Long before the United States entered the war, a handful of American reporters and editors in the National Press Building privately declared war against Germany and its partners in the Vichy French government. Their actions went well beyond writing articles designed to elicit sympathy for the British people or blacken the reputations of isolationist politicians, and included pressuring the US government to seize German companies and working with BSC to neuter Vichy espionage capabilities. BSC operatives in the Press Building were also active in a less successful operation aimed at Britain's neighbor Ireland.

Preventing the Vichy government from conducting espionage, disseminating propaganda, and benefiting from commercial operations in the United States was a difficult problem for BSC. There was a good deal of sympathy in the United States for the French people, and as an officially neutral government, the Vichy regime was legally permitted to operate in the United States.

BSC was typically thorough and ruthless in its approach to the problem. First it dispatched an American agent, Betty Pack, wife of Arthur Pack, a British diplomat, to seduce Charles Brousse, the press attaché in the French embassy in Washington. After gaining his admiration and confidence, Pack, referenced in BSC files by the cover name Cynthia, “confessed” to him that she was an American intelligence agent. It was a shrewd deception because the Anglophobe Brousse would never have divulged secrets to someone he believed was a British agent.

She persuaded Brousse to provide unencrypted copies of all encrypted cables sent to and received by the embassy, as well as detailed reports of private conversations involving the ambassador, Vichy officials in France, and the German government. The cables kept Britain informed of Vichy activity in Washington and helped its cryptanalysts defeat French codes. Brousse also provided the names and addresses of undercover agents in the United States. A male BSC officer used romance to recruit a lonely embassy secretary who filled in details that Pack's lover was not privy to.1

The British were so curious about the activities of a Vichy agent named Jean Louis Musa that a BSC operative befriended him, proposed a business partnership, and, to facilitate the fictitious business, provided an office. BSC bugged the office, tapped its phones, and swooped in every night to copy documents, including those locked in a safe. Musa may have attracted BSC's attention because he was involved with Havas News Agency, a pro-Vichy news service that had an office in the National Press Building.

In July 1941 BSC wrote up a summary of Vichy operations in the United States that included transcripts of illegal telephone taps and copies of secret documents, and gave a copy to Roosevelt. He awarded it his highest compliment, saying he was reading it “as a bedtime story,” and gave his permission to have the information made public.²

BSC, which had some of England's most talented journalists on its staff, spun the Vichy dossier into a series of newspaper articles. The stories were handed to a BSC contact, Ansel E. Talbert, who worked in the New York Herald Tribune's National Press Building office. The first article in the series, which was reprinted in over one hundred American newspapers, was published on August 31, 1941. It accurately reported: “Operations of a clique of Vichy agents, working under direct control of Gaston Henry-Haye, French ambassador to the United States, whose activities are designed to create sentiment for the Nazi ‘new order’ in Europe, have come to light in Washington.” The story described how the Vichy government's intelligence operation in the United States had “thwarted actual military moves of Britain and her allies,” and said it aimed to create “an ever-widening network to bring Vichy's message of defeatism before isolationists, noninterventionists, and all others who will listen.”3

The stories revealed that Vichy agents had attempted to obtain blueprints and plans of the improved Bren gun, a mainstay of the British invasion defenses, and described Musa's role in thwarting efforts to mass produce an improved version of the machine gun in the United States for export to England.⁴ Remarkable details were included, such as news that an Allied effort to overthrow the Vichy garrison at Dakar, Senegal, had been derailed because de Gaulle's plans for the battle were smuggled into the United States for transmission to the Vichy in the gasoline tank of an automobile shipped from London to Hoboken aboard a Greek steamer. The gas tank also held lists of French officers and pilots who were fighting Germany as part of the Free French movement.⁵

The BSC-written articles pointed out that the US Treasury was unintentionally financing Vichy's nefarious activities by unfreezing $1 million per month of French government funds, which were supposed to be used only for diplomatic activities and to provide assistance to colonies like Martinique that had been cut off from France.

