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| Agents of Influence/Henry Hemming |
A world turned topsy-turvy, a hotly contested presidential election, an
isolationist demagogue and murky rumours of interference by foreign
intelligence services.
Sound familiar?
It was the summer
of 1940.
At the core of this book is a Prairie kid named Bill Stephenson. Life in
Winnipeg had been rough. His father died when he was four and his hard-pressed
mother, with two other children, decided the boy would best be raised by
friends, as was common in their mutual Icelandic tradition. His new family was
kind, but young Stephenson was clearly affected by this.
He joined the Canadian army during the First World War before transferring
to the Royal Flying Corps. He served with distinction until he was shot down
and sent to a German prisoner of war camp, where he swiped a locally made can
opener and mused about patenting it outside Germany.
When he returned to Winnipeg, Stephenson’s war record brought entrée to
many circles but all this was dashed when one of his business ventures
collapsed in 1922. He moved to Britain; his only asset was that little can
opener, which he patented under his own name. This gave the capital to launch
more business ventures, ones that did well enough to make him wealthy even as
the depression of the 1930s went on.
To protect his enterprises, he organized an informal commercial
intelligence network across Europe. Through this, he encountered British MP
Winston Churchill, who was impressed by Stephenson’s grasp of the threat from
resurgent Nazi Germany. Stephenson drifted into the orbit of MI6, the British
foreign intelligence agency. After Churchill became prime minister in May 1940,
he was sent to New York as what could be called the regional manager for all
British security services in North and South America -- areas that so far in
the war had very low priority for Britain.
That changed in June 1940, as France collapsed and the British Expeditionary
Force was chased off the European continent at Dunkirk. Suddenly, getting money
and arms from the United States became top priority for Britain -- and for Stephenson.
This book, written by a man whose grandfather was a close friend of Stephenson,
describes the next 18 months in the life of Stephenson and the United States.
Among American voters, only one in 10 that summer thought the U.S.
should aid Britain, and there was a growing “America First” neutrality movement
getting money and encouragement from the German embassy. Working without pay,
Stephenson spent his own money leasing and fitting out offices in central
Manhattan, into which a steady stream of British intelligence officers,
propagandists and public relations operatives came. (Mindful of the widespread
American aversion to upper-class British accents, Stephenson hired plenty of
Canadian secretaries. Local folklore holds that some of these women worked in
the Saskatchewan civil service as late as the 1980s.)
American president Franklin D. Roosevelt, in 1940 seeking his third
term, was also worried by Hitler’s war machine but had to tread carefully
because of the coming election, with the Republican party in the thrall of isolationists
who wanted nothing to do with Europe and its rivalries. The GOP presidential candidate,
businessman Wendell Wilkie, was also wary of Germany, but wanted to keep his party
behind him. Still, FDR was able to arrange a deal to send 50 elderly destroyers
to Britain (Canada got seven of them) and to create a draft (or conscription) system.
Britain’s fortunes looked worst around the end of 1940. Its economic
situation was desperate and isolationists were riding high, thanks to the entry
of Charles Lindbergh, aviation hero – and also the son of a fiercely isolationist
Republican Congressman into the debate.
Lindbergh’s logic was that Germany’s armed forces were too powerful to be
beaten. The best America could do would be to seek a peace deal in Europe. German
atrocities? What atrocities?
Around the same time, Lord Lothian, Britain’s highly competent ambassador
to the US, died of natural causes, and was replaced by a dud. The German
embassy was already active in stoking the isolationist mood and had several
“tame” congressmen speaking on this issue and even sending out pamphlets on it.
(More on this later.)
The only good news (for Britain and Canada) was the re-election of
Roosevelt, who began work on a “lend-lease” program. As he put it, imagine your
neighbour’s house was on fire. You are a good neighbour, so you loan him your
hose to put it out. You don’t want payment, only the return of the hose. Similarly,
he proposed to ship weapons to Britain -- providing they someday be returned. Giving
more aid to Britain improved America’s chance of staying out of the war, he
argued.
Then, a dramatic development. Free from electoral politics, Wilkie
appeared before a Senate committee to counter Lindbergh’s appeasement testimony,
and also went on a fact-finding tour to Britain, where he met everybody from
the king and queen to factory hands. He returned fired up for a fight.
Meanwhile, Stephenson’s people continued their work, setting up or
bankrolling pro-British organizations and digging up dirt on German diplomats
and isolationist politicians. More good news came when Roosevelt authorized
American troops to set up a base in Greenland (hinting that Germany wanted to
grab this Danish territory) and authorized the US Navy to carry out armed
patrols in the western Atlantic. Conversations from that period indicate Roosevelt
was secretly expecting for a German attack on American warships, thus bringing
US public opinion to his side.
