By Edward Kosner

Ernest Cuneo, a burly former Columbia football player who weighed in at nearly 300 pounds, was an unlikely spook -- but an effective one. During World War II Cuneo served as President Franklin D. Roosevelt's secret liaison with a covert British spy nest -- known only to FDR and a few members of his innermost circle -- hiding in the heart of corporate New York City.

As Thomas Maier writes in "The Invisible Spy: Churchill's Rockefeller Center Spy Ring and America's First Secret Agent of World War II," the British operation was unconventional, too, opaquely labeled the British Security Coordination Office and tucked away on an upper floor of Rockefeller Center, behind a door bearing the bland sign "British Passport Control."

The spy operation's mission -- to get America's mighty armed forces into the war against the rampaging Axis powers -- was vital to Britain's struggle for survival. "The propaganda war," Mr. Maier quotes Cuneo as saying, "was fought with deadly ferocity, like a battle with thousands of tanks on each side locked in fierce, lethal combat, firing at point blank range. The moral hatred hung over the field like poison gas. No chivalry, no Geneva Convention, no code of military honor governed the war of words." At its peak, the author tells us, Britain's spy operations in wartime America were more extensive than those of Germany or Russia.

Mr. Maier, a journalist and the author of "Masters of Sex" (2009), "When Lions Roar" (2014) and "Mafia Spies" (2019), plunges the reader back into the dark, early days of World War II, when ultimate victory over the fascist onslaught seemed precarious at best.

For a secret agent, Cuneo was quite the man about town, squiring gal pals to the Stork Club and the 21 Club and feeding self-interested tips to Walter Winchell and Drew Pearson, the top newspaper and radio gossip columnists of the day. A vast network of more than a thousand spies and tipsters reported to Cuneo. Among his tasks: keeping tabs on leading American isolationists such as John F. Kennedy's father, Joe, and Charles Lindbergh. By 1941, Mr. Maier writes, Lindbergh's America First movement had 700 chapters across the country, with nearly a million members. Appropriately, the FBI tracked Lucky Lindy as if the aviation hero were a Nazi spy.

Celebrities such as Charlie Chaplin, Noël Coward, Cary Grant and Alfred Hitchcock kept Cuneo in the loop on gossip and possible intelligence they picked up in Hollywood. "Celebrity was a wonderful cover!" Coward liked to proclaim.

As a bonus, there's a cameo from a young operative already adept at the spy game. Ian Fleming would go on to write the James Bond novels and later dedicate "Thunderball" to Cuneo, his "muse." In New York, however, he was officially a British naval-intelligence officer and led one of the spy ring's greatest coups -- the burglary of the Japanese consul-general's offices, located below the British Security Coordination Office in Rockefeller Center. Using duplicated keys, the Brits snuck in at 3 a.m., picked the locks on the safe and swiped a Japanese codebook and other secret papers. The snoops took the stash back up to their office, microfilmed the works, then returned the material, meticulously placing it back exactly as they'd found it.

Another coup involved a counterfeit map showing Hitler's supposed plans for realigning Latin America after achieving victory in Europe. It was the brainchild of Ivar Bryce, a British spy who was a childhood friend of Fleming. The map, once "discovered" and released, was intended to help convince isolationist Americans that Hitler not only had designs on Europe but planned to elbow his way into America's Monroe Doctrine-sacred neighborhood.

There were also potentially dangerous slip-ups that the British Security Coordination Office had to clean up. One involved the high-tech-for-its-time Norden bombsight, which enabled U.S. warplanes to safely and accurately attack enemy targets. The U.S. government poured more than $1 billion in today's money into the development of this device. Strict security measures were imposed to protect the design, but an employee sneaked the plans out of the factory and passed them along to a Nazi operative. The BSC came to the rescue and helped track down the leaks.

America's own intelligence agency -- the Office of Strategic Services $(OSS)$, a forerunner of the CIA -- was not without its glamour. Headed by Gen. William "Wild Bill" Donovan, at one time or another the OSS counted among its staff, we are told, Julia Child, John Ford, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and the baseball player Moe Berg. There were so many socially prominent members in the agency that observers would jibe that "OSS" stood for "Oh So Social." Ford, the movie director, memorably described Donovan as "the sort of guy who thought nothing of parachuting into France, blowing up a bridge, pissing in Luftwaffe gas tanks, then dancing on the roof of the St. Regis hotel with a German spy."

Cuneo and Winchell remained loyal to FDR, pushing for an unprecedented third term for Roosevelt. Later, as FDR was running for his fourth term, Cuneo arrived at the White House for a meeting and was shocked by what he saw when he was ushered in. "As I glimpsed at the President, I was almost visibly startled," he later wrote. "I hadn't seen him in nearly a year. The change was ghastly, literally ghastly."

"The president's congestive heart failure and the strains of his office had taken their toll," Mr. Maier writes. "His eyes were dark and sullen, his body wan. Cuneo kept staring as the president spoke, realizing he was talking to a doomed man."

"As one last favor to their friend," the author writes, after Cuneo's retirement Cuneo's pals and colleagues strenuously lobbied for him to receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Their efforts were still under way in March 1988 when Cuneo died from a heart attack at the age of 82. He was buried with full military honors at Arlington National Cemetery.

--Mr. Kosner is the author of "It's News to Me," a memoir of his career as the editor of Newsweek, New York magazine, Esquire and the New York Daily News.

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

March 30, 2025 12:35 ET (16:35 GMT)

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