Blood, Class and Empire

by Christopher Hitchens

  As in the case of the First World War, the British were able to make use of well-placed financial and political, as well as journalistic and academic, allies. William Stephenson, “the man called Intrepid,” actually began his operations by persuading men like “Wild Bill” Donovan to get on nickname terms with him (for a while, they were “Big Bill” and “Little Bill”) and to help in the politics of influence. The retired General Pershing was induced to come out of retirement and to give a speech in favor of the “destroyers for bases” agreement. A series of articles on “German Fifth Column Tactics” was written by Donovan from material supplied by Stephenson and published in the Chicago Daily News—then owned by Frank Knox, Secretary of the Navy—and the New York Herald Tribune. This was in August 1940. The second time around, though, the theme of German-American “dual loyalty” was not too heavily stressed. And, the second time around, diere was no need to invent atrocity stories.

  In fact, Stephenson was more careful than his First World War predecessors had been and so were his hosts. When he established British Security Coordination (BSC) in New York in 1940, it operated out of Rockefeller Center under the time-honored cover of a British Passport Control bureau, but was met with a demand for registration from the State Department while a series of stipulations from the rather Anglophobic FBI. J. Edgar Hoover extracted undertakings from Stephenson not to employ Americans, not to have independent agents under his own control, and to cooperate with the FBI at all times.

  It does not seem likely that he ever intended to keep these pledges. As a millionaire in his own right, a Canadian citizen, and a personal friend of Winston Churchill’s, he was able to command varying degrees of latitude. He was also empowered to deal with the White House directly on matters of such consuming interest as British work on uranium isotopes and electronic code breaking, matters in which the United Kingdom then led the field and the very stuff of which “bargaining chips” are made.

  The personnel upon whom Stephenson could call were precisely of the sort that have since been romanced in a thousand indifferent movies. There was Sir Connop Guthrie, a baronet and former Grenadier Guardsman, who headed the Security Division and established himself in the Cunard Building on Broad Street to keep an eye on shipping. There was Sir William Wiseman, another baronet, who had been a confidant of Woodrow Wilson a quarter of a century before and who had remained on Wall Street as a banker. These and other natural Establishment guerrillas helped to circumvent any literal-mindedness about the Neutrality Act as it might touch British economic or military interests. Occasionally, the taste for shortcuts and swashbuckle led to embarrassment as well as to a certain vicarious admiration from offended Americans. Once, in Baltimore, British intelligence hired trucks and went on a sweep of the bars, rounding up Danish sailors who had been accused of deserting a British convoy. Under Secretary of State Sumner Welles recalled after the war that, upon hearing of this,

  I promptly notified the British ambassador. Lord Halifax, needless to say, had received no news of the occurrence, let alone any intimation that such action was to be taken. He was aghast at the reaction that might be provoked, even in wartime, if the American public learned of so flagrant a violation of American sovereignty, and one so painfully reminiscent of the British impressments of colonial days.

  Yet it was exactly this corner-cutting, red-tape-slicing brio that showed the experience and the confidence of the British secret services vis-à-vis their junior partners, and which furnishes the material of legend in the folklore of the secret world. (In just the same way at another level, Lord Halifax vindicated the national reputation for rigidity in the upper lip when pelted with eggs and tomatoes by isolationist ladies in Detroit. “We do not have,” he murmured, “any such surplus in England.”)

  Isolationists were a special target of Stephenson’s operation. He made a particular effort to embarrass Congressman Hamilton Fish, a domestic political enemy of President Roosevelt and a suspiciously enthusiastic backer of America First. Stephenson discovered checks written to him by prominent Germans and caused their provenance to be published in the American press. He intercepted Fish’s mail at Congress and was able to show that his staff was abusing the congressional franking privilege to send out isolationist statements from the Congressional Record to pro-Nazi organizations. He was able to show that the chief contact of one of Fish’s staff, a certain George Viereck, had violated the Foreign Agents Registration Act. When Congressman Fish stood for reelection in November 1944, the voters of the 26th Congressional District in New York were reminded of these facts in a series of well-informed leaflets. In private, British intelligence veterans do not hesitate to take credit for his failure to be reelected.

