Clare Mulley

How Britain conned the US into entering the war

MI6’s Bill Stephenson used many dirty tricks, including forgery and fake news, to persuade the Americans to join the Allies

In June 1940, MI6’s new man, Bill Stephenson, ‘a figure of restless energy… wedged into the shell of a more watchful man’, sailed from Liverpool to New York on the MV Britannic. Once separated from its protective convoy, ‘this elegant, ageing liner was on its own’, Henry Hemming writes, noting that the same was true of Britain and ‘salvation for both lay in the New World’.

Shortly after America entered the second world war in December 1941, a plane left for Britain carrying just a handful of passengers. Stephenson was among them. Over the intervening 18 months he had become Britain’s extraordinarily effective ‘Man in New York’. Not only did he set up a foreign intelligence service with unparalleled reach in the USA and help to establish the precursor of the CIA, he also achieved his ultimate goal of shifting American public opinion away from isolationism, towards support for direct intervention in the war, before Pearl Harbor provided the due cause.

It was said that Stephenson was ‘impossible not to like’. He certainly inveigled an extraordinary range of people to manipulate American public opinion, using every conceivable method — from forgeries, fake news and astrology to, possibly, assassination. Among the outstanding movers here was the Oscar-nominated screenwriter Eric Maschwitz, perhaps most famous for the songs ‘These Foolish Things’ and ‘A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square’ — the latter written as a diversion from his MI6 work. The early days of the Battle of Britain had found him racing round Yorkshire in a car loaded with Molotov cocktails; but he was soon on his way to America, where he produced one of the most important forgeries of the propaganda war. (A man of seemingly inexhaustible creativity, as the BBC’s director of light entertainment in the 1960s he commissioned a new show called Doctor Who.)

Opposing Stephenson and his team were the heavyweights of the America First isolationist movement, including the legendary pilot and anti-Semitic campaigner Charles Lindbergh, often but not always indirectly supported by Nazi staff and budgets.

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