A new line of black lettering neatly drawn on the glass door of suite 1059 of the National Press Building in the spring of 1941 spelling out “Overseas News Agency” was the first sign in Washington of one of BSC's most intriguing enterprises.

ONA had been launched in July 1940 as an adjunct to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. JTA informed newspapers that the ONA's mission was to “gather and distribute news about minorities in Europe, supplementing news coverage of other services.” It promised to “devote itself exclusively to reporting facts” and claimed that it would “indulge in no propaganda, preach no theory or philosophy.”1 The new name alerted editors that JTA was expanding its coverage beyond reporting on issues of relevance to Jews. It also facilitated work in Central and Eastern Europe at a time when the only doors a business card with the word “Jewish” on it would open were hanging on prison cells.

From the start, attacking Nazi Germany was a higher priority for ONA than hewing to the truth. Much of its copy was based on sources close to the imagination of its writers and their friends in London. For example, its second bulletin, distributed in August 1940, cited anonymous “qualified Czech” sources reporting that “Czechoslovak girls and young women have been transported from the Protectorate to German garrison towns to become white slaves.” It claimed that “Nazi officials, dispatching these trainloads of prospective white slaves to the Reich, informed husbands and relatives that the women ‘will be entrusted with the important work of amusing German soldiers, in order to keep up the morale of the troops.’”²

A few weeks before ONA opened its Washington office, the president and chairman of JTA reached an agreement with William Stephenson, the head of British Security Coordination. BSC agreed to give the ONA a monthly subsidy in return for a promise of cooperation. The commitment included giving ONA credentials to British spies around the world. British intelligence reports to London about propaganda activities in the Americas routinely mentioned securing ONA employment as cover for agents. ONA also recruited its own spies.3

JTA and ONA founder Jacob Landau spent the last five months of 1940 in South America, setting up bureaus in Buenos Aires and Rio and hiring correspondents in other countries. After the United States entered the war, it became clear what he had been doing when he approached a senior FBI agent, offering to help in the fight against fascism. Landau said he had established “particularly intimate contacts” with Jewish groups and leaders in South America, and noted that there were 600,000 Jews living on the continent who “are anti-Nazi and are vitally interested in the victory of the United Nations.”⁴

In addition to providing information from South America, Landau told the FBI that it could use the ONA “for the gathering of information among the foreign-language groups and the various foreign politicians who have come to our country.” In case the FBI didn't understand what he was offering, Landau made it plain: “It is suggested that a special division be established [at ONA] devoted to the gathering of information in which your office would be interested.” He stressed the advantages of using an intermediary like ONA to obtain information from non-citizens: ONA's staff would be in a better position than the FBI to judge the informants’ trustworthiness, and in case anything went wrong the bureau's involvement would be hidden.⁵

There is no record of the FBI availing itself of ONA's services.

Landau also discussed his Latin American intelligence organization with Soviet intelligence officers, though the extent of his collaboration with the KGB isn't clear from the available decrypted cables.⁶

There can be no doubt about the ONA's close relationship with British intelligence. As the BSC history notes, ONA's primary value “lay in its ability not only to channel propaganda outwards but to assure wide dissemination of material originated by BSC and intended for internal [American] consumption.”7

In part because of the money and information—both true and false—provided by BSC, the ONA became a trusted source of news from around the world for newspapers that reached most Americans.

ONA's reporters were almost certainly unaware of the fact that their salaries were being underwritten by a foreign intelligence organization that had, according to the BSC history, “effective control” over the news agency. They probably wouldn't have been bothered. ONA staff felt an affinity for Britain's war aims and a passionate hatred for Americans who favored neutrality.⁸

The publishers and editors of scores of newspapers, ranging from the New York Times, the New York Herald Tribune, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and the Washington Post to tiny papers like the Circleville, Ohio, Daily Herald—all important sources of information in the pre-television era—had no idea that ONA was sending them stories written with a keener eye on Britain's war needs than on objective truth.

British funding helped ONA send copy in various languages, so its reports appeared in hundreds of foreign-language papers published for immigrant communities throughout the United States. Many of these papers were also distributed in Nazi-occupied and neutral countries.⁹

ONA hired Harry Hart Frank, a talented writer who used the pen name Pat Frank, to run its Washington bureau. He was already working in the JTA's National Press Building office writing a syndicated column called Frankly Speaking that had been warning of the Nazi threat for years.

