracy this is a crucial difference.+

Cantril also refers to a March 1941 study showing that the social class of the interviewer affected the degree of isolationism that respon- dents would admit; most interviewers were middle-class. In a test group, working-class interviewers were trained to ask the same ques- tions. Vhe result: "On war questions the working-class interviewers reported more isolationist sentiment than did the middle-class inter- viewers.” From other parts of this study Cantril concluded that “it seems likely that the findings of the working-class group are more rep- resentative of the true state of opinion....”*

Vhe results of this question concerning the desire of Americans to help England even if it meant the United States becoming involved in the war were used to keep the i solationists off balance.

Cantril’s analysis on how poll results could be severely skewed even by the social class of the interviewer was unknown to the isolationists, but they did suspect there was something wrong with the polls. Robert M. Tlutchins, the tsolationist president of the University of Chicago, chaired a committee that looked at the problem and sponsored a care- fully done opinion poll by Samuel E. Gill, a professional pollster from New York. ‘Uhis poll showed only 20.3 percent answering “Yes” to the question “Do vou believe that the United States should enter the war asanacuve belligerent at this time?” Phe “Yes” percentage rose only to 34.4 percent when a possible British defeat was proposed. At the time these poll results were released, July 14, 1941, the various well-publi- cized polls into which BSC and the interventionists had their fingers showed 60 to 90 percent of Americans willing to fight if Britain was

The Voice of the People *** 81

threatened with defeat. Ewen if this poll ts simply considered an advo- cacy poll from the other side. it shows the wide variability of results obtainable from “scienufic” polling techniques. This episode should also make the historian extremely wary of the opinion polls of the time.

Sut the Hfutchins poll did not disturb the public. The Hutchins group found it almost impossible to get its results published. BSC and its interventionist allies had a lock on the major media outlets. Only Time magazine carricd a very small. verv disdaintul mention of the poll: no other national paper or journal even mentioned it.~”

Another possible ploy, visible only on those rare occasions when the questions are published verbatim. or to the professional investigator with access to the raw data, is the problem that can be caused by the order of the questions.

Rowena Wyant of the Office of Radio Research. Columbia Univer- sity, wrote an interesting article for the tall 1941 issue of Public Opinion Quarterly, Buried deep in her article. utled “Voting via the Senate Mailbag,” is a three-pronged attack on the Gallup poll. The problem was the exact order of the questions. She wrote: “...the Gallup poll appears to be unduly weighted in favor of the idraft] bill. These pos- sible sources of bias are...: 1. The question itself. ‘Do you favor in- creasing the size of our army and navy by dratting men between the ages of 21 and 31 to serve in the armed forces tor one vear:* has the rather obvious defect of not being confined to the issue it is supposedly testing....2. Phe conscription question was asked immediately after two questions which may be accused of steering the respondents’ thoughts in a bellicose direetion....” Wyant also found evidence that some of the subjects were afraid to tell the truth.?”

‘The dratt (selective service) merits a closer examination. Sir William Stephenson’s mandate when he arrived in the United States in June 1940 was to bring the United States into the war. One of the predica- ments faced very carly by the British was that even if the United States could be dragged into the war, its army was far too small to be useful.

If the British were to go back onto the continent of Europe, the mumber of troops they could muster was simply inadequate. Despite the vigorous denials, there was no possibility for the British to invade lurope without American troops. The polls plaved their part in this campaign. “The polls of the summer ot 1940, which seemed to show overwhelming public support for the draft. were im fact running

82 eee PESPERATE DECEPTION

counter to a number of other indicators. Public devotion to the draft was doubtless much thinner than it appeared.

In the published literature there are many references to the involve- ment of British intelligence in the effort to get President Roosevelt to give or trade Britain fifty destroyers. There is little mention of similar efforts to pass an American draft law. William Donovan's trip to En- gland in July 1940 was promoted by William Stephenson of BSC. In England, Donovan was subjected to a hoax as the British impressed him with a great facade suggesting they were well prepared to resist the Germans.

