BOOK REVIEW: Agents of Influence: A British Campaign, a Canadian Spy, and the Secret Plot to Bring America into World War II
By Henry Hemming
Reviewed by Jason U. Manosevitz
The reviewer is an Intelligence Community officer with 16 years of experience analyzing military and political issues in East Asia and the Middle East, managing global coverage issues, briefing senior national security policymakers, and teaching analytic tradecraft.
The paramount operation for any intelligence service is successfully swaying a foreign public’s opinion. It’s an intricate operation, requiring a mosaic of elements working together. These include a significant understanding of the target’s political cleavages, individuals comfortable with manipulating those differences, an apparatus for masking and disseminating plausible fabrications, an extensive network of witting and unwitting actors to carry the message, an ability to exploit favorable circumstances, moves and countermoves against those attempting to thwart one’s campaign, and of course money. Done well, influence campaigns hide the operational hands at work, give rise to conspiracy theories, and take on a life of their own, all to benefit the intelligence service pulling the strings.
But how can one assess if an influence campaign is working? Coming up with measures of effectiveness for these operations is devilishly hard. In Agents of Influence: A British Campaign, a Canadian Spy, and the Secret Plot to Bring America into World War II, author Henry Hemming subtly implies that changes in U.S. public opinion polls demonstrated the effectiveness of MI6’s efforts to get the American public to support going to war against Germany. While true that the U.S. did enter the war against Germany, determining how much the UK’s operation influenced the American public is tricky at best. Russia’s effort to influence the U.S. presidential election in 2015 will naturally spring to mind for readers of Hemming’s book, even without the author drawing parallels between the two operations. And while its safe to say that all information operations have similarities, there are significant differences between these two operations that should not be overlooked.
Agents of Influence is fun, delightful reading. Hemming provides a lucid narrative that draws on recently declassified documents and reads like an historical fiction. Hemming has a few books already under his belt, including Agent M: The Lives and Spies of MI5’s Maxwell Knight, which documents his knack for bringing to life seemingly forgotten British spy history.
Hemming weaves in his family’s personal connection to some of the main characters in Agents of Influence, but the vignettes don’t add much to the main narrative though the book is extremely timely and thought provoking. It packs quite a punch, particularly in the wake of Russia’s operation. And it will, I believe, further prompt readers to think critically about the sources and veracity of information they consume daily.
Hemming sets the scene for Agents of Influence with the departure in June 1940 of the ocean-going liner Britannic, carrying a tremendous sum of gold and the new MI6 Station chief—William “Bill” Stephenson. Hemming characterizes Stephenson as a “Bond-like” figure that UK’s intelligence service had tasked with persuading the U.S. to join Britain against Germany. Given the importance and enormity of his mission, it is surprising that Stephenson had only formally joined MI6 a few months prior, and with a meager background in intelligence at best. Hemming briefly covers Stephenson’s unusual entrance into MI6, his Canadian upbringing, service in the Canadian Expeditionary Force, and eventual rise as a wealthy businessman with a vast network of contacts. Stephenson got his start as an entrepreneur after WWI by passing off a German design for a can-opener that he obtained while he was a prisoner of war. The patent for the can-opener not only made Stephenson a tidy sum of money but also helped define him as someone comfortable with fabrications. Hemming offers few clues, however, as to why MI6 chose Stephenson for such a critical task.
Hemming lays out Stephenson’s operating environment. The U.S. was in the middle of a grand debate between isolationists and interventionists over what to do about German aggression. Although President Roosevelt supported siding with the UK against Nazi Germany, he could not take the U.S. to war without widespread domestic support.
Opposite Stephenson, Hemming retells the story of how Charles Lindbergh became a strong public proponent of isolationism, progressively making strident anti-war speeches. Hemming also highlights the role the America First movement, which was a public interest group that carried the anti-war banner and sustained pressure on Roosevelt not to drag the U.S. into war. Perhaps as Stephenson’s most direct adversary, Hemming describes actions taken by Hans Thomsen, the German Foreign Ministry charge d’affaires in the U.S. Thomsen, shrewdly working through cutouts, inserted German propaganda into the U.S. Congressional record and then leveraged sympathetic Congresspersons to use their franking privileges to send this propaganda across the U.S. for free.
Stephenson comes off as a superior spymaster, with nary a misstep. Hemming traces how Stephenson, and ultimately the large office he set up in New York, built a vast network to shape information for American public consumption. Stephenson’s operation liberally used witting and unwitting individuals to place “sibs,” from the Latin sibilare, meaning whisper, into foreign and U.S. domestic newspapers and radio aimed to persuade the U.S. public to support fighting Hitler. During one week in November 1941, at the height of its operational tempo, Stephenson’s network covertly placed some 21 fake news stories in the New York Post, Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, and Christian Science Monitor, as well as WRUL radio. Some of these stories were designed to counter Lindbergh and the America First isolationist group while others focused on whipping up support to join the war. In most cases, as Hemming describes, major press outlets were completely unaware they were picking up and distributing fake news.
