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By Root 2455 0

the Allies, while a whole range of information-gathering resources – again, both overt and covert – was devoted to ascertaining the views of policy-makers and opinion-formers in Washington and elsewhere. Cumming’s organisation played its part, as did Room 40, the Admiralty’s signals intelligence department, which by 1916 was successfully deciphering American diplomatic telegrams as well as enemy ones. Maurice Hankey, Secretary to the Committee of Imperial Defence, described information from Berlin-Washington traffic as ‘priceless’. British intelligence expertise underpinned the dissemination of the famous Zimmermann Telegram of 16 January 1917, in which the German Foreign Minister, Arthur Zimmermann, informed his ambassador in Mexico that Germany intended to begin unrestricted submarine warfare on 1 February. If as a result of this the USA ceased to be neutral, Germany offered the Mexican government an alliance, a joint declaration of war on the USA and help for Mexico to recover the states of Texas, New Mexico and Arizona, which it had lost in the mid-nineteenth century. Aware that their cable communications were vulnerable to attack, the German Foreign Ministry had arranged with the American embassy in Berlin to send telegrams on their behalf, but since these cables passed through British territory they, too, were intercepted for Room 40 to decrypt. So it was with the Zimmermann telegram. Admiralty Intelligence, indeed, had a partial decode of it even before the original had reached its intended recipient in Mexico City. The British (naturally suppressing the fact that they had acquired the telegram by intercepting American diplomatic communications) provided Washington with a copy, which was subsequently released to the press. The German decision to extend submarine warfare (which put American ships in the front line) had already caused Washington to break off diplomatic relations on 3 February, and the publication of the telegram on 1 March gave a further powerful boost to anti-German feeling in the USA.22

At this crucial juncture Wiseman played a central role in providing an insight into both presidential and public opinion in the USA. In time for an Imperial War Conference scheduled to be held in London at the end of March, Wiseman and House together prepared a memorandum on American attitudes towards Britain and the war. House told Wiseman ‘that the President had read it and thought it a just statement’, though in forwarding it for transmission to London Wiseman warned Spring Rice that it was not an official American document. While the paper conceded that Americans were ‘beginning to realise that it may not be possible for them to remain at peace with Germany’, it noted that the mass of the people were not particularly pro-British or pro-Ally. Americans, for example, were deeply concerned about British policy in Ireland (where the 1916 Easter Rising had been sharply suppressed and its leaders court-martialled and executed) and British blockade policies were widely resented. There was, wrote Wiseman and House, ‘a feeling among the Americans that if they tolerate too much they will lose their prestige and authority as a world power’. Thus any decision to enter the conflict would be based on considerations of America’s own national interest: ‘If the United States goes to war with Germany – which she probably will – it will be to uphold American rights and assert her dignity as a nation.’23

This remarkable document, jointly drafted by the British intelligence chief in North America and President Wilson’s closest confidential adviser, and validated by the President of the United States himself, encapsulates the high quality of Wiseman’s influence and political reporting, which continued after the USA declared war on Germany on 6 April 1917, and which from late 1917 was channelled through the Political Section V at Cumming’s Head Office in London. Wiseman’s friendship with House brought him unprecedented (for a Briton) access to the President – they met regularly and he spent a week’s vacation with him and the colonel