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Agents of Influence is Henry Hemming’s engagingly reported story about an audacious British clandestine propaganda campaign to draw the United States into World WarTwo.

On one level, it’s a story of the life and times of William Stephenson, a Canadian with no espionage training who becomes Britain’s unlikely key operative in the United States as well as MI6’s direct intermediary with the FBI, including J. Edgar Hoover, and President Franklin D. Roosevelt himself. At the same time, unseen by the Americans, and disregarding his orders from London to keep a low profile, Stephenson mounts an aggressive secret underground disinformation operation to systematically coax a resolutely neutral America into the fight on Britain’s side. This is a story of manipulating public opinion, producing, and promoting, well, fake news while duping public figures into being useful idiots to get the job done. 

Sound familiar? The British author makes the connection quite explicit: While Hemming is concentrating on Hitler and Roosevelt and Churchill,  he is thinking all the while about Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump. 

“Strip away the technology involved, the names and the dates, and there are some surprising similarities between the Russian operation which ended in 2016 and the British one which began in 1940,” he says up front.

The British campaign was a matter of survival. The Nazis were at the door in France, assembling an invasion force. And  so Stephenson was allowed to disregard orders, it turned out: a desperate Churchill was willing to accept all means necessary to bring the United States into the war—lies and fake news be damned. Or as the British prime minister later said: “In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.”

On the Ropes

The story begins in June 1940, a pivotal moment in history. Belgium, the Netherlands,  France and Norway have fallen to the Wehrmacht; Britain, at war with Nazi Germany, has just evacuated hundreds of thousands of soldiers at Dunkirk amid fears of an imminent invasion. Churchill knows that Britain cannot survive without help from the United States, but Roosevelt is pinned down from coming to its aid by American isolationists, one of whom was the immensely popular transatlantic pilot Charles Lindbergh.

At that moment,  Stephenson, a World War One flying ace, is ordered to open an MI6 information—and disinformation—bureau, disguised as the “British & Overseas Features” agency, which Hemming describes as “a harmless British news agency supplying published articles to foreign newspapers.” With machines and ticker tape clacking in the outer office as an effective façade, the operation “was the pre-internet equivalent of a troll farm,” Hemming writes.

Within months, Stephenson’s fake news purveyors were shipping stories of inflated German losses and Nazi crimes to news outlets around the world, all designed to land back at the place of origin in the United States. All the while, Stephenson was watching public opinion polling  on the British cause rising  slowly from miserable single digits to the teens and beyond.

Hemming reminds us there is a world of difference between the British operation and Russia’s 21st century campaign to help Donald Trump win the White House. “Whereas the British wanted to defeat one of the most tyrannical and murderous regimes in world history, the Russians were motivated partly by a desire to shore up their own authoritarian kleptocracy.”

Stephenson’s adversaries in Berlin had sent their own propagandists to sway U.S. public opinion and sometimes bribe American politicians. Lindbergh, a Nazi sympathizer,  told Americans that Hitler was certain to win the war in Europe. Hemming does not go beyond previous accounts of Lindbergh’s affinity for the Nazis, but he holds the once towering American hero to task. Lindbergh’s isolationist speeches, Hemming writes, were riddled with charges that Jews have too much “influence in Hollywood, the press, the radio and the US government,” and that “Jewish thinking was ‘not American.’” In private, Lindbergh went further. In his diary, he memorialized remarks he made at an election night party on Nov. 5, 1940, with returns showing Roosevelt rolling toward victory over Republican Wendell Willkie and on the cusp of an unprecedented third term in office. 

“I said that I did not believe a political system based on universal franchise would work in the United States, and that we would eventually have to restrict our franchise,” Lindbergh wrote. 

Restrict from whom? Hemming writes that Lindbergh meant “African Americans. Everyone there agreed.”

Nazi Tools

Lindbergh probably did not know, we are told, but also would not have cared, that “passages of his speeches were being mailed around the country as part of a scheme run from the German Embassy.” 

Shades of Tucker Carlson’s defense of Russia and his clips recycled on Russian state TV. 

Working closely with Lindbergh was New York Republican Congressman Hamilton Fish III, the latest in a line of a prominent family of politicians. Fish argued in Congress that unnamed “powerful elements” in America were conspiring to drag the country into war. Fish’s and the America First isolationists were recycling an old trope that has also appeared in the Trump years, updated for different circumstances, that American Jews were working with the Soviet Union to take over the United States. Or as Fish dared say on the floor of Congress: “I should a hundredfold rather be enslaved by Nazi Hitler than by Red Stalin.”

