David Ogilvy - The Farmer and the Spy

Ogilvy had been moonlighting since 1939 as an advisor to the British government on American public opinion, at the same time he was working at Gallup. In 1942, with the United States now embroiled in World War II, Ogilvy resigned from the Audience Research Institute and went to work full time in British military intelligence, initially in New York. He called it the “Hitler War” and was prescient in recognizing what was at stake. His first client at Mather & Crowther in 1937, the Council of German Jewry, raised money for refugees from Hitler. Ogilvy claimed his threat to resign from the agency stopped it from accepting Hitler’s ambassador as a client. He and Melinda supported four refugee children from England while they were living in Princeton.

His new boss in the spy business, Sir William Stephenson, was the head of British Security Coordination (BSC) and the central figure in covert operations involving Britain and the United States in the years leading up to World War II. BSC was to represent all British intelligence services in the Western Hemisphere.

A compelling personality, Stephenson became a model for Ian Fleming’s famous secret agent 007. “People often ask me how closely the ‘hero’ of my thrillers, James Bond, resembles a true, live secret agent,” wrote Fleming, who was working in British Naval Intelligence and was fascinated by the cloak-and-dagger world. Bond is not in fact a hero, he explained, but a highly romanticized version of the true spy—and not in a class with Stephenson, a man of “super-qualities,” a super-spy and a hero “by any standard.”

Fleming drew on Stephenson’s intelligence operations for several Bond stories. The giant fish tank at the Hamilton Princess hotel in Bermuda, a BSC station, became the glass wall that separated Bond from Dr. No’s sharks. A plan concocted by BSC to rob Martinique of gold, to keep it out of German hands after the Nazis conquered France, led to the novel Goldfinger. Bond earns his double-O classification by shooting a Japanese cipher agent in Rockefeller Center, where the BSC’s code-breaking operations were based in New York. Stephenson was the source of Bond’s martini recipe, according to British Special Operations secret agent Vera Atkins : “Billy mixed the deadliest martinis. Booths gin, high and dry, easy on the vermouth, twist of lemon peel, shaken not stirred.” Fleming respected Stephenson’s martinis, served in quart glasses.

The full story of how the United States entered World War II is still not widely known. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was of course the ultimate provocation, followed by Germany’s declaration of war. Yet America’s involvement started earlier, in 1940, on two fioors of the International Building at Rockefeller Center in New York, in Stephenson’s secret intelligence operation. Nazi Germany had invaded Czechoslovakia and Poland and was moving through the rest of Europe, but President Roosevelt’s search for a U.S. role was constrained by a powerful isolationist bloc, popular resistance to foreign entanglements, and the American Neutrality Act.

In Britain, short of arms and supplies and facing certain invasion, a desperate Winston Churchill told his son Randolph there was only one possible solution: “I shall drag the United States in.” In the years leading up to Pearl Harbor in 1941, Stephenson led Britain’s covert operations in the United States as Churchill’s secret weapon. A successful Canadian businessman and inventor, Stephenson was alarmed to discover on one of his buying trips during the 1930s that virtually all German steel production was being diverted to armaments, a serious and worrying violation of the Treaty of Versailles. Churchill, the only one to listen to his solitary campaign to alert the British government, gave Stephenson the job of coordinating an unofficial prewar relationship between British and American intelligence, under the standard diplomatic cover of “British Passport Control.”

A small man with piercing blue eyes, the strong-willed Stephenson—Ogilvy described him as “quiet, ruthless, and loyal”—took on the difficult task of combining propaganda for the British cause with intelligence work and counterespionage and, far more hazardous, carving out a working arrangement with American intelligence within the limits of the Neutrality Act. All communication had to be kept secret, even from the U.S. State Department. “If the isolationists had known the full extent of the secret alliance between the United States and Britain,” FDR’s speechwriter (and playwright) Robert Sherwood commented later, “their demands for the President’s impeachment would have rumbled like thunder through the land.”

