Secrecy was William Stephenson’s watchword in his personal as well as professional life. “An extremely private man.… An enigma all around,” said the writer Roald Dahl, who worked as a BSC agent. According to another staffer, Stephenson “never told anybody about himself. Never.” Only a handful of employees knew the small, slight BSC chief by sight. He moved “like a panther, a black panther,” said a woman who worked in his private office. “He had that quality of blending into a crowd. You wouldn’t see him.… He was so swift and so silent.”
Adept at cultivating Americans who might be useful to him, Stephenson and his American wife gave frequent cocktail parties at their penthouse suite at the Dorset Hotel, just a couple of blocks from the BSC offices. “You’d meet almost anybody there,” said a key aide of Stephenson’s, from “admirals and generals to Henry Luce, Walter Winchell, and Robert Sherwood.”
A suave and charming host, Stephenson was known for his potent martinis; another colleague, writer Ian Fleming, called them “the most powerful martinis in America.” After a couple of them, the six-foot-seven-inch Sherwood was once heard to say: “If I have another cocktail, I’ll just call timber and fall on my face.” Fleming, who would model his famous fictional character James Bond in part on Stephenson, noted that the BSC chief was the source of Bond’s martini recipe: “Booth’s gin, high and dry, easy on the vermouth, shaken not stirred.”
Sherwood’s frequent presence at Stephenson’s parties underscored the most remarkable aspect of the Canadian’s organization: its presence was not only known to the White House and FBI, it was endorsed by both. In truth, the BSC’s operations benefited Franklin Roosevelt as much as they did the British government, at least when it came to the effort to defeat his antiwar foes. In its covert work to discredit isolationists, the BSC was in effect an active partner of the president. Shortly after Stephenson arrived in the United States, FDR directed that “there should be the closest possible marriage between the FBI and British Intelligence.” No other U.S. government agency, however, would be informed of the full extent of the BSC’s operations. When Stephenson registered his outfit with the State Department, he said that its only purpose was to protect the security of munitions and other war material bound for Britain.
For Stephenson, J. Edgar Hoover’s cooperation was especially crucial. The United States was still officially neutral, and Britain’s campaign against German, Italian, and Vichy French activities in the country was a clear violation of U.S. law. The FBI chief not only closed his eyes to that fact, he provided valuable assistance to the British, which they returned in full measure.
Hoover, for example, allowed the BSC to use an FBI shortwave station to transmit top-secret coded messages to London. Through one of his agents, working undercover as a Nazi sympathizer, Hoover also passed along to the German embassy disinformation that the BSC wanted to plant with Hitler’s government, such as rumors that the Soviet Union was preparing to invade Germany.
In return, British agents handed over to the FBI thousands of confidential reports dealing with their work in the United States. They also taught their American counterparts some of their many tricks of the counterintelligence trade, including their elaborate techniques for opening and resealing letters and packages without any trace of tampering. BSC personnel employed that skill at highly secret mail-opening centers in Bermuda and Trinidad, British islands through which virtually all correspondence between the Americas and Europe was routed, including supposedly inviolate diplomatic pouches from Axis and other embassies. In Bermuda, scores of British government employees toiled in the cellar of the luxurious colonial-style Princess Hotel, poring over letters and packages carried by the ships and aircraft that routinely stopped at that Atlantic island for refueling before heading for Europe. Photographs were taken of the contents of mail considered particularly significant, which then was resealed and sent on to its designated recipients.
Although the opening of others’ mail was illegal under U.S. law, the FBI, following British instructions in the technique, instituted what it called the Z Coverage program, in which agents surreptitiously examined correspondence from, among other targets, the German, Italian, Japanese, and Vichy French embassies in Washington. The policy of opening mail for supposed national security purposes continued until 1966, during which time the FBI read and photographed more than 130,000 letters. According to a 1976 report by the Senate Intelligence Committee, “the mail of hundreds of American citizens was opened for every one communication that led to an illegal agent.”
