WASHINGTON, D.C. – On the 27th of October, 1941, President Franklin Roosevelt stood before a room full of Naval officers and bragged about a map, which he described as proof of Hitler’s expansionist plans for South America.
Just over a month before Pearl Harbor, FDR claimed that he had in his possession a secret document that vindicated his repeated warnings about the German threat to America’s sphere of influence and put the nail in the coffin of the isolationist camp in the US Congress.
Roosevelt’s secret map had been procured by agents of the British Security Coordination (BSC), a beachhead of UK intelligence based out of New York City, that purported to show how the Nazis intended to carve up South America among the Axis powers after the war.
What Roosevelt perhaps didn’t know was that the map was really the culmination of a covert propaganda campaign designed to get the United States into the war, initiated and carried out through the BSC by the man who inspired Ian Fleming’s fictional secret agent, James Bond.
His name was William Stephenson, codename INTREPID. Since 1940, the Canadian multi-millionaire had taken on a furtive mission on behalf of the British Secret Intelligence Service to procure war materiel from the US government and shift public opinion about the war to facilitate America’s entry on the side of the Allies.
The map in question was only one of several obtained by the agents he directed through the BSC from Nazi sources in Buenos Aires, that had to do with fuel production and storage on the continent. One of these was forwarded to the outfit’s technical facilities in Canada, where it was doctored and made to look as if the continent was partitioned into five regions to be split between Germany and Vichy France.
Once “Station M” in Toronto – Fleming’s Q Branch – completed the alterations, the map was presented as a genuine document to Stephenson’s prime asset in the United States and by then, Coordinator of Intelligence (COI) at the White House, William “Wild Bill” Donovan, who delivered the map to FDR through one of his assistants.
FDR Knew
Suspicions about BSC’s real activities had begun to fester in the State Department and a memo written by Assistant Secretary of State Adolf Berle circulated only one month prior to Roosevelt’s Navy Dinner speech warned that British intelligence agents were manufacturing documents to spread misinformation about Nazi conspiracies in South America.
Unlike Berle’s superiors and the rest of the State Department, President Roosevelt and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, knew perfectly well what the BSC was doing in the United States. Roosevelt himself gave the go ahead for the establishment of a covert British intelligence organization in America in early 1940.
Due to the Neutrality Act, which prohibited the export of “arms, ammunition, and implements of war” the activities of the BSC were patently illegal and thus deliberately kept from the State Department. In conjunction with the FBI director, who christened the British project, and Berle himself, Roosevelt created a foreign intelligence branch of the FBI tasked with collecting “political, economic, industrial, and financial information” across the Western hemisphere.
The Special Intelligence Service (SIS) was formed in June, 1940. Unbeknownst to Berle and the Military and Naval intelligence divisions privy to its creation, the SIS would in fact be an appendage of the BSC. In August, the FBI rented suite 4332 in 30 Rockefeller Center to serve as the headquarters for its undercover operations through a front company called Importers and Exporters Service Company.
Seven floors down, the BSC occupied suite 3603 and eventually two entire floors of the RCA building, as it was known until the 1980s, from where Stephenson managed an international staff of more than three thousand from Canada to Argentina, taking Hoover’s novices under his wing and organizing training exercises in British intelligence outposts across Latin America, where most of SIS’ activities would unfold
So it was, between the 35th and 43rd floors of the newest skyscraper in New York that the most special relationship began as war broke out in Europe once again and a fading imperial power brought out its finest set of knives from the drawers of King George’s most cunning intelligence services to carve out a hole in the heart of the American body politic and pave the way for post-war Anglo-American hegemony.
Stephenson, William Stephenson
In the foreword to former BSC operative, H. Montgomery Hyde’s book, Room 3603, Ian Fleming calls William Stephenson, a.k.a. “Little Bill”, his hero. A man of “super-qualities” and magnetic personality, who pales in comparison to the fictitious character Fleming created for his popular spy novels.
According to the author of the James Bond books, 007 was merely a “blunt instrument in the hands of government”, whereas the real life Bond was “another kind of beast altogether”. Just what kind of beast depends on the historical context and his legacy.
