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Morton could promise nothing definite. ‘The Prime Minister’, he replied, ‘knows well the value of Donovan to us, though rightly or wrongly he considers Donovan to be over optimistic.’ Morton offered to give Donovan lunch and ‘remind the Prime Minister’ of his ‘propinquity’. Menzies also lobbied Cadogan, passing on Stephenson’s opinion that Donovan had ‘more influence with the President than Colonel House had with Mr. [Woodrow] Wilson’. This seems to have had the desired effect and Churchill turned up trumps. Not only did he have Donovan to lunch in 10 Downing Street, but he also instructed that, during an extended tour of the Mediterranean, Middle East and Balkans, ‘every facility’ should be afforded to Colonel Donovan, ‘who has great influence with the President’ and who had been ‘taken fully into our confidence’.11

Menzies’s letter of 7 December 1940 to Desmond Morton, introducing ‘Wild Bill’ Donovan to the Prime Minister.

Although Stephenson’s North American position as Director of British Security Co-ordination was formally ‘registered and welcomed’ by the United States government at the end of January 1941, some members of the administration, notably the anglophobe Assistant Secretary of State, Adolph Berle, remained suspicious about the activities of BSC and the closeness of the Anglo-American relationship. In March Berle noted that Stephenson, although ostensibly involved with the protection of British supplies, was developing ‘a full size secret police and intelligence service’, with a string of ‘regularly employed secret agents and a much larger number of informers, etc.’. Berle was not necessarily opposed to protecting British ships and munitions, but believed that this should be done only with official authorisation and in conjunction with the FBI. 12 During 1941 Stephenson’s burgeoning activities also began to concern Menzies, who worried that with his multifarious responsibilities to SOE, MI5, the Security Executive and the Ministry of Economic Warfare he might be losing sight of his primary duty to SIS. Stephenson had been asked to identify potential agents in North America for deployment into occupied Europe. ‘Hope that in this question you will remember that the old Firm has constant and imperative needs,’ wired Menzies. Stephenson could exploit United States neutrality by recruiting agents locally who ‘after training by Ellis as to Service requirements’ could be sent to Lisbon or Switzerland. Stephenson might utilise Spanish ships to put agents into France through Bilbao or Santander. Giving an indication of current SIS priorities, Menzies said that he really ‘wanted high class agent in Vichy for political information as to Government’s plans and true position of [Admiral Jean] Darlan’, the supposed strong man of the Vichy administration.

During the early summer of 1941 Admiral Godfrey, the Director of Naval Intelligence, accompanied by his personal assistant Commander Ian Fleming, travelled to the USA to review and improve Anglo-American intelligence relations. He went out with SIS’s support and, liaising closely with Stephenson, appears to have been in part responsible for persuading Donovan to accept (and getting Roosevelt to agree to) appointment to the position of Intelligence Co-ordinator. As Stephenson envisaged it, Donovan was the ideal person to head an American equivalent of BSC, and he reported to Menzies on the eve of Godfrey’s visit in May 1941 that he had ‘been attempting [to] manoeuvre Bill into accepting job of co-ordinating all 48 land [USA] intelligence’. Once Godfrey arrived, Stephenson organised a private meeting with Knox, Henry Stimson (the Secretary of War) and Robert Jackson (the Attorney-General), hoping that this would ‘induce immediate decision, which would otherwise be long delayed through usual “official channels”’. For his part, Godfrey (who stayed with Donovan in his New York apartment) was ‘profoundly impressed’ by the work being done by Donovan and believed that his ‘energy and drive’ would ‘probably be decisive in obtaining results desired by [British] Chiefs of Staff,