Churchill, a believer in apt code names, knew that the man to bring the Americans into the war must be fearless. “Dauntless?” he considered. Then, to Stephenson, “You must be—intrepid.” Intrepid became his code name and cable address as head of British Security Coordination. Stephenson was not a professional spy, nor were many of the people he recruited. His unlikely team was largely comprised of enthusiastic amateurs whose names and faces were not known to enemy intelligence agencies; it included actors Leslie Howard, David Niven, and Cary Grant, director Alexander Korda, author Roald Dahl (who would later assist on a history of BSC), and Noel Coward, whose disguise was to be... Noel Coward. “Celebrity was wonderful cover,” said Coward. Ogilvy served in the Secret Intelligence Division; his friend and former Aga boss “Freckles” Wren headed BSC’s Security Branch in London.

“Ogilvy was perhaps the most remarkable of the younger men to join Stephenson’s BSC,” wrote Harford Montgomery Hyde in his insider’s book Room 3603. Recruited by Hyde in 1941, shortly after his thirtieth birthday, Ogilvy said later that Stephenson (like several others he named before and later) had changed his life. He considered Stephenson a man of “extraordinary fertility.... It took eleven secretaries to keep up with him.”

Ogilvy’s history of fragile health had prevented him from serving in the armed forces like his brother, who enlisted in the Royal Air Force at the beginning of the war but was too old to fiy and was working for bomber command intelligence. Later, when David was criticized for not serving, Francis came to his defense: “Despite his robust appearance and rampageous behaviour, David is physically C–3, or lower. He has been a chronic invalid since babyhood, suffering particularly from asthma. He has also a double mastoid on the same ear, which has left him about 85% deaf in that ear. There could never have been any question of his joining any fighting service.” Asthma, which started when he was nine, affiicted him for the rest of his life.

At the same time that David was working for BSC, Francis was working in British intelligence. He made a memorable impression on one assignment in Scotland. Hyde talks about Francis arriving “complete with black hat and striped trousers, in a remote Scottish village, and, on asking the post-master if he would accept two parcels of stores, was promptly handed over to the police.” Safely extricated from police custody, he went on to serve in a less conspicuous but more infiuential role. When Churchill became prime minister in 1940, he defined one of the requirements for his staff as the ability to write well, listing among several candidates a professor of English at Oxford and “that man who’s writing the bombing reports.” It was Francis’s reports that Churchill had been reading.

For most of World War II, Squadron Leader F. F. Ogilvy lived in the underground Cabinet War Rooms, not far from 10 Downing Street in London, where he was on watch every night. As he described it, you’d get to sleep at some unearthly hour, the Old Man would come down, shake you and dictate—not verbatim as one would to a secretary, but in broad general terms, outlining what he wanted to say, leaving it to the transcriber to do the actual writing, in Churchillian style. I want a cable to Roosevelt, Churchill might say. Copy to Stalin, copy to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Then he would outline his ideas. “And have it ready for me at breakfast.” Francis said that, when he started this job, he had thought he could write well, and everybody else thought so too. “I realized I couldn’t. But by the time he finished shouting at me and educating me, by the end I thought perhaps I could.”

David started his new job by attending a course for spies and saboteurs at Camp X, officially Special Training School 103, a topsecret British training school on the north shore of Lake Ontario in Canada. There he said he was taught the tricks of the trade: how to follow people without being observed, how to blow up bridges, how to kill a man with his bare hands. People who knew him to be something of a physical coward were amused by this and by his claim that he learned how to cripple police dogs by grabbing their front legs and tearing their chests apart. Confronted by a police dog, says a former colleague, Ogilvy would be gone in a fiash. He would employ other talents.

Like his brother, David also learned something about writing from his time in the intelligence service. Stephenson was a master of the terse note. Memos to him were returned swiftly to the sender with one of three words written at the top of the page: YES, NO, or SPEAK, meaning to come see him. Asked to identify his source for a report that a Japanese attack was expected on Pearl Harbor, Stephenson responded: “The President of the United States,” a still controversial allegation. Ogilvy later directed his agency’s newsletter to publish Churchill’s 1941 memo to the First Lord of the Admiralty: “Pray state this day, on one side of a sheet of paper, how the Royal Navy is being adapted to meet the conditions of modern warfare.” It was Ogilvy’s model of clarity and brevity.