William Samuel Stephenson was born in Winnipeg, Canada during the late 19th century to Scottish settlers. He joined the Royal Canadian Engineers as World War I was igniting and eventually became a fighter pilot for the Royal Flying Corps during the war.
Stephenson’s engineering background dovetailed with the radio technology craze then sweeping the world and through a combination of luck and his own intellectual abilities, he became a millionaire practically overnight as a result of his foresight regarding the nascent broadcast radio business.
By the mid 1930s, Stephenson had multiplied his fortune and expanded his interests into the steel industry, which ultimately brought him into contact with British intelligence. Already a known quantity of the government because of his prominent media holdings, Stephenson’s manufacturing concerns led him to become increasingly involved with the UK’s foreign trade missions.
While visiting Germany on several occasions to buy steel, Stephenson noticed that the country’s steel production had been almost entirely diverted to the manufacture of armaments and munitions. In 1936, he reported these developments to Winston Churchill himself, providing detailed financial information to back it up.
Shortly thereafter, when Churchill was once again in government, Stephenson was attached to a relatively new outfit of British intelligence, the Industrial Intelligence Centre (IIC). The IIC focused exclusively on obtaining and analyzing the industrial preparedness of foreign countries for war and was headed by Churchill’s personal assistant during his Prime Ministry, Desmond Morton.
This new agency pioneered some of the most prevalent aspects of post-war intelligence work, such as developing the field of “special operations”, entailing the sabotage and subversion of supply lines in both enemy and neutral countries. It also coined the term “economic warfare” that has pervaded the national security lexicon ever since.
Weeks after Hitler invaded Poland in 1939, Stephenson offered his own services to carry out a special operation in Sweden, where he would use contacts of his steel company to organize a convoy to sabotage a large shipment of ore destined for Germany. When the scheme failed due to the intervention of the Swedish government, Stephenson was recalled to London, where he would receive new marching orders.
The Boxer and the Bulldog
Under cover as a private business man, Stephenson arrived in the United States with the mission of establishing high level contacts in the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and gauge the agency’s receptivity to a collaboration with British intelligence services. Within days, INTREPID was on the telephone with FBI director Hoover thanks to an old boxing buddy, who informed him that as much as he would like to, the Neutrality Act prohibited such a relationship.
Nevertheless, Hoover recognized the power a connection of this sort would afford him and suggested that if Stephenson could swing a direct order from the White House, he could change his mind. As soon as the FBI director provided the opening, Stephenson contacted a mutual acquaintance – New Jersey lawyer, Ernest Cuneo –, to reach out to the President.
Roosevelt reacted enthusiastically and asserted that there should be the “closest possible marriage between the FBI and British Intelligence”. Stephenson returned immediately to report the good news to London and was just as quickly asked to take on the responsibility of presiding over the marriage himself. For the first time in his life, Stephenson balked.
In the meantime, the IIC had been dissolved and all special operations were transferred to a new entity called the Special Operations Executive (SOE). Together with the tectonic reshuffling of the British government that brought his friend Churchill back to power, Stephenson started to come around. Finally, the British Bulldog himself sat him down: “You must go”, Churchill ordered.
Our Man in Washington
Originally, Stephenson was supposed to work out of the cramped quarters of the Passport Control Officer’s desk in Britain’s Consulate-General in Manhattan. But, the wealthy industrialist was not about to trade in his rich lifestyle for the humdrum existence of a government bureaucrat, so he opted to work out of his fancy apartment overlooking Central Park until he could find adequate installations.
Among his first orders of business was to find the whereabouts and establish contact with an Irish-American he had met years’ prior in England by the name of William “Wild Bill” Donovan. Known to be a childhood friend of the President, Donovan’s recent political difficulties and FDR’s reported desire to help his old chum made him a perfect mark for recruitment as an asset for British intelligence.
There was no “single individual,” Stephenson later recalled, “despite all my contacts in high places, [who] might achieve more than any widespread effort on the official or sub-official levels” in advancing the primary goal of his mission at that time, which was to procure war materiel from the US government. Stephenson “instinctively” knew that Donovan was the correct man for the job and began to cultivate the devout Catholic as a British asset.
