ica – including a plan to abolish
all religion.
Roosevelt gave his most provoca
tive and angriest speech since
the start of the war as a result of
the documents. But did he have any
reason to suspect they could be
British forgeries? Declassified
cables from Stephenson to his supe
riors in London reveal that British
‘operations of any importance
directed against isolationist groups
had been approved by President
Roosevelt beforehand’.
It’s scarcely believable that Roose
velt thought these documents
were genuine, but he needed inci
dents that might make the USA
enter the war and was willing to do
whatever he could
to make ‘the right
things’ happen.
Towards the end of
1941, Stephenson
employed one final
t a c t i c , a r g u a b l y
more effective than
any other.
He employed poll
ing company Market
Analysts to gauge
public opinion about
the Americans join
ing the war. They made sure the
wording of each question steered
the respondent towards particular
answers. The order in which the
questions were asked mattered, as
did the emphasis pollsters gave to
each one. Thus, the researchers
found that 92 per cent of their sam
ple ‘favoured America’s entry into
the war against Germany’.
Meanwhile, the reputation of
Lindbergh had become toxic as a
result of the infamous speech he
gave in Des Moines, Iowa, on Sep
tember 11, 1941, in which he sug
gested Jews were pushing the US
to enter a war that was not in the
national interest. It was widely
labelled as antiSemitic. America,
it seemed, was finally ready.
At 7am on December 7, 1941, the
Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor
began, killing 2,335 American ser
vicemen. Roosevelt declared waron Japan the following day and on
December 11, Germany declared
war on America.STEPHENSON was knighted at
Churchill’s request in 1945. After
wards, he ordered four members
of staff, including assistant air atta
che Roald Dahl, to turn his office
records into a definitive history.
In 1976 he was immortalised
in the biography A Man Called
Intrepid, which sold more than
two million copies. The book was
popular, pacy – and so inaccurate
that its US publisher later reissued
it as a work of fiction. It created a
mythical figure,
an iconoclastic
spymaster with
unlimited power.
It might seem
s t r a n g e t h a t
Stephenson was
not kept on by MI6
when the war was
over, but not all
his operations and
techniques had
been officially
sanctioned and he
had burned bridges with London
colleagues. So rather than return to
Britain, he set up home in Bermuda,
where he lived until the age of 92.
It is perhaps fitting that in the
days before his death in 1989, he
managed one final act of press
manipulation. Fearing a media cir
cus might follow the news, he
arranged for the announcement to
be held back for three days so his
funeral could take place in peace.
His instructions were followed
and Sir William Stephenson was
given the quiet sendoff he desired,
successful to the very end.© Henry Hemming, 2019lOur Man In New York, by
Henry Hemming, is published
by Quercus on Thursday,
priced £20. Order for £16 before
September 30 on 0844 571 0640
or at mailshop.co.uk.of Stephenson’s officers. His first
job was to look after Louis de Wohl,
a Hungarian refugee, British secret
agent and celebrity astrologer.
Britain’s wartime secret services
had various pet astrologers around
the world, including De Wohl. Over
the summer of 1941 they were told
to start predicting the Nazi leader’s
sudden death.
Knowing Hitler was obsessed by
astrology, it was hoped the rumours
would haunt him. For those who
took astrology seriously, including
millions of Americans, it might
also help to undermine their notions
of Nazi invincibility.
It was around this time that a
British intelligence officer named
Ian Fleming was sent to New York
to help Stephenson persuade the
US to create its own centralisedintelligence agency. Fleming used
Stephenson’s office in the Rocke
feller Center as a location in his
first James Bond novel, Casino
Royale, published a decade later.
He later described Stephenson as
‘one of the great secret agents of
the last war’, a man with ‘a mag
netic personality’ who mixed ‘the
most powerful martinis in Amer
ica’. They were so good that Flem
ing jotted down Stephenson’s recipe:
‘Booth’s gin, high and dry, easy on
the vermouth, shaken not stirred.’OVER time, Stephenson’s tactics
became still more cunning. He
decided to forge a letter by Major
Elias Belmonte, Bolivia’s military
attache in Berlin and a fervent proNazi, outlining a planned Nazi coup
in the Latin American country.
For this task he turned to Masch
witz, who was not only a writer but
a gifted forger.
Maschwitz carefully altered the
keys on a typewriter to produce
a letter that appeared to have
been typed on a German machine.
Nobody who saw the document,
including Roosevelt and Hoover,
appears to have doubted its authen
ticity. When it was published, the
American public was outraged.
The customised typewriter was
thrown into the East River.
Maschwitz was then dispatched
to Toronto to set up a dedicated
forgery section and create his
most extraordinary work: a Nazi
map showing what they intended
to do with South and Central AmerOne report
claimed the
Sicilian Mafia
was taking on
the Fascists
The secreT persuader
September 1 • 2019 The Mail on Sunday^45
TARGET: Stephenson’s agents disrupted Charles Lindbergh’s speechesON MESSAGE: Campaigners in New York in 1941 call for war with Germany, as Stephenson’s propaganda drive wantedREX / ALAMY