Frank's first big scoop for ONA, a series of stories based on a November 1940 trip to Martinique, was typical of the news agency's best work: brave, compelling, and slanted to advancing the war aims of Great Britain. The story, which ran in newspapers across the country, began by establishing Frank's credentials as both a Washington insider and an intrepid reporter: “The Caribbean Sea is supposed to be an American lake, according to what you hear in Washington. But after you've looped around it a while you discover there are some people in the Caribbean who don't agree with that and are preparing to argue the issue with guns, not words.”10

Frank reported that he'd been sent to the largest island in the French West Indies, “where a group of French soldiers, sailors, and civilians are quarreling about what to do with some $240,000,000 worth of gold bullion and several million dollars’ worth of bombing planes and warships.”¹¹

Frank depicted an island preparing for a siege, and ready to serve as a base for attacking shipping in the Caribbean. He also suggested that it was ripe for a pro-American uprising. The “250,000 inhabitants of the island are on the verge of revolution, but have no arms to rise against their rulers,” Frank reported, adding that “to the people of Martinique, Roosevelt is practically a God.”¹²

Frank's observations, which were at odds with the picture painted by both the US government and French officials on Martinique, and with the report Curtis Munson gave FDR in the summer of 1941, were printed in hundreds of American newspapers, and he was interviewed on national radio programs. ONA's stories about Martinique served British interests by piercing Americans’ comfort zone, reinforcing the idea that if they didn't go abroad to fight the fascists, they would have to fight them much closer to home. Frank's stories also bolstered arguments against America's continuing to trade with the Vichy government. Convincing the United States to sever financial ties with the French puppet government was a high priority for Britain.

Frank returned to the theme of tropical fascism in February 1941. Papers around the country ran his stories from Puerto Rico and Haiti which painted a dire and unrealistic picture of Haiti joining the Axis and serving as a jumping off point for Nazi raids on the Panama Canal, Miami, and Puerto Rico. “There is enough Nazi activity in Haiti to create a Caribbean Sudetenland,” Frank claimed.13 Like his reporting from Martinique, the stories were intended to shake Americans’ sense of comfort and drive them to take the war to Hitler before he brought it to their doorsteps.

BSC fed about twenty rumors a week to American reporters and kept close track of its success in getting them into print. The British didn't restrict themselves to stories that had the potential to inflict immediate or severe damage to the enemy, and they weren't concerned about the veracity or believability of the rumors. For example, in August 1941 the New York Times published ONA's report, which had been concocted in London, that the death of a 130-year-old Bedouin soothsayer was seen in the Middle East as “a sign of a coming defeat for Hitler.”¹⁴ BSC also sponsored a US tour for Louis de Wohl, a Hungarian “astro-philosopher.” In press conferences and an appearance at the annual convention of the American Federation of Scientific Astrologers, de Wohl pontificated about astral signs of Hitler's doom and Roosevelt's success: “A yogi once told me a man born on the date Hitler came into power would cause his downfall. Hitler rose to power on Jan. 30, and that is Roosevelt's birth date.”¹⁵

American newspapers and radio played an important role in conveying false information to the Axis during the two years between the Nazi/Soviet invasion of Poland and Germany's declaration of war on the United States. The Brits would feed a rumor to a London newspaper, which could be relied upon to cable its New York correspondent for confirmation. BSC then fed the New York reporter additional information. “At the same time, the London newspaper would make inquiries of an American news agency, which in turn would cable its Berlin correspondent. The rumour would thus be planted in Berlin—with the German censors, the Gestapo and the Berlin correspondent of the US news agency, who would in all likelihood discuss it with other correspondents,” according to the BSC history.¹⁶

One of ONA's tasks was to help BSC get disinformation broadcast on WRUL, a shortwave radio station located on Long Island with a powerful signal that could be heard clearly throughout Europe. The operating rules for WRUL, which had programming in several languages, specified that it would broadcast only news that had already appeared in print. ONA published BSC-generated rumors, WRUL repeated them, and by the time other newspapers and radio stations picked them up, BSC's and ONA's fingerprints had disappeared.

These rumors weren't the result of happenstance.

The British government had a well-oiled, coordinated scheme for generating and disseminating rumors, which it called “sibs,” short for sibilare, the Latin word for whisper or hiss. In continental Europe British sibs were distributed almost exclusively through whispering campaigns. In the United States ONA was used to place sibs in American newspapers that were unaware that the material was in any way inspired by the British government.

