One of the least well-understood eras in the history of espionage is the time just before the Second World War, when British Security Coordination sought to drag the United States, by hook or by crook, into the conflict, long before Pearl Harbor.
It was no small feat, best described in Thomas Mahl’s book Desperate Deception: British Covert Operations in the United States 1939-1944, and involved the suborning or smearing of members of Congress, like Hamilton Fish, and Senator Arthur Vandenberg, with the full cooperation of the Roosevelt Administration, who allowed the BSC to set up shop in Rockefeller Center. The nomination of Wendell Willkie was substantially a creation of British intelligence as well, lest you think 2016 was the first time there was foreign interference in American elections.
BSC operated a number of fronts, such as Fight For Freedom, which was also run out of Rockefeller Center. FFF would generate the appearance of public demand for interventionist policies that FDR would then follow. “Another of BSC’s fronts,” according to Mahl, was the Friends of Democracy, led by Rev. Leon Birkhead, the Kansas City unitarian minister. “On its stationary it still listed Kansas City as headquarters and persisted in this practice until at least 1951. By 1940, however, it operated from its ‘Eastern Regional Office’ at 103 Park Avenue, New York City. According to Fight for Freedom and OSS executive Francis P. Miller, Dr. Birkhead ‘is a grand person who has organized the best private agency in this country for collection of information regarding Nazi activities.’ Friends of Democracy specialized in sensational, hard-hitting attacks on isolationists and America First.
Mahl quotes a letter from Birkhead to an FFF executive, saying “we are going to take on about fifteen key anti-democratic leaders and organizations … We hope to do with these organizations and individuals something of the same sort of things we did with Coughlin and McWilliams, and to some extent, with Verne Marshall.”
It seems a reasonable assumption that John Roy Carlson’s sensational book, Under Cover: My Four Years in the Nazi Underworld of America, a rollicking odyssey through America’s isolationist and pro-Nazi right wing fringe, was the result of these efforts. “One of Friends of Democracy’s most fruitful accomplishments,” according to the New Yorker in 1947, was discovering Arthur Derounian, Carlson’s real name. In the book itself, he’s cagey about his sources of funding.
There are three main ways Under Cover sets a pattern for a lot of undercover watchdog work, which organizations like the SPLC would later take up. The first is the sources of funding: these watchdog organizations are very closely tied to liberal elites. Second, Carlson, like other undercover operatives, engages in the same sort of extremist rhetoric and activity he condemns in print. And finally, it has the quality of a smear job, designed to lump political opponents in with genuine extremists, connections which in some cases were made by Carlson himself.
Carlson was first assigned to write about the far-right by Russell Davenport, for Fortune, a Luce publication. Davenport was a huge influence on Wendell Willkie’s political rise, which was also boosted in Luce publications. In other words, Carlson’s career was promoted by people at the very center of the interventionist political establishment. In the acknowledgments he thanks the Reverend Birkhead and his son Kenneth, who worked at Friends of Democracy.
The Bircher writer Gary Allen — father of Axios’s Mike Allen — made a lot of hay about the memoir of Russell Davenport’s wife, which refers to a “Fortune Round Table” where Willkie’s run for president was discussed. Allen writes:
Willkie, the high-salaried head of a large utility company, had never done anything in or for the Republican party and was completely unknown outside his own limited but highly influential circles. What apparently sold the Establishment Insiders on Willkie was, as Mrs. Davenport puts it, that he was "outspoken in opposition to what was then a classic isolationist position in the Republican party." Mrs. Davenport claims that the Willkie for President idea occurred to a number of individuals simultaneously, including "Harry [Henry] Luce and other members of Time, Inc., who met him in our house."
Carlson may have been bankrolled by WASPs, but himself was a somewhat shadier character. Congressman Roy Woodruff pointed out that he had written, under his real name, an article favorable to Soviet rule in Armenia for Soviet Russia Today in 1936.
The way Carlson ingratiates himself into New York City’s fascist scene was to generate far-right propaganda. His paper, the Christian Defender, reads like a 4chan post. Here’s an excerpt:
"Let the kikes attempt to stop the sale of Social Justice, and they will court the righteous wrath of several million Christians in New York. Then woe unto the miserable Yiddies. Woe unto them and their progeny. Their now confounded yelpings of persecution, when that day comes, will find full justification in fact. All we can say now is: BEWARE JEW!"
Carlson was producing the same kind of odious material he claimed to be exposing in others, in other words. One of his first targets was the Christian Mobilizers, a group run by the “Yorkville Fuhrer,” Joe McWilliams. The hate sheet helped grease his way into the group.
