Foreign Intervention in United States Elections Through Fake News
The use of propaganda, illegal spying on citizens, and fake news reporting has been used to influence the outcome of the American Presidential election by a foreign power. The election was the third election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1940 and the foreign power was Great Britain, then locked in a death struggle with Nazi Germany. From the time of the British Army’s collapse and the defeat of the French in the spring of 1940 and the entrance of the United States into the war following Pearl Harbor, the British Secret Intelligence Service operated within the United States to influence its policies. There was collusion with American operatives who assisted the British.
Isolationists, communists, and those who directly supported the Germans such as the American Nazi Party, howled loudly and often about British manipulation of the American media to influence opinion. Their accusations were dismissed by liberal media and the supporters of intervention in Europe as paranoia. British Security Coordination (BSC) was registered with the State Department as a foreign entity and worked as part of the British Passport Control Office. BSC was originally tasked with countering Nazi propaganda, among other things, and was soon creating propaganda of its own, as well as placing news stories in American publications.
BSC worked in liaison with the FBI’s J. Edgar Hoover, the OSS through William Donovan, and with the knowledge and approval of FDR. BSC used its influence to shape news stories and opinion pieces in the New York Herald Tribune, The Baltimore Sun, and critically Radio New York Worldwide. Stories on Radio New York were picked up for distribution by other outlets across the country, spreading anti-German and pro-British “news” nationwide. BSC hired an American polling company, Market Analysts Inc., which was run by Sanford Griffith. Griffith was an operative for British Intelligence, and produced polling data which was invariably favorable to the British or to American intervention on the British side.
The polling data was also used to influence Republican policy, implying that the isolationist positions of many leading Republicans such as Thomas Dewey and Robert Taft were out of touch with mainstream Republicans. BSC efforts included targeting specific Republican candidates for office other than president, including New York congressman Hamilton Fish III. BSC funded a campaign to defeat Fish, an influential Republican, which included fake news stories of Nazi officials paying exorbitant rents for property Fish owned, with the money being used to pay for his anti-British pro-German policies and public statements. The attack on Fish originally appeared in the Washington Post only days before the election. Fish won re-election, but by substantially less votes than expected before the story appeared.
Two election cycles later the BSC attack on Fish finally paid off when he failed to retain his seat. British intelligence operatives continued to provide stories to reporters throughout the war to influence American opinion. Operatives who worked for the BSC included the writers Roald Dahl and Ian Fleming, who helped create the stories which were then presented to the American people by the likes of Walter Winchell, Ulric Bell, and many others.