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“That plays a significant and sometimes overlooked part in helping to precipitate this shift towards the idea that the British are doing alright, that the war in winnable, that Nazi Germany should be taken on.” “Most of the material that passing on to the White House…originates with MI6 and British sources, and that givens Stephenson enormous power in terms of what American government officials are reading about the stakes of the war,” he says. Both of these events unfolded in July 1941, when President Roosevelt created a new intelligence organization called the Office of the Coordinator of Information, or COI (a predecessor to the CIA), and appointed Donovan-whom Stephenson had been courting as a sympathetic ally-to lead it. to establish its first intelligence office and convince William “Wild Bill” Donovan to run it. “There are three major strands to what he does,” Hemming says. Stephenson, who was director of British Security Coordination in the Western hemisphere from 1940-45, circa 1946. Donovan, wartime OSS chief, presenting the medal for merit to Canadian-born Sir William S. READ MORE: 10 Things You May Not Know About Winston Churchill The British worked to seed U.S.

A personal friend of Churchill, Stephenson (code name: “Intrepid”) began to employ new tactics to sway public opinion about the war-and convince the U.S. Why the shift? Earlier that year, according to Hemming’s book, William Stephenson, a decorated WWI fighter pilot and source of inspiration for James Bond (Ian Fleming noted Stephenson’s martinis were “shaken, not stirred”), was installed as the head of MI6’s U.S.

“Britain was instead one of the major economic rivals to the United States.” In addition, the colonialist British Empire, which America had proudly detached itself from, “was hugely unpopular, and understandably so.”īy November 1941, though, polls suggested that a majority of Americans now favored entering the war to help defeat Germany. “Americans generally did not see Britain as some close, beloved ally at the start of the Second World War,” says Henry Hemming, author of Agents of Influence: A British Campaign, a Canadian Spy, and the Secret Plot to Bring America into World War II.

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Watch full episodes of 'WWII: Race to Victory,' and tune in Sundays at 9/8c for all-new episodes. entry into WWII, a conflict many Americans didn’t see as winnable. In April 1941, the aviation hero Charles Lindbergh and the America First Committee led a massively popular campaign against U.S. In May 1940, after the Nazis invaded the Low Countries and France, a Gallup poll reported that only 7% of Americans thought the U.S. Roosevelt for reinforcements against the Germans, but America firmly resisted being drawn into another bloody war on the European continent. With Hitler aggressively gaining ground across the continent and dropping bombs over London, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill had been anxiously lobbying Franklin D. Unbeknownst to the United States, the British foreign intelligence service known as MI6 had planted the story in the press as part of a covert influence campaign to convince the country to enter World War II. All of the team members made it back to Britain alive via torpedo boats, along with 40 German prisoners in tow. Newspapers, including the Baltimore Sun and New York Post, detailed how the British parachuted into an airfield with tommy guns and hand grenades, overpowered the guards and destroyed about 30 planes. In June of 1941, Americans read about an extraordinary British mission into Nazi-occupied France.