Pearl Harbor: The Seeds and Fruits of Infamy - Ludwig von Mises ...

Foreign Relations in an Election Year 35
and Woodring and replaced them with two men more willing to
follow Roosevelt’s lead.
Stimson, the new secretary of war, began almost immediately
to push for compulsory military training. His eff orts were soon
crowned with success. Th e Selective Service Act of 1940 was
passed, and the president signed it into law on September 16. 14
British Secret Agent in the U.S.
By the summer of 1940 England’s plight was desperate.
Germany controlled most of Europe; her planes were being readied
for nightly bombings of Britain’s cities; her U-boats were preparing
to attack British shipping in the Atlantic on a massive
scale.
In June the British sent to New York Sir William Stephenson
who opened offi ces in New York in Radio City. Ostensibly a public-relations
man, Stephenson was actually a British agent known
as “Intrepid,” a secret envoy of Churchill’s and chief of British
Security Coordination. Intrepid’s express purpose was to get the
United States into the war. FDR reportedly told Stephenson on
one occasion, apparently he wasn’t kidding, “I’m your biggest
undercover agent.” 15
Stephenson met with Roosevelt in Washington. Secret
arrangements were made for U.S.-British cooperation and for
sharing of confi dential information with the Federal Bureau of
Investigation (FBI). In retrospect, the foreign-policy decisions
made in Washington from that time on seem to have been aimed
relentlessly at taking the United States down the road to war on
the side of England and against Germany and Japan.
14 Ibid., pp. 345–48.
15 William Stevenson, A Man Called Intrepid: Th e Secret War (New York:
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976), p. 127.