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15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Power structure at work, May 6, 2002
By A Customer
This review is from: Desperate Deception: British Convert Operations in the United States, 1939-1944 (Paperback)
This book is the missing link showing how elites use their influence to bring us into wars, manipulate political conventions, conduct propaganda campaigns against the populace(now known as public diplomacy), and other dirty tricks. For those students of power structure and are familiar with the work of the late Carrol Quigley, many of the people mentioned in his work play roles in this book. Members of the Round Table network( a global network of discussion groups of people waging propaganda justifying the British Empire on moral grounds) include:
Walter Lippman - American Round Tabler, whose column in the Intl Herald Tribune was to guide American foreign policy in an anglophile direction.
Thomas Lamont - Director and Chrm of the Board at J.P. Morgan, allied with FDR and instrumental in getting lifelong Democrat Wendell Willkie the 1940 Republican Presidential nomination. British members of the Round Table group include Ambassadors to the US - Lord Lothian(Phillip Kerr) and Lord Halifax. Some other members in MI6 in the US were also affiliated with this group. The Rockefeller family also loaned much of the office space for the British intelligence operations during the war, so they definitely had some knowledge or approval of their operations. Nelson Rockefeller was also appointed Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs. Basically, there was a group of influential anglophile Americans, who wanted to get America into the war with Germany, so they provided assistance to British intelligence, who set up front organizations to agitate in a pro-British manner. They recruited anglophiles to stage demonstrations to fight Germany, write pro-British propaganda, and destroy the careers of isolationist Congressmen. They also penetrated polling organizations, and some of the polling results appear quite suspect. During the Republican Convention of 1940, the mysterious death of Ralph Williams, a pro-Taft isolationist, allowed Sam Pryor, a pro-Willkie man, to take over the convention. Through dubious allocation of tickets to the convention floor(Willkie supporters got way more than their fair share), an impression was made that he was the man of the people. Speaches of isolationists were also sabotaged by tampering with microphones or sending in bands during speaches. Having Willkie as the Republican nominee, allowed FDR to give destroyers to the British without a political opponent making political hay about it. For any Birchers out there, yes, there were some members of the Council on Foreign Relations involved. However, that is not the influential body. It is the rich and powerful, who control the mass media and bodies like the government and the CFR, who really make things happen. There are quite a number of typing errors in the book, but the editor should be faulted, not the author. Many people have suspicions about accounts of history, and Mahl does quite a good job supporting his account of what really happened. I strongly recommend reading this book for anyone interested in how our world really operates.
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21 of 24 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Churchill and FDR -- the Two-Headed Monster, July 1, 2002
This review is from: Desperate Deception: British Convert Operations in the United States, 1939-1944 (Paperback)
The book's thesis is that British and U.S. "elites" maneuvered us into WWII to serve the interests of the State. The corrupt Churchill and FDR and their respective intelligence agencies blindfolded the American public into believing that U.S. entrance into the war was justifiable on moral and political grounds. As usual, the docile masses were swept away in all the rhetoric. Every attempt was made to smear the isolationists as Hitleresque and un-American. More often than not, with such media rhetoricians as Walter Lippman, the attempts were successful. Even today, the uneducated public is convinced that the Old Right anti-interventionist movement was Communist! Mahl covers some old ground--for those who are familiar with the FDR-Churchill deception--but he writes a compelling story.
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16 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
For our own good, or for their own purposes?, August 31, 2000
This review is from: Desperate Deception: British Convert Operations in the United States, 1939-1944 (Paperback)
This is a shocking book. No, let's put it another way. I would have been shocked by this book had I not been educated about the corruption of the press with a crash course during the Clinton administration. What's truly revealing about Mahl's book is how long the press has been sold out to prevailing political power. In the period covered by the book, the prevailing power was the British and their internationalist collaborators here in the United States. The legacy of the British intelligence service in the U.S. lives on with their spawn, the CIA: "Further testimony to the success of British intelligence operations can be seen in the actions of Americans who, having learned the intelligence trade from the British, later flattered their teachers by copying their successful methods. The aggressive offensive spirit of British intelligence at war became the model for generations of American intelligence officers and government officials in the Cold War." --- "Was [British] Special Operations Executive officer Bill Morrell planting twenty items a day in the media? The CIA planted eighty. Did BSC organize opposition for political candidates? The CIA did the same: the Italian election of 1948 is a known example. Did BSC introduce women and agents of influence to politicians? 'The CIA maintanis an extensive stable of 'agents of influence' around the world..from valets and mistresses to personal secretaries....'" The planted stories in the American press included polls by British-penetrated "reputable" polling firms giving the impression that Americans were a good deal more eager to support the British in the war in Europe than was actually the case. It also included buying off American journalists, a task made easier by the fact that the Roosevelt administration and powerful Americans like Walter Lippmann and Nelson Rockefeller collaborated with the British in their efforts. The organization of political opposition included setting up the lifelong Democrat, Wendell Willkie, to oppose FDR as a Republican in the 1940 presidential election, giving the electorate no genuine anti-war choice. The "agents of influence" were used to neutralize hopeless womanizer, Senator Arthur Vandenberg, who had been one of the most powerful voices against American foreign entanglements. His own carnal entanglements, with the help of the British, led him astray. This book should be read along with Robert B. Nesbitt's "Day of Deceit, the Truth about FDR and Pearl Harbor." Together, they remove all doubt that Roosevelt--or whoever was pulling his strings--put first priority on coming to the aid of the British. Mahl shows that he was quite willing to see our democratic institutions and our "free" press subverted to achieve that end. Nesbitt shows definitively that Roosevelt and his coterie were also willing to provoke the Japanese into an attack while depriving commanders on the ground with the information needed to combat it, leading to the deaths of thousands of sailors and soldiers. Maybe it is a concession they make in order to get their books published, but both Nesbitt and Mahl suggest strongly that it was all worth it. Roosevelt and the conniving elitists with or for whom he worked, they imply, did it for our own good. I can't quite shake the suspicion, though, that they simply did it for their own purposes. But for Mahl's cop out in the end, I would have given the book five stars.
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