The Secret History of MI6 - Keith Jeffery [70]
Wiseman’s greatest achievement lay in the access and influence he was able to secure at the very highest levels of the United States administration, making him the most successful ‘agent of influence’ in the first forty years of SIS. Thwaites provided a link to an old friend, Frank Polk, who was appointed Counselor to Secretary of State Robert Lansing in 1915 and was effectively the second-in-command in the State Department. Polk became responsible for intelligence matters, supervising the counter-espionage work of various departments and co-ordinating the activities of United States agencies involved in gathering intelligence from foreign sources. But a more important contact was Colonel Edward House, President Woodrow Wilson’s confidant and principal adviser, who was the focus of constant attention from those who wished to communicate with the President.19
Wiseman’s first meeting with House occurred quite fortuitously when in December 1916 the British ambassador, Sir Cecil Spring Rice, employed him to deliver a message to the colonel. Wiseman made an immediate and extremely favourable impression. House thought him ‘the most imp[ortan]t caller I have had for some time’ and the two men met frequently thereafter. Sir William’s arrival on the scene came at a time when Wilson and House had been losing confidence in the ailing Spring Rice, whose Republican political attitudes and unsympathetic manner had alienated them. On 6 December there was also a change of government in London, when David Lloyd George replaced Herbert Asquith as Prime Minister. Sir Edward Grey, Foreign Secretary in Asquith’s government, and with whom House had regularly communicated directly, was left out of the new Cabinet; thus House had lost his high-level entrée into the British administration and was perhaps especially susceptible to the possibilities of close communication being re-established through Wiseman. Sir William so charmed and impressed House that the latter thought Britain would be ‘far better’ represented by him than by Spring Rice. Enticingly, Wiseman told House ‘in the gravest confidence’ that he was ‘in direct communication with the Foreign Office’, and that neither the ambassador nor other members of the embassy were aware of it. This was, in fact, only half true. While Wiseman certainly had independent communications with London which the embassy knew nothing about, the principal line he had to the Foreign Office was through Cumming at MI1(c). House was not to know this, and, evidently won over by both Wiseman’s discretion and his apparently privileged position, told President Wilson he judged that Wiseman ‘reflects the views of his government’.20
Wiseman was well aware that in assuming a position as intermediary between the American and British governments he was moving beyond a mere intelligence role. According to Arthur Willert, American correspondent of The Times, Wiseman told London in January 1917 that he was taking ‘a more active interest in politics than he would ordinarily have considered his duty because the Ambassador and his staff have practically all their friends among the leaders of the Republican Party’. This had ‘produced an unfortunate situation’ in that President Wilson’s administration had ‘come to regard the British officials as Republican partisans’. Yet, once Spring Rice became aware of Wiseman’s newly privileged position, he sought to exploit the information-gathering possibilities and asked Wiseman to let him know ‘at once any political information which you may receive or give in order that I may check it against other information’.21
The crucial subject about which the British were interested, of course, was that of the United States entering the war. Both British overt and covert publicity and propaganda efforts were focused on marshalling American political and public opinion behind