The startling thing for the researcher reading Donovan’s posttrip correspondence with his hosts is the great effort the British intelli- gence and propaganda chiefs must have made to impress upon him the need for an American draft law. Judging by its frequent mention in the correspondence, the draft must have been the primary topic of discus- sion. Someone has torn from its bindings Donovan’s letter to Sir Stewart Graham Menzies, the head of MI-6. Fortunately the Log of Documents summary survives. It says: “Letter WJD to Col. S.G. Menzies DSO re WJD plans, his efforts to get conscription passed by House and Senate and his efforts to alert the country as to situation in Europe 8/27/40.”*

Donovan's correspondence with Admiral John Godfrey, the head of the British Office of Naval Intelligence, to Sir Cyril Newall and to Marshall Field’s cousin Ronald ‘Tree of British Information Services carry on similarly. To Admiral Godfrey he wrote: “We have been hav- ing difficulties with conscription. In my absence I found that resistance had developed in several quarters. However, we have been keeping up the fight and I really believe that we will probably have the bill passed and in effect within the next month. It will not be as complete as I would have liked it, but it will mean that we are going to have men available.”

On August 17, 1940, “our man,” as British intelligence called Donovan, made a nationwide radio address promoting the draft. He was sponsored by the Century Group.

Another example of the considerable effort British intelligence put into promoting the American draft law can be seen in the work of intel- ligence agent Sandy Griffith and his polling company, Market Analysts Inc. In a letter of August 3, 1940, Griffith wrote to Ernest Cuneo:

The Voice of the People *** 83

“Enclosed are copies of a release I just made of some preliminary returns. This gain in sentiment for conscription I think is very important.” The press release, titled “Big Majority of People Favor Conscription,” an- nounced: “Three-fourths (75.6%) of the American people are in favor of ‘some form of universal selective service now.’ ” Sandy also notes the “unbroken rise in public opinion in support of conscription.”*?

The ostensible prime mover for the draft was another major figure in Fight for Freedom, Grenville Clark (1882-1967), Harvard College 1903, Harvard Law School 1906, onetime law clerk with Franklin Roosevelt. His Wall Street law firm, Root Clark, Buckner and Bal- lantine, was one of the most prestigious in the country, but Clark was unknown to the general public despite his role as a major figure in the Plattsburg Movement of officer training from World War I.

In May 1940 he started the campaign for a draft law. With the help of that irrepressible Anglophile Supreme Court Associate Justice Felix Frankfurter, Clark was able to have the isolationist, antidraft Secretary of War Henry Woodring replaced by the interventionist, pro-draft Henry Stimson. Clark’s National Emergency Committee pledged it- self to raise $285,000 (more than $3 million in 1997 dollars) in six months for publicity. One luncheon at the Bankers Club on June 7, 1940, netted $30,000.*!

The public opinion polls whose questions Rowena Wyant found so biased produced spectacularly prodraft results. Of those people Gallup asked whether they would favor one year compulsory military service at age twenty, the yes response in December 1938 was 37 percent; in December 1939, 39 percent; on June 1, 1940, 50 percent; and by the end of June, 63 percent. This had climbed to over 70 percent by late August 1940. Certainly an astounding figure.*?

Of those men Gallup questioned who would actually be facing the draft shortly if it passed, those between the ages of sixteen and twenty- one, an unbelievable 81 percent were willing. Congressional mail, on the other hand, was running “overwhelmingly against conscription.”*’

In tracking this problem for London, the British Library of Informa- tion wrote in its August 14, 1940, “Washington Letter”: “Congress- men are frightened by their mail which 1s overwhelmingly against the bill and they don’t trust the straw polls which indicate the country ap- proves. They feel that even if not faked they don’t take into consider- ation the fact that a man sufficiently interested in a public question to

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write about it, is a man prepared to turn out and vote, while a man who has to be hunted up and asked his opinion by a canvasser is likely to stay heme

Even if they were not fully believable—and they were not—the polls controlled by British intelligence and its interventionist allies served to confuse the issue of public support for the peacetime draft. Without these cooked polls the congressional mail would certainly have killed conscription.

