Book Review

Comparative/World

Thomas E. Mahl. Desperate Deception: British Covert Operations in the United States, 1939–44. McLean, Va.: Brassey's. 1998. Pp. xiv, 257. $26.95.

Jay Jakub. Spies and Saboteurs: Anglo-American Collaboration and Rivalry in Human Intelligence Collection and Special Operations, 1940–45. Foreword by Douglas Dodds-Parker. New York: St. Martin's. 1999. Pp. xxix, 280. $45.00.	1
Jay Jakub reminds us that intelligence history requires sifting "the real from the imaginary, the informative from the purposely misleading, the facts from the sensationalism" (p. xvii). These books extend our insight into the origins of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) by integrating intelligence and international history into analysis of Anglo-American intelligence agencies' coordination and competition. They thereby contribute to the ongoing reconsideration of the wartime "special relationship" initiated by David Reynolds. Here the similarities end.	2
Belligerent Britain did covertly try to coax neutral America into war. Yet Thomas E. Mahl's conspiratorial tone and sensationalist derivation of exaggerated or unwarranted conclusions are more redolent of popular espionage literature than of academic scholarship. Mahl describes efforts to discover, finance, and guide Americans who would attack Britain's isolationist enemies and propel America toward war. Claiming that William Stephenson's British Security Coordination (BSC) "had available willing and powerful agents, subagents, and collaborators at the very nerve centers of American politics, news, and entertainment" (p. 68) fails to clarify sufficiently a critical distinction: active BSC agents were not identical either with sympathizers who intentionally aided Britain, assuming that coincided with America's national interest, or with those who loyally promoted the U.S. national interest, benefiting Britain as an (un)intentional byproduct. Noting BSC tributes to "those who rendered service of particular value" (p. 51) and classifying Walter Lippman as a British agent (p. 54) without evidence sifts neither motives nor the extent of the intersection of British and American interests in 1940–1941. Mahl does not ask whether bureaucratic turf battles inspired claims of influence and success. He does not challenge unreliable sources: one claimed "FDR was at war with Hitler long before Chamberlain was forced to declare it" (p. 7)!	3
To demonstrate BSC's reach, Mahl claims mistresses assigned to seduce Senator Arthur Vandenberg influenced his conversion to internationalism in 1940, not the accepted date of 1945. Mahl cites one speech as proof, but he neither analyzes it nor examines Vandenberg's 1940–1945 career for corroboration. Republican dark horse Wendell L. Willkie becomes BSC's stalking-horse. Mahl links the premises that BSC planted articles in the New York Herald Tribune and that Tribune staffers aided Willkie's campaign with the charge that Franklin D. Roosevelt's domestic enemies joined forces with British intelligence to help him: "they backed his vulnerable interventionist policies and supplied a cooperative candidate to oppose him" (p. 163). Mahl ignores a simple alternative: Willkie was the only internationalist candidate available for delegates shocked by French defeat.	. . .