The FBI also bugged and tapped the phones of Axis embassies, as well as those of neutral foreign missions for such countries as Spain, Portugal, and Switzerland. The BSC followed suit, focusing especially on the Vichy French embassy, considered such a hotbed of pro-Nazi activity that both U.S. Navy and Army intelligence also had it under close surveillance.
Amy Elizabeth Pack, an American agent working for the BSC, was ordered to get whatever information she could from the Vichy French. Tall and slim, with honey-blond hair and green eyes, the thirty-year-old Pack was a well-traveled ex-Washington debutante who had gone to school in Switzerland, summered in Newport, and spoke fluent French and Spanish. The estranged wife of a British diplomat, she was known for her charm, strong will, passion for adventure, and sex appeal, which she put to good use in her work for British intelligence, becoming romantically involved with numerous foreign diplomats and military officers, including Charles Brousse, the Vichy French press attaché in Washington.
Soon after their affair began, the besotted Brousse raided the embassy safe to provide his lover with top-secret cables between France and the embassy, as well as France’s naval cipher. Pack, whose code name was “Cynthia,” passed the material on to Marion de Chastelain, an aide to William Stephenson, at surreptitious weekly meetings in New York and Washington. Of Pack, Chastelain would later note: “She was the type who reveled in espionage. She really loved it.… She did very well for us.”* Pack herself told a journalist after the war: “I did my duty as I saw it. It involved me in situations from which respectable women draw back. But wars are not won by respectable methods.”
Using the intelligence provided by Pack, together with the contents of tapped phone conversations, the BSC prepared a report charging the embassy and the Vichy government with working on Germany’s behalf. The report was leaked, through an intermediary seemingly unconnected to the BSC, to the New York Herald Tribune, which published a series of articles linking the Vichy embassy to Nazi interests.
This was a common technique of Stephenson’s—to uncover information damaging to the Axis or isolationist cause and pass it along, usually through cutouts, to American news organizations. “The greatest care had always to be exercised,” noted a postwar BSC history, “for clearly if British Security Coordination had ever been uncovered or had the sources of its information been exposed, it would at once have been [identified as a] covert British propaganda organization, and as such would be considerably worse than useless.”
Even though the recipients of this journalistic largesse might not have been fully aware of the material’s source, they all were considered pro-British. According to the official BSC history, among those who “rendered services of particular value” were the columnists Dorothy Thompson, Walter Lippmann, Walter Winchell, and Drew Pearson. Also mentioned were a number of newspaper publishers, including Arthur Sulzberger of The New York Times, Ralph Ingersoll of PM, and Helen Reid of the New York Herald Tribune. In the words of The Washington Post’s David Ignatius, “the British spymasters played this media network like a mighty Wurlitzer (organ).”
The Herald Tribune, which was noted for its outspoken, aggressive support of interventionism, was by far the biggest beneficiary. In addition to getting the Vichy embassy story, its reporters were tipped off by the British about one Gerhard Westrick, the commercial attaché at the German embassy, and his shady dealings with several American companies. Posing as a private citizen, Westrick had rented an expen
sive house in a New York suburb, where he entertained a number of representatives of U.S. firms, most of them in the oil business. Westrick’s purpose was apparently to convince the executives that Germany was close to winning the war and that if they threw their support behind the isolationist movement, they would be provided abundant business opportunities in a Nazi-dominated Europe. He also had reportedly worked with a number of U.S. oil companies to break the British naval blockade of Germany and Italy and to supply the Axis with oil.
After undertaking an investigation of its own, the Herald Tribune ran a front-page series of articles about Westrick, which prompted a flood of abusive letters and phone calls to the unhappy attaché, as well as a demonstration by angry neighbors outside his house. At the instigation of the FBI (prompted by Stephenson), the State Department ordered Westrick’s recall, and the Herald Tribune was widely congratulated for smoking out a dangerous emissary of Hitler. Its stories were reprinted in newspapers throughout the country and inspired numerous editorials on the dangers of the Nazi fifth column.