Secretary of War Stimson attributed the imbalance of letters to “Mushroom peace societies” that were better organized and financed than the champions of conscription.**> Stimson’s statement is a com- plete falsehood. All those who opposed the bill spent less than $5,000 for their campaign. The high-powered prodraft campaign had been run by Pearley Boone, a former New York Times journalist who had more recently done the publicity for the New York World’s Fair. With his able staff of writers and photographers he easily outmatched history professor Howard L. Beale from the University of North Carolina.°®

There are others besides Rowena Wyant who analyzed the polls and the issues involved with intervention. A study by Dartmouth psycholo- gist Ross Stagner examined the Gallup polls from April 1937 until Feb- ruary 1941. Stagner chose fifty-nine questions for study because they focused directly on the “problem of intervention against Germany.” About one-third had related to the repeal of the Neutrality Act in the fall of 1939.57

Stagner analyzed the polls for four types of wording that tend to bias the results. For thirteen of the questions he judged the language to be as impartial as possible within the bounds of plain English. In forty-six of the fifty-nine, however, he found flaws. Since some questions combined these flaws, there were fifty-five “cases of dubious practices.” Seven of these he judged to bias the answer toward the noninterventionist camp while forty-eight tended to elicit an interventionist reply.°®

His example of the effect of injecting prestige-bearing names, such as President Roosevelt’s, into the questions is revealing. The week of May 29, 1940, the Gallup’s organization for the Princeton Public Opinion Research Project asked: “The United States Army and Navy have about 5,000 airplanes. Would you approve of selling all, some, or none of these planes to England and France at this time?” Forty-nine percent of the respondents were recorded as answering “none.” But

The Voice of the People see 85

only 20 percent disapproved of this action a few days later when Presi- dent Roosevelt’s name was injected thus: “President Roosevelt has taken action making it possible for England and France to buy air- planes that were being used by our Army and Navy. Do you approve or disapprove of this action?” The great change was due to the “prestige value of Roosevelt’s name,” plus the fact that the deal was already done and could not be changed.

An important fact here is that the questions used in the Market Analysts Inc. BSC-rigged polls were very similar to those being asked by Gallup and to a lesser extent by Roper. The Roper polls usually gave a larger choice of answers. Two purported examples of FFF questions were included in the article reporting the refusal of the National Association of Manufacturers to allow its members to be polled by Fight for Freedom: “Which do you consider more important: that Hitler be defeated or that the United States stay out of war?” and “Do you think that we should try to block further Japanese expansion even at the risk of war?”°?

There is an important issue to note regarding the simple direct ques- tion of whether the respondent wished the United States to declare war on Germany and fight against her. The percent in favor never rose above 21 before Pearl Harbor was attacked. [t was on tangential, diffi- cult-to-check, often loaded and contrived questions that covered step- ping-stone issues that the American public was said to favor policies that would obviously lead to war.

The way that most authors today quote the polls of 1939-42 gives the numbers an aura of hard scientific truth that is little merited. In a recent book review attacking John Charmley’s revisionist book Churchill: The End of Glory, Louis D. Rubin, Jr., writes: “But public opinion was overwhelmingly on the side of Britain; an opinion poll taken in July 1940 indicated that seven out of ten Americans believed a Nazi victory would place the United States in danger, and so were in favor of assistance to the embattled British.”

As with many other ploys worked by British intelligence and its friends, there were people at the time who suspected that there was something wrong with many of the polls being ballyhooed by interven- tionists. The anti-interventionist problem was how to prove the decep- tions, discover who was involved and how the rigging was done, and then get their views published.

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The North American Newspaper Alliance sent out a story from Washington on February 8, 1941, saying that Senators McKellar of Tennessee and Holman of Oregon and Representative Walter M. Pierce of Oregon “have resolutions pending, which they say they intend to press cooperatively for an investigation of the Gallup, Fortune Maga- zine and other polls which have been reporting public opinion on the lease-lend bill and other features of the defense program.” Whether or not at the prompting of the White House, the administration’s spokes- man and House Majority Leader John McCormack “said he could not see why there should be an investigation of polls....”°!

Senator Gerald Nye of North Dakota did no better challenging the major polls. On May 6, 1941, he introduced Senate Resolution 111, “Investigation of Polls of Public Opinion.” This resolution was re- ferred to the Committee on Interstate Commerce. It disappeared.“

So the polls of World War II should be seen for what they were: at worst they were flatly rigged, at best they were tweaked and massaged and cooked—advocacy polls without the advocate being visible.

