‘This map makes clear the Nazi design not only against South America but against the US itself’
shocking, disturbing – and completely fake. Both had been cooked up several weeks earlier at the behest of Bill Stephenson, one of the most unusual wartime appointments to Britain’s foreign intelligence service.
MOST of his new colleagues were privately educated with family ties to the old firm. Stephenson, for his part, was of working-class Icelandic stock, and had grown up in extreme poverty in the red-light district of a remote Canadian town.
By the age of five his father had died, and he had been given up for adoption by his mother. But Stephenson proved to be a master of reinvention. During the First World War, just out of his teens, he became a
decorated flying ace. By the start of the Thirties, he had moved to London, glossed over his past and emerged as a maverick “tech” millionaire working in radio. Now in his early forties, Stephenson had been sent to New York by MI6. Since the summer of 1940, he had run a vast British influence campaign out of a sprawling office deep inside Manhattan’s Rockefeller Center.
At its peak, his operation employed just under 1,000 staff, making it considerably larger than the alleged Russian influence campaign launched in America some 75 years later in the run-up to the 2016 US presidential election.
Among Stephenson’s colleagues was a British intelligence officer named Ian Fleming, who a decade later used the Rockefeller Center as a location in his first James Bond novel, Casino Royale.
Fleming later paid tribute to Stephenson as