Treasury secretary Henry Morgenthau publicly praised Talbert and personally complimented the journalist for his brilliant exposé. Morgenthau was apparently unaware of the source of the articles, and Talbert didn't tell him that his biggest contribution to the series was lending his byline.

The articles had their intended effects. The Vichy embassy was indelibly marked as a tool of Nazi Germany, the State Department and FBI forced the Vichy intelligence service to curtail its activities in the United States, and American sympathy for representatives of the Vichy government evaporated. A BSC source in the French embassy reported to BSC that the ambassador had “described the whole affair as ‘De Gaullist-Jewish-British-FBI intrigue.’ But he never really suspected the British.”⁶

At the same time as it was battling the Vichy embassy in the press, BSC was using similar tactics to combat commercial collaboration between American and German companies. Stephenson's men worked on the project with some of the most prominent reporters of the era.

Drew Pearson and Robert S. Allen were particularly aggressive in confronting Nazis. They coordinated closely with Ernest Cuneo, BSC's liaison to American government officials and reporters. One example of this collaboration is a May 1941 Washington Merry-Go-Round report that “Justice Department sleuths” had discovered that the US subsidiary of the German pharmaceutical company Schering AG was illegally funneling millions of dollars to Nazi Germany. The story followed revelations from other reporters that the pharmaceutical company had violated antitrust laws.7

Pearson and Allen knew, but did not disclose, that the sleuths who discovered Schering's illegal ties to Nazi Germany had more in common with Sherlock Holmes than Elliott Ness. Schering was targeted, according to the BSC history, because it was part of a “vast and intricately organized network of companies [that] became the backbone of the German intelligence and propaganda systems in the Western Hemisphere, and its existence seriously endangered the security and the economy of both Britain and the United States. To devise a way in which to combat and if possible to liquidate it was one of the most important problems which confronted BSC in late 1940.”⁸

BSC's first step was to obtain proof that the subsidiaries of German companies operating in America were sending money to their parent companies in violation of US law. The second step was to expose these connections, launch a campaign to persuade the public that American/German firms posed a threat to America, and finally to pressure the US government to take control of German and collaborationist businesses.⁹

The Brits recruited a Schering employee in New Jersey who revealed the company's secret connections to Germany. In addition, he photocopied documents demonstrating that Schering was a party to cartel agreements that violated the Sherman Anti-Trust Act. BSC contacted a friendly reporter at the International News Service who, in return for exclusive rights to the story, “agreed to follow a course of action which BSC suggested to him and promised at the same time not to reveal his source.”10 The course involved showing the documents to a Justice Department official and giving him an ultimatum: The United States must initiate legal proceedings against Schering within three weeks or contend with headlines asking “Why is the Department of Justice sleeping at such a critical time?” The reporter obeyed his instructions, as did the Justice Department.

“Startling facts indicating that Nazi Germany is waging a concerted undercover ‘economic blitzkrieg’ on the US through an ingenious network of ‘dummy’ corporations has been unearthed by the department of Justice,” Americans read on April 10, 1941.¹¹ Pearson and Allen were among the scores of journalists who reported the story. The media firestorm prompted the Canadian government to confiscate the assets of Schering's Canadian subsidiary. The US Department of Justice first fined the US subsidiary, and later acquired its stock and supervised the firm's operations for the duration of the war.

BSC operated with impunity because Stephenson knew that he had enthusiastic, though passive, backing from the highest levels of government. Roosevelt encouraged British covert operations in the United States, even telling Stephenson, “I'm your biggest undercover agent.”¹² On April 1, as Washington Merry-Go-Round was preparing to break the Schering story, Stephenson cabled Menzies with news that FDR had told Cuneo he planned to bring the United States into the war “very shortly.” Menzies passed the message on to Churchill.¹³

British efforts to push America into the war were not universally admired in Washington, and as BSC became bolder in the autumn of 1941 isolationists began to detect hints of its activities.