Many of the sibs were silly or outlandish, but British intelligence took them extraordinarily seriously. “The object of propaganda rumours is in no sense to convey the official or semi-official views of H.M.G. [His Majesty's Government] by covert means to officials in the countries concerned,” a secret report circulated to British intelligence officers and diplomats noted. “It is rather to induce alarm, despondency and bewilderment among the enemies, and hope and confidence among the friends, to whose ears it comes. If a rumour appears likely to cheer our enemies for the time, it is calculated to carry with it the germs of ultimate and grave disappointment for them.” Rumours, the memo stated, “are expected to induce a certain frame of mind in the general public, not necessarily to deceive the well-informed.” The memo said that rumors are “the most covert of all forms of propaganda. Although the enemy may suspect that a certain rumour has been started by the British Government, they can never prove it. Even if they succeed in capturing an agent engaged in spreading whispers, there will be no written evidence against him, and should they exhort a confession from him, nothing is easier [than] for the British Government to deny the whole story.”17

BSC didn't mince words in describing the goals of its American fake news operations. In a memo to the British Foreign Office, Sydney Morrell, one of two journalists in charge of BSC's work with the press, described his unit's remit as conducting “subversive propaganda in the United States” and “countering isolationist and appeasement propaganda which is rapidly taking on the shape of a Fascist movement, conscious or unconscious.” It also sought to leverage “America's prestige and neutrality by directing ostensibly American propaganda towards the three Axis powers and enemy-occupied territories.”18

British intelligence agencies were careful about terminology. To set out the distinction between “publicity” and “propaganda,” the UK Political Warfare Executive (PWE) produced a memo titled “The Meaning, Techniques and Methods of Political Warfare.” Each copy was numbered and marked “Secret,” and carried on its cover page the instruction: “To be kept under lock and key.” The memo defined “publicity” as “the straightforward projection of a case; it is the build-up of a picture in the mind of the audience which will win their confidence and support,” and explained it was intended to persuade through “the presentation of evidence, leaving the judgment to the audience.”¹⁹

Propaganda, PWE made clear, was publicity's evil twin. The term was used in reference to deliberate, covert activities, not run-of-the-mill publicity campaigns, its purpose being to “direct the thinking of the recipient, without his conscious collaboration, into predetermined channels. Propaganda is,” PWE summed up, “the conditioning of the recipient by devious methods with an ulterior motive.”²⁰

An organization called the Underground Propaganda Committee (UPC) met twice a week in London to approve new sibs. The UPC sent thousands of sibs out into the world. For many, the first stop was ONA's New York and National Press Building offices.

To cite one example, at a meeting of the UPC on August 8, 1941, a decision was made to release a series of sibs that, according to the meeting minutes, were “intended to suggest that the Führer, who is alone responsible in the face of a good deal of opposition for the Russian campaign, is becoming more and more unbalanced as he realises that the vast gamble is miscarrying.”21 Summaries of the planned rumors included:

SibSD/7: Hitler's megalomaniac paranoia is getting rapidly worse. He can't bear any contradiction or opposition. He is in constant fear of assassination. His memory is becoming confused. There is great secrecy about his movements.

SibR/183: Sauerbruch (Hitler's doctor) visiting Switzerland told Professor Jung that Hitler isn't at the Russian front at all, but at Berchtesgaden suffering from violent epileptic fits.

SibR/185: Hitler's paranoia has reached the point where he suffers from delusions. He has an uncontrollable fear that his mustache is growing more and more like Stalin's, and he has it shaved every morning much closer than usual.

Eight days later the New York Post ran an article supplied by ONA citing “circumstantial evidence for a belief that Hitler is not at the Russian front but at Berchtesgaden suffering from a severe nervous breakdown.” The article went on to assert that the Führer's personal physician had traveled to Switzerland to consult with the famed psychiatrist Carl Jung to discuss “the rapid deterioration of Hitler's mental condition,” which ONA reported was characterized by delusional rages in which he confused the contemporary battle for Smolensk with a World War I battle in France. “Confusion of memory and rage at any kind of opposition were stated to be symptoms of the Führer's condition, accompanied by the return of his old megalomaniac paranoia in aggravated form.”²²

