OUR MAN IN NEW YORK

THE BRITISH PLOT TO BRING AMERICA INTO THE SECOND WORLD WAR

Hitler’s perverse decision to declare war on the United States was a strategic blunder second only to his invasion of Soviet Russia. But was it also the triumphant culmination of a cunning plan to get America onside, devised by Churchill and executed by ‘our man in New York’, a ‘quiet’ Canadian called William Stephenson? Yes, says Henry Hemming, who puts Stephenson in the ring against the iconic aviator Charles Lindbergh, a staunch isolationist and suspected Nazi sympathiser. Both men hit below the belt, but luckily for us, Stephenson, who once sparred with the heavyweight champ Gene Tunney, packed a heavier punch.

According to the Spectator’s Clare Mulley, Stephenson had one other great advantage, he was ‘impossible not to like’. Hence, presumably, the ease with which he ‘inveigled an extraordinary range of people to manipulate American public opinion – from forgeries, fake news and astrology to, possibly, assassination’. Hemming, said Mulley, keeps the pages turning. ‘In his sure hands America’s uncertain progress towards direct engagement in the second world war becomes riveting history.’ Max Hastings in the Sunday

Times believed that ‘Hemming tells this racy story well’. However, Hastings had doubts about ‘how far covert activities influence most great events, notably including US entry into the Second World War…[and] as the author concedes, after the war the Canadian told fearful fibs about his role, inventing for himself the codename Intrepid.’

In the Times Tim Bouverie recalled that a previous book about Stephenson, A Man Called Intrepid, was ‘almost total tosh’. Not surprisingly, then, Hemming ‘sticks closely to the documentary record, including the most recently declassified files’. But, says Bouverie, ‘this is a fast-paced yarn [that] reads like the film script of a 1940s thriller and it is no surprise that Hemming is already collaborating with producers.’