When isolationists, by now operating under the “America First” brand,
held a rally in Manhattan in April 1941, Stephenson’s staff arranged for pro-British
organizations to picket it. Fighting broke out and sympathetic newspapers
devoted plenty of space to women protesters roughed up by America Firsters –
the insinuation being they were Nazi brutes.
By now, support for Britain was at 20 per cent – and rising.
Stephenson’s workers got astrologers to predict bad fates for Nazi leaders.
Lindbergh soared in influence, then came back down toward earth, his wings
clipped by rumours and accusations planted by Stephenson’s men, and also by his
own hubris: in one speech he went “off message” and lashed out at Jews for
antagonizing the Nazis. Blame the victim.
Stephenson, meanwhile, played up stories of (rather rare) British
military successes and invented others that could not possibly be checked out.
British executives in two major polling companies, Gallup and Roper,
occasionally planted softball questions that increased the apparent support for
American intervention against the Nazis.
Meanwhile, things were not going well for Lindbergh. He was accused of
admiring Nazi Germany. And when the air conditioning failed as he spoke in a
Philadelphia arena in May 1941 he impulsively suggested “Jews” had turned it
off. Widespread outrage did not stop Lindbergh from talking about American’s
“Jewish problem,” implying they were setting themselves up for a backlash by
opposing Germany and backing Britain.
More problems were ahead. With help from Stephenson’s allies, a New York
advertising specialist confirmed that the German embassy’s “tame” congressmen
had been using their “franking” or mailing privileges to send out huge volumes
of pro-German brochures. This went viral in New York, then across the rest of
the country and prompted Roosevelt to close all German consulates.
Stephenson’s British Security Co-ordination then twisted in the knife by
faking a letter indicating a German plan to stage coups in several South
American countries. This British-Canadian forgery was blamed by Berlin on
Roosevelt, who knew nothing of it and became enraged at the accusation. No
connection, but Roosevelt announced in May 1941 that a national state of
emergency existed and sent US Marines to garrison Iceland, and the US Navy to escort
convoys originating in the US as far east as Iceland.
Mid-September saw a US destroyer drop four depth charges on a U-boat,
which replied by firing two torpedoes. Nobody was hurt, but tension clearly was
rising.
That same month, Lindbergh fatally overplayed his hand. In a speech
carried nationwide by radio from Indianapolis, he spoke about “a Jewish
conspiracy to bring the US into the war.” Stephenson’s allies had infiltrated
the meeting and the radio audience heard not only Lindbergh’s remarks but
frequent booing. The national response was near-total outrage at Lindbergh’s
claims. There were even calls for his name to be removed from bridge and monuments.
FDR’s support now was up to 67 per cent.
The next month, the destroyer USS Kearny, operating in the Atlantic, was
torpedoed by a U-boat. 115 American sailors were killed. Lindbergh left the
America First movement and by November FDR’s support was up to 85 per cent.
Then came Japan’s Pearl Harbour attack. America rose up righteous anger.
Germany, for whatever reason, declared war on the US a few days later, and the
rest is history.
In an attempt to redeem himself, Lindbergh (too old for active military
service) signed on as a technical representative with Lockheed Aircraft and went
to the south Pacific in 1943 to tutor young pilots on setting their engines to
get the best possible power and endurance. It is widely reported that Lindbergh
unofficially flew in combat and unofficially shot down a few Japanese aircraft.
But the taint lingered. Even today, there is a movement to get Lindbergh’s name
taken off San Diego’s airport.
American author Philip Roth got a good novel out of a hypothetical
situation: suppose Lindbergh had moved earlier and won the Republican presidential
nomination in 1940, and then the presidency. It paints a picture of rising
anti-semitism and even a plan to forcibly resettle American Jews into the American
West and Southwest. Lindbergh disappears in 1942 and the ensuing chaos sees
anti-Jewish riots and, out of the turmoil, the re-election of Roosevelt.)
Back to reality. A major theme of this book is how British intelligence
helped get the US into the Second World War. Nobody complains about that. The carbon-copy
Russian operation to embarrass and defeat Hillary Clinton in 2016 is, by those
who acknowledge it took place, shocking. So what’s the difference?
The answer, of course, is the end game. Stephenson and his crew were
assigned to halt the Nazi war machine; Russia’s meddling was about defeating
Clinton, a strong critic of Russia’s meddling in Ukraine and the Baltic states,
and thus avoiding economic sanctions and travel bans for Russian strongman
Vladimir Putin and his henchmen. Can they even be compared?
“Both campaigns were probably approved by the respective
leaders, Churchill and Putin, and were successful in the sense that the goal
they had been working toward came to pass,” wrote author Hemming in his
summary. “To what extent these covert operations were directly responsible for
this is an open and contentious question. Cause and affect in the field of
influence campaigns will always be hard to measure exactly. But a lack of
precision is not the same as a lack of impact.”
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By Will Chabun
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