Desperate Deception

Rating:
Summary: Your patience will be rewarded...
Review: ...if you can get thru the first hour of names, acronyms & unfamiliar agencies. Then the story picks up. Much in this story of friendly espionage is known to historians. Thomas Mahl pulls it together, fills in & adds some sordid new items. I recommend it to those interested in the mechinations of the British in the United States before our entry into the war. Franklin Roosevelt was up to his neck in conspiracy with the British to discredit isolationist by any means, legal or not. The British moved covertly on a scale that FDR & his administration could not have conceived of on their own. The Office of Strategic Services, the prototype of today's CIA was created by the British. They also installed their own man, but an American, Bill Donovan at its head. A federal investigation was launched against leading isolationist Congressman Hamilton Fish. Mr. Mahl shows how the British engineered it. When testifying at the trial of a German national, British agents perjured themselves. He had in his possession a map describing the invasion of South America by Germany. It was forged by the British secret service & planted on him. Their perjured testimony convicted him. The British attacked Standard Oil of New Jersey for their dealings with I. G. Farben a German company. They were accused of creating a cartel to drive up oil prices. This critism was found to have come from inside the U.S. Public opinion polls were just starting to come into their own. British intelligience was able to publish polls that showed American support for entering the war on Britain's side. This actually was never true, until perhaps when Germany declared war on the U.S. Very little could have been accomplished without the complicity of an interventionist press. Those writers were numerous and well known including Walter Lippman, Dorothy Thompson & James Reston. Marshall Fields founded the Chicago Sun-Times to counter the editorials of the isolationist Chicago Tribune. The Chapter I found utterly fascinating was the author's claim that the British, with FDR's connivance, co-opted the Republican National Covention in 1940. They were able to install the dark-horse canidate, Wendell Wilkie, as the GOP nominee against FDR. The thing is, he supported the president's views on extending the draft one more year & Lend Lease. The Repubicans in Congress & the Senate opposed both of these measures. But it is pretty difficult to oppose your party's standard bearer. The British got Lend Lease which was their goal. Wilkie was so well thought of by FDR & the British that he was for a short time considered for the vice-presidency by the Democrats in 1944. What a disaster that could have been! The sordid stories of beautiful female agents compromising prominent Americans was also an interesting sidelight. Are these stories true? Undeniably some are. But they all add up to a entertaining book & a well read audio-tape.

Rating:
Summary: Your patience will be rewarded...
Review: ...if you can get thru the first hour of names, acronyms & unfamiliar agencies. Then the story picks up. Much in this story of friendly espionage is known to historians. Thomas Mahl pulls it together, fills in & adds some sordid new items. I recommend it to those interested in the mechinations of the British in the United States before our entry into the war. Franklin Roosevelt was up to his neck in conspiracy with the British to discredit isolationist by any means, legal or not. The British moved covertly on a scale that FDR & his administration could not have conceived of on their own. The Office of Strategic Services, the prototype of today's CIA was created by the British. They also installed their own man, but an American, Bill Donovan at its head. A federal investigation was launched against leading isolationist Congressman Hamilton Fish. Mr. Mahl shows how the British engineered it. When testifying at the trial of a German national, British agents perjured themselves. He had in his possession a map describing the invasion of South America by Germany. It was forged by the British secret service & planted on him. Their perjured testimony convicted him. The British attacked Standard Oil of New Jersey for their dealings with I. G. Farben a German company. They were accused of creating a cartel to drive up oil prices. This critism was found to have come from inside the U.S. Public opinion polls were just starting to come into their own. British intelligience was able to publish polls that showed American support for entering the war on Britain's side. This actually was never true, until perhaps when Germany declared war on the U.S. Very little could have been accomplished without the complicity of an interventionist press. Those writers were numerous and well known including Walter Lippman, Dorothy Thompson & James Reston. Marshall Fields founded the Chicago Sun-Times to counter the editorials of the isolationist Chicago Tribune. The Chapter I found utterly fascinating was the author's claim that the British, with FDR's connivance, co-opted the Republican National Covention in 1940. They were able to install the dark-horse canidate, Wendell Wilkie, as the GOP nominee against FDR. The thing is, he supported the president's views on extending the draft one more year & Lend Lease. The Repubicans in Congress & the Senate opposed both of these measures. But it is pretty difficult to oppose your party's standard bearer. The British got Lend Lease which was their goal. Wilkie was so well thought of by FDR & the British that he was for a short time considered for the vice-presidency by the Democrats in 1944. What a disaster that could have been! The sordid stories of beautiful female agents compromising prominent Americans was also an interesting sidelight. Are these stories true? Undeniably some are. But they all add up to a entertaining book & a well read audio-tape.