CHAPTER 5

UB

G.112— Lt. Commander Griffith

Sandy Griffith was a British intelligence agent. The archives of Special Operations Executive list him as Lt. Commander Griffith and indicate that he also had an SIS connection.! His work and that of his company, Market Analysts Inc., and his closest associates, Francis Henson and Christopher Emmet, allows us to focus on some of those events in which British intelligence actively attempted to alter American public policy. These include the legal/political problems of Hamilton Fish, which drove him from Congress; a series of carefully wrought public opinion polls favoring the peacetime draft, the Destroyer Deal, and America’s desire to help Britain; the creation of a number of British intelligence front groups; the BSC attack on Esso; the writing of pro- paganda radio programs used on shortwave Boston radio station WRUL; and finally the trial and conviction, and retrial and conviction, of George Sylvester Viereck, among other accused seditionists.

Sometime before World War I, Griffith attended Heidelberg Uni- versity. With the outbreak of the Great War, Griffith joined first the Belgian army for six weeks and then the French army before joining the U.S. Army.

The American Legion Magazine of February 1939 carried an article, “They Told All,” describing the great success American army intelli- gence (C:-2) had interrogating German prisoners in the World War. Much of the article is on Sandy Griffith. One photograph shows a seri- ous, dark-mustached Griffith staring into the camera. The caption reads: “Captain, later Major, Sanford Griffith under whose direction

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most of the 48,000 Germans captured by the A.E.F. were subjected to questioning.”?

At the end of the Great War Sandy Griffith found himself a member of the Armistice Commission at Spa. From 1920 to 1923 he worked in Germany and Rome as a European correspondent for that great friend of British intelligence the New York Herald Tribune. From 1923 to 1927 he was based in London representing the Wall Street Journal and other Dow Jones publications; his two sons, Sandy and Peter, were born there in 1925 and 1927. From 1927 to 1930 he represented the stock- broker Dillon, Read & Co. in Paris, where his daughter, Brenda, was born in 1929.

During the early 1930s he worked as a broker for Stokes Hoyt & Co. and Otis & Co. In 1924 he had married Katherine Beach Bennett; he was divorced in 1934. Her death in that year left him with the three children.

After a 1938 stint as director of consumer research projects for a company called Miller Franklin, Griffith became, in 1939, president of Market Analysts Inc. In 1939 and 1940, this company worked from a suinmer office at the New York World’s Fair. There Griffith functioned as a consultant to companies wishing to brighten up their booths at the fair—Borden, Addressograph Multigraph, IBM.+ By 1940 his polls for the Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies—the White Committee—were becoming a major focus of his efforts.

Bill Ross-Smith, assistant to Intrepid at British Security Coordina- tion, remembers Griffith: “Sandy was a cheerful confident American utterly devoted to awakening American Opinion. He lived near Lloyd’s Neck Long Island, where I once visited him for Sunday lunch.”>

‘There was another connection between BSC and Sandy Griffith, the particulars of which are not clear. According to Sandy’s son Peter, “Dick Ellis came out to the house a number of times in 1940. His son Olic Ellis, whose mother was Russian as I recall, spent several weeks with us at that time. He was fourteen or fifteen, the same age as my older brother, Sandy. I believe Ellis was divorced from Olic’s mother at the time.” Ellis was, of course, the number two man at BSC and the man who actually ran “Wild Bill” Donovan’s COI/OSS from its starein 94 1,°

According to his second wife, Sandy Griffith joined British intelli- gence in “the late 1930s—’38 or 739.” Most likely this was the black-

G.112 Lt. Commander Griffith *** 89

propaganda and dirty-tricks group, Section D of MI-6, which under- went tremendous expansion during this period. BSC officer Bill Ross- Smith also remembers: “When [Bill Morrell] first arrived at BSC he worked in my section for a while & did excellent, he soon moved on to dealing with press, radio, black propaganda & anti British pro-German organizations. For instance he coordinated Sandy Griffith’s work.”’

Sidney “Bill” Morrell (SOE code number G.101), who “coordinated Sandy Griffith’s work,” had been European correspondent for Lord Beaverbrook’s Daily Express, had married Beaverbrook’s secretary, and, according to a later employee, had been recruited into British intelli- gence by “the Beaver himself.”

