Our Man in Washington, (New York, Chicago……………)

I often post about historical events that are well known to me but are not well known to many. This post, however concerns a tale that stopped me in my tracks. I had no idea at all it happened. This is an edited version of an article written by William Boyd and appeared in Saturday’s Guardian. If you have an interest in WWII I can highly recommend the full article.

"British Security Coordination" (BSC). The phrase is bland, depicting perhaps some sub-committee of a minor department in a lowly Whitehall ministry. In fact it represented one of the largest covert operations in British spying history. It was not run in Occupied Europe, or across the Iron Curtain but in the US during 1940 and 1941.

When Winston Churchill became prime minister he realised that he had to achieve one thing in order to ensure that Britain was not defeated: he had to enlist the US as Britain's ally. With the US alongside Britain, Hitler would be defeated eventually. At the time, however, 80% of Americans were against joining the war in Europe. Anglophobia was widespread and the US Congress was violently opposed to any form of intervention. After the fall of France it was assumed that British capitulation was simply a matter of time so why join the side of a doomed loser, ran the argument in the US.

Churchill felt his task was clear: somehow to persuade Americans that it was in their interests to join the war in Europe. BSC was set up by a Canadian entrepreneur called William Stephenson, working on behalf of the British Secret Intelligence Services (SIS). An office was opened in the Rockefeller Centre in Manhattan with the discreet compliance of Roosevelt and J Edgar Hoover. That said, they did not realize the British agenda and never anticipated the sheer scale of its operations.

BSC became a huge secret agency of nationwide news manipulation and black propaganda. Pro-British and anti-German stories were planted in American newspapers and broadcast on American radio stations. At the same time there was a campaign of harassment and denigration against organisations perceived to be pro-Nazi or virulently isolationist (e.g. the America First Committee).

BSC's media reach was extensive: it included such eminent American columnists as Walter Winchell, and influenced coverage in newspapers such as the Herald Tribune, the New York Post and the Baltimore Sun. BSC effectively ran its own radio station, WRUL, and a press agency, the Overseas News Agency (ONA), feeding stories to the media as they required from foreign datelines to disguise their provenance. WRUL would broadcast a story from ONA and it thus became a US "source" suitable for further dissemination, even though it had arrived there via BSC agents. It would then be picked up by other radio stations and newspapers, and relayed to listeners and readers as fact. Nobody suspected this was all emanating from three floors of the Rockefeller Centre. BSC took enormous pains to ensure its propaganda was circulated and consumed as bona fide news reporting: they were never rumbled.

Some of BSC's schemes verged on the absurd; some were highly sophisticated media manipulation. BSC invented a game called "Vik", described as "a fascinating new pastime for lovers of democracy". Printed booklets described up to 500 ways of harassing and annoying Nazi sympathisers. Players of Vik were encouraged to ring up their targets at all hours of the night and hang up. Dead rats could be put in water tanks, air could be let out of the subject's car tyres, anonymous deliveries could be made to his house and so on.
In the summer of 1941, BSC sent a sham Hungarian astrologer to the US called Louis de Wohl. At a press conference De Wohl said he had been studying Hitler's astrological chart and could see nothing but disaster ahead for the German dictator. De Wohl became a minor celebrity and went on tour through the US, issuing dire prognostications about Hitler and his allies. De Wohl's wholly bogus predictions were widely published.

One of BSC's most successful operations originated in South America. The aim was to suggest that Hitler's ambitions extended across the Atlantic. In October 1941 a map appeared that purported to show a South America divided into five new states - Gaus, each with their own Gauleiter - one of which, Neuspanien, included Panama and "America's lifeline" the Panama Canal. In addition, the map detailed Lufthansa routes from Europe to and across South America, extending into Panama and Mexico. The inference was obvious: watch out, America, Hitler will be at your southern border soon. The map was taken as entirely credible and Roosevelt even cited it in a powerful pro-war, anti-Nazi speech on October 27 1941: "This map makes clear the Nazi design," Roosevelt declaimed, "not only against South America but against the United States as well." The news of the map caused a tremendous stir: as a piece of anti-Nazi propaganda it could not be bettered. But was the South America map genuine? Probably not -BSC had a superb document forging facility across the border in Canada.

The story of BSC seemed to be one of those wartime secrets that was never to be wholly revealed unlike Station X and the Enigma story which is now well known. Perhaps the reason for this is because the story was simply too embarrassing. We will of course never know whether BSC's activities would have been ultimately successful. Although US public opinion was on the turn by the end of 1941 it was overtaken by the events of December 7 1941 and Hitler’s subsequent declaration of war on the USA.

BSC
WWII
espionage
USA