In a cable to Berlin, Hans Thomsen, the chargé d’affaires at the German embassy in Washington, complained about the “sensational and vicious attacks” on Westrick, apparently unaware that they had been prompted by British agents. “The deplorable part,” Thomsen wrote, “is that as a result of this publicity, which was in no way provoked by Westrick, Americans who have still maintained business connections with Germany and social relations with the Embassy and Consular staffs, are so compromised before the public that they have found themselves compelled to sever these relations.”
For Thomsen and his embassy colleagues, whose main goal was to win over Americans to the isolationist cause, it was an extremely frustrating time. Instead of being in league with the FBI, as the British were, the Germans were spied on by both the FBI and the British. Even worse, from the Germans’ perspective, most Americans, even though they had no desire to go to war with Germany, wanted nothing to do with the Reich or its government. At one point, Thomsen complained to Berlin about “the general anti-German mood and mistrust of all German efforts at enlightenment” in America. The isolationist movement, he added, was constantly being “shouted down by the press and terrorized by the Government.” Ernst Weiszacker, a top German Foreign Ministry official, had the same complaint, writing to propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels: “The real friends of Germany in the United States are unfortunately so few and far between that they are hardly a political factor at the present time.”
Hans Thomsen, Nazi Germany’s chargé d’affaires in Washington, with his wife.
Because of U.S. antagonism, Hitler’s government avoided giving overt support to American isolationists. The Germans even shied away from criticizing Roosevelt and his government, for fear such moves would increase the danger that America would enter the war. “The less we intervene spectacularly in this contest, and the more we skillfully let the Americans themselves carry on this fight … the better for us,” Weiszacker noted. “On the other hand, any obvious intervention by Germany will only have the result that all Americans will unite against us.”
But while the Germans did their best to lie low, the U.S. government and the British stepped up their efforts to persuade the American people of the dangers posed by a German fifth column. In a series of syndicated newspaper articles, the columnist Edgar Ansel Mowrer and the Wall Street lawyer William Donovan, an unofficial emissary for Roosevelt and a close friend of William Stephenson’s, speculated that “a German-American colony of several million strong,” including “thousands of domestic workers and waiters,” was working undercover in the United States for the Reich. The most egregious example of such fifth-columnism, the authors wrote, was the German-American Bund.
Since the mid-1930s, oceans of ink had been spilled in press coverage of the Bund, the most notorious Fascist group in the United States. Openly referring to their organization as America’s Nazi Party, Bundists wore Nazi-style uniforms, used the Hitler salute, held youth camps and drills, and attacked Jews wherever they could find them.
Members of the German-American Bund parade down a street in New York City. Note the Nazi flag preceding the American flags.
Two days before George Washington’s birthday in 1939, the Bund captured front-page headlines across the country by staging a giant rally at New York’s Madison Square Garden, attended by some twenty thousand Nazi sympathizers and picketed by thousands of protesters. Standing in front of giant portraits of Hitler and Washington, Bund leaders, swastikas adorning their uniforms, railed against “the invisible government of international Jewry” and the socialist plots of “President Franklin D. Rosenfeld.”
For Germany, the event was a public relations disaster. It outraged Americans and made them think the Bund was considerably better organized and more dangerous to America’s security than it actually was. Unquestionably hateful in its rhetoric and activities, the organization, for all the lurid publicity surrounding it, had never succeeded in rallying a sizable number of German Americans to the Nazi cause. At its peak in the late 1930s, it probably numbered no more than seventy-five hundred activists and another twenty thousand sympathizers.
By the summer of 1940, the Bund was virtually moribund, with fewer than two thousand members. After the Washington’s birthday rally, the German government cut off all financial support and other ties. In late 1939, the Bund leader Fritz Kuhn was indicted and sent to prison for embezzling funds from the organization. Bund meetings were routinely broken up by protesters, and in several states, the group was investigated and in effect outlawed.