Churchill specifically required 50 naval destroyers and military equipment, which were not going to be forthcoming as long as American isolationists controlled the Congress and the Neutrality Act remained in effect. In the summer of 1940, Stephenson arranged a tour of London for William Donovan after Roosevelt agreed to send his long-time friend on the unofficial diplomatic mission.
Stephenson made sure Donovan was briefed from every quarter of British political, economic and military sectors, organizing meetings with industrialists, cabinet members and more. He spent hours with Churchill and even had an audience with the King. Upon his return, Donovan was more than ready to make Churchill’s case before Roosevelt, presenting a report that predictably recommended moving forward with supplying the destroyers.
Because the Neutrality Act precluded any kind of congressional avenue for the military aid, Roosevelt turned to executive action to carry out the so-called Destroyers-for-Bases deal, which transferred 50 US Navy destroyers to England in exchange for the rent-free establishment of naval and air bases in numerous British possessions across the Caribbean and the North Atlantic.
Stephenson’s coup emboldened the British operative, who doubled down on his instincts about Donovan and brought him deeper into the world of “covert diplomacy” and international intrigue. Soon enough, Donovan was helping INTREPID land military technology secrets and more war supplies through alternative channels.
With the distractions of the upcoming presidential election, Stephenson was able to expand the BSC operations undisturbed. Having accomplished the first mission, it was now time to move on to the next one: Crushing the American isolationist movement and paving the way for the United States’ entry into the war.
Ghostwritten in the Stars
The American Federation of Scientific Astrologers was holding its third annual convention in Cleveland, Ohio in the summer of 1941. The keynote address was delivered by an eccentric Hungarian astrologer named Louis de Wohl, who had been put up to it by Stephenson after the large, bespectacled man had been hired by his bosses at SOE and sent stateside to be managed by INTREPID for a unique propaganda campaign.
Speaking to a spellbound audience, de Wohl predicted that Hitler would invade the United States in less than a years’ time, when Saturn and Uranus entered the zodiac sign of Gemini. He informed the delegates that the Fuhrer was relying on Germany’s “best astrologers” to plot the attack. Following his warnings about the numerous omens in the sky, he concluded with the hard sell: “if the United States enters the war before next spring, he is doomed.”
De Wohl’s speech was picked up by newspapers all over the country. Similar stories by other “astrologers” began appearing all over the world a few days later. De Wohl was kept in American headlines by coordinating his “predictions” with manufactured events that inevitably came to pass, confirming his credibility among the American public.
It was perhaps the most notorious of Stephenson’s propaganda activities, but hardly the only one. BSC had an enormous network of media and journalists at its disposal. From prominent columnists like Walter Winchell to Edgar Ansel Mowrer of the Chicago Daily News and many others, who worked directly or indirectly for the BSC and regularly pumped out pro-war, anti-isolationist material. Some of them published articles written by BSC staff and simply attached their bylines.
At the height of BSC’s operation, its New York headquarters had over 1,000 employees. Most of the key propaganda positions were staffed from London directly and featured individuals like future advertising tycoon David Ogilvy, who was officially employed at the Gallup Audience Research Institute. During the war, Ogilvy was trained at BSC’s Camp X in Canada, where he is said to have learned everything he needed to build one of the world’s most powerful ad agencies.
BSC’s propaganda initiatives went beyond public opinion about the war. They also heavily interfered in the country’s political elections and were highly instrumental in Franklin Roosevelt’s re-election of 1940. In addition, many covert BSC propaganda campaigns targeted isolationist candidates, preventing their access to Congress.
Once the Pearl Harbor attack took place, much of this activity became moot. But the BSC was far from done and after the US finally joined the war, Stephenson again turned his attention to Donovan, whom he had successfully installed as a British asset inside the White House as the Coordinator of Intelligence (COI) in June of 1941.
The same day Roosevelt agreed to appoint him COI, Stephenson cabled London expressing his relief that “after three months of battle… our man is in a position of such importance to our efforts”. By that time in the following year, Stephenson would be pushing a reluctant Donovan to form an intelligence agency of his own, the Office of Strategic Services (O.S.S.).
