My Amazon Review of Henry Hemming's "Agents of Influence...."

Churchill’s Man in New York

On the 36^th floor in the Rockefeller Center International Building (630 5^th Avenue) at the elevator bank for the offices of Capital Research there is a small plaque commemorating the work of William Stephenson for his efforts to bring the United States into the war against Nazi Germany. It was out of those offices in 1940 and 1941 that Stephenson ran a vast apparatus to influence an isolationist America to enter the war. 

Henry Hemming tells the story of how a boy who was born in Winnipeg, Canada’s red-light district grew up to be a World War I ace flier, established a successful business in the booming 1920s British radio industry which then morphed into a European-wide investment company. The information network that he established caught the eye of MI-6 led to his recruitment to head-up British efforts in the United States. What makes the book especially interesting is that William Stephenson was the author’s grandfather’s godfather. So in a way through family lore, Hemming is connected to his protagonist.

It is in New York that Stephenson establishes a far reaching network that encompasses the pro-intervention Century Group, Wendell Willkie and future advertising mogul David Ogilvy who was then working for the Gallup Poll. His most important connection was with Bill Donovan whom he convinces of the need for the U.S. to establish a centralized intelligence agency and it is with that connection Stephenson gets access to the White House. Stephenson schools Donovan on the art of intelligence. Donovan initially establishes the Office of Information Coordination, which morphs into the Office of Strategic Services and then in 1947 becomes the CIA.

Stephenson faces off against his German counterpart Hans Thomsen who out of the German Embassy was in the business of funding pro-German groups, funding supportive Congressmen, most notably Hamilton Fish of New York and feeding speech and newspaper article ideas to the pro-German aviator Charles Lindbergh.  

We see that in 1941 Stephenson engaged in the same tricks that the Russians used in the 2016 elections.  He generates “fake news”, funds pro-intervention groups, sabotages pro-German and anti-intervention groups, forges documents and plants articles in the New York Herald Tribune which for all practical purposes became an arm of British intelligence. Along the way we meet song writer and expert forger Eric Mashwitz and Ian Fleming who would later write the James Bonds spy novels.

Hemming, utilizing recently declassified sources, tells Stephenson’s life story with great verve. It still remains a wonder how Stephenson pulled everything together and managed to move American public opinion, along with the facts on the ground and in the Atlantic, towards intervention prior to Pearl Harbor.

For the full Amazon URL see: https://www.amazon.com/review/R17KRNE7A0VOBM/ref=pe_1098610_137716200_cm_rv_eml_rv0_rv