Although thoroughly discredited and defanged, the Bund, in the public mind, was still a dangerous presence in the United States—a belief that the U.S. government and the British were only too happy to encourage. “The best British ambassador we ever had in the U.S. was Adolf Hitler,” declared Robert Bruce Lockhart, director general of Britain’s wartime propaganda agency, the Political Warfare Executive. “The crass stupidity of Nazi propaganda, which reached the height of insolent absurdity in a pamphlet entitled George Washington, the First Nazi, did more than any British statement could have done” to underscore the chasm between Germany and America.
Lockhart’s statement was a bit unfair to the German government, since the pamphlet in question was a product of the Bund. But there’s no doubt that Hitler and his men were at times equally clueless in their understanding of the United States. Ernst Weiszacker underscored that point when he informed the German propaganda ministry in 1941 that it should rethink its name for the “Goebbels Hour,” a new shortwave radio program beamed to America. Rather recklessly perhaps, Weiszacker wrote that there existed “in the U.S.A. such a misconception of the person of the Reich Minister of Propaganda that merely the announcement of a ‘Goebbels Hour’ would cause the American listeners to shut off their radios at once.” The plan was reluctantly shelved.
In Washington, Hans Thomsen was having similar trouble with his own propaganda efforts. He confessed to Berlin that his attempts to place pro-isolationist articles in American newspapers had been, for the most part, an abject failure: “Influential journalists of high repute will not lend themselves, even for money, to publishing such material.”
Having no luck with U.S. publications, Thomsen had to rely on Reich-supported organizations and institutions, such as the German Fellowship Forum and the German Information Library, to get the word out. Using German government funds, the chargé oversaw the creation of a publishing house in New Jersey that put out antiwar and anti-British books, which, he assured his superiors, would have “great results in regard to the enlightenment of American public opinion.” Unfortunately for Thomsen, almost all the books went unsold.
* After divorcing their spouses, Pack and Brousse married and lived in France following the war.
CHAPTER 9
“IS THIS WAR OUR CONCERN?”
On June 4, 1940, the new prime minister of Great Britain rose from his seat in the House of Commons to deliver one of
the most magnificent speeches in British history.
“We shall fight on the beaches,” Winston Churchill growled, “we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills.” Pausing a moment, he proclaimed to his spellbound parliamentary colleagues: “We shall never surrender!”
At a time when the fall of France was imminent and a German invasion of Britain was expected soon afterward, Churchill’s defiant jab in the eye of “Herr Hitler,” as the prime minister sarcastically called the Führer, electrified not only his own country but the world. In that speech, as in a number of unforgettable addresses to come, Churchill made clear that Britain would resist, no matter the cost. When his foreign secretary, Lord Halifax, argued in late May that the country should consider peace negotiations with Germany, Churchill rejected the idea, vowing, “We shall fight it out.” Years later, Sir Charles Portal, Britain’s wartime chief of air staff, remarked, “They say there was no danger that we should have made peace with Hitler. I am not so sure. Without Winston we might have.”
But what if Churchill were ousted from power? That was not an impossibility, as the prime minister made clear to Roosevelt in a series of desperate pleas for help immediately after he assumed office. Despite the miraculous rescue of more than two hundred thousand British soldiers from Dunkirk’s beaches, the country’s future verged on the calamitous. Many of the RAF’s most experienced pilots—not to mention hundreds of planes and more than 68,000 ground troops—had been lost during Britain’s attempt to come to the aid of Belgium and France during the German blitzkrieg. Britain now had only enough men to field twenty army divisions, less than a tenth of the forces mustered by Germany. And that small number had almost nothing to fight with, having left behind virtually all their tanks, armored cars, weapons, and other equipment in France. There were only a few hundred thousand rifles and five hundred cannon in all of Britain—and most of the cannon were antiques, appropriated from museums. Churchill was hardly exaggerating when he declared: “Never has a great nation been so naked before her foes.”