All Together Now
J. Edgar Hoover, for his part, was quite pleased with the reports and documents Stephenson kept furnishing him. They gave the FBI director preferential treatment over at the Office of Naval Intelligence and the Army’s Signals Corps. At the same time, the domestic law enforcement agency’s covert foreign intelligence outfit on the 43rd floor of Rockefeller Center, the SIS, was growing and becoming more professional thanks to the expertise of the BSC.
Barely seven years since its grand opening, Rockefeller Center housed the broadcast operations of RCA’s flagship media property NBC and its handful of subsidiaries that still controlled the vast majority of the radio industry, despite a recent anti-trust battle with the previous Herbert Hoover administration.
As a radio entrepreneur and owner of several film studios, Stephenson didn’t necessarily need to tap into RCA’s vast broadcasting infrastructure to mount his own international propaganda campaigns on behalf of the British government. On the other hand, the SIS was able to take advantage of the prime real estate location and its biggest tenant to buttress its operations in Latin America.
The landlord’s young son, Nelson Rockefeller, had been placed at the head of another propaganda-slash-intelligence outfit created by James Forrestal, then one of six special advisors to FDR. The Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs (OCIAA) began operations in August 1940 to ostensibly counteract Axis propaganda in the Western hemisphere; coinciding exactly with the SIS’ theater of operations.
The BSC and the SIS worked secretly with Rockefeller’s OCIAA from the start and with Roosevelt’s blessing. Embedded within the official mission of the OCIAA was a covert intelligence gathering operation targeting commercial activity in Latin America. Several friends of Rockefeller’s, a career diplomat from the State Department and BSC’s FBI liaison, Percy Foxworth, comprised the core team.
Under the flag of anti-Nazism, the OCIAA’s intel operation spread a wide net to identify any kinds of threats to American business interests in Latin American countries. Conveniently labeled as anti-American, these were by and large matters that pertained to the private interests of American corporations, like those owned by the Rockefellers and others with considerable interests in the region.
Stephenson helped Foxworth establish the SIS’ far flung network of FBI agents in Latin America, often using cover from the OCIAA. Together, they would lay the foundation for what after Pearl Harbor became active economic warfare against countries in the Western hemisphere that didn’t adhere to US economic policy and the proliferation of subversive networks of intelligence agencies and military bases, all in service of Anglo-American hegemony.
Post War Shuffle
Stephenson’s BSC carried Donovan’s COI operations until the summer of 1942, when it was transformed into a wartime agency with a staff of 12,000 and renamed the Office of Strategic Services under the supervision of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. At the time of Roosevelt’s announcement, both Donovan and Stephenson were together in London and discussions ensued regarding the nature of the collaboration between U.S. and British intelligence moving forward.
The BSC would be the liaison with O.S.S. headquarters in Washington and would cover anything outside of the Western hemisphere, which by then was firmly in the hands of the SIS’ two thousand operatives, informants and agents placed in every U.S. embassy in Mexico, Central and South America.
BSC’s shortwave radio stations in Boston and San Francisco were increasingly used to serve OCIAA propaganda in Latin America and the SIS began to use the radio facilities of RCA’s former partner, United Fruit Company, which since the 1920s owned the largest commercial radio network in Central America called the Tropical Radio Telegraph Company or TRT, and would become a critical partner for covert American activities in the region for years to come.
TRT’s radio transmission base in Swan Island, a tiny atoll in the southern Caribbean, would be used by several U.S. government agencies and in particular by the CIA, whose infamous agents E. Howard Hunt and David Atlee Phillips, set up a pirate radio station there in 1954 that was used to great effect during the agency’s coup of Guatemalan president, Jacobo Arbenz.
When the agency was created in 1947, many of the SIS organizational methods, networks and agents were absorbed by the new organization, and during its early years, every CIA station chief in Latin America had cut their teeth at the SIS. Coincidentally, its first director – a young lawyer by the name of Allen Dulles, also had an office on the BSC floors of 630 Fifth Avenue.
