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impressed SIS sufficiently for Menzies to use him in April 1940 as a go-between with J. Edgar Hoover of the FBI. Stephenson was ideal for the job as he could reach Hoover through a mutual acquaintance, the boxer Gene Tunney, whom he had met as a fellow member of an inter-service boxing team in Amiens in 1918. The first Paget learned about this mission was a cable from Menzies informing him that Stephenson ‘is doing nothing against America and is known to us. Should an enquiry reach you from Hoover you can say he is all right.’ Stephenson visited Hoover on 16 April and (as the American record dryly put it) ‘discussed arrangements for co-operation between the British Intelligence Service and the Federal Bureau of Investigation’.3 That evening Stephenson excitedly reported to London: ‘long Washington conference completely successful . . . Will co-operate fully with all resources . . . Have undertaken all communications strictly unofficial personal and secret between him and C.S.S.’ Code-names were given to the two men: ‘Our chief is S. M. Scott’ – Menzies – while Hoover was to be ‘H. E. Jones’: ‘Jones sends Scott assurances of goodwill and of desire to assist far beyond confines of officialdom.’

While London reminded both Paget and Stephenson ‘that any liaison resulting from this must be entirely unofficial’, Hoover took very good care to clear the arrangement with President Roosevelt’s secretary, General Edwin M. Watson, and ensure that the White House had no objection to the proposed relationship (still apparently kept secret from the State Department) between the FBI and SIS. Stephenson stayed in America for over a month and had a number of meetings with Hoover who, he told Menzies, had invited him to ‘procure official position to remain Washington as your personal contact’. Menzies liked the suggestion and appointed him Passport Control Officer at New York in place of Paget (who was ordered home and rejoined the navy), explaining to Gladwyn Jebb that Stephenson had good contacts with an official who saw Roosevelt daily, and he thought that this would prove of ‘great value’.4

As Paget received his orders to leave, the controversial former SIS New York representative, Sir William Wiseman, turned up in London offering his services. The previous autumn Broadway had rejected a suggestion that he might organise propaganda in the USA. By this stage Wiseman’s notable success as an ‘agent of influence’ during the First World War had been rather eclipsed by the reputation for self-promotion which he had acquired among Admiralty circles (and put about by the former naval attaché Sir Guy Gaunt whose amour propre Wiseman had offended in 1915-17). ‘Beyond indulging in an inordinate amount of intrigue,’ Sinclair had written in October 1939, ‘it is not known that he achieved any signal success.’ Wiseman was, he continued, ‘extremely shrewd, and although mistrusted by most people, nevertheless manages to worm his way into the confidence of prominent persons’. So it happened in June 1940 when Wiseman persuaded the Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax, to suggest that he be found some substantive role in America. But Menzies would have none of it. ‘Both my predecessors made it clear that in their view Wiseman should never be employed again by this Organisation,’ he wrote, adding enigmatically: ‘They had their reasons.’5

Stephenson arrived in New York to take over as Passport Control Officer on Friday 21 June 1940. The following day France signed an armistice with the Germans, leaving Britain and the empire to stand alone. The official history of what became (from January 1941) British Security Co-ordination, which Stephenson had caused to be compiled in 1945, states that, before he left London, he ‘had no settled or restrictive terms of reference’, but that Menzies ‘had handed him a list of certain essential supplies’ which Britain needed. Menzies also laid down three primary concerns: ‘to investigate enemy activities, to institute adequate security measures against the threat of sabotage to British property and to organize American public