Even the Soviet press helped propel this rumor on its trip around the world. TASS Washington bureau chief Laurence Todd cabled it from the National Press Building to Moscow, which published the news under a Swiss dateline. British reporters picked up the Russian story, and, completing the circuit, a United Press International reporter read it in London and cabled it to the United States, where it is was published in numerous papers as fresh news.23

On July 11, 1941, the UPC approved a sib for distribution in US newspapers, where Japanese diplomats would read it, indicating that if Japan attacked Indochina, the Soviet Union would attack Japan by air. The next day the New York Times and other American newspapers ran an AP story that cited “reliable persons” reporting that Japan was poised to “make a move against French Indo-China soon.” The story noted that “Russia has a large air force within easy range of Japan's vulnerable centers of population.”²⁴

The UPC approved another sib involving Hitler on July 11, this one alleging that the German leader had purged a number of mid-level Nazis whom he believed to be plotting against him. On August 18 the Baltimore Sun ran a story that had been provided by the New York Herald Tribune, one of BSC's favorite vehicles for disseminating disinformation. The headline asked “Purge of Nazi Minor Officials?” Like many UPC sibs, the story relied on anonymous sources and was built not on reporting but on paraphrasing a story from another newspaper that had itself relied on murky sources. The first sentence read like an abstract of the UPC's sib: “Reliable information from Germany leaves no doubt that there is grave disunity within the Nazi party and between the party and the army leaders with neither side daring to openly express the points in dispute, according to an article to appear in the Daily Telegraph and Morning Post tomorrow by the paper's diplomatic correspondent.”²⁵

The British devoted a lot of attention to persuading German soldiers that any attempt to cross the English Channel would be foolhardy. The men in charge of the sibs were thrilled when they learned that captured German pilots had expressed horror to interrogators about a new secret weapon that could set the sea on fire, incinerating any pilot who ejected or was forced down over the water. The imaginary weapon was one of the UPC's rumors.²⁶

Some of the sibs were so outlandish that they must have been aimed more at bolstering morale in England, or giving the men who came up with them a laugh, than alarming the enemy. There is no evidence that any German believed rumors the UPC spread that two hundred man-eating sharks had been imported from Australia and released in the Channel, where they could devour pilots and sailors unlucky enough to find themselves in the water.27

BSC asked ONA in November 1941 to help dent the morale of U-boat crews. ONA released a report, allegedly based on news from Ankara, stating that the British had invented a new super-explosive and were frantically stuffing it into depth charges. American reporters followed up on the ONA story with questions to British officials, who played along with the game. Newspapers gave prominent coverage to an AP story disclosing that “the British were filling their depth charges for naval warfare with an explosive forty-seven times more powerful than TNT.” Testing the credulity of their readers, the papers reported that the “new ammunition is more than ordinarily secret,” and in the same story quoted British military sources providing details about its manufacture and deployment—as if the British government was in the habit of revealing military secrets to any reporter clever enough to ask the right questions.²⁸ To its credit, after publishing the AP story on its front page on November 2, the New York Times ran a small story buried on page C18 of the next day's paper suggesting that “the more imaginative rumors crediting the British with new and ‘highly secret’ ammunition for use against German submarines in the Battle of the Atlantic should be taken with perhaps a little more than the proverbial grain of salt.”²⁹

A surprising number of sibs were aimed not at the brains, or even the hearts, of targeted populations, but rather at the genitals. For example, on December 5, 1941, three sibs were approved:

“The tremendous demand for aphrodisiacs among quite young soldiers returning from Norway seems to tie up with the general fear of impotence which is spreading among German troops.”³⁰

“The drugs the Germans give foreign workers to supplement the poor food supply are rendering them impotent.”31

“The Germans are blaming the housing crisis for the decline in their birthrate; actually the food concentrates now used are causing widespread impotence.”³²

The practice of planting rumors in American newspapers did not stop when the United States joined the war. Officials responsible for British propaganda carried on a lively debate in February 1942 about the merits of informing coordinator of information Bill Donovan about its system for planting fake news in American newspapers, and of seeking his prior approval for rumors connected with or disseminated in the United States. One official, who referred to Donovan as Britain's “‘underground’ friend,” argued that he shouldn't be burdened with the information, presumably because he would be expected to keep it secret from his superiors. Another official characterized the suggestion that Donovan should be given any say over fake news involving the United States as “outrageous,” and he vowed to do his utmost to kill it. In the end Donovan, and the American government, were kept out of the loop.³³