“George is an Italian that’s as militant as hell [Carlson was at this point going by George Pagnanelli]. Ever read his paper, The Christian Defender? It’s hotter than the Deutscher Weckruf,” says one Christian Mobilizer by way of introduction.
One tidbit that isn’t further explored by Carlson is Joe McWilliams’ unusual biography for a Nazi. Carlson says, “from February 1930 to April 1938, Joe spent nearly all his time in the company of four American Jews,” who helped him with his bills. He speaks to two friends of McWilliams who recall “Joe’s views from 1928 to 1938 were so violently Communistic that they avoided the subject.” He also went to the Communist Workers School and became a Trotskyite, according to Carlson.
I bring this up by way of getting at the third way Carlson’s book sets a pattern for future watchdog work. The main trick of Under Cover is the way it elides isolationists and actual fascists. To Carlson, there isn’t much difference between the Bund and the America First Committee. To give you a sense of his prose, here’s how he describes the latter: “The America First Committee had become the voice of American Fascism and the spearhead aimed at the heart of Democracy, carrying to their doom many who were innocent and would have resigned in disgust had they known what went on behind the scenes.”
It’s probably not worth parsing all the smears one can find in the book, and to quote its dialogue at length is beside the point—I assume none of the dialogue is reliable. But it’s full of rhubarb about the fascist menace. And some of the details are amusing, like his comparison of Senator Gerald Nye with — and this is an insult coming from an Armenian — Ataturk. It cites an estimate of 100,000 members for the “Black Legion,” which is almost certainly exaggerated. As literature, it’s drivel: “I looked at him silently and said, ‘Yes, Mr. Roberts.’”
Given McWilliams’ background, it’s interesting to consider his activities showing up unwanted to America First Committee rallies. John T. Flynn, the writer associated with the “old right,” fought the good fight keeping fascists out of the America First Committee, and also wrote an entire book on influence operations like Carlson’s. He was a speaker at a May, 1941 Madison Square Garden rally for the America First Committee, and called out McWilliams in the crowd:
“The America First Committee is not crazy enough to want the support of a handful of Bundists, Communists, and Christian Fronters who are without influence, without power, and without respect in this or any other community. Just because some misguided fool in Manhattan who happens to be a Nazi, gets a few tickets to this rally, this meeting of American citizens is called a Nazi meeting. And right here, not many places from me, is sitting a man named McWilliams. What he is doing here, how he gets in here, whose stooge he is, I do not know, but I know the photographers of these war-mongering newspapers can always find him when they want him.”
This caused the audience to break into applause. You might take that as a show of support for Flynn’s position, but not Carlson, who writes, “But instead of booing, the Coughlinite mob burst into applause for Joe!!!”
Two pages later, Carlson quotes this exchange with McWilliams:
“Joe,” I began, “some woman wants to know why you go to A.F.C. meetings and raise hell.”
“Tell her this. I want to put it up to those America First guys that they are no different from us nationalists here. Their fine clothes and respectability don’t fool me. I’ve met them up on Park Avenue and down in Wall Street. I want them to wake up to themselves and get up the guts to call a spade a spade.”
Consider what this all looks like. Two communist fellow-travelers, both in the guise of far-right people, commiserating after a rally, while one admits he was there as an agent provocateur.
Flynn’s account of Under Cover is online, and we can give him the last word when it comes to Carlson’s technique:
The book itself is a wilderness of lies. I repeat, its chief purpose was to tell the story of (1) the more imposing subversive groups, such as the Bund, Pelley, Viereck, etc.; (2) then connect them by hook or crook with a whole spawn of small-fry groups and (3) finally splash the odium fastened on these people upon men like Senator Wheeler, Senator Nye, Senator Taft, Senator Brooks, General Wood, Colonel Lindbergh and others. In doing this the most shocking smears were plastered upon the good names of decent people without a shadow of basis.
The thing is, though, it worked. Carlson had all the support of the Madison Avenue ad agencies his WASP backers were close to, and the book was boosted heavily by Walter Winchell, who probably deserves a post of his own.
Carlson admits in the book to informing for no less than seven “Government research and prosecuting agencies,” he writes in the book. “I was pleased to know that as an American I had been of some service to my adopted country.” What’s more this strange, quasi-public, quasi-private role was not even unique at the time. Dillard Stokes, a Washington Post reporter, helped gather evidence for the Great Sedition Trial.
After the Second World War, the modern intelligence, law enforcement and NGO apparatus began to take shape, all of which bear on the phenomenon of informants in important ways, but as we continue looking at informant case studies, John Roy Carlson makes for a nice starting point.