Instead of being parachuted behind enemy lines, as he expected (or, more likely, feared), Ogilvy was placed in charge of collecting economic information from Latin America, to assist BSC agents in foiling businessmen known to be working against the Allies by supplying Hitler with strategic materials. He helped develop “black lists” of profitable German and Italian businesses that could provide money, help, or information, possibly even spying. In every Latin American country, there were prosperous Germans who went to dinner parties and saluted “Heil, Hitler” when they came in. The Mexicans thought Hitler was fantastico. “Heil, Hitler. Fantastico.”

Ogilvy’s experience with Gallup was particularly valuable to Stephenson, who commissioned a series of polls to analyze U.S. public opinion toward Britain. The results countered isolationist doubts of British ability and will to win the war. Ogilvy’s report, with its cumbersome title, “A Plan for Predetermining the Results of Plebescites, Predicting the Reactions of People to the Impact of Projected Events, and Applying the Gallup Technique to Other Fields of Secret Intelligence,” showed how polls could assess the true strength of political movements in different countries and guide British policy. Although neither the British embassy in Washington nor the London Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) went along with the report’s recommendations, General Eisenhower’s staff later did pay attention and successfully carried out polls in Europe as Ogilvy had advised.

Ogilvy’s basic job, says intelligence expert Richard Spence, was to spin or spike polling information considered harmful (or helpful) to British interests. BSC wanted results that would steer opinion toward support of Britain and the war—front-page stories that showed people were more interested in defeating Hitler than staying out of war—and make sure the polls told people what they wanted them to hear. Espionage work sounds more romantic than it was, Ogilvy conceded later in life, although it did have its cloak and dagger side. He sometimes came home from work with a briefcase handcuffed to his wrist.

His effectiveness in targeting pro-Axis operators led to him join the BSC team that helped the United States set up a foreign intelligence service—it had none—that became the Office of Strategic Services and today’s Central Intelligence Agency. “At one point, I was giving OSS about 80 reports a day from my sources,” said Ogilvy.

But professional spies in MI6 felt threatened by street-smart “amateurs” like Ogilvy. There were efforts to debunk Stephenson, even questioning whether Intrepid was his code name. Ogilvy remained Stephenson’s admirer, although he deplored those who exaggerated his boss’s real accomplishments. Noel Coward agreed. “On one hand, [Stephenson] was certainly a James Bond-like ‘M,’ a puppet master cannily twitching the strings, as his ‘boys’ went about his business. But his real contribution was to lie in his domain of information—information on what the Germans intended to do next, so it could be thwarted.” General Bill Donovan of OSS (“Big Bill,” as distinguished from “Little Bill” Stephenson), confirmed his contributions: “Bill Stephenson taught us everything we ever knew about foreign intelligence operations,”

Before long, German aggression started to edge American public opinion away from isolationism toward aiding another democracy, with an assist from BSC. Some called it “gentlemen’s espionage,” and Ogilvy recognized his own wartime service as tangential to the main action. But BSC had helped bring the two countries together—this was the start of the “special relationship” between the United States and Britain—and supported the war effort, as well as helping America build its own intelligence service.

Ogilvy’s work on economic issues continued when he was named second secretary at the British embassy in 1943. Although he was meeting top figures in and out of government, much of his work was ordinary business intelligence—compiling statistics on U.S. production and writing brochures—and Ogilvy soon had his fill of bureaucratic infighting. He had reveled in dealing with secret documents and personalities on the world scene but bridled at his mundane duties and the politics of diplomacy, and resigned from the staff of the embassy in 1945. He turned down the offer of a permanent job in the commercial department of the SIS foreign office, but continued to be regularly consulted as an advisor. By that time Francis was out of the RAF and back at Mather & Crowther, and the brothers were ready to return to private business.

Unlike other parts of his life, Ogilvy seldom talked or wrote about this glamorous