In his book Freedom Betrayed: Herbert Hoover’s Secret History of the Second World War and Its Aftermath, the former president repeatedly complained about President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “fright campaign” to get the United States into World War II. In his terrifying Navy Day address on October 27, 1941, Roosevelt claimed to have a “secret map” showing Nazi plans to invade South America, targeting Brazil and the Panama Canal. The key section of his Navy Day address began with Roosevelt saying, “I have in my possession a secret map made in Germany by Hitler’s Government—by planners of the new world order. It is a map of South America and a part of Central America, as Hitler proposes to reorganize it.”
Hoover was skeptical. He conducted his own personal investigation into FDR’s secret map. “Four years later, after the German surrender, I was in Germany,” he wrote. “The American Army authorities informed me they had been instructed to search for these plans,” former President Hoover added. The result of Hoover’s investigation was fruitless. “Our officials informed me there were no such plans in the captured German files.”
Hoover was not the only one to investigate the origins of Roosevelt’s secret map. According to Lynne Olson’s book Those Angry Days: Roosevelt, Lindbergh, and America’s Fight over World War II, 1939-1941, the German government engaged in a frantic search to find out if it had produced the map. The result of this search was also fruitless. Four days after Roosevelt’s speech, Germany’s Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop “flatly denied the existence of such a map” and he called it a forgery “of the crudest and most brazen kind.” So, who was telling the truth, Roosevelt or von Ribbentrop?
With a sense of genuine surprise, Olson wrote that “the Reich was telling the truth.” Olson said that “it was a forgery, the product of a clandestine BSC unit in downtown Toronto called Station M.” BSC, which stands for British Security Coordination, was a covert arm of MI6, Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service. Creating fake documents at its Toronto “phony-document factory” was only one part of BSC’s covert operations. According to Thomas E. Mahl’s book Desperate Deception: British Covert Operations in the United States, 1939-44, BSC infected the public opinion polling industry to rig polls and to influence the congressional decision-making process. Mahl wrote, “Unknown to the public, the polls of Gallup, Hadley Cantril, Market Analysts Inc. [run by Sanford Griffith], and Roper were all done under the influence of dedicated interventionists and British intelligence agents.”
Interventionists faced additional problems that extended beyond the manipulation of American public opinion and American politicians. Hitler, for example, was one obstacle to their agenda because he strenuously tried to avoid war with the United States. “Even after Roosevelt had issued orders to American warships to ‘shoot on sight’ at German submarines on October 8, 1941,” wrote Thomas Fleming in his book The New Dealers’ War: Franklin D. Roosevelt and the War Within World War II, “Hitler had ordered Grand Admiral Erich Raeder, the German navy’s commander in chief, to avoid incidents that Roosevelt might use to bring America into the struggle.” To further complicate matters for the interventionists, a “loophole” existed in the Tripartite Pact between Italy, Germany, and Japan. The Pact “did not obligate Germany to join Japan in a war Tokyo initiated.” A war between the United States and Japan might not automatically include Germany. This was a serious problem for interventionists hoping to entangle the United States in Europe.
But then a seemingly miraculous thing happened that changed everything. On December 4, 1941, the Chicago Tribune and the Washington Times-Herald published Chesly Manly’s bombshell revelation that Roosevelt was, contrary to the president’s previous denials, planning to lead the United States into war against Germany. “The source of the reporter’s information was no less than a verbatim copy of Rainbow Five, the top-secret war plan drawn up at FDR’s order.” Rainbow Five “called for the creation of a 10-million-man army, including an expeditionary force of 5 million men that would invade Europe in 1943 to defeat Adolf Hitler’s war machine.” Hitler responded on December 11 by declaring war on the United States. In his address to the Reichstag, Hitler said that his final decision was forced on him by the American newspapers that had leaked Rainbow Five. In summary, on December 11, the interventionists got exactly what they had wanted.
Who leaked Rainbow Five to Chesly Manly? Manly’s source was Senator Burton K. Wheeler. This much is known. Wheeler’s source was an unnamed army air force captain who was “only a messenger.” The army air force captain’s source was someone else hiding in the shadows. So, who was the mystery man hiding in the shadows? General Albert C. Wedemeyer, who had contributed to the writing of Rainbow Five, thought Roosevelt was the culprit:
I have no hard evidence, but I have always been convinced, on some sort of intuitional level, that President Roosevelt authorized it. I can’t conceive of anyone else, including General Arnold, having the nerve to release that document.
Roosevelt did not have a monopoly on the use of documents that were meant to manipulate the United States into war. Harry Dexter White was both the director of the Division of Monetary Research of the United States Treasury Department and a spy working under Soviet NKVD operative Vitalii Pavlov, according to John Koster’s book, Operation Snow: How a Soviet Mole in FDR’s White House Triggered Pearl Harbor. Because the Soviet Union wanted to avoid a two-front war against Germany in the west and Japan in the east, White’s mission was to direct Japanese aggression away from Siberia by instigating a war between the United States and Japan. To achieve his mission, White took an active role in the diplomatic negotiations with Japan; it resulted in the American final offer, called the Hull note.
The Treasury Department and White were involved in the diplomatic negotiations because economics was such a pressing issue. By freezing Japan’s assets and by requiring Japan to get export licenses, the United States had imposed a de facto oil embargo on July 26, 1941. Suffering from economic strangulation and seeing a major threat to its military power, Japan wanted the oil embargo lifted.
White successfully steered the negotiations away from softer, conciliatory policies (such as Hull’s three-month truce and limited oil shipments for civilian consumption) to his preferred hardline outcome. White accomplished this by writing two memoranda, the content of which influenced the content in the final Hull note. Specifically, the Hull note demanded that Japan withdraw from China, including the puppet state of Manchukuo (essentially Manchuria) in the northeast, and Indochina (modern Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia).
Japan’s emperor responded by calling a meeting of Japan’s former prime ministers. Kiichiro Hiranuma pinpointed Japan’s problem when he said that “giving up Manchuria under American pressure was political suicide.” Koster concluded by saying, “None of these elder statesmen could suggest an offer to the United States that might ameliorate its drastic and startling demands.” On December 1, the emperor met with his privy council. The cabinet voted unanimously for war. “The Japanese fleet was told to attack Pearl Harbor on December 7 unless it received a last-minute cancellation because of a sudden change in America’s attitude.”
The BSC’s fake map, the Rainbow Five Leak, and the Hull note reveal a hidden history of manipulation. Each document, whether forged by British intelligence, leaked to provoke Hitler, or crafted to incite Japan, pushed the United States into a global conflict it was unprepared to fight.
Image: Public domain.
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