On the morning of November 10, 1941, Burton Wheeler stood on the floor of the Senate and excoriated the US and British governments for conspiring to disseminate pro-intervention publicity through front groups that typically had the word “committee” in their name. He decried a “rising tide of propaganda” created by “committee after committee” and said that many Americans wondered “how far the Government of the United States and the British Government have acted in collaboration behind these committees.”14

Wheeler read from the confidential minutes of a meeting that had been held a month earlier in Donova'sn office. The meeting was held, Wheeler noted with a hefty dose of sarcasm, to plot the formation of an organization dedicated to lining up Irish Americans “behind the war policies of the United States and on the side of Ireland's ancient and warm-hearted friend, the British empire.” The group “is called American Irish Defense Committee,” Wheeler reported. “There is very little Irish about it except the green ink in which it prints some of its literature.” Wheeler didn't reveal the source of the confidential minutes.¹⁵

Turning up the heat on his sarcasm, Wheeler told his colleagues that the meeting had been attended by “great Irish champions and prominent Hibernians,” and proceeded to list several attendees who had non-Irish names. Wheeler's colleagues were familiar with, and weary of, his conspiracy theories and attacks on Roosevelt. The few who listened to the speech paid little or no attention to his claim that the American Irish Defense Association “originated in New York, in the minds of gentlemen closely associated with the British government.” Wheeler's accurate assertion that the association was not seeking dues or contributions from prospective members because “expenses will be paid by England,” was reported in only one major newspaper, the isolationist, Roosevelt-hating Chicago Daily Tribune.”¹⁶

The senator from Montana was shooting in the dark. If he had been well informed when he read into the Congressional Record the names of those in attendance at the meeting, he wouldn't have been content to note that Sanford Griffith ran the meeting and the attendees included Francis Henson; he would have identified them as paid agents of British intelligence.

In fact, Wheeler's guess was correct. BSC created the American Irish Defense Association because existing Irish American groups were militantly anti-British. The Ancient Order of Hibernians and the American-Irish Historical Society had teamed up with isolationist, violently anti-Roosevelt organizations like America First. In the minds of BSC's leaders, this marked Americans of Irish ancestry as fair game.

Describing the origins of the American Irish Defense Association, the BSC history states: “After the usual preliminary steps had been taken in the way of collecting intelligence, BSC sponsored an Irish interventionist society in the autumn of 1941.”17 Any overt connection with the British government would have rendered the association radioactive to Irish Americans, so BSC was careful to maintain contact through “a good cut-out, a man who followed directives from the BSC office and kept BSC posted on every move it made.” This was probably Henson.

BSC's effort to organize pro-British sentiment among Irish emigrants was a direct response to requests from Winston Churchill. The prime minister wanted the American government and private citizens to pressure the Irish government to allow Britain to use bases in southern and western Ireland to provide air and naval cover for Atlantic convoys.¹⁸

Prominent Irish Americans were recruited to lead chapters of the association in New York, Boston, Washington, and other cities. BSC funded a publicity blitz that included radio broadcasts, news releases, dinners, mass meetings, street corner meetings, and personal appearances of film stars and other Irish celebrities. Although it failed to persuade Ireland to join the war or provide naval bases for Britain, the association was effective in mobilizing Irish Americans to set aside their antipathy to Britain and to endorse American aid to the United Kingdom at a time when interventionists needed every friend they could muster.¹⁹

Wheeler's denunciation of the American Irish Defense Committee fell on deaf ears. The idea of a conspiracy between the Roosevelt administration and the British government to create a phony propaganda operation didn't seem credible, even to Republican senators.

A week after Wheeler's speech, BSC and the White House rushed operatives, including several based in the National Press Building, to Detroit to collaborate on an urgent project. Their mission was to defuse the threat posed by John L. Lewis, leader of the United Mine Workers of America (UMW) union, who was openly plotting to use a convention of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) to launch an insurrection against the White House's plans to prepare the nation for war.

Lewis and Roosevelt had once been close allies, but by 1940 they had parted ways. Hatred for the president had so clouded Lewis's judgment that he first aligned himself with communists and then backed Herbert Hoover—the man many Americans believed was responsible for the Depression—as the Republican presidential candidate.20 After the GOP convention, Lewis endorsed Wendell Willkie and said that if workers did not follow his lead he would regard it as a personal repudiation and would step down as head of the CIO. Workers did not follow him and Lewis quit.

