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opinion in favour of aid to Britain’. With his headquarters on the thirty-fifth and thirty-sixth floors of the International Building in the Rockefeller Center, 630 Fifth Avenue, Stephenson built up a very extensive organisation, recruiting many staff from his native Canada, although Menzies sent the intelligence veteran C. H. (‘Dick’) Ellis to be his second-in-command. The New York organisation expanded well beyond pure intelligence matters, and eventually combined the North American functions not just of SIS, but of MI5, SOE and the Security Executive (which existed to co-ordinate counter-espionage and counter-subversion work): intelligence, security, special operations and also propaganda. Agents were recruited to target enemy or enemy-controlled businesses, and penetrate Axis (and neutral) diplomatic missions; representatives were posted to key points, such as Washington, New Orleans, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Seattle; American journalists, newspapers and news agencies were targeted with pro-British material; an ostensibly independent radio station (WURL), ‘with an unsullied reputation for impartiality’, was virtually taken over; and close liaison was established with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Stephenson also ran special operations throughout the western hemisphere and from July 1942 to April 1943 was put in charge of all SIS’s South American stations.

‘Wild Bill’ Donovan and liaison with the USA

United States intervention on the Allied side was, of course, the ultimate British aim and in 1940-1 Stephenson played a central role in building the closest possible Anglo-American relations. Making contacts and lobbying at the highest levels of the American administration was a key objective, though one which inevitably overlapped with the conventional diplomatic activities of the British embassy in Washington. Both Stephenson and the British ambassador, Lord Lothian, for example, worked to cultivate Frank Knox, the recently appointed United States Secretary of the Navy, who was known to be strongly pro-British and anti-Axis. Stephenson’s entrée to Knox was through an existing acquaintance, Colonel ‘Wild Bill’ Donovan, who was to become the leading figure in American secret intelligence and operations during the war. Donovan came from a poor Irish-American background, but had been a classmate of Roosevelt at Columbia Law School. He earned the nickname ‘Wild Bill’ when fighting against Pancho Villa with General Pershing’s expedition to Mexico in 1916 and went on to command the New York Irish ‘Fighting Sixty-Ninth’ regiment on the Western Front, returning home as America’s most decorated soldier. In the later 1930s he was used by Roosevelt for fact-finding missions to Ethiopia and Spain and came to oppose the USA’s prevailing isolationist foreign policy. He was to be an extremely important ally. As Stephenson told Menzies in December 1940: ‘A Catholic, Irish American descent, Republican holding confidence of Democrats, with an exceptional war record, places him in an unique position to advance our aims here.’ Though he was pro-British, this was ‘from a practical American stand-point and really simple fundamental that only Britain is between Hitler and America’.

On 10 July 1940 Lord Lothian reported that Knox was sending Donovan to England to investigate ‘Fifth Column methods’. Lothian recommended that Donovan, as an ‘influential adviser’, be ‘given every facility’, even to the extent of meeting the Prime Minister. On 15 July Stephenson wired Menzies to tell him of the proposed trip, adding that Donovan was personally representing Roosevelt, Hoover and Knox. The visit was a tremendous success, not least because of Menzies’s efforts. He told Stephenson that Donovan had ‘been put in contact with all leading Government officials and Ministers’. Meetings with both Churchill and the King had been arranged, and he visited factories and military bases, returning to the USA convinced of Britain’s resolve to hold out, an opinion diametrically opposed to the reports of imminent and inevitable defeat being sent to Washington