British Security Coordination

BSC was set up by a Canadian entrepreneur called William Stephenson, working on behalf of the British Secret Intelligence Services (SIS). An office was opened in the Rockefeller Centre in Manhattan with the discreet compliance of Roosevelt and J Edgar Hoover of the FBI. But nobody on the American side of the fence knew what BSC's full agenda was nor, indeed, what would be the massive scale of its operations. What eventually occurred as 1940 became 1941 was that BSC became a huge secret agency of nationwide news manipulation and black propaganda. Pro-British and anti-German stories were planted in American newspapers and broadcast on American radio stations, and simultaneously a campaign of harassment and denigration was set in motion against those organisations perceived to be pro-Nazi or virulently isolationist (such as the notoriously anti-British America First Committee - it had more than a million paid-up members).

In addition to infiltrating groups like America First, an isolationist lobby to keep the United States out of the war, they also created their own competing front groups. They worked closely with other major nongovernmental groups like the American Federation of Labor and ethnic fraternal organizations. They fed rumor mills to support people and issues they favored and discredit those they did not. They used a variety of devices, including what would clearly be called "dirty tricks" today today, to neutralize their opponents.