In November 1941 Lewis, desperate to regain his stature and determined to stymie Roosevelt's efforts to prepare labor and business for war, threatened to paralyze the steel industry by calling a massive coal miners’ strike. At the same time, he plotted to push isolationist resolutions through the CIO national convention that could have led to widespread strikes in other industries. A Wall Street Journal headline captured Lewis's motives and intentions: “He Hates Roosevelt; He Hates War; He Wants a Showdown” and is “Ready to Go Through with the Coal Strike, Come Hell or High Water.”²¹

The conflict was as important to Churchill as it was to Roosevelt: if Lewis prevailed, the flow of materiel across the Atlantic would stop, and with it hope for Britain's survival. BSC mobilized its forces, in close coordination with the White House, to battle Lewis. The CIO convention, the BSC history noted, “offered BSC a dramatic opportunity to attack the union's isolationist façade.” There was, BSC believed, grave danger that the convention would adopt isolationist resolutions “which would have long-lasting and possibly disastrous consequences.”²²

Repeating a tactic from the previous summer, Henson conducted a poll of delegates. “The questions asked were designed to be ‘educational,’ a euphemism in this case for tendentious,” according to the BSC history. The poll, newspapers around the country reported, showed that 98 percent of CIO delegates believed it was more important to defeat Hitler than to keep the United States out of war.23

Fight for Freedom, a pro-intervention group backed by BSC, launched a massive publicity campaign at the convention, handing out buttons and flyers and meeting with CIO leaders. John Franklin Carter's representative, Jim Gillan, circulated among the delegates at Detroit's Moose Temple Lodge. Gillan called Carter with frequent updates, which he had typed up and delivered to the White House. The news was good for Roosevelt. Lewis was marginalized and the isolationists were routed. The convention voted overwhelmingly for a resolution stating that “Hitler and the Nazi government…directly menace the security of the United States,” condemning appeasement, calling for “all possible aid” to Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and China, and backing FDR's foreign policy without reservation. Lewis lost control of the CIO and, a few weeks after the convention, called off the coal strike.²⁴

President Roosevelt was aware of and appreciated the role Fight for Freedom, and BSC, had played in defanging Lewis.²⁵

It took decades for information about some of BSC's operations to start leaking out, and by the time a reasonably complete picture emerged few remembered how fraught the situation had been, or how bitter were the divisions in American society.

With the clarity of hindsight, some may write off the extraordinary collaboration in 1940 and 1941 between journalists in the National Press Building and a foreign intelligence agency as little more than a historical curiosity. Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor and Hitler's declaration of war vaporized notions of neutrality, rendering British intelligence's efforts to defeat America's isolationists superfluous. In reality, given the depth and strength of the opposition to FDR's efforts to aid Britain in 1940 and 1941, and the importance of the lifeline that pro-British propaganda made possible, it is clear that the efforts of Mowrer, Bell, Henson, Carter, Frank, and many others who viewed themselves as partisans in a fight to defend western civilization helped change history.

To cite one example, during the summer of 1941 the Roosevelt administration went all out to persuade Congress to amend an emergency military conscription law extending mandatory service from a year to two and a half years. The House of Representatives passed the extension on August 12 by a one-vote margin. It is easy to imagine, though impossible to prove, that the efforts of BSC's operatives in the National Press Building to bend and bully politicians away from isolationism tipped the balance in favor of the law.

BSC privately took credit for, and its operatives in the Press Building played a major role in, the destroyers-for-bases deal that provided a vital morale boost for Britain in one of its darkest hours. British influence on public opinion and shaping of the political climate were important factors in another bitterly fought pre–Pearl Harbor initiative, the lend-lease program that allowed the United States to ship massive quantities of supplies to the Allies.26

Without American assistance, Britain wouldn't have been able to hold Germany at bay in 1941. Roosevelt barely mustered the public support that enabled him to provide that aid. The manipulation of American opinion by British intelligence, exemplified by the covert actions of its operatives in the National Press Building, is one of the least-known and most-successful applications of covert propaganda in modern history.