Morrell had been the only reporter who had been present at all of Hitler’s great triumphs of the 1930s. The resulting book, titled J Saw the Crucifixion, charges that British Prime Minister Neville Chamber- lain was wrong at Munich. William Shirer mentions Bill Morrell sev- eral times in Berlin Diary: “Prague, September 12 [1938]....I listened to the broadcast of the [Hitler] speech in the apartment of Bill and Mary Morrell overlooking Wilson station. The smoke-filled room was full of correspondents—Kerr, Cox, Maurice Hindus, and so on.”*

In much the same way that Stephenson had lent Dick Ellis to help organize Donovan’s Coordinator of Information office, Intrepid also lent Bill Morrell to Robert Sherwood for Sherwood’s Foreign Infor- mation Service. With Morrell at Sherwood’s office we should not be surprised to find Market Analysts Inc. also working with Sherwood’s people. Judging by the closing lines of a report to Ernest Cuneo from Sandy Griffith’s assistant, Francis Henson, Market Analysts must have been in close touch with Sherwood: “The primary purpose of this let- ter is to urge you to call and go out to lunch with Mrs. Mildred ‘Pat’ Allen, who is now secretary to Robert Sherwood, assistant to Donovan ...she is dying to meet you—after I tooted your horn for you.”

Sandy Griffith’s helpers on these projects were Christopher Temple Emmet and Francis Henson. Christopher Emmet is a classic example of those who ran the British intelligence fronts before and during World War II and who, having proved themselves faithful and compe- tent, went on to help run the CIA/MI-6 fronts of the Cold War. The Eastern establishment ties of family and school are also well exempli- fied in Christopher Emmet. Emmet was born in 1900 in Port Chester, New York, into a prominent Protestant [rish patriot family—one of

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whose members, Robert Emmet, had been hanged by the British in 1803. In 1968 Life magazine did an article titled “America’s ‘Grandes Dames.’ ” Christopher Emmet’s mother merited a full-page photo- graph captioned, “Alida Chanler Emmet, 94, of Stony Brook, Long Island, is a grandniece of Mrs. William B. Astor and one of only two or three ladies now living who made their debuts at her great-aunt’s 1892 ball, the ball of the original Four Hundred.”!° His father, sisters, and kin were prominent artists.

The catalog of a recent art exhibit gives a taste of the Emmets’ prominence. “New York society stampeded the opening tea for the Arden Gallery’s 1936 fall exhibition, ‘Paintings, Drawings and Sculp- tures by Five Generations of the Emmet Family.’ ” The ties of blood and marriage to both the banking Aldrich and Morgan families are evi- dent in the names of some of the exhibitors. There was not only Rosina Emmet Sherwood, the mother of Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Robert Sherwood, but also Elizabeth Winthrop Emmet Morgan, Jane Grenville Lapsley, and Mrs. Nicholas Biddle, Jr."!

One in-law, Margaret Chanler Aldrich, had won a Congressional Medal for her work as a nurse during the Spanish-American War.!? This connection, of course, tied Christopher to the Aldrich/Rocke- feller clan. Emmet’s first cousin was playwright, FDR speechwriter, and British agent of influence Robert Emmet Sherwood, with whom he worked so closely.

Emmet attended Harvard (1919-20) before going on to “several universities in Germany” during a six-year study and writing odyssey. He returned to the United States in 1933. By 1938 he was secretary to the Volunteer Christian Committee to Boycott Nazi Germany. In 1940 he became chairman of the Committee to Aid Britain by Recipro- cal ‘Trade and helped Sandy Griffith and Francis Henson found France Forever. He became vice president of the latter, which was a British intelligence front group whose purpose was to promote Charles de Gaulle as the true voice of France.!3

In 1941 he was treasurer and major force in the British intelligence front group Committee for American Irish Defense. It had the same street address, 8 West 40th Street, as Sandy Griffith’s Market Analysts Inc. The ground floor of this building was occupied by the New York chapter of the CDAAA, of which Emmet was a member of the execu- tive committee; in July and August 1941, Emmet played a major role in

G.112 Lt. Commander Griffith ¢** 91

the amalgamation of the New York chapter with Fight for Freedom. According to his obituary, Emmet worked during World War II for a “Freedom lobby to defeat ‘isolationist’ congressmen who had opposed American involvement in the European War.”!*4

Later during the Cold War when the British and American intelli- gence assets were used to prevent the Russians from dominating the continent of Europe, Emmet manned a slew of front groups in the CIA/MI-6 political warfare against the Soviet