  More in the tradition of Blinker Hall and the Zimmermann Telegram, British intelligence again cut with the grain of the Monroe Doctrine and fabricated a map showing Nazi designs for an empire in Latin America. Passed by Stephenson to Donovan, the map was flourished by Roosevelt at a Navy Day dinner held in the Mayflower Hotel in Washington on October 27, 1941. “The territory of one of these new puppet states,” he said, “includes the Republic of Panama and our great lifeline, the Panama Canal.”

  Stephenson, indeed, took the credit for having built up Donovan into the United States’ first real intelligence chieftain. In May 1941 he cabled London that he had been “attempting to persuade Donovan into accepting the job of coordinating all U.S. intelligence.” He was later to say that “had it been comprehended . . . to what extent I was supplying our friend with secret information to build up his candidacy for the position I wanted to see him achieve here,” there would have been horror and mayhem throughout British intelligence headquarters in London. Thus, when Roosevelt appointed Donovan to the position of “Coordinator of Information” with the rank of Major General, Stephenson was able to say: “If Donovan had not been able to rely upon BSC assistance, his organisation could not have survived. Indeed, it is a fact that, before he had his own operational machinery in working order, which was not until several months after Pearl Harbor, he was entirely dependent upon it.”

  In their book Sub Rosa, Stewart Alsop and Thomas Braden confirm this pardonably boastful claim. The British, they write, “told him how they trained their men, what weapons they had, and how they communicated with the resistance. Breaking the precedent of centuries, they even sent a man over to sit down with Donovan and explain the workings of British espionage.”

  When H. Montgomery Hyde’s hagiographic history of the Stephenson operation was published in the United States in early 1963, it contained a bonus which the English edition had not. This took the form of an introduction by Ian Fleming. There could hardly have been a happier moment for this piece of atmospherics in cementing the British spy connection, just then looking a little tarnished by defections to the other side. In the early days of the Kennedy presidency, Hugh Sidey had told the readers of Time magazine that JFK had a list of ten favorite books, on which From Russia with Love ranked at number nine (just ahead of The Red and the Black). Fleming had been a dinner guest of the Kennedys during the 1960 election campaign. He had also, in his fabled Caribbean retreat, Goldeneye, entertained Sir Anthony Eden as a house guest while the latter recuperated from the bruising inflicted upon him by the breakdown of the “special relationship” over Suez.

  Fleming had been an assistant to the director of British Naval Intelligence during the Second World War. In that capacity, he had composed the charter for General Donovan’s tenure as Coordinator of Information. Ivar Bryce, a deputy of Stephenson’s, recalls: “Ian wrote out the charter for the COI at General Donovan’s request. . . . He wrote it as a sort of imaginary exercise describing in detail all the arrangements necessary for financing, paying, organizing, controlling, and training a secret service in a country which had never had one before.”

  In his introduction, Fleming did his best to evoke the classic melding of designer snobbery and the affectation of “class” that were also his fictional stock-in-trade. Describing the
“small study in an expensive apartment block bordering the East River” where Stephenson had his abode, Fleming filled in the details:

  Ranged bookcases, a copy of the Annigoni portrait of the Queen, the Cecil Beaton photograph of Churchill, autographed, a straightforward print of General Donovan, two Krieghoffs, comfortably placed boxes of stale cigarettes . . .

  Drawing the readers’ attention to what was then a secret, he discussed the fact that the model for his M, “Major-General Sir Stewart Menzies, KCB, KCMG, DSO, MC, and member of White’s and the St. James’s, formerly of Eton and the Life Guards, was head of the Secret Service in the last war—news which will no doubt cause a delighted shiver to run down the spines of many fellow-members of his clubs and of his local hunt.” Fleming there set up a model, of the aristocratic and laconic, that is still faithfully imitated in depictions of British intelligence by American pulp writers such as Tom Clancy, and which survives innumerable revelations of its inauthenticity.