Step by step, meanwhile, Stephenson was finding the means to counteract the isolationists. While his team worked to discredit the likes of Lindbergh and Fish, their disinformation teams were in hyperdrive on other fronts. One of the most successful efforts was a phony document that showed Germany planned to foment a coup in Bolivia as part of a plot to gain influence in South America and  isolate the United States. Rather than circulate the fake information in the press per usual, Stephenson provided the news as a fact to J. Edgar Hoover, who passed it along  to Roosevelt. The resulting  document, known as the Belmonte Letter, was reminiscent of World War One’s Zimmerman Telegram, in which Britain coaxed President Woodrow Wilson into the conflict by leaking word of a planned military alliance between Germany and Mexico. The key difference was that the Zimmerman Telegram was genuine. Both had the same function of swaying American opinion.

In the course of his activities, Stephenson’s influence was profound. He encouraged William J. Donovan to establish the OSS and eventually a global espionage and sabotage outfit that became the CIA. Stephenson, meanwhile, who liked his martinis “shaken, not stirred,” may well have inspired a fellow British intelligence officer, Ian Fleming, to  create James Bond.

The Natural 

Stephenson came naturally to the world of intelligence and deception. Born in Winnipeg, his official biography had him as the son of a British war hero killed in the Boer War. Closer to reality, Stephenson was embarrassed by his humble origins, Hemming writes. His father, who died when William was four, had been a laborer in a mill, his mother, a poor Icelandic immigrant. Stephenson grew up in Winnipeg’s red-light district. By joining the Canadian Expeditionary Force in France in 1917, however, he transformed himself. By the end of the war, he was an ace pilot, having scored 14 kills in his Sopwith Camel, which earned him the Military Cross, the Croix de Guerre, and the Distinguished Flying Cross.

The war hero returned to Winnipeg long enough to earn some money, lose it all, marry an American heiress and become a millionaire in the 1930s marketing radio sets. When he returned to England a few years before World War II, he had a fateful encounter with no less than author Henry Hemming’s father. 

In September 1938 Stephenson and the Hemming family were visiting mutual friends at a house outside London. Hemming’s father, then a child of three, had wandered off toward a pond. Stephenson raced to look for the child. “Bill arrives at the pond out of breath to find three-year-old Dad either walking into the water, drowning, or, in the most colorful version, he has disappeared beneath the waterlilies,” Hemming writes. “Bill then wades, jumps or dives into the pond in his clothes, before staggering out with a spluttering child in his arms.”

Hemming, of course, felt “a tacit bond to the hero of this tale, Bill, who went on to become Dad’s godfather.” The author, then, has every reason to repair the story of William Stephenson for all history. Stephenson’s story of derring-do—spy master, propagandist, participant in the creation of the OSS and the CIA—had been known to the public mostly through a 1976 best seller, A Man Called Intrepid, and a subsequent TV miniseries of the same name, starring David Niven, Michael York, and Barbara Hershey. The problem, Hemming tells us quite convincingly, was that the book (written confusingly by a man named William Stevenson) gets most things wrong, starting with the fact that Stephenson was neither called Intrepid, nor was it his code name. The book, writes Hemming, “was popular, pacey, and so inaccurate that allegedly its US publisher later had it reissued as a work of fiction.”  

Agents of Influence (subtitle: A British Campaign, a Canadian Spy, and the Secret Plot to Bring America into World War II, newly released in paperback, succeeds in setting the record straight. Hemming is telling the real story of the real man who saved his father’s life. 

“My favourite part of the story….” he writes, is “hearing that Dad had survived, and could go on to meet Mum, and my sister and I could be born.” Second, by clarifying the story of William Stephenson, Hemming is adding to our understanding of the establishment of the U.S. intelligence apparatus and its dirty tricks pioneered by others,  in the 20th century. Finally, though, his celebration of Stephenson’s  successes in creating the British disinformation operation, in  finding willing co-conspirators and swaying public opinion through black propaganda, are confounding and ironic at the same time.

We  should be “more vigilant, to consider where our news has come from,” Hemming warns, and “scrutinize the business dealings and contacts of those who represent us politically.”  

All too true In the era of Donald J. Trump and the threat he and his followers represent to American democracy.

Yet here we cheerfully accept British fakery to lure America into war and eventually defeat Nazism. Should we equally accept the CIA’s employment of such techniques to combat Soviet-backed communists  in postwar Italy or overthrow governments in Guatemala, Iran and Chile? Should we also give Ukraine a pass when it employs propaganda and disinformation in its lopsided battle against the Russian invasion of Ukraine? In the end, deception has always been a part of warfare. It is a moral judgment for all of us, to decide when the ends justify the means.

Former award winning Washington Post, Newsday and A.P. reporter and editor Peter Eisner is the author of a series of nonfiction World War Two books, most recently MacArthur’s Spies, The Soldier, the Singer, and the Spymaster Who Defied the Japanese in World War II.