Stephenson also cultivated a close relationship with famed OSS founder William “Wild Bill” Donavan. In doing so, Stephenson fed Donovan information that Donovan then passed on to the White House. Stephenson also provided Donovan ideas for establishing the Office of the Coordinator of Information (COI), which enabled Stephenson to side- step working through the FBI and create a more suitable, pliant American intelligence counterpart for MI6. So tight was the relationship, that Stephenson was only too glad to oblige Donovan’s request to train soon to be American intelligence officers, as the COI stood up.
Stephenson’s most daring and impactful operation in his influence campaign was in the form of bogus documents. Working with forgers and designed to strike a nerve with an American public that saw Latin America as its backyard, Stephenson’s network created documents—including a map—showing Nazi Germany had plans to remake Latin America. These documents, which were carefully researched and created, made their way to President Roosevelt’s desk by way of Stephenson’s relationship with Donovan. Whether the President knew they were forgeries or not is unclear, but nonetheless the President made reference to them in a speech pointing out the threat Germany posed to U.S. interests. Equally important, the public discussion of the documents angered the Germans as much as it confused them. After all, the Germans knew the documents were fake, but the more they publically protested the more fuel they added to the story.
Stephenson’s operation did attract unwanted attention. Adolf Berle, a State Department official, grew suspicious of Stephenson’s office in New York and its activities. Berle discovered some of MI6’s schemes, including fake information and fake documents about Nazi plots in Dutch Guiana, Columbia, and Bolivia. In September 1941, Berle reported to the President what he had learned about Stephenson, but Roosevelt seemed unconcerned, according to Hemming. Stephenson was no stranger to Roosevelt and the President’s response may have been because the forgeries and fake news flowing from Stephenson’s operations fit with Roosevelt’s own goal of going to war against Nazi Germany. Hemming recounts, and most readers will recall, how Roosevelt developed a close relationship with the UK’s Prime Minister Winston Churchill, which included secret meetings.
In many ways, Stephenson’s information operation was successful. He developed a close working relationship with his U.S. intelligence counterpart (launching the ‘special’ UK-U.S. relationship), undermined UK adversaries, fed false information into the U.S. national security decision making process, and ultimately achieved MI6’s goal of getting the U.S. into the war against the Nazis. Hemming implies that Stephenson helped shift U.S. public opinion, periodically providing polling numbers on questions of U.S. support for war during the 1940-41 timeframe. The problem, however, is that the polling questions Hemming brings forth are not the same for the whole time period. As such, it’s hard to see them as a good measure of the operation’s success. Hemming himself points out significant problems in the polling methodology, including having assets inside polling firms that may have slanted questions and results that showed more success than there actually was. Moreover, it was Roosevelt himself who publicly asserted that the Japanese had colluded with the Germans in plotting their fateful attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, swaying the American public to support going to war against Berlin. Germany’s declaration of war against the U.S. in the days that followed Pearl Harbor also certainly helped.
At the start and end of the book Hemming draws parallels between the UK’s influence campaign and the one Russia conducted against the U.S. in the lead up to the presidential election in 2015. Readers will readily see that both campaigns relied on the elements of successful influence operations, such as fake, but plausible, stories and cutouts to spread lies. And much like MI6’s operation, the fact of Russia’s interference is well documented. But how much the Russians influenced the electoral outcome is more murky and difficult to determine, similar to measuring MI6’s operations.
There are distinct and significant differences between these two operations that cannot be overlooked, despite Hemming’s effort to draw linkages. From the outset, MI6’s operation had a specific, identifiable strategic intent and clear operational goals—among them to gain U.S. support in the war against Germany and penetrate the U.S. decision making process. Russia’s operational goal was clear, to “undermine public faith in the U.S. democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency,” according to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence report Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent U.S. Elections, Intelligence Community Assessment (Unclassified Version), January 6, 2017. Russia’s strategic intent, however, is much fuzzier and still unclear. Unlike the UK’s operations, Russia’s ability to guide the outcomes they sought were weak at best and ultimately may not benefit them, in part because of how quickly the operation has been discovered.
This book earns a strong 3.5 our of four trench coats.
Disclaimer: All statements of fact, opinion, or analysis expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official positions or views of any U.S. Government agency. Nothing in the contents should be construed as asserting or implying U.S. Government authentication of information or endorsement of the author’s views.
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