British Spies in the USA, 1940-1945

The Saturday Guardian has a fascinating article by William Boyd about British Security Coordination, a covert operation in the US whose goal was to get America to enter the war.

... at the nadir of Britain's fortunes, polls in the US still showed that 80% of Americans were against joining the war in Europe. Anglophobia was widespread and the US Congress was violently opposed to any form of intervention. After the fall of France in June 1940, Britain's position became even weaker - it was assumed that British capitulation was simply a matter of time; why join the side of a doomed loser, ran the argument in the US. Roosevelt's hands were therefore thoroughly tied.

Hundreds or thousands of people worked for BSC, which was run from Rockefeller Center in New York by William Stevenson, a Canadian World War I flying ace and businessman. BSC operations included "denigration [of] those organisations perceived to be pro-Nazi or virulently isolationist"; planting stories on radio and in the press; the creation of booklets listing "up to 500 ways of harassing and annoying Nazi sympathisers" such as putting dead rats in water tanks; and, apparently, forging a map showing that Hitler planned to invade South America and Panama. Franklin Roosevelt announced the existence of the map in a speech on October 27, 1941:

"Hitler has often protested that his plans for conquest do not extend across the Atlantic Ocean. I have in my possession a secret map, made in Germany by Hitler's government - by the planners of the new world order. It is a map of South America and a part of Central America as Hitler proposes to reorganize it." This map, the President explained, showed South America, as well as "our great life line, the Panama Canal," divided into five vassal states under German domination. "That map, my friends, makes clear the Nazi design not only against South America but against the United States as well."