  Conforming perfectly to service traditions, Fleming went on to describe his own immediate chief, Rear Admiral J. H. Godfrey of Naval Intelligence, as “the most inspired appointment to this office since ‘Blinker’ Hall.” One sees what he must have meant.

  In trespassing with such élan on American turf, Stephenson could call upon prototypes of the gifted gentleman amateur who looked upon England’s cause as their own. The most audacious of these was the now forgotten Donald Downes, who after the war also became a fiction writer and had one of his cloak-and-dagger yarns filmed by Anthony Asquith. Of English descent, he was a schoolteacher on Cape Cod at the outbreak of war, and made repeated attempts to volunteer for secret work during the period of American neutrality; a period of which he felt the shame very keenly. His memoirs, entitled The Scarlet Thread, draw their title from a Bible story about the first spy but could equally well have furnished the name of a romance by Rider Haggard, Conan Doyle, A. E. W. Mason, or (the first British spy story author) Rudyard Kipling. Given a rather grudging “Reserve Commission” in G2 American intelligence, he acquired his own cover as a missionary student and set off through Asia and the Middle East to make himself useful. His admiration for the British took a few knocks on the way, but seems to have strengthened from the test:

  In Singapore it was evident that Mr. Churchill, through no error of his and despite his later denials, was indeed destined to preside over the dissolution of the British Empire, at least in the Orient.

  Downes decided this after hearing gloomy British pilots in Raffles’ bar (which he charmingly miscalled Ruggles); the ideal setting for a visitor seeking colonial angst. Pushing on to British India and Calcutta (“a city so loathsome to western sensibilities that it leaves a sort of scar on the memory tissue”), he found it hard to decide whether he disliked Indian backwardness more than British supremacy. “In Bombay I saw the great Gandhi himself come to visit his British dentist in a green Rolls-Royce on which was mounted a sign in five languages saying ‘Boycott British Goods.’ “ In general, “it was much more difficult to blame the British after sampling India, than before. But it was obvious that the British Raj was dead.”

  Voyaging back through the Persian Gulf, Downes met H. St. John Philby, “advisor to the King of Arabia and Ford agent for the Persian Gulf countries.” He was fascinated by this encounter with the personification of British Orientalism; survivor of the contest between the India Office Arabists who had backed Ibn Saud and the War Office Arabists who preferred the Hashemites. “I was anxious to know how this thoroughly English scholar and soldier became so estranged from his homeland.” He also wondered how he had got on with his rival, T. E. Lawrence, but felt unable to broach the question. Writing in 1953, in praise of Anglo-American solidarity, Downes was accidentally prescient about the phenomenon that, a few years later, was nearly to poison “special relationship” intelligence gathering for good:

  The agent turns with anger and shame against his own government. By 1945 I grew to understand the Philby-Lawrence reaction and to consider such men, and their honor, as casualties of war—for war cares no more for honor, or for decency and honesty, than it does for life.

  Back in New York, Downes made contact with Stephenson’s office and was duly recruited as having demonstrated the right kind of pluck and interest. He was at once asked the tough question:

  “Do you feel strongly enough on these matters to work for us in your own country? To spy on your own fellow-Americans and report to us?”

  He was able to answer in the affirmative, and was told: “Be careful of the FBI, and the Neutrality Act can land you in prison, for in this work you could not register as the agent of a foreign power as the law requires. It would give the whole show away.” Downes busied himself at first with the Free World Association, a coalition of politicians from occupied Europe who ranged from Count Carlo Sforza of Italy to Julio Alvarez del Vayo of Republican Spain. (This grouping, which then called on a multiplicity of exiles and refugees who were committed against neutralism, has also since furnished the luster of its name in the general borrowing of anti-Nazi for anti-Communist terminology.) The targets of his operation were those America First circles which might have been infiltrated, knowingly or otherwise, by agents of Hitler. The list maintained by Downes was impressive, ranging from Senators Nye and Wheeler through Charles Lindbergh to the Chicago Tribune and “two officials of the export division of General Motors.” After much rummaging in this murky world, with a little discreet and illegal help from Colonel Eugene Prince and the Army Counterintelligence Corps, Downes completed a report and was paid “the exciting compliment” of being told that “a copy for the PM would leave by bomber-ferry route.”

