A World War II-era poster showing portraits of Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, the flags of the Allies, and the sinking of the Japanese battleship Haruna. (Photo: Corbis via Getty Images)
The Campaign To Lie America Into World War II
Before Pearl Harbor, there was an elaborate British influence operation of forged documents, fake news, and manipulation
Hunter Derensis / The America Conservative
(December 6, 2019) — Seventy-eight years ago, on December 6, 1941, the United States was at peace with world. The next morning, local time, the Empire of Japan bombed the US Navy base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. Four days later, Nazi Germany issued a declaration of war against the United States. The American people were now unalterably involved in a global conflict that would take the lives of over 400,000 of their native sons.
But before Japan opened this door to war, the United States had been the target of an elaborate, covert influence campaign meant to push public opinion, by hook or by crook, into supporting intervention on the side of the British. Conducted by the United Kingdom’s MI6 intelligence service, it involved sometimes witting (and often unwitting) collaboration with the highest echelons of the US government and media establishment.
In the early summer of 1940, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill dispatched intelligence agent William Stephenson to North America to establish the innocuous-sounding British Security Coordination (BSC). The Canadian-born Stephenson was a World War I flying ace and wealthy industrialist who had been a close Churchill confidant for several years. Adopting the codename “Intrepid” during his operations, spymaster Stephenson served as the main inspiration for James Bond (whose creator, Ian Fleming, worked with the BSC).
The BSC’s base of operations was the 35th floor of Rockefeller Center in New York City, which it occupied rent-free. The influence campaign began in April 1941, employing hundreds of agents, including well-placed individuals in front groups, the government, and polling organizations.
Intrepid had his work cut out for him.
Entering 1941, upwards of 80 percent of Americans opposed US intervention in the war in Europe, a sentiment expressed through the America First Committee. Founded in September 1940 by a group of Yale students (including Gerald Ford, Sargent Shriver, and future Supreme Court justice Potter Stewart), at its peak the organization had 800,000 dues paying members and 450 local chapters spread across the country.
“The America First Committee was taking the position that we should not be involved in foreign wars, as we were in World War I,” John V. Denson, a distinguished scholar at the Ludwig von Mises Institute and former circuit judge in Alabama, told The American Conservative. “There was a great deal of criticism of [Woodrow] Wilson taking us into World War I, so there was strong sentiment that we were tricked into that war and therefore that we needed to stay out of European wars. That was the America First position. We didn’t want England or anyone else dragging us into another war.”
This meant that a primary goal of the BSC was to disparage and harass those Americans opposed to entering World War II. But it couldn’t do this in the open. The Fight for Freedom Committee was (like the BSC) established in April 1941 and also headquartered at Rockefeller Center. There it announced that the United States ought to accept “the fact that we are at war, whether declared or undeclared.”
In September 1941, when North Dakota Senator Gerald Nye, an anti-interventionist and scourge of the armaments industry, gave a speech in Boston, Fight for Freedom demonstrators booed and heckled him while handing out 25,000 pamphlets labeling him an “appeaser and Nazi-lover.”
Similarly, when New York Congressman Hamilton Fish III, an irritable thorn in Franklin Roosevelt’s side, held a rally in Milwaukee, a Fight for Freedom member interrupted his speech to hand him a placard: “Der Fuhrer thanks you for your loyalty.” Reporters, alerted ahead of time, made sure photos of the scene were reprinted nationwide.
When Charles Lindbergh, the aviator and the America First Committee’s most popular speaker, addressed a rally at Madison Square Garden in October 1941, Fight for Freedom attempted to sow confusion by printing duplicate tickets. Lindbergh still successfully spoke to over 20,000 supporters, not including an agent provocateur who tried to cause a stir by yelling, “Hang Roosevelt!” (In actuality, it would be Lindbergh’s infamous September 11 remarks in Des Moines that would do more to damage the non-interventionist cause than any of the BSC-orchestrated hijinks.)
