Agents of Influence: A British Campaign, a Canadian Spy, and the Secret Plot to Bring America into World War II by Henry Hemming

Author:Henry Hemming
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 2019-10-07T16:00:00+00:00

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Meanwhile the actual conspiracy against Charles Lindbergh and America First was gathering momentum. Pressure groups secretly under British control continued to picket America First meetings and distribute leaflets attacking Lindbergh. They also asked awkward questions in the press about the pilot’s links to Berlin. In the days before an America First rally at Madison Square Garden, on 23 May 1941, one of these groups, the ANL, had publicly urged Lindbergh to denounce Nazi Germany ‘with equal vigor to your denunciation of American participation in the war’.1 This he would not do.

At the rally itself, more than one hundred interventionist protesters showed up, although they had been forbidden to do so by the police. As America First supporters approached the venue they noticed these protesters, most of them women, stationed at street corners with police protection where they handed out what looked like flyers.

On closer inspection, these turned out to be thousands of copies of a derogatory advertisement about ‘ex-Col. Charles A. Lindbergh’ which had appeared in that day’s New York Times.2 The publication of that advertisement, the money to pay for the copies, the speed with which they had been produced, and the presence of so many interventionists: this was all the work of an energetic new pressure group which had begun to galvanize the interventionist movement. It was called Fight For Freedom, and it had not been infiltrated by British agents. That was because there was no need.

Only the month before, the Century Group – that secretive cabal of influential Americans including press baron Henry Luce, well-known commentator Major George Fielding Eliot, and White House speechwriter Robert Sherwood – had reinvented itself as Fight For Freedom. This was a larger, richer and supposedly more transparent version of the Century Group. Their long-term plan was to become the interventionist equivalent of America First. Where the isolationists had Lindbergh, they would use Wendell Willkie.

In their literature they presented themselves as a popular alliance of American interventionists, free from foreign influence or any ties to the administration. The reality was rather different.

By June 1941, Fight For Freedom officials in New York were on the phone to Roosevelt’s secretaries at the White House, Steve Early and ‘Pa’ Watson, ‘at least once or twice a day’.3 Most of Roosevelt’s off-the-record press conferences were read out to them over the phone to keep them au fait with the president’s thinking. The White House even suggested members of his administration to speak at Fight For Freedom rallies, and gave pointers on who to attack and when, and which line to take on vexatious political questions.

From the outset, Fight For Freedom was ‘an unofficial propaganda instrument’ for the White House.4 Its leaders were also hand-in-glove with the British. Stephenson’s office subsidized Fight For Freedom by paying to have its speeches copied and mailed out. They also used this new interventionist organization as an outlet for some of the stories pouring out of their rumour factory.

As they had done the summer before, during the campaign to get the

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