  Not long afterward, Pearl Harbor put a stop to isolationism and Downes transferred from Stephenson’s office to that of Wild Bill Donovan. His initial employment was with Allen Dulles, whose office in Rockefeller Center was happily situated just one floor above Stephenson’s secret bureau, masquerading until then under the Bulldog Drummond-like name of “Rough Diamonds, Ltd.” Once within OSS, he found allies such as David Bruce and George Bowden, all of whom would have agreed with him about “the English—always our betters in this field.” Together, these men did much sterling work in Washington, subverting the loyalty of diplomatic missions that represented pro-Axis noncombatants like Spain and Portugal. They caught General Franco red-handed as he refueled Nazi submarines with the American oil that had been intended to keep him neutral. But at every step they were inconvenienced by Hoover’s FBI, which seems to have numbered a few Chicago Tribune readers among its active membership. Any interference, especially in Monroe Doctrine countries, was not just resented but opposed by the Bureau. “Does J. Edgar think he’s fighting on Bunker Hill against us Redcoats or has he really heard of Pearl Harbor?” inquired a drawling but infuriated British intelligence officer of Downes at a meeting in New York.

  Downes went on to distinguish himself in numerous theaters of the secret war in Europe and North Africa. His admiration for William J. Donovan grew as the struggle intensified, against both the enemy overseas and the red-tape artists at home. But he was under no illusions as to the source upon which America drew in its race to build an espionage network from scratch:

  The USA was a “secret intelligence virgin.” Donovan turned to our British allies, the most experienced nation in the world in intelligence matters. He frankly asked their aid and advice and they unreservedly and energetically supplied him with both.

  “Unreservedly” is certainly an exaggeration, but it is beyond doubt that wherever the United States needed to lose any kind of virginity in global affairs, the British were on hand with unguents and aphrodisiacs of all kinds. As Robin Winks puts it judiciously in his racy but expert history of American intelligence and the Yale connection, Cloak and Gown:

  Later, when Sir William Stephenson and others claimed that they had taught the Americans what they knew, or when those charged with creating a postwar Central Intelligence Agency wished to refute the claim that such
an agency might become an American equivalent of the KGB, there was a good bit of talk about the paternity of American intelligence.

  Winks has an excellent account of the X-2, XX, or “Double Cross” fraternity, a transplanted group of Americans headed by Norman Holmes Pearson who made up a part-OSS, part-SIS unit in London. Their task was to be the American partners in the handling of Ultra intelligence. Contact with the British was facilitated by David Bruce (as indicated, member of the Mellon family and future ambassador to London), who became overall director of OSS in England. Ticklish questions of status arose at once, and Donald Downes was able to advise on how these might best be handled. He had already advised Donovan:

  Whoever set up this early experiment in counterintelligence must be able to learn from the British, since they were the masters at the game; at the same time, the person must not be slavishly Anglophilic, as many academics tended to be, for he would have to bring a critical eye to the British operation so that the Americans would remain independent of, and ultimately improve upon, the British system. Learning, Downes argued, had to be between social equals if OSS were not forever to be the junior partner. A Yale man, an academic, might carry it off, he thought, and certainly ought to if also a Rhodes Scholar (which Downes believed Pearson to be)— though he acknowledged that the British could be quite snobbish about Rhodes Scholars, who were thought of as the best of the colonials and thus eminently teachable, though not necessarily as yet equals. . . . Pearson was encouraged to use English academic terms and, apparently, to inflate his resume slightly, for most of his British counterparts called him a don, and though he was in fact an instructor still moderately fearful for his tenure, he converted his brief 1938 summer appointment at the University of Colorado into an associate professor on the record and was referred to then and in the literature since as “a Yale professor.”