A 1945 study by BSC historians described their efforts: “Personalities were discredited, their unsavory pasts were dug up, their utterances were printed and reprinted…. Little by little, a sense of guilt crept through the cities and across the states. The campaign took hold.”
To promote the influence campaign, Stephenson gave large sums of money every month to the heads of media outlets like the Overseas News Agency or the WRUL radio station, and in exchange they would publish or broadcast “fake news” overseas. The stories were often fictional accounts of the British war effort and were promptly republished by American newspapers, which believed them to be credible. By the fall of 1941, the BSC was pushing out 20 to 25 phony stories a week.
Stephenson’s influence campaign was at its most effective when he used his political connections to shape the Roosevelt administration’s policy. It was Stephenson who suggested that prominent lawyer William J. Donovan be made “Coordinator of Information” (whose office was also in Rockefeller Center). Describing this appointment, the late historian Ralph Raico wrote, “Through Stephenson, Churchill was virtually in control of William Donovan’s organization, the embryonic US intelligence service.” Donovan, who the British described as “our man,” later headed the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor to the CIA.
With the pieces in place, Stephenson directed British lyricist Eric Maschwitz to create two forgeries: one, a map showing a German war plan to occupy South America; the other, a Nazi plan to abolish the world’s religions. These fake documents were provided by the BSC to Donovan, who gave them to the president.
“I have in my possession a secret map made in Germany by Hitler’s government—by the planners of the new world order,” Franklin Roosevelt announced during an October 27 radio address at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, D.C. “It is a map of South America and a part of Central America, as Hitler proposes to reorganize it. …This map makes clear the Nazi design not only against South America but against the United States itself.”
“Your government has in its possession another document made in Germany by Hitler’s government,” continued Roosevelt. “It is a plan to abolish all existing religions — Protestant, Catholic, Mohammedan, Hindu, Buddhist, and Jewish alike. …In the place of the Bible, the words of Mein Kampf will be imposed and enforced as Holy Writ. And in place of the cross of Christ will be put two symbols—the swastika and the naked sword.”
Donovan, aware that Stephenson had given him falsified information in the past, almost certainly knew the documents were forgeries. But what about President Roosevelt?
Henry Hemming, author of Agents of Influence: A British Campaign, a Canadian Spy, and the Secret Plot to Bring America into World War II, explained in an interview with TAC: “When [Assistant Secretary of State for Latin American Affairs] Adolf Berle comes to see Roosevelt in September 1941, he brings with him a dossier. And in this dossier, he has evidence of three separate occasions in which the British have tried to fabricate proof of a Nazi plot somewhere in South America. … He says, ‘This is a real problem. We have to do something about this.’ And in his notes from that meeting, Berle says the president was curiously reserved and didn’t seem to react in the way he expected him to. And Roosevelt eventually says, ‘You should probably bring this up with Bill Donovan.’”
“[I]t’s the South American map that’s so interesting,” Hemming said, “because Roosevelt knows that the British are concentrating on South America. This is where they’re trying to create evidence of a Nazi plot. And here is a document which does precisely the same thing, just after he’s been warned that the British are trying to do this. So knowing that, it would have been very strange for him not to think, ‘Hmm, this looks and smells like a British fake.’” Hemming concludes that it is “extremely likely” Roosevelt suspected the forgery, but proceeded with the speech anyway.
Denson believes Roosevelt’s motivation for this deception was that American entry into World War II would gift the United States the international system he’d always desired: “I think he made up his mind as soon as the Senate didn’t confirm the League of Nations [in 1919]. He decided he could do a better job than Wilson, and he could get a world government like the League of Nations started. I think he was always on that train.” The “Declaration of United Nations,” co-written by Roosevelt and Churchill, was signed in January 1942.
From manipulating American public perceptions against peace to actively propelling the United States towards war, the influence campaign by Intrepid was a rousing success for the British. And not incidentally, it helped build the modern world.
Hunter DeRensis is a reporter with The National Interest, and a regular contributor to The American Conservative. Follow him on Twitter @HunterDeRensis.
Posted in accordance with Title 17, Section